velocity across the terrain of the world. Then, as abruptly as it had started, the blurring stopped.
Zane looked around, startled. He knew immediately that he was in a different city. He guessed it was one a significant distance northwest of Kilvarough - perhaps all the way across the continent. Maybe even the great port city of Anchorage.
But he had no time to be concerned about that. The cat's eye had grown abruptly and significantly larger, the two dots on the gridstone had merged, and his watch was down to a single minute. He was very close to his object.
With this assurance, Zane proceeded with greater con- fidence. He was beginning to get the hang of the use of Death's instruments. He now understood that the eye grew until it covered the stone, and that would be when he arrived. When the direction arrow started shifting, though he was driving in a straight line, Zane knew he was there. Just in time, too; his watch's red hand showed only thirty seconds and counting.
The eye was maximal, and the arrow spun in a full circle. He had to be right at the scene-but there was nothing here. He was passing through an ordinary inter- section. Was this a false alarm?
He slowed and drew to the side of the street, perplexed. He had thought he had it, and now it seemed he did not. The arrow steadied, pointing back the way he had come. Pointing at nothing.
The sweep hand on the Deathwatch closed on noon.
There was a crash in the intersection. A small truck had made a preemptive left turn into the right-of-way of a tiny Japanese subcompact, and the two had collided violently.
Zane turned off his motor and got out of the Death- mobile, not caring whether it was legally parked. He hurried to the scene of the accident.
The man in the truck was half-stunned. The woman in

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the little car had an enormous sliver of supposedly unbreakable glass through her neck. Blood was gushing outof her, flooding the dashboard, but she was not dead.
Zane hesitated, appalled. He saw no way to save the woman-but what was he to do? Cars were screeching to halts, carpets were landing, and people were converg- ing.
The woman's glazing eyes clarified, momentarily. She saw Zane. Her pupils contracted to pinpoints. She tried to scream, but the blood cut off her breath, keeping her silent.
Someone nudged Zane's elbow. He jumped. Fate stood beside him. "Don't torture her, Death," Fate said. "Finish it."
"But she isn't dead!"
"She can't die-quite-until you take her soul. She must remain in terrible agony until you put an end to it. She and all the others who are trying to die during this hold period. Do your duty, Death."
Zane stumbled toward the wreckage. The woman's terrified eyes tracked his progress. She might see nothing else, but she saw him-and Zane knew from his own recent experience how horrible the oncoming specter of Death was. But he did not know how he was supposed to finish ending her life.
The victim's dress was'torn, showing how the glass had sliced all the way down across her right breast, leav- ing her front a mass of gore. There was absolutely nothing pretty or merciful about this demise. It had to be termi- nated quickly. Yet the woman tried to resist his approach. She wrenched her left hand up to fend him off, the hand hanging from a broken wrist. Zane had never before seen such physical and emotional pain, not even when his mother had-
He reached for her, still uncertain what to do. Her wrist blocked his hand, but his flesh passed through hers without resistance. His hooked fingers caught in something that felt like a cobweb, there inside her head. He wrenched his hand out-and it trailed a festoon of transient film, like the

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substance of a soap bubble. Disgusted, he tried to shake it off, but it clung like a string of spittle. He brought his other hand up, holding the jeweled bracelet, and tried to scrape the stuff away. The thin film tore, but clung to his other hand.
"This does not become you. Death," Fate said reprovingly. "This is her soul you are brutalizing."
Her soul! Zane's eyes tried to glaze like those of his victim. He stepped back-and the tattered soul moved with him, stretching out from her destroyed body as if reluctant to separate from it.
Then the silken strand snapped free and contracted. He held it dangling limply, like the discarded skin of a molting snake.
The woman in the car was dead at last, the horror and anguish frozen on her face. Death had taken her soul and ended her suffering.
Or had he? "What happens now?" he asked Fate. His body was shaking, and he felt unpleasantly faint.
"You fold the soul, pack it in your pouch, and go on to the next client," she answered. "When you have a break in the schedule, you will analyze the soul, to de- termine to which sphere it should be relegated."
"Which sphere?" His mind refused to focus, as if his very thoughts were blinded by the client's blood.
"Heaven or Hell."
"But I'm no judge of souls!" he protested.
"Yes, you are-now. Try not to make too many mis- takes." Fate turned and walked away.
Zane stared at the dangling shreds of the soul. People passed him, but no one noticed him. He might as well have been alone.
Awkwardly, he brought his hands together, folding the gossamer material like a sheet. It bent in the wrong places and creased horizontally, and the torn edges flopped out of place, but he muscled it together stage by stage. Finally he had

