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Klaus August Schare called Paradise close to Koln in the middle of the year 1940 The na to do with Schar but paradisiacal, being a collection or huddle of farasthaus, all reached along unmetalled roads, which, for at least four months of the year were little y fields

Therefore, neither the date nor location of his origin was especially auspicious The best we can say of thes for a odlike proportions, not only in his own lifetime but also in every one of the countless o - often in unseemly haste - before Scharme himself was yet fifty years old

But here the paradox: he achieved that age not as ht be expected in 1990, but in the su story includes the facts of how that caed sixteen years and three nwriter He took up lodgings in Koln at the house of his master, where for the next five years he learned how to paint those intricate Kreise signs which signify with heraldic sigils the boundaries of the ns could be found on all major roads where they approached any specific district, and where for many years they had been the prey of avid &039;art collectors&039; froeneral - energetically -since conquered German countryside But this too is a mere detail and should not be allowed to detractexcept that it also served as Schar point on his trajectory of four hundred years&039; duration

It started as a drea old at an unprecedented rate He aged a day for every hour, then a week for every minute, finally a year for every second, at which point he collapsed in upon himself, died, cru, and it was theof his twenty-first birthday Perhaps the dreah a subconscious awareness of his proxie of manhood; perhaps it had dawned on him that the first part of his life was done, ended like a chapter closed But that san upon its post, he saw speeding by hi in the open back of the vehicle a good half-dozen of these very signs over which he laboured so long and hard! The driver of this vehicle, a young Corporal in British uniforhed and waved as he sped into the distance; Scharht: &039;Dan you&039;ve stolen?

At which he was horrified to see the Land Rover swerve violently fro onto his bicycle, Scharme raced to the scene of the accident The Corporal, alas, was dead; also, he was old; moreover (and as Scharme would later work it out) it was probably the instantaneous aging which had caused hiust Scharme a murderer! And he kneas so, for at the e co - he had felt himself the beneficiary of those years, some thirty-five in nue; he was now sixty Schare temporal instinct within told hiain Somehow - in some monstrous and inexplicable fashion - he had stolen all the young soldier&039;s years!

And so for the next thirty-five years Schared not at all but remained twenty-one; but - and ether too hts (?) he should only be twenty-two, his internal hourglass told him that in fact he had spilled the sands of ten whole years! It was the summer of 1997; K A Schared by only twenty-two of theed thirty-two of the old at ten times the normal rate, and that therefore he had started to pay the world back for the time he owed it In just two and a halfsixty, and all the pleasures of an apparently eternal youth would be behind hirossly unfair and Scharuilt he had felt over the past thirty-five years quiteabout his predica an entire year for every five weeks, tirows very short But still Scharme was not a cruel man, and so chose his next victim (the very word left an unpleasant echo in his mind) with a deal of care and attention

He chose, in fact, a crippled greypate who suffered incessant arthritic pains, stealing his last four years with the lance The old man never knehat hit him but simply crumpled up in the street on his way to collect his pension And Scharme was pleased that (a) the old boy would know no more pain, and (b) that the state was plainly a benefactor, likewise every taxpayer, and (c) that he himself, K A Schare of only thirty-two and some few months Which would surely be sufficient tiy

Exceptno sooner had his mental meter clocked up the defunct dodderer&039;s four years, than it inexplicably halved the Scharme only two! Alarmed, he returned home and collapsed before his TV, where at that veryan intervieith a prisoner on Death Row It was reckoned that this one could stave off his execution by a reat expense Scharme decided to save him and the state both ht through the screen! The prisoner died right there in full view of ood riddance, the istered within him at a mere fraction of the time perceived: namely, six months!

