The Best of Science Fiction 12

At the next junction, he transferred to a faster track, still walking rapidly, weaving neatly between the younger mutes, with their frondular arms and snapping fingers.

Hejar was less adept and less gentle. Once, he jostled a young man so violently that his earpiece slipped to the moving pavement.

The youth recovered it and pursued the pursuer long enough to tap his heels and send him headlong before returning to his reverie.

Trevnik heard the resultant tumble and allowed the pavement to bear him along until the dishevelled Hejar regained his feet. Then he back-pedalled until the man drew level, still dusting himself down. He raised the pitch of his voice a deceptive shade.

"I hope you didn't hurt yourself," he said, fussily ... too fussily. "Perhaps we should walk a little more slowly."

Hejar eyed him warily. "I'm quite recovered now," he said. "Thanks for your concern."

If the guy knows why I trail him, he wondered, why doesn't he show it? Why this spectacular concern?

"Perhaps I should walk with you in case you feel suddenly faint," said Trevnik. "If you're shaky, you ought to get to bed. Are you sure I can't help you?"

The attitude jarred on Hejar's sensitivity. He began to notice other things about the man. How he moved — almost mincingly. The breeze that played on their faces as they were drawn along the track brought a musky aroma to the nostrils grown acute with death. Hejar swallowed and looked at the man again.

"Really," he said, almost defensively. "It's all right. The next quay is as far as I go."

"As you please," said Trevnik. His lips tightened with a hint of petulance. "But if there's the smallest thing ... "

"Nothing," said Hejar, savagely.

Trevnik rode beside him, barely glancing at him but carrying the smug conviction of a man who has done a good turn only to meet an ungracious response.

Smug? Hejar, sneaking glances at Trevnik from the shelter of his hat-brim, became even more apprehensive.

Trevnik's finely developed limbs and torso were bound to fetch a good price. Or were they? Trying to sell internal organs marred by chromosomatic complications or a brain whose motivations were neither particularly masculine nor blatantly feminine but in some twilight in-between ... that had definite set-backs.

At the quay closest to his office, he disembarked. "Thanks for everything," he said.

"I hope we meet again," said Trevnik. He waved until the rotor bore him out of sight.

There was no doubt Trevnik had a physique rarely seen among the squat inhabitants of 1983; a body which, if properly marketed, could still prove profitable despite ...

Hejar chewed his sensual lower lip. Despite nothing. He had kept observation for weeks now, at first unnoticed and lately unheeded. In the beginning there had been no such doubts proffered. It was just today? Hejar could not be sure that the disturbing traits had not been there for some time. Certainly, they had not been apparent when he began his vigils. And that was it — a device, dated from the time Trevnik first noticed that the snatchers were on to him, or at least some time subsequent to that ... when he thought of it.

Hejar felt better. The fall had shaken him, had made his heart pound alarmingly. But now he had rumbled the man, his good spirits returned.

Any fresh measures to protect the remains after death intrigued him. There was, after all, no pain, no occupancy and postmortem activities were unlikely to disturb the main participant. But the sanctimonious sproutings of the sixties and early seventies still persisted though even the government had officially classed them out of date. There remained in certain circles a horror of disturbing the corpse. Hejar had long ago shouldered and forgotten the inferences of obscenity and laughed all the way to the credit pile when somebody called him a ghoul, a cannibal, a necrophile.

"I do mankind a service," he would tell people who questioned his motives. "The burial grounds have been used up, built over, defiled in asphalt. The crematorium has a use, but it is a great leveller. How do you identify ashes? Items that could be vital to the living are wasted in the flames. Far better, is it not, to have a scroll stating that even in death, your dearest are unselfishly helping those who continue to suffer. I aid medical science. I am trained to the task and my spirit is right."

"If I can help somebody," he crooned raggedly as he entered the block where his office was situated, "as I pass along ... "

He boarded the elevator and pressed the button for the 11th floor.

"Then my living shall not be in vain ... "

The elevator wound upwards. Head bowed, Hejar was engrossed in the half-remembered song.

"Then my living shall not be in vain ... Oh ... "

The elevator shunted him into the nth floor berth. He opened the door of his office.

"My living shall not be in va-a-i-i-n-n-n ... "

The woman in the guest chair had red-rimmed eyes but she watched him intensely.

"Good evening," he said calmly. He was used to finding such women in his office. One pair of red eyes looked much like another.

"I've been here for hours," she said.

"I didn't know you were waiting," he said, obviously. He did not concede the necessity for an apology. Instead, he smiled.

"You are ... Mr Hejar, the ... reclamation ... man?" Hejar's smile had disconcerted her, as it had been meant to do. The smile therefore broadened.

"I've been sitting here, looking at your ... pictures," she said, gesturing vaguely at the Ben Maile skyline and the Constable pastoral. "They're not ... what I ... would have expected."

Hejar hung his hat and coat carefully on the old-fashioned stand. He took his seat behind the desk and built a cathedral nave with his fingers while the smile lay dozing on his face.

It was always best to let them talk — as much as they wanted to, about whatever they wanted to. Gradually they would work their way round to the inevitable plea.

"What had you expected, Mrs ... " He deliberately left the sentence hanging in the air.

"An office without a single rounded edge. No softness anywhere ... everything sharp and cold and soulless."

She would tell him her name and the reason for her presence in her own time. He would not prompt the revelation because it was important to maintain a singular lack of interest.

"I think pictures add another dimension to an office," he said "Constable had a way with water, an eye for minute detail. I often think he sketched every leaf. Maile, now ... "

"You're probably wondering why I am here," said the woman. She was fortyish, plump, not unbecoming. She was in pain, with her loss, with the alien circumstances in which she now found herself.

"Take your time. I know how it is ... "

"I'm Elsie Stogumber."

Stogumber. Hejar switched on the audiostat which unscrambled the data from the long-winded secretary computer.

"Stogumber," he said into the feeder piece.

"There would hardly be anything recorded yet," said the woman.

"Today?"

The woman twisted her gloves in her lap.

"He asked for you," said Hejar.

"Small comfort to me now." The woman seemed mesmerised by the anguished play of finger and nylon. Hejar waited.

"They say you — you had his head."

"That's right."

The woman watched his face for perhaps five seconds. Then she went back to her glove play.

"You wouldn't still have it?"

Hejar's stomach churned. His vocation was bloody enough, even viewed with the detachment he brought to it, but ...

"Why?" he asked. The smile had gone.

"I suddenly couldn't remember my husband's face. It terrified me. If I could just ... "

"I no longer have it. My clients demand prompt delivery."

"Your — clients?"

"Come now, Mrs. Stogumber. I'm sure you realise the complete situation. You already know exactly what came to me. You also know why and that I am only an agent in this ... "