Klaus August Scharme was born in a tiny village called Paradise close to Koln in the middle of the year 1940. The name of his birthplace has nothing to do with Scharme's story; the village was anything but paradisiacal, being a collection or huddle of farm buildings, some middling private dwellings and a grubby gasthaus, all reached along unmetalled roads, which, for at least four months of the year were little more than ruts around the perimeters of boggy fields.

Therefore, neither the date nor location of his origin was especially auspicious. The best we can say of them is that they were uninspired . . . drab beginnings for a man whose longevity would make him a legend of godlike proportions, not only in his own lifetime but also in every one of the countless millions of lives which would come and be lived and go - often in unseemly haste - before Scharme himself was yet fifty years old.

But here the paradox: he achieved that age not as might be expected in 1990, but in the summer of 2097. And the following story includes the facts of how that came about.

Aged sixteen years and three months, Scharme left Paradise and became an apprentice signwriter. 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 many and various districts of Germany. At that time such signs 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 'art collectors' from England, France, the USA - the troops of NATO in general - energetically manoeuvring and war-gaming across the long-since conquered German countryside. But this too is a mere detail and should not be allowed to detract . . . except that it also served as Scharme's launching point on his trajectory of four hundred years' duration.

It started as a dream: Scharme dreamed that he was growing 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, crumbled into dust and blew away.

He woke up screaming, and it was the morning of his twenty-first birthday. Perhaps the dream had come about through a subconscious awareness of his proximity to the age of manhood; perhaps it had dawned on him that the first part of his life was done, ended like a chapter closed. But that same day, as Scharme replaced a purloined sign upon its post, he saw speeding by him a military Land Rover . . . and reclining 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 uniform, laughed and waved as he sped into the distance; Scharme, wide-eyed in anger where he gazed after him, thought: 'Damn you . . . you should age a year for every sign you've stolen?

At which he was horrified to see the Land Rover swerve violently from the road to strike a tree!

Leaping 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 him to swerve - making Klaus August Scharme a murderer! And he knew it was so, for at the moment of his wish - that the Corporal should age commensurate with his thieving - he had felt himself the beneficiary of those years, some thirty-five in number. The Corporal had been twenty-five years of age; he was now sixty. Scharme had been twenty-one and still looked it, but some strange temporal instinct within told him that he would be fifty-six before he began to age again. Somehow - in some monstrous and inexplicable fashion - he had stolen all the young soldier's years!

And so for the next thirty-five years Scharme aged not at all but remained twenty-one; but - and most monstrously -in the twelve-month after that he aged altogether too many years, so that while by rights (?) 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. Scharme had lived for fifty-seven years, should have aged by only twenty-two of them, and yet knew that physically he had aged thirty-two of them. In short, he knew that he was now getting 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 half more years he'd be pushing sixty, and all the pleasures of an apparently eternal youth would be behind him and senility just around the corner. It was all grossly unfair and Scharme was very bitter about it.

So bitter, indeed, that the guilt he had felt over the past thirty-five years quite melted away.

He determined to do something about his predicament, and of course it must be done quickly; when one is aging an entire year for every five weeks, time grows 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 merest glance. The old man never knew what 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. Scharme, would now live for a further four years at the constant age of only thirty-two and some few months. Which would surely be sufficient time to work out some sort of humane strategy.

Except ... no sooner had his mental meter clocked up the defunct dodderer's four years, than it inexplicably halved them, alloting Scharme only two! Alarmed, he returned home and collapsed before his TV, where at that very moment they were showing an interview with a prisoner on Death Row. It was reckoned that this one could stave off his execution by a maximum of only two years, and that only at great expense. Scharme decided to save him and the state both money and trouble, and snatched his two remaining years right through the screen! The prisoner died right there in full view of many millions (good riddance, the majority said) but Scharme only gasped as the stolen time registered within him at a mere fraction of the time perceived: namely, six months!

It didn'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 Scharme was only going to get one-eighth of his next victim'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.

