"Anthony, Piers- Incarnations of Immortality 1- On a Pale Horse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anthony Piers)

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 continued, 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 performing 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 happened 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. 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 disconnected? 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 governed 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 appointments 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 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 Death mobile 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 reschedule, 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 expert 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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Chapter 3 - EWES AND DOES

Zane jumped. A man sat in the adjacent seat. He was perhaps fifty, with a mustache and goatee and piercing blue eyes. He held a small double cone in his hand.

"You must be immortal," Zane said, after a moment of fevered thought.

"In a sense," the man agreed. "I am another Incarnation, like Fate and Death."

Zane studied him, suspecting that he should recognize the man, but he did not. "Who-?"

"I am Chronos, colloquially known as Time." He tilted the cones, and fine sand sifted from one to the other. It was an hourglass.