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a very small, light package; the soul had hardly any physical mass. He fished in his pockets again and found a cloth bag; he stuffed the wadded soul into this. Then he tried to retch, but his empty stomach lacked the wherewithal to complete the job. What a mess he had made of his first case!
The police had arrived, and an ambulance, and people were extracting the mangled remains of the victim from the wreckage of her car. Witnesses were being inter- viewed, but no one thought to question Zane. He was coming to understand how this operated; he was not in- visible, but he was unnoticeable. Except when it counted.
He had collected his first soul. No one needed to tell him that he had pretty well bungled it. He had frightened the woman unnecessarily, extended her torment while he dallied, and ripped her soul forth most unkindly. This certainly was not an auspicious commencement of his new duties!
His watch was flashing again. The sweep hand was moving. He had seven minutes to make his next appoint- ment.
"I'd rather die myself!" he muttered. But he wasn't quite sure of that. Life could be ugly, and his present office was also ugly, but dying was worse yet. What a torment the human condition could be!
What alternative did he have? Zane hurried to the Deathmobile. He did not know what the normal frequency of clients was, but supposed a backlog had accumulated during the transition, if such a thing were possible. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe Fate had timed the changeover to occur during a lapse in other clients.
He oriented on the next case and drove toward it. As the green grid flashed, he touched the button on the dash panel-and launched toward the location on hyperdrive. This one was far south, probably well below the equator. But as the car stabilized in the new city, the guide-gems functioned normally, and no one seemed to notice his sudden appearance on the street.
Zane was not at all sure he liked this business of collecting

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souls, but still was hesitant about balking. How long would the woman in the wrecked car have suffered if he. Death, had not been there to relieve her other soul? He didn't care to think about that.
The car ran smoothly, maneuvering through traffic ex- pertly. It was a real pleasure to drive. He followed the arrow and eye and closed quickly on his destination.
Where was he? Maybe in Brazilia, in the bosom of the southern continent. But no-now he saw the Phoenix General Hospital. This was the Arizona of the country. He had not hyped south of the equator at all; he had severely misjudged his progress. Well, he would learn with experience.
He parked in the visitors' lot, drew his cloak about him, and proceeded to the appropriate ward, feeling ner- vous. He had never liked hospitals, especially since his mother had been confined to one. Yet he realized that Death would have a number of calls at hospitals, since many terminally ill people would expire in them.
No one challenged him, though he had not arrived during visiting hours. Evidently they took him for a doctor or hospital functionary. Perhaps he was; his function was the most basic of them all.
He found his client. It was an old man in a ward of four. All of them had tubes and apparatus connected to their bodies in awkward ways and all seemed to be ter- minally ill. Oh, he hated this! He wanted to flee, but could not.
Zane was concerned that his appearance would terrify the client, as it had before, but there was no way to sneak up on him anonymously. In addition. Death was early; two minutes remained on the countdown.
He decided to be forthright. After all, that couldn't be any worse than the previous case. He marched up to the bed. "Hello." His spoken word sounded strange; there seemed to be an echo from his pocket.
None of the four patients reacted at first. This gave Zane a moment to ferret out the mystery. He reached in the pocket

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and found the earring he had taken from Death. Had the echo come from it? Why?
"Hello," he repeated-and this time was sure the sound reacted with the gamet.
The client's eyes turned slowly on him. The sagging mouth formed words. "About time you got here. Death!"
The client was speaking in a foreign language-but Zane understood him, because a translation emanated from the gem he held. He realized that this was a magic trans- lation device, another enchanted stone. Naturally Death had duties all over the world and had to be able to handle any language. He jammed the gem into his left ear; later he would get it attached in a more normal fashion.
The novelty of the language and the stone had dis- tracted him from the business at hand; the client was looking at him expectantly. Zane was taken aback. "You were expecting me? You're not afraid?"
"Expecting you? I've been seeking you for six months! Afraid? I thought I'd never get out of this prison!"
"This hospital? It seems nice enough."
"This body."
Oh. And it seemed the translation worked both ways, for the man understood Zane's words, though there was no noise in his ear. "You want to-?"
The client squinted at him. "You're new at this job, aren't you?"
Zane choked. "How did you know?"
The man smiled. "I had a close encounter with Death once before. He was older than you. More wrinkles in his skull. The sight of him so fazed me that I surged right back into life. I had been dying on the operating table, but the operation became a success. That time."
"I know how that is," Zane agreed, thinking once more of his mother.
"Then I had a reserve will to live that manifested when