But. . . let's not leap ahead. Scharme now had two and a half years of other people'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'll see why if you apply yourself to his problem:

His seventh victim would yield only one sixty-fourth of his remaining span, his eighth perhaps four or five months . . . good 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'd be down to seconds! Then half-seconds, microseconds, nanoseconds! By which time, quite obviously, he'd have arrived at the point where he was taking multiples of lives, perhaps even entire races at a gulp. Was that his destiny, then: to be a mass murderer? To be guilty of invisible genocide? To be the man who murdered an entire planet just to save his own miserable life?

Well, miserable it might 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 must use his two and a half year advantage to its fullest, and work out the real way it was going to be.

Scharme's grandfather had once told him: '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's something you should remember. Klaus August Scharme . . .' And Scharme had remembered.

And so for now he lived as frugally as possible, saved every pfennig he could get his hands on, banked his wages and watched the interest grow month by month, year by year. And while his money was growing, so he experimented.

For instance: he knew he could steal the lives of men, but what about animals? Scharme had read somewhere that no man knows the true age of sharks; so little is known about them that their span of years is beyond our scope. And he'd also read that barring accidents or the intervention of man, a shark might live for as long as two or three hundred years! Likewise certain species of tortoise, lizard, crocodile. Testing out the sharks, crocs and such, Scharme gained himself a good many years. But at the same time he lost some, too. The problem was that he couldn't know in advance how long 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, was worth 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 make it to the handbag stage!

And so eventually, without for the moment doing any further damage (to the human race, anyway) Scharme clocked up one hundred years on his mental chronometer and was able to give 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'd come out rich!

Except . . . what then, he wondered? What if - in the summer of 2097 when he'd used up all his stolen time - what if he then began to age too fast again? And just how fast would he age? Would it be ten years for every ordinary year, as before - or a hundred - or . . .a 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'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 now he was worth close to one hundred million. (Not in any bank in Koln, no, but in several numbered accounts in Switzerland.) And Scharme was still only thirty-two years old.

But as the spring of that year turned to summer the thief immortal was prepared and waiting, and he sat in his

Hamburg mansion and listened to the clocks in his head and in his very atoms ticking off the seconds to his fate. And he knew he was taking a great chance but took it anyway, simply because he had to know!

And so the time narrowed down to zero and Scharme's internal time clock - the register of his years - recommenced the sweep which he had temporarily stilled back in 1997. And so horrified was Scharme, so petrified at what transpired, that he let the thing 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 trembling but deadly finger 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'd clocked up thirty-eight and a half years, he was satisfied -for a brief moment. Until as an afterthought (perhaps on a point of simple economy or ecology), he also took half of the fishermen in the Med and so evened up the balance.

And he knew that he must never let time creep up on him again, because if he did then it were certainly the end. For during the span of those three monstrous, uncontrolled seconds Klaus August Scharme had aged almost a half-billion such units and was now fifty years old!

Ah, but he would never get any older . . . not 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; mercifully, being islands, their plagues were contained. That lesser ravage (men called it The Ravage) which had slain so many in and around the Mediterranean was guessed to have had the same origin as the Japan I Indonesian Plagues, but science had never tracked it to its source. It was generally assumed that Mother Nature had simply bridled at one of Man's nuclear, ecological or chemical indiscretions. No one ever had cause to relate the horror to the being of Klaus August Scharme. No, not even when his strange longevity finally became known.

That was the fault of his doctor; rather, it came about through that doctor's diligence. Scharme had gone 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 a man with many lifetimes? What fatal cancers were blossoming in him even now? What tumours? What micro-biological mutations, even as he was a mutation, were killing him? And when he had submitted himself for the most minute examination, he'd also submitted his medical records . . .

The news broke: the world had taken unto its bosom, or created, what appeared to be an immortal!

The Second Coming? It could be! A miracle to bring 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 him for his friendship and favours; wealth as great and even greater than his own billions was heaped at his feet.

And when the Maltese Plague struck in the Year 2163, Klaus August Scharme bought 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 Scharme, a vampire thief drinking up the lives of men. But why should they?

