"All right. All right, I'll tell you. You've shown me what the good life is, Jason. I wouldn't want to be without it for long. I--I'd hook onto someone else, as you say." Jason Wall smiled. "Thank you," he said sincerely. "Thank you so much for being honest." He made love like a college sophomore that night. Eve was quite pleasantly startled. * * * * * Later that week and for the next month or so, he thought of suicide. The trouble was, he had never been able to stand pain. A weakness. The one weakness he had. When he thought of the pain which would surely come, when he thought of the last few months of his life, which would be spent, pain-wracked, on his death bed, his thoughts leaned most strongly toward suicide. Yes, suicide was the obvious way out, and Jason Wall had neither religious nor moral scruples about it. Jason Wall had religious scruples, or moral scruples, about nothing under the sun. He was an utterly egocentric man. But when his thoughts of suicide were strongest he would remember what he'd seen from the doctor's window. Children at play, delighting in their simple pleasures. A postman at work, contented with his lot, humming gayly. Or, he would send for Eve, and take from her body what he craved. And, when it was over, he felt a strange, hollow sense of loss. No, he would tell himself with complete objectivity (he had always been thoroughly objective) not exactly loss. A sense, rather, of lost possession, of something which belonged to Jason Wall, as his life belonged uniquely to him, and would be taken away at his death. He tried to imagine Eve in someone else's arms, Eve dancing with a younger man, drinking with him, making love. A rage of jealousy flooded him, not for the particular man lucky enough to win Eve, but for the world. For everything in it. For the whole blasted world, Jason Wall told himself. He'd made his own world, fashioned it with the sweat of his brow and the cunning of his brain. But ultimately, it did not matter. He was going to die, to die in great pain. It wasn't fair that the rest of the world should go right on living, enjoying the life that Jason Wall had barely begun to taste. They'd see an article in the newspaper, perhaps. Famous Tycoon Dies. In a day, a week, they would forget. They would go on living out their little lives, enjoying their little enjoyments. But the sum total of them--three billion men, women, and children on Earth, was it?--added up to considerable enjoyment. Jason Wall envied them with a desperate, passionate envy. When his thinking evolved to the next stage, he knew with petty triumph that only Jason Wall would have taken that step. He had an incurable disease. He was going to die. But the world would go right on, generations after generations. It wasn't fair. They had no right to enjoy what he, Jason Wall, would lose forever.