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challenged. But my condition is farther gone now. Neither science nor magic can abate the pain any more. Not with- out dulling my intellect, and I don't want that. In any event, I suspect that death is merely a translation to a similar existence without the burden of the body. Some people don't even realize when they're dead. I don't mind if I realize, just as long as the pain abates. So my will has eased, and I'm ready to lay life down. I hope you are competent."
Zane looked at the Deathwatch. He was a minute over- due! "I hope so, too," he said. "I talked with you too long."
The man smiled again. "It was a pleasure, Death. It provided me a brief respite. If you ever discover a person truly being kept alive beyond his will, you must use force if necessary to ease him. I think you will do that."
Again Zane thought of his mother. "I have done that," he agreed in a whisper. "A person has a right to die in his turn. I believe that. But some would call it murder."
"Some would," the client agreed. "But some are fools." Then his face tightened with a spasm of intense pain. "Ah, it is time!" he gasped. "Do it now, Death!"
Zane reached for the man's soul. His fingers passed through the client's body and caught the web of the soul. He drew it carefully out, not tearing it. The man's eyes glazed; he was dead and satisfied to be so.
The three other patients in the room paid no attention. They did not realize the nature of the visitor, or know that their companion had died.
Zane folded the soul and put it in his bag with the other. He was getting better at this, fortunately. He felt better about it, too, for he knew he had done right by this particular client, sparing him further futile pain. Perhaps this office was not as dreadful as he had thought.
He looked at his watch. The countdown was running again, but showed almost half an hour. The cat's eye was large; the location was close. For once he wouldn't have to hurry.

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He drove to a park area beyond Phoenix and pulled off the street. He opened his bag of souis, put in his hand, and drew one out. He unfolded it carefully, spreading it out as well as he could against the inside of the windshield. It was a whole soul, untorn, so he knew it was the most recent one he had collected.
The soul, silhouetted against the glare of oncoming headlights, showed patterns of translucency and opacity, like a convoluted Rorschach blob. It was fascinating in its intricate detail, but he had no way to judge its overall nature. Should this one be relegated to Heaven or Hell?
Something glimmered in his mind, almost like a mem- ory from a prior existence. Zane reached around the soul, his arm crumpling it slightly in passing, and punched open the dashboard compartment. Sure enough, inside it were several more gemstones. He had gone from paucity to plethora when he assumed this office!
Two stones were gently flashing. Zane drew them out. They were more cabochons, half-rounded-polished hemispheres. One was a dull brown, the other a dull yel- low. He set their flat faces together, and the two formed a sphere, a little like the dark and light faces of the moon. Perhaps they were moonstones. They were a matched set-but what was their purpose?
He let the stones separate and brought the brown one near the spread soul. The stone flickered as if hungry. He slid it across the surface of the soul, and it flickered when- ever it crossed a dark patch.
Aha! Zane brought the yellow stone near. It flickered as it passed the light portions.
If dark equated with evil and light with good, he had here his analytic mechanism. One stone responded to each aspect of the soul. He could perform the magic analysis scientifically. But how was the final balance to be ascertained?
Maybe the stones gained weight as they absorbed the readings from the soul. Was there a set of scales? He checked in the compartment, but found no scales.Well,

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maybe the mechanism would become apparent at the right moment. He really did not have time to ponder at length.
Zane passed the brown gem across the length of the edge of the soul, then down a swath just in from the edge. The dark items flashed into the stone. Where he ran over a portion already covered, there was no response; the gem only picked up any given sin once. As it did so, it gradually darkened, but did not seem heavier in Zane's hand. Of course, the change might be too small for him to detect.
By the time he had covered the whole soul, the stone was almost black. There was certainly a lot of guilt and sin on this ledger. Zane wondered what the details were, but had no way to learn them. The client had had a mixed life before cancer brought him down; perhaps that was all Death needed to know.
He passed the yellow stone across the soul in the same fashion. As it picked up the good aspects, it brightened, until at the end it shone like the brightest moon.
Now what? Certainly the stones had changed, taking the measure of this soul-but which one had changed more? The dark one certainly seemed heavier than the light one; did that mean that evil predominated in this soul? Yet the light stone had seemed to become lighter as it proceeded, as if the good in it were buoyant. Maybe the trick was to ascertain which gem had changed more. Was there more sink to the dark stone, or more lift to the so bright one? Where was the balance, when the two were averaged ?
Then he had it. He put the two stones together. They clung to each other, as if magnetically attached, and the line of their cleavage writhed into the configuration of the Oriental Yin-Yang or the Occidental baseball. They were merged.
He let go of the ball. It hovered in mid-air, in almost perfect balance. What was this soul's destiny?
Then, slowly, it rose. The balance was marginally in favor of Heaven. Zane let his breath out; he had been more nervous