Scharme gave 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 Scharme declared was fitting 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 dams and barriers to stem the floods in the Nile and Ganges; 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 the monies and the science requisite to prolonging the lives of men. Ah, of course he did! The longer men lived, the longer he would live. It was a question of careful culling, that was all ...

In 2247, the whales died . . . but of no discernible disorder. Those largest of all Earth'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 Scharme with life. And the thief immortal gaining only a moment or two from each huge, placid creature. Not all of them died; perhaps a dozen of each species were left to repopulate the oceans - naturally. Scharme was not an unreasonable man, and he was learning.

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 and man did not go short. At the end of that period, in the spring of 2292, all the world's longest lived trees became firewood overnight. 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 more wars. World President Scharme in his impregnable Malta fortress, rearing two miles high from the sea, would not allow wars; 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 was wont to strike so pitilessly and without warning.

Scharme had long ago discovered that it was not the number of lives he took which determined the ever-shortening half-life of his obscene talent but the number of times he used that talent.

Whether he took the life of a single 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 was wasteful - what? It was sheer madness! - to take single lives and he would never do that again; indeed he had not done so since the late twentieth century.

Towards the end of 2309 he took seven-eighths of all the world's corals and earned himself only nine weeks! And that same night, after worriedly pacing the floors of his incredible palace fortress, Scharme eventually retired to dream his second inspirational dream. An inspiration, and a warning:

He saw a word: NECROMETER.

That single word above an instrument with one hundred little glass windows all in a row. Behind each window, on a black background, the same white digital number (or negative) gleamed like a long line of open mouths: one hundred 'O's, a century of zeroes.

Scharme was in a dark room, seated at some sort of console. He was strapped into a sturdy metal chair-like frame, held upright and immobile as a man in an electric chair. Behind the NECROMETER a massive wall reached away out of sight both vertically and horizontally. The wall was made up of trillions of tiny lights no bigger than pinheads, each one like a minuscule firefly, lending the wall a soft haze of light.

Scharme looked at the word again: NECROMETER. And at the digital counter beneath it. Even as he watched, the number I clicked into place in the window on the far right, in the next moment became a 2, a 3, 4, 5 ...

The numbers began to flutter, reaching 1,000 in a moment, 10,000 in seconds. On the wall the tiny lights, singly, in small clusters, in masses, were blinking out, whole sections snuffing themselves before his eyes. On the NECROMETER the figure was into millions, tens of millions, billions; and a hideous fear, a soul-shrinking terror descended upon Scharme as he watched, strapped in his sturdy metal chair. If only he could break these straps he knew he could smash the counter, stop the lights from winking out, put an end to the wanton destruction of life, the death.

The death, yes. NECROMETER.

An instrument for measuring death!

But whose instrument? Obviously it belonged to Death himself. The entire - control room? - was Death!

Now the number on the counter was into the trillions, tens of trillions, hundreds of trillions, and entire sections of the wall were darkening like lights switched off in a skyscraper. In as little time as it takes to tell the quintillions were breached, the counter whirring and blurring and humming now in a mechanical frenzy of death-dealing activity. The wall was going out. Life itself was being extinguished.

Scharme struggled frantically, uselessly with his straps, straining against them, clawing at them with trapped, spastic hands. The counters were slowing down, the wall dimming, the NECROMETER had almost completed its task. The world - perhaps even the Universe - was almost empty of life.

Only two tiny lights remained on the dark wall: two faintly glowing pinheads. Close together, almost touching, they seemed to swell enormous in the eye of Scharme's mind, blooming into beacons that riveted his attention.

Two lights. He - his life - must be one of them. And the other?

The Conqueror Worm!

The Old Man!

The Grim Reaper!

The Nine of Spades!

The black lumpish machine bank atop the console above the NECROMETER split open like a hatching egg, its metal casing cracking and flaking away in chunks.

An eye, crimson with blood, stared out; a mouth, dripping the blood of nameless, numberless lives, smiled a monstrous smile, opening up into an awesome, gaping maw.

Scharme's straps snapped open. His chair tilted forward and flexed itself, ejecting him screaming down Death's endlessly echoing throat . . .

