The Best of Science Fiction 12

The siren of the approaching ambulance rose and fell on a scale of panic. Hejar moved the man's head gently, looking for marks or a tell-tale run of blood from the ear. He found nothing. Good. The brain, then, the control centre was undamaged. Great.

He went through the pockets of the overcoat covering the man. From one he produced a small tin and opened it, exposing an inked pad. He manoeuvred digits on a rubber stamp.. The man moved feverishly beside him. "You'll be fine, old son," he said gently. "Help's just arriving."

Then he brought the rubber stamp down right between the man's eyes.

Doberman Berke, a morgue attendant of intermediate stature, humbled through life in constant awe of the ubiquitous Anton Hejar. Where death stalked, there, too, walked Anton Hejar, hat pulled low, hand on stamp.

Berke paused in his work to examine the insignia between the corpse's eyes. It was not elaborate, a mere functional circle with script around the outer edging and the characters 'A.H.' tangled in some written state of intercourse at centre.

'Item and contents property of ... ' read the circumferential legend if one cared to crane one's neck and bend kiss-close to the poor dead face to see.

Berke did no such thing, nor had he ever done so. He knew Hejar's function, knew the language of the snatchers from careful study. Instead, with a curiosity he compared the time on Hejar's stamp — 14:34 — with the report that accompanied the cadaver. The ambulance men had put the time of extinction at 14:34.5. Hejar's professionalism was uncanny.

He detached the item and placed it in a refrigerated container. Then he pushed it to one-side to await collection.

Invariably, Hejar came himself. If he had any juniors, Berke had never seen them. Certainly, they never came to claim their master's bloody bounties. Hejar knew Berke's routine. He had already checked the attendant's volume of work. He would be here very shortly.

And even as Berke acknowledged the fact, the door swung wide and Hejar was walking towards him, smiling and beneficent, unfolding a spotless receipt.

Berke took the receipt and examined it closely, though he knew full well it would contain adequate authority from Coroner Gurgin. Dealing with Hejar, an expert in his own field, Berke endeavored to appear as painstaking and conscientious as Hejar's patience would allow. And Hejar had a fund of patience. Hejar had so much patience he should have had a long face and a penchant for squatting on desert cactus plants to go with it. Instead, he just smiled ... and in that smile lay a chill warning that if you didn't move fast enough to prove you were alive, then Anton Hejar would take you for dead.

Berke handed back the receipt. "Any trouble this time? Sometimes sector centre gets a little old-fashioned about dispatchment at speed. Like sympathy for the dependents."

"Sympathy is out of date," said Hejar blandly. "Absurd sentimentality about a piece of stiffening flesh." He showed his teeth again, setting up laughter wrinkles around his blue, blue eyes. "Burgin knows where his steroids come from. He gives me no complications. A little blind-eye money for his favourite dream pill and he is always prepared to write me a rapid registration marker. Now, is this mine?"

He moved towards the container and identified his designation, humming busily to himself. He caught up the container by its handle and started for the door.

"Wait."

"Why?" Hejar spat out the word with a venom that made Berke writhe, but his face, all the while, was mild, his manner charitable. "Why," he said, more reasonably.

Hejar was no stranger. They met elsewhere and often and dialogue came far more easily where surroundings were no more indicative of the one's vocation than the other's.

Berke felt foolish. There were always questions that occurred to him moments before Hejar's arrival at the morgue and each time, he lined them up and rehearsed a conversation which, he hoped, would impress Hejar with its depth and insight.

But when Hejar came, it was as though he dragged the careful script out of Berke's head and bundled it into a corner. Berke was tongue-tied. Hejar, as ever, was sunny. Today was no exception.

"Why?" Hejar asked again, patiently.

Berke stumbled. "Isn't ... isn't there anything else you want? The trunk isn't spoken for."

"No wonder."

"I'm not with you."

"The man has been struck by a car," said Hejar with exaggerated diction. He might have talked thus to a retarded child — if he had ever spared a little of his surface warmth for a creature who could do him no good. "Digestive chemistry, kidney system, circulation ... they're all finished. At most, there may be a dozen organs worth salvaging, and we don't have time for that. Besides, our clients pay more money for bits and pieces."

"Uh-huh." Berke slotted away the piece of business acumen. Sooner or later, he would have to take his chance on the outside — he was fast running out of apprenticeships. And he was determined to sample the lush pastures of the thoroughfare section, with its easy pickings and its first-come-first-served credo. There was small reward, by comparison, in industrial accidents or domestic mishaps.

"Now," said Hejar, "is there anything else?" He made it sound like a polite inquiry, but Berke knew that he delayed the man further at his peril. He didn't want to leave his room one morning and find Hejar waiting to follow him. He shifted from one foot to another.

"Oh, yes. Forgive me." Hejar reached in his pocket and tossed a handful of notes across to Berke. They fluttered on to the separation table. In the time it took Berke to wipe them clean of tell-tale stains, Hejar was gone.

Jolo Trevnik locked the weathered door of his downtown Adonis League and wondered, as he wondered every night, why he tried to carry on. Once, his culture clinic had been definitely uptown and well filled with rounded young men who slung medicine balls at each other and tested their biceps in crucifix poses on the wall-bars.

Ironic how, when you had survived everything else from social stigma to national laziness, finally location turned against you. The people had moved away into apartment blocks on the town periphery, leaving the centre purely for business and only that which was conducted in skyscraper settings.

These days, Trevnik exercised alone, moving slowly from one piece of apparatus to another, not because he had himself slowed up, but because now only time hung heavily on the wall-bars.

His suit grew progressively shabbier and his fortune, body-built in the days of blind, rootless activity that followed the tobacco ban, grew correspondingly smaller. As did his steaks and his health food orders. He was still in fine shape ... and frustrated as only a man can be whose sole talent has become redundant.

He turned away from the door and walked towards the main rotor quay. A shadow in a doorway down the street moved to follow him.

Hejar had made only a token attempt at concealment and Trevnik knew of his presence. It was part of the new fatal system that had emptied Trevnik's clinic and all others around the town, and all football grounds and all places where excitement or over-exertion might bring unexpected eclipse. The body that had once been so envied in life was now attractive only in terms of death.

I guess I ought to be honoured, Trevnik thought. But I feel like a cat in heat. I'll make the pink punk work for his money.

At the rotor quay, he selected the slow track, and moved quickly along it. He wanted to put the idlers in his pursuer's way and they made no protest, silent, turned inward with the sea-shells in their ears filling their minds with hypnotic rhythms and whispered words.

Above the whine of the rotor and the passing traffic, he heard the man stumbling after him, heard him cursing, and laughed.