Photo courtesy of Jessica N. Diamond on Flickr.
The Thousandth Birthday Party
Durant Imboden, first published in If: Worlds of Science Fiction, December, 1966.
part 3
It was a simple idea, of course. For that matter, it wasn’t even a terribly new idea. Prophets in the fiction and alarmist propaganda fields had been predicting similar lotteries for several centuries.
In any case, the lottery was put into effect. It naturally upset a great many people. But necessity was necessity, and the world’s leaders — who were exempted from the lottery, by the way — accepted the inevitable and told their subjects that they would have to do likewise.
The plan worked qite simply. Whenever a person reached the age of 1,000 as verified vy a check of government birth records, the lottery officials of his region would treat him to a birthday party. The primary game at the party was not Bland Man’s Bluff or Pin the Tail on the Donkey, but the lottery. And the lottery was a life-or-death game.
It did help to make the party more interesting than the average party, though.
After the senior citizen and his clan had enjoyed a feast of gargantuan proportions and had lightened their hearts and heads with synthetic champagne (far cheaper than the real stuff; government economy was always an important political issue, after all), the lottery officials would escort the guest of honor into a soundproofed, concrete room at the end of the long, concrete corridor.
Then one of the officials would unlock a large bin filled with Ping-pong balls.
One of the balls was coated with a substance which would cause it to glow when placed under an ultraviolet light source. The senior citizen would be told to pick one of the balls from the bin; if he happened to be lucky enough to get the one which glowed, he would be escorted back into the banquet hall, and everyone would drink even more synthetic champagne, on the house, and jubilation would reign as the man blew out the candles on his cake and rejoiced in his good fortune and in the most lovely and lasting birthday gift of all… immortality. Or at least as much immortality as medical science and the military-industrial power structure could promise him.
On the other hand, if the guest of honor failed to pick the winning Ping-pong ball, he would immediately be shot. A high-powered rifle was held by a hidden sharpshooter who kept it aimed at the back of the lottery partici[ant’s head as he drew the ball form the bin. At a sign from one of the officials, the senior citizen would be sent into God’s kingdom without so much as a last cigarette.
In such cases one of the officials, a psychiatrist specially trained to calm screaming relatives, would go back into the banquet hall to console the next of kin and to extinguish the candles on the deceased guests’s cake before the melting wax spoiled too much of the frosting.
In this Sunday series of posts I will be “re-publishing” pulp science fiction short stories that have long since gone out of print. When possible I will seek out author’s and estates for permission.