In the Year 2310, Scharme built the NECROMETER into a new wing of his massive Malta stronghold, and not a man of the thousands of technicians and scientists and builders who constructed it could ever have guessed at its purpose. Nor would they have thought of trying to do so. It was sufficient that the Immortal Man-god Master and Benefactor of the World Klaus August Scharme desired it, and so it was done. And Scharme's Computer of Life - and more surely of Death - was fashioned almost exactly as his dream had prescribed.

Within its electrical memory were housed details of every known species of animal, insect and vegetable, the approximate spans of life of each, their locations upon a vast world globe which turned endlessly above the console. This last was lit from within, taking the place of the wall of lights; and this was Scharme's single improvement over his dream.

The computer contained details of every species that flew in the sky, walked or grew upon the ground, crawled beneath it or swam in the deeps of the seas. It kept as accurate as possible a record of births (and deaths, of course) and updated Scharme's precious seconds of vampiric life in a never-ending cycle of self-appointed self-serving sacrifice. It specified the region of the planet to be exploited, told Scharme whom or what to kill and when to do it, programmed his culling of life until it was the finest (and foulest) of fine arts.

And suddenly, with all the weight and worry of calculation and of decision-making taken from his shoulders, and with all of his long years of existence stretching out behind him and apparently before him, Scharme began to feel the inevitable ennui of his immortality. And until now, he had not once thought of taking a wife.

There were three main reasons for this.

First, despite all the years he had stolen, there had never seemed to be enough time for it.

Second, he had feared to father children who might carry forward and spread his own mutation throughout the world, so robbing him of his future. Last, he knew how great was his power and mighty his position, and so would never be certain that a woman -any woman - would love him for himself and not for the glory of knowing him. All of which seemed valid arguments indeed . . . until the day he met Oryss.

Oryss was young, innocent and very beautiful: long-legged, firm-bodied, green-eyed and lightly tanned. And courting her, Scharme also discovered her to be without greed. Indeed, he was astonished that she turned him down on those very grounds: she could not marry him because people would say it was only his power and position which she loved. But while she visited him in his Maltese redoubt there occurred one of those unimaginable disasters with which, paradoxically, the world was now all too well acquainted. Her island, the island of Crete, was stricken with plague!

There were no survivors save Oryss; she could not go home to what was now a rotting pesthole; she became Scharme's wife and thus Queen of the World . . .

The years passed. She wanted children and he refused. Soon she was thirty-five and he was still fifty. But in three more years, when he saw how time was creeping up on her, Scharme began to despair. So that one day he called her to his most private place, the hall of the NECROMETER, and explained to her that machine's purpose. Except it had no purpose unless he also explained his talent, which he did. At first she was astonished, awed, frightened. And then she was quiet. Very quiet.

'What are you thinking?' he eventually asked her.

'Only of Crete,' she told him.

'The great whales have proliferated during the last hundred years,' he told her then. 'I would like to experiment, see if I can give you some of their time. I can't bear to see another wrinkle come into your face.'

'They were only laughter lines,' she said, sadly, as if she thought she might never laugh again.

'Here, hold my hands,' said Scharme. And there in the hall of the NECROMETER he willed half the whales dead and their time transferred to Oryss. And here the most astonishing thing of all: he discovered that his internal chronometer worked not only for him but also for his wife - and that she had gained several millions of years!

And he saw that because she was new to his art, it was for her as it had been at first for him: just as he had gained all of that almost forgotten Corporal's years, so had Oryss gained all of the years of the many whales. 'It could have been me!' he told himself then. 'If I had known at the beginning ... it could have been me . . .' And while he clapped a hand to his forehead and reeled, and thought these things - things which he had always known, but which never before had been brought home so forcefully - so Oryss fainted at his feet.

He at once carried her to her bed, called his physicians, sat stroking her hand until the medical men were finished with their examination. And: 'What is it?' he whispered to them then, afraid that they would tell him the worst.

