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And then he died.
For an instant he hung in limbo, feeling and seeing nothing. Then-- a light stabbed at his eyes and soft foam peeled away from his skin and the prosecutor stood there, watching as he gasped and retched and clutched at his throat. It seemed incredible that he could now breathe, and if he had experienced only the strangling, he might now sigh with relief and say, "I've been through it once, and now I'm not afraid of death." But the strangling was nothing. The strangling was a prelude. And he was afraid of death.
They forced him to come into the room where he had died. He saw his body hanging, black-faced, from the ceiling, the helmet still on the head, the tongue protruding.
"Cut it down," the prosecutor said, and for a moment Jerry waited for the guards to obey. Instead, a guard handed Jerry a knife.
With death still heavy in his mind, Jerry swung around and lunged at the prosecutor. But a guard caught his hand in an irresistible grip, and the other guard held a pistol pointed at Jerry's head.
"Do you want to die again so soon? " asked the prosecutor, and Jerry whimpered and took the knife and reached up to cut himself down from the noose; in order to reach above the knot, he had to stand close enough to the corpse to touch it. The stench was incredible. And the fact of death was unavoidable. Jerry trembled so badly he could hardly control the knife, but eventually the rope parted and the corpse slumped to the ground, knocking Jerry down as it fell. An arm lay across Jerry's legs. The face looked at Jerry eye-to-eye.
Jerry screamed.
***
"You see the camera?"
Jerry nodded, numbly.
"You will look at the camera and you will apologize for having done anything against the government that has brought peace to the earth."
Jerry nodded again, and the prosecutor said, "Roll it."
"Fellow Americans," Jerry said, "I'm sorry. I made a terrible mistake. I was wrong. There's nothing wrong with the Russians. I let an i
Forgive me. The government has been kinder to me than I deserve." And so on. For an hour Jerry babbled, insisting that he was craven, that he was guilty, that he was worthless, that the government was vying with God for respectability.
And when he was through, the prosecutor came back in, shaking his head.
"Mr. Crove, you can do better than that.
"Nobody in the audience believed you for one minute. Nobody in the test sample, not one person, believed that you were the least bit sincere. You still think the government ought to be deposed. And so we have to try the treatment again."
"Let me try to confess again."
"A screen test is a screen test, Mr. Crove. We have to give you a little more experience with death before we can permit you to have any involvement with life.
This time Jerry screamed right from the begi
They made him come in and, when the oil had cooled enough to touch, fish out the pieces of his own corpse.
He wept all through his confession this time, but the test audience was completely unconvinced. "The man's a phony," they said. "He doesn't believe a word of what he's saying."
"We have a problem," said the prosecutor. "You seem so willing to cooperate after your death. But you have reservations. You aren't speaking from the heart. We'll have to help you again."
Jerry screamed and struck out at the prosecutor. When the guards had pulled him away (and the prosecutor was nursing an injured nose), Jerry shouted, "Of course I'm lying! No matter how often you kill me it won't change the fact that this is a government of fools by vicious, lying bastards!"
"On the contrary," said the prosecutor, trying to maintain his good ma
"You can't change the truth!"
"We've changed it for everyone else who's gone through this. And you are far from being the first who had to go to a third clone. But this time, Mr. Crove, do try to forget about being a hero."
They ski
They slowly crushed him to death, and he had to scrub the blood out of the crusher when he awoke, but the audience only commented. "Who does the jerk think he's fooling?"
They disemboweled him and burned his guts in front of him. They infected him with rabies and let his death linger for two weeks. "They crucified him and let exposure and thirst kill him. They dropped him a dozen tirnes from the roof of a one-story building until he died.
Yet the audience knew that Jerry Crove had not repented.
"My God, Crove, how long do you think I can keep doing this?" asked the prosecutor. He did not seem cheerful. In fact, Jerry thought he looked almost desperate.
"Getting a little tough on you?" Jerry asked, grateful for the conversation because it meant there would be a few minutes between deaths.
"What kind of man do you think I am? We'll bring him back to life in a minute anyway, I tell myself, but I didn't get into this business in order to find new, hideous ways of killing people."
"You don't like it? And yet you have such a natural talent for it."
The prosecutor looked sharply at Crove. "Irony? Now you can joke? Doesn't death mean anything to you?
Jerry did not answer, only tried to blink back the tears that these days came unbidden every few minutes.
"Crove, this is not cheap. Do you think it's cheap? We've spent literally billions of rubles on you. And even with inflation, that's a hell of a lot of money."
"In a classless society there's no need for money."
"What is this, dammit! Now you're getting rebellious? Now you're trying to be a hero?"
"No."
"No wonder we've had to kill you eight times! You keep thinking up clever arguments against us!"
"I'm sorry. Heaven knows I'm sorry."
"I've asked to be released from this assigrunent. I obviously can't crack you."
"Crack me! As if I didn't long to be cracked."
"You're costing too much. There's a definite benefit in having criminals convincingly recant on television. But you're getting too expensive. The cost-benefit ratio is ridiculous now. There's a limit to how much we can spend on you."
"I have a way for you to save money."
"So do I. Convince the damned audience!"
"Next time you kill me, don't put a helmet on my head."
The prosecutor looked absolutely shocked. "That would be final. That would be capital punishment. We're a humane government. We never kill anybody permanently."
They shot him in the gut and let him bleed to death. They threw him from a cliff into the sea. They let a shark eat him alive. They hung him upside down so that just his head was under water, and when he finally got too tired to hold his head out of the water he drowned.
But through all this, Jerry had become more inured to the pain. His mind had finally learned that none of these deaths was permanent after all. And now when the moment of death came, though it was still terrible, he endured it better. He screamed less. He approached death with greater calm. He even hastened the process, deliberately inhaling great draughts of water, deliberately wriggling to attract the shark. When they had the guards kick him to death he kept yelling, "Harder," until he couldn't yell anymore.