It didn&039;t take much of a mathematician to work out the implications Complete this sequence: If thirty-five equals thirty-five, and four equals two, and two equals one-half

Patently Scharhth of his next victim&039;s span of years; and after that one-sixteenth; then only one small thirty-second part, und so wetter Which was precisely the way it was to work out

Butlet&039;s not leap ahead Scharme now had two and a half years of other people&039;s time in which to think about it and plan for his vastly extended future Which, diligently, he now set about to do Nor did it take him thirty months by any means but only one day You&039;ll see why if you apply yourself to his problem:

His seventh victi span, his eighth perhaps four or five ood God!By the time the vampire Scharme had taken his tenth victim - and even were that tenth a newborn infant - he would only be gaining a matter of weeks! Twenty victims later and he&039;d be down to seconds! Then half-seconds, microseconds, nanoseconds! By which time, quite obviously, he&039;d have arrived at the point where he was taking ulp Was that his destiny, then: to be a enocide? To be the man who murdered an entire planet just to save his own ht be, but it was the only one he had And life was cheap, as he above all other men was only too well aware And so now he e to its fullest, and work out the real way it was going to be

Scharrandfather had once told him: &039;It takes hard work to earn a sum of money, but after that all it takes is time Money in the bank doubles every ten years or so That&039;s soust Scharme&039; And Scharally as possible, saved every pfennig he could get his hands on, banked his wages and watched the interest grow , so he experimented

For instance: he knew he could steal the lives of men, but what about anie of sharks; so little is known about them that their span of years is beyond our scope And he&039;d also read that barring accidents or the intervention ofas two or three hundred years! Likewise certain species of tortoise, lizard, crocodile Testing out the sharks, crocs and such, Scharood many years But at the same time he lost some, too The proble these creatures were destined to live! A hammerhead off the Great Barrier Reef earned him three whole years (miraculous!), but another, taken the same day, orth only an hour or two Obviously that one had been set to meet its fate anyway As for crocodiles: he ensured that several of those would never e!

And so eventually, without for the e (to the human race, anyway) Scharme clocked up one hundred years on his ive it a rest He was more or less happy now that he could take it easy for a full century and still come out the other end only thirty-two years and some few months old But rich? Oh, be certain he&039;d come out rich!

Exceptwhat then, he wondered? What if - in the summer of 2097 when he&039;d used up all his stolen tiain? And just how fast would he age? Would it be ten years for every ordinary year, as before - or a hundred - ora thousand? Or would he simply wither and die before he even knew it, before he had time to steal any more life?

Obviously he should not allow that to happen But at least with an entire century to give it a deal of considered thought, he wasn&039;t going to let the knowledge of it spoil what he already had

Or what he was going to have

The spring of 2097 eventually came around, and Scharme was a multi-millionaire Back in the Year 2000 he had had only 23,300 Deutsch Marks in his Koln bank; in 2010 it had been 75,000; in 2050 the sum was 3,000,100; and noorth close to one hundred million (Not in any bank in Koln, no, but in several numbered accounts in Switzerland) And Schar of that year turned to su, and he sat in his

Ha mansion and listened to the clocks in his head and in his very ato off the seconds to his fate And he kneas taking a great chance but took it anyway, simply because he had to know!

And so the time narrowed down to zero and Scharister of his years - recommenced the shich he had temporarily stilled back in 1997 And so horrified was Schar run for a full three seconds before he was able to do anything about it And then, on the count of three and when he was capable again, he pointed a treer at a picture of Japan in his Atlas and absorbed the lives of all its millions - yes, every one of them - at a stroke! And saw that he had only clocked up five extra years!

He killed off Indonesia for another ten before his panic subsided - and then took half the fish in the Mediterranean just to be absolutely sure Then, when he saw that he&039;d clocked up thirty-eight and a half years, he was satisfied -for a brief ht (perhaps on a point of siy), he also took half of the fishermen in the Med and so evened up the balance

And he knew that he ain, because if he did then it were certainly the end For during the span of those three ed almost a half-billion such units and was now fifty years old!