'Nothing, merely a faint,' they shrugged. But Scharme suspected it was much more than that. He felt it in his bones, a cold such as he had never known before, not even as a barefoot boy in Paradise in the winter. And mazed and mortally afraid he once more turned his eyes inwards and gazed upon the life-clock ticking in his being. Ah, and he saw how quickly the pendulum swung, how fast his time was running down! Too fast; the weight of Oryss's myriad years had tipped the scales; he had a month and then must take life again. Oh, a great many lives . . .

It was too much for him. Even for the Great Vampire Klaus August Scharme. To extend his life a single hour beyond the twenty-eight days remaining to him he must devour a hundred lifetimes, and for the next hour ten thousand, and for the next one hundred million! The figure would simply multiply itself each time he used his talent. Quickly he returned to the hall of the NECROMETER, fed the computer with these new figures, impatiently waited out the few seconds the machine stole from him to perform its task. And while he stood there trembling and waiting, so the NECROMETER balanced all the planet's teeming life against the single life of Klaus August Scharme, and finally delivered its verdict. He had only twenty-eight days, six hours, three minutes and forty-three seconds left - and not a second longer. Neither Scharme, nor any other living thing upon the face of the planet!

Gasping his horror, he fed new figures into the computer. What if he took all the Earth's life at a single stroke - with the exception, of course, of life in the air and on the land and in the waters around Malta? And the computer gave him back exactly the same result, for it had assumed that this was his question in the first instance!

At which, Scharme too fainted away . . .

But before he woke up he dreamed his third inspirational dream, whose essence was simplicity itself. He saw gigantic scales weighted on the one side with Oryss, and on the other with the planet Earth and all it contained. But for all that she was a single creature, still those cosmic scales were tilted in her favour. And between the pans of the scales, holding them aloft on arms which formed the pivot, stood Klaus August Scharme himself.

He awoke, and Oryss stood there close by, looking at the NECROMETER. Upon its screen were those terrible calculations which had caused her husband's faint. And from the look on her face Scharme supposed she understood them. And from the look on his face, she also understood that he had reached a decision.

'So,' she said then, 'it is ended.'

He climbed tiredly to his feet, burst into tears. 'It is the only way,' he said, folding her to his heart. 'But not yet, my love, not yet. I can wait... a day? Perhaps even a day and a night.

But you must understand that what was mine to give, is also mine to take away.'

'Not so,' she clasped him coldly. 'For when you gave me my millions of years, you also gave me your talent. I feel it within me, ticking like a clock.'

He gasped and thrust her away, but she was pointing at him and had already commenced to say: 'You should age one second for every man, woman and child, every beast, fish, fowl and creeping thing which you destroyed in the island of Crete!' Which was the end of him, for he had something a deal less than two and a half millions of seconds left, and of creeping things alone, that would have sufficed to kill him. But Oryss had loved her island dearly.

Long ago, Scharme had conceived of a time when someone might see his NECROMETER, understand its purpose and meaning and attempt to kill him. And he had determined that if that time should ever come, then that his executioner must die with him. Now, even as he crumbled to dust, he fell upon a certain lever.

The console of the NECROMETER cracked open into a gaping mouth and the floor of the hall lashed like a crippled snake. A convulsion which hurled the beautiful Oryss and the vile vampiric debris of Klaus August Scharme into eternity within the clashing cogs and wheels and electrical daggers of the great machine. Scharme's fortress blew apart from its roots upwards, and the island of Malta collapsed inwards, and great tidal waves washed outwards to the furthest corners of the world.

And Time Itself felt a wrenching and a reckoning, and Inviolable Life - so long held upon Scharme's monstrous leash - rebelled and added to the space-time confusion. So that for a split second all was chaos until the vast Engine which is the Universe backfired . . . !

Laughing and waving, the Corporal sped away in his Land Rover. Scharme's short ladder shuddered for a moment beneath the post to which he'd nailed his Kreise sign, then stood still and empty.

The Kreise sign swung all askew upon a single nail, the job unfinished. And at the foot of the ladder lay a small pile of rags and a handful of grey dust, which the winds of time quickly blew away . . .