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.

He toyed--seriously toyed for some weeks--with the idea of destroying
the world. It could be done: he never doubted it for a minute. To
develop the atomic bomb, the governments of the free world had pooled
their resources in a crash program costing two billion dollars, and had
succeeded in a very few years. Two billion dollars--that was the kind of
figure Jason Wall understood. For two billion dollars, couldn't he hire
all the world'