Ah, but he would never get any oldernot until the very last second, anyway

There had been no one left to bury the dead in the Japanese and Indonesian Islands; for fifty years they were pestholes; ues were contained That lesser ravage (e) which had slain so uessed to have had the saues, but science had never tracked it to its source It was generally assumed that Mother Nature had siical or chemical indiscretions No one ever had cause to relate the horror to the being of Klaus August Scharevity finally became known

That was the fault of his doctor; rather, it caone through a phase of worrying about diseases He had reasoned that if, in a normal lifetime, a man will suffer several afflictions of mind and body, how then ain hiicalhim? And when he had submitted himself for the most minute examination, he&039;d also submitted his medical records

The news broke: the world had taken unto its bosom, or created, what appeared to be an i lasting peace and tranquillity? Possibly And Klaus August Scharme became the most feted man in the history of the world Church men, at first sceptical, eventually applauded; world leaders looked to hireater than his own billions was heaped at his feet

And when the Maltese Plague struck in the Year 2163, Klaus August Scharht that island and sent in a million men to burn the bodies, cleanse the streets and build him his palace there And still no one suspected that the Great Benefactor Scharme was in fact the Great Monster Schar up the lives of ave work to the millions; he lavished billions of dollars, pounds, yen, lire, on charities across the face of the world; countless fortunes were spent in the search for the ultimate secret - that of eternal youth - which Schar for all mankind and not just himself He built hospitals, laboratories, schools, houses He opened up the potential of the poorer countries; dug wells in the Sahara, repopulated ravaged islands (such as Japan, Indonesia), built daes; wiped out the locust (at a stroke, and without ever hinting at the miracle he employed); deliberately and systematically did all he could to provide thethe lives of er he would live It was a question of careful culling, that was all

In 2247, the whales diedbut of no discernible disorder Those largest of all Earth&039;s creatures - protected, revered and preserved by man since the turn of the twenty-first Century - switched off like a light, wasted, erased to provide Schar only a e, placid creature Not all of them died; perhaps a dozen of each species were left to repopulate the oceans - naturally Schar

In the North Sea and the waters around England, across the Atlantic to the American coastline, there came the sudden and inexplicable decline of the cod; that was in 2287 But in the ensuing four years the rest of the food fishes surged andof 2292, all the world&039;s longest lived trees becaht It was Nature, the Top Men said; it was Evolution, an ecological balancing act; it was the Survival of the Fittest And in that last, at least, they were right; the survival of Klaus August Scharme

But there were no nable Malta fortress, rearing two h from the sea, would not alloars; they were destructive and cost him too many lives Nor would he allow pollution or disease, and wherever possible he took all steps to avoid natural disasters The world had become a very wonderful place in which to live - if one could live long enough and avoid those unpredictable places wherein an apparently outraged Nature ont to strike so pitilessly and without warning

Scharo discovered that it was not the nu half-life of his obscene talent but the number of tile man or an entire species of toad made no difference: always the sum of the span of stolen time was halved And by the year 2309 he was already well down into the micro-seconds Patently it asteful - what? It was sheer ain; indeed he had not done so since the late twentieth century

Towards the end of 2309 he took seven-eighths of all the world&039;s corals and earned hiht, after worriedly pacing the floors of his incredible palace fortress, Scharme eventually retired to dream his second inspirational drea:

He saord: NECROMETER

That single word above an instrulass s all in a row Behind each , on a black background, the sa line of open mouths: one hundred &039;O&039;s, a century of zeroes

Scharme was in a dark room, seated at some sort of console He was strapped into a sturdy ht and immobile as a man in an electric chair Behind the NECROMETER a ht both vertically and horizontally The as er than pinheads, each one like a ht

Scharital counter beneath it Even as he watched, the nuht, in the next an to flutter, reaching 1,000 in a ly, in s out, whole sections snuffing theure was into millions, tens ofterror descended upon Scharme as he watched, strapped in his sturdy metal chair If only he could break these straps he knew he could s out, put an end to the wanton destruction of life, the death

The death, yes NECROMETER