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about this than he had realized. He had been in doubt about both the technique of analysis and the destination of the nice gentleman he had talked with.
Nice? The man couldn't have been too nice, or he would not have had so much evil on his soul!
The gem ball nudged gently against the ceiling of the car. Zane did not let it go outside; with the car windows closed, the ball was not going anywhere. He needed to send the soul itself to Heaven. But how?
He fished in the compartment again. He found a roll of transparent tape and two packages of balls. The balls were of distinctly differing densities. Some were pith and threatened to float away; others were lead, quite heavy.
Now it came clear. Zane refolded the soul into a com- pact mass, bound it together by a loop of tape, and affixed a buoyant pithball. Then he opened the car window and released it. It floated up into the starry sky and in a mo- ment was lost to view.
He hoped the package arrived safely in Heaven. This seemed an unconscionably primitive way to transport a commodity as precious as a soul. Surely it should be possible, in a world possessing magic carpets and luxury airplanes, to transport a soul more safely and efficiently than by such means. But, of course, this was his prede- cessor's method; maybe Zane would be able to update it when he learned more about the office.
The merged stones fell apart, their original dull colors returning. That job was finished. He returned them to the dashboard compartment.
The Deathwatch was counting down past ten minutes. He had used up his spare time and had to move.
Zane oriented the car and touched the hyperdrive but- ton. This time the wrenching was longer. He looked out the window. He was passing across water. He was proceed- ing east across the ocean, according to the compass he now

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spotted on the dash. He left the night and reentered day, realizing that it had been evening when he started this business, and late afternoon when he had taken his first client in Anchorage, and evening again in Firebird for his second. The world continued its turning regardless of his business, and he was zipping in and out of day.
In a moment, land loomed. The car swooped up to it, slowing, then rolled across a brief beach, through a de- velopment of twenty-storey modernistic condominiums, through-not around-a ragged brown mountain range, past a village that filled in a valley with white, plaster- sided houses, through an olive orchard, past grazing horses, and to an open field.
He was now near his client. He wasn't sure why the hyperdrive never delivered him precisely to the target; perhaps long-distance accuracy was not great. More likely it was to preserve the anonymity of Death's approach; it would be hard for people to ignore a car that abruptly materialized on the site of an accident. Magic did have its limitations, so it was best not to push it too far.
He used the eye and arrow to close in on the target and arrived with a good minute to spare. He was at a decrepit farmhouse amidst languishing fields. This was a poverty-stricken family.
He opened the door and walked in. He wondered whether he should have knocked, but concluded that no one would care to answer Death at the door. It was dawn here; he could hear the members of the family screaming at each other as they blundered sleepily about, getting organized in the chill house. His left ear picked up the translated words, for, of course, this was not Zane's own language. The people were grumbling about the cold morning, the inadequacy of food for breakfast, and a rat that skittered across the floor.
Zane's gems guided him to the bedroom. The woman was there, sitting on the bed, an expression of discomfort on her face as she struggled to don heavy, opaque stockings. One leg

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was raised, the knee bent, so that he had an intimate view of her thighs. He was shocked to see that they were almost covered by a flaming rash. Indeed, the woman looked sick; her face was flushed, her hair straggly and tangled. Her teeth, as she grimaced, were discolored, perhaps rotting. This was a young, fairly shapely woman, but her bad health made her unappealing. Her eyes were so deeply shadowed, it was as if they had been blacked by violence. Then Zane realized that there had been violence; she had bruises and scrapes all over her body where flesh showed.
Perhaps death would, in fact, be a boon to her. She was obviously living in misery.
But the arrow did not point to the woman. It pointed to the crib on the far side of the room where a small baby lay huddled.
A baby? How could he take a baby?
Zane walked past the woman, who paid him no atten- tion, and stood over the crib. The baby had scuffled off its inadequate blanket during the night and lay, exposed and damp, face down, its skin bluish. It was, he realized, about to suffer a crib death.
But what of the fifty-fifty rule that governed his clients? Most people died and were separated from their souls without his direct help. Only those who so cluttered their souls with evil as to be in doubt of salvation required the personal service of Death. Almost by definition, a baby was innocent; therefore its freed soul should float blithely to Heaven. A baby was not yet, as Fate had quoted, the captain of its soul, and Heaven still lay about it.
Yet there was no question this was his client. The baby was fading fast. It was time. Zane reached down and hooked out the small soul.
The baby's mother, intent on her laborious dressing, never noticed. Zane walked past her, carrying the soul, and left the house. He felt ill.

