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agents?” Zane was grasping at peripherals, being as yet unable to get to the nucleus of this situation. “Incarnations?”
    “Death, Time, Fate, War, Nature,” she said. “The major field agents operating between God and Satan, answerable to neither. If any of us were scheduled to die like mortal folk, we would have to be concerned for the disposition of our souls, and that's a conflict of interest. No, we are immortal, as we have to be, accountable to neither superpower. But we do have to do our jobs, or things become complicated.”
    “Our jobs,” Zane repeated weakly. “I'm no killer. At least I wasn't, until this—”
    Fate glanced at him penetratingly, and suddenly he knew she knew about his mother. He felt cold, and the guilt rose up in him again. But Fate did not raise that matter. “Of course not,” she agreed, eying the body on the floor. “This was a mismanaged suicide. Death does not kill; Death merely takes the souls of those who are dying, the problematical ones, lest they be lost and wander forever inchoate.”
    Now Zane found something concrete to argue. “There are five billion people in the world! A hundred million or so die each year. Death would have to take several each second, scattered across the globe. That's impossible!”
    “Not impossible, but perhaps unfeasible,” she said. “Look in the mirror, please.”
    Zane looked. The death's-head gaped back at him, encased in its hood. Hits hands in the gloves were skeletal, and his ankles above the shoes were fleshless bones. He had assumed the visage of Death.
    “You are, of course, invisible to most people when in uniform,” Fate said. “Clients can perceive you, and those who are close to them emotionally, and the truly religious people, but the rest will overlook you unless you call attention to yourself.”
    “But the mirror reflects my image—as that of Death! People will faint!”
    “Perhaps I misspoke myself. You are not physically invisible; you are socially invisible. People see you, but do not recognize your significance, and forget you once you pass. But when you remove the uniform, your powers fade. You are then vulnerable; you can age and be touched and hurt. So don't step out of character without reason.”
    “Why would Death want to step out?”
    She formed an obscure little smile. “It does get dull socializing with your own kind exclusively. I am said to be attractive in my Clotho aspect—” She became abruptly young and lovely, a striking figure of a woman with hair so light in color it seemed to shine and with skin like alabaster, but her eyes remained disturbingly knowing. “Yet I would not hold your interest for centuries, perhaps not even decades. So we must dally on occasion with mortals.”
    Zane wondered how many decades or centuries it would take to get bored with a woman who looked like that. It was an intriguing thought, but in a moment he returned to his prior concern. “How can a single Death person take several people each second? Hundreds of people must have died just while we've been talking here! I didn't collect their souls and I don't think this person did.” He indicated the defunct Death.
    “I see I will have to explain in greater detail.” Fate shifted back to her middle-aged aspect and sat down in Zane's best chair. Her eye caught the Wealth stone on the table beside it. “Oh, I see you have a junkstone. You use it to produce dimes for telephones?”
    “Something like that,” Zane admitted sheepishly.
    “I've seen them before. The stone is dirt-grade ruby from India, imported wholesale and sold in five-thousand carat lots for fifty cents a carat. It's technically corundum, but too poor a quality to hold a decent spell. I understand some idiots are deluded into paying gem-grade prices for individual stones.”
    “True,” Zane agreed, drawing the Death hood close about his face so his flush would not show.
    “Still, as a cheap novelty item, it's not bad. Once in a while a stone like