Divine Intervention

Dial-A-Death

You never think it can happen, do you? You’re going along fine in the middle of your life. Time stretches endlessly ahead of you, and a serious matter such as dying will just have to wait because you haven’t time now even to consider it.

And then it happens. The glitch in the system. The little pain in your head becomes piercing. Whammo, cerebral hemorrhage. The car, out of control, mounts the curb and carries you screaming through the plate glass window. The guy behind you on the subway platform gives a nervous little twitch and a push and there you are, dancing on air under the thunderous headlight of the Broad- way-7th Avenue Express. I don’t mean to be morbid, but these things happen. Then it’s too late to think of Dial-a-Death.

Jack Stanton made page 3 of the Times when a furniture sling parted and a grand piano landed on him from ten stories up. Jack didn’t have time to think about it, didn’t even know what happened. There was a sudden rush of air blowing straight down, and then whammo—a fast, clean death, and not unmusical.

You may have thought the transition between living and death would be instantaneous, but you’d be wrong. Latest research shows that once the body realizes that it’s outward bound on a one-way trip to whatever comes next, it goes into its own special time. A few seconds can elongate and stretch into the feeling of hours. That’s the time when you really need Dial-a-Death.

Jack Stanton never felt a thing. One minute he was walking down 57th Street in Manhattan thinking about how he could raise ten million dollars for a merger (he was a lawyer specializing in corporate finances) when there was something like a puff of air above his head and he found himself somewhere else.

He was standing on a landscaped lawn near a big gracious old house, like his parents used to have when he was a kid. A party was going on inside. He could hear the music, and through the windows he could see people dancing. Somebody waved to him from the house. A pretty redhaired girl was beckoning to him.

He went in. It looked like a really good party. There were a lot of people there and they all seemed to be having fun. They were square dancing inside. Jack hadn’t seen square dancing in twenty years. He joined in. Unexpectedly, he found that he was an expert at it. The crowd moved back to give him and his partner room. The girl he was dancing with was buxom and pretty and light on her feet. They were great together. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers! They finished with a flourish and went hand in hand upstairs.

The girl led him into one of the back rooms. There were coats stacked two feet high on the big double bed. They got up on top of them. The girl was so astonishingly pretty that it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d been cold, indifferent, or even blew a pink chewing gum bubble at the moment of supreme ecstasy. With her looks she couldn’t do anything wrong, not the first time, anyhow. And in fact she was amazingly responsive, tender, fiery, unfathomably and endlessly delicious. She was what you’d have to call a peak experience anyway you slice it.

Jack floated upward through the intensities of mounting excitement. His orgasm was tremendous, gargantuan, exemplary, incomparable, and he fell back on the bed exhausted, sated, pleased beyond telling, dropping into that delicious time when exhaustion steals over you like a gift from Psyche and there is nothing ahead but a sweet floating fall through endless layers of soft-scented sleep.

Maybe he did sleep for a while. When he opened his eyes the girl was gone. The party was gone, even the house had vanished. Now he was standing alone in a long corridor, facing a closed door, and he was stark mother naked.

A voice came from nowhere: “Jack—go through the door.”

“Who is this?” Jack says. “Where am I?”

“Don’t ask questions. Just go through the door. Everything will be all right.”

Still drowsy and happy, Jack had an impulse to obey the voice. But he resisted. He had always been cantankerous, cross-grained, self-directed. He hadn’t gotten to where he was by taking orders from people. He was Jack Stanton. People did what he told them to do, not the other way around.

“Whoever you are,” Jack said, “quit kidding around and come out here and tell me what’s going on.”

“Mr. Stanton, please—”

“Who are you? What is all this?”

“I am Doctor Gustaffson from the Institute. Do you remember now?”

Jack nodded slowly. It was coming back to him. “The guy with the new medical thing. What was it?”

“Dial-a-Death. The Institute for Harmonious Dying.”

“I hired you?”

“That’s right.”

“To arrange my death?”

“To arrange your dying, Mr. Stanton, not your death. We had nothing to do with that grand piano falling on you. What a shame that was, cut off in your prime like that! On the part of myself and all the staff at Dial-a-Death I want to offer you our condolences. But we did all right by you, didn’t we? When the time came, Dial-a-Death was right there. Our operators picked up your neural web within milliseconds of the piano pulping you. The computer implants worked just right. The girl was something, eh? With programming like that it’s almost a pleasure to die, eh?”

“What are you talking about, dying? I’m in a hospital somewhere, right?”

“Mr. Stanton, be realistic. I hate to mention what must be a painful subject, but they could have put most of what they found of you in a gallon jar and still have room left for a wax seal. Face it, Mr. Stanton, the body’s gone, you’re dead.”

Jack Stanton had a moment of sickening panic. Death! He had tried to make it nice for himself. Sure, he’d signed up for Dial-a-Death, and it had cost plenty. A man owes it to himself to try to make his dying nice. But that was for some time in the future. Dying had always been for later.

“What you have to do now,” the doctor said, “is open that door in front of you and walk through.”

“And what happens then?”

“We don’t know. Nobody’s ever come back. Our job is to try to keep you in a good frame of mind until you reach the door. After that, you’re on your own.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Jack said. “I’m staying right here.”

“Mr. Stanton, I’m very much afraid that won’t do.”

“I’m not going through that door!”

“Well, it’s up to you, Jack,” the doctor said. “This is the limit of Dial-a-Death’s service area.”

Jack Stanton stood alone in the corridor. To hell with them, he wasn’t going anywhere. He looked at the door. He was sort of curious to see what was on the other side. But that was probably what all dead people thought. They wanted to see what was on the other side of the door, and no one ever heard of them again.

To hell with that, Jack thought. I’m staying right here.

He waited. After a while the door opened all by itself. On the other side he could see another long corridor.

All right, now he knew what was on the other side. But he still didn’t move. They’d have to drag him through that door kicking and screaming.

It didn’t happen that way. The door waited for a while. When he still didn’t move it came for him. There was nothing to struggle against, nothing to resist. Suddenly he was on the other side. And then the next thing began.