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In the Deathmobile, he used the stones to analyze the little soul. The pattern was strange, because it was not a pattern at all; the soul was uniformly gray. Experience had not yet caused it to be variegated.
The verdict of the combined stones was neutral; the gem ball hovered in place like the moon it resembled, neither rising nor falling.
How could this be? What evil had this little boy done? What evil could he have done, confined to his crib, com- pletely dependent on his sick mother?
Zane had no answer. He folded the soul neatly and put it in the bag.
The Deathwatch was counting down yet again. Was there no end to this? When did he get some rest, some time to think things out?
He knew the answer. Deaths occurred all the time, and the small percentage that required special attention con- tinued, too. At some point he would have two difficult cases happen at the same moment, on opposite sides of the globe. What would he do then?
Zane was beginning to understand how a person per- forming the office of Death could grow careless, as his predecessor had done. When things got rushed, comers had to be cut, or the job would not get done. What hap- pened to a Death who got too far behind?
He looked at the watch more carefully. It had three buttons on the side. This was a stopwatch, a chronograph, of course, though its timer did run backward. He had seen the type before. One button would be used to start and stop timing; another to zero the total; and the shorter middle one to set the regular time and calendar features when necessary.
But this watch ran itself, magically, responding to input he did not know about. Maybe it had a direct line to Heaven or Hell or wherever the allocation of souls was determined. Fate probably had a hand in it, as she measured her threads.

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He didn't time events; events timed him. Why, then, were the extra buttons necessary? What did they control?
He thought of punching a button. Then he hesitated; it could be dangerous to play with something he did not understand. Yet how else was he to learn? He had lived his life and almost died his death in an impetuous manner; he might as well be consistent.
Experimentally, he punched the lowermost button. Nothing happened. It depressed and sprang back without any specific point of resistance. Had it been discon- nected? Not necessarily; a good stopwatch was protected from an accidental punching of the wrong button, as might occur when someone was distracted by a close finish in a race and aimed for the STOP button without looking. This should be the zeroing control, operative only when there was a fixed time registered, as would be the case after a race had been timed.
He punched the highest button. It clicked-and the red sweep hand stopped.
He studied the dial. There was no motion in either of the two miniature dials that showed hours and minutes. The sweep hand was frozen at twenty-three seconds after the minute. Before the minute, since it ran backward. But the third little dial continued to function; its hand moved briskly clockwise, telling off the seconds of ordinary time. So the stopwatch was stopped, but not time itself.
What did this mean? Since the stopwatch function gov- erned the timing of the deaths of his clients, did this imply that a hold had been put on such deaths? That was hard to credit-but indeed his whole situation was hard to credit. Fate had mentioned a stoppage of deaths in the world until he, the new holder of the office, had commenced activity. And this did answer his question about appoint- ments that occurred too close together. He might freeze one case while he handled the other.
And, of course, this gave him his chance to rest. He could

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simply turn off his job while he slept or ate or thought things out.
This was some watch! It did not merely time existing events, it coerced events to its timing.
Zane saw that he had only two minutes, in addition to the twenty-three seconds, until his next appointment, and the green gridstone showed this was halfway across the world. That was crowding it. He punched the zeroing button-and sure enough, the timing hands clicked back several minutes, providing him a full ten minutes. In that time, he knew, the Deathmobile could take him anywhere on Earth.
What, then, was the hours dial for? It could register up to twelve, but if ten minutes was all he could resched- ule, he would never need to read hours.
Zane decided to ponder that later. Right now he had to organize himself. He needed to figure out what to do with the baby soul, for one thing. He was not going to send it to Hell, and might not be authorized to send it to Heaven. Probably he should take it to Purgatory for ex- pert designation. He assumed that if Heaven and Hell were literal, so was Purgatory-but where was it?
"There is so much I don't know!" he exclaimed.
"This, too, shall pass," someone answered him.

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