The man glanced up languidly. 'Please leave,' he said, his voice mild.
'First I must do my job,' Zane said.
'Job? Perhaps you are in uniform, and assume I recognize your business. I can not see you, for I am blind.'
Oh. That accounted for the disabled sticker. But mere sightlessness wouldn't kill this man, unless some bad accident were coming up. 'I suspect you will be able to see me, if you try,' Zane said.
'You are a faith healer? Go away. I am an atheist, and have no traffic with your kind.'
An atheist! One who did not believe in God or Satan, or in their related artifacts. How could Death have been summoned for a nonbeliever?
Two answers offered. It was possible that this man was not as cynical as he professed — and really did believe in Eternity perhaps unconsciously. Or it could be that there had been another glitch, and that the Powers that Be had not realized that no service was required for this particular client.
Well, Zane was here, and the case would have to be played through to whatever conclusion was fated. He looked at the water in the bath and saw that it was discolored by a cloud of darkness. 'You are committing suicide,' he stated.
'Yes, and I must ask you not to interfere. My folks are away for two days, so will not know until it is safely done. I have slashed veins in my ankles and am pleasantly bleeding to death in this hot water. There is no greater kindness you can do me than to let nature take its course.'
'I am here for that,' Zane said. 'I am Death.'
The man laughed, becoming more animated as his attention focused. 'An actual, physical personification of Death? You're crazy!'
'You don't believe in Death?'
'I believe in death, and, obviously. I am about to experience it. Certainly I don't believe in a spook with skull and crossbones and scythe.'
'Would you like to touch my hand and face?' Zane asked.
'You persist in this nonsense? Very well, while I still command my faculties, let me touch you.' The man lifted an arm from the water with some visible effort and extended it toward Zane.
Zane clasped that hand in his own gloved one, curious how the man would perceive it. He was hardly disappointed in the reaction.
'It's true!' the man exclaimed. 'A skeleton!'
'A glove,' Zane said, not wanting to deceive him. 'And my face is a skull-mask generated by magic. Nevertheless, I am Death, and I have come to collect your soul.'
The man touched Zane's face. 'A mask? It could fool me! That's a skull!'
Zane had been uncertain before whether his skull-face was tactile as well as visual; now he knew. 'I am a living man performing an office. I wear a costume and have certain necessary powers, but I am alive and have the flesh and feelings of a man.'
The client took his hand again. 'Yes, now I perceive the flesh, faintly, the way I do my own when my foot is asleep. Strange! Perhaps I do believe in you, or in your belief in the office. But I don't believe in the soul, so your effort is wasted.'
'What do you believe happens when you die?' Zane asked, genuinely curious. This man seemed to have a good mind.
'My body will be inert and in time will dissolve into its chemical components. But that is not what you mean, is it? You want to know about my supposed soul. And I will answer. There is no soul. Death is simply the end of consciousness. After death, there is nothing. Like the flame of a candle snuffed out, the animation is gone. Extinction.'
'No afterlife? You do not consider death a translation to a spiritual existence?'
The man snorted. He was slowly sinking in the tub, as loss of blood weakened him gradually, but his mind remained alert. 'Death is a translation to intellectual nonexistence.'
'Does that frighten you?'
'Why should it? It is the deaths of others I should fear, for they can cause me inconvenience and grief. When I myself pass, I shall be out of it, completely uncaring.'
'You have not answered,' Zane said.
The man grimaced. 'Damn it, you are putting my toes to the fire! Yes, my own death does frighten me. But I know that is merely my instinct of self-preservation manifesting, my body's effort to survive. Subjectively, I do fear extinction, because instinct is irrational. Objectively, I do not. I have no terror of the nonexistence before I was conceived; why should I fear the nonexistence after I die? So I have overridden the foible of the flesh and am proceeding to my end.'
'Wouldn't you be relieved to discover that life continues on the spiritual plane?'
'No! I do not want life to continue in any form! What uncertainties or tortures might I experience there? What tedium, existing for eternity with no reprieve in another person's sterile conception of Heaven? No, my life is the only game, and the game has soured, and I want nothing more than to be able to lay it aside when its convenience is over. Oblivion is the greatest gift I can look forward to, and Heaven itself would be Hell to me if that gift were denied.'
'I hope you find it,' Zane said, shaken by this unusual view. A man who actually insisted on oblivion!
'I hope so, too.' Now the atheist was fading rapidly. The loss of blood was affecting his consciousness and soon he would faint.
'A man's death is the most private part of his life,' Zane said. 'You have the right to die as you wish.'
'That's correct.' The voice was slow and faint. 'Nobody's business but mine.'
'Yet shouldn't you be concerned about the meaning of your life, about your place in the greater scheme of things? Before you throw away your one chance to improve — '
'Why the hell should I care about improvement when I don't believe in Heaven or Hell?' the atheist demanded weakly.
'Yet you assume that your own relief is all that matters,' Zane said. 'What of those you love, who remain in life? Those who love you, and who will find your body here, a horror to them. They will still suffer. Don't you owe them anything?'
But the atheist was too far gone. He had lost consciousness and no longer cared who else might suffer, if he ever had cared. In due course he died.
Zane reached in and drew out his soul. It was a typical mottled thing, good and evil spotting it in a complex mosaic. He started to fold it — and the soul disintegrated, falling apart into nothingness.
The atheist had his wish. He really had not believed, and so the Afterlife had been unable to hold him. He was beyond the reach of God or Satan. That did seem best.
It was best — but was it right? The atheist had not seemed to care about anyone except himself — and in that uncaring, perhaps had rendered his own existence meaningless.
Zane rejoined Mortis. 'I think that man was half-right,' he said. 'He is better off out of the game — but the game may not be better off without him. A man should not exist for himself alone. Life made an investment in him, and that investment was not paid off.' But Zane wasn't sure.
His timer was going again. He oriented on the next client, wondering how he was going to account for the soul that disintegrated. The Purgatory News Center would have a ball with that one. He visualized the headline: THE FISH THAT GOT AWAY.
He arrived at a hospital. That was not unusual; the terminally sick tended to congregate there, and he had made a number of similar collections all over the world. But he still didn't like hospitals very well, because of his lingering guilt relating to his mother.
At the edge of the parking lot was an ad, for once not Satanic. SHEEPSHEAD HORN O' PLENTY — MORE FRUIT THAN BRANDS X, Y, AND Z HORNS. Just the thing to buy for a hospitalized person recovering from stomach surgery.
Zane felt worse when he saw his client. It was an old woman, and she was embedded in a mass of lines and burbling devices. Some sort of bellows forced her to breathe rhythmically, and monitors clicked and bleeped to signal her heartbeat, digestion, and state of consciousness. Her blood coursed through the tubes of a dialysis machine. A nurse checked the equipment regularly, going on to the others in the ward. There were five other
