"I hope so, Miss Froon. Like a certain Cardinal of Ragusa—you have probably never heard of him—I am inclined to put a high price on existence before it ceases." He paused and settled on the edge of the desk, musing. "Yes, I rather hope so. There is little else to be afraid of." He watched her through the smoke of his cigarette, blinking, a wet stain of puny resentment and annoyance on the blotched beak. She hesitated for an instant, but the flying fingers never stopped.
"Would you care to disclose the reason you wish to die?" she asked.
Let science in for one final peek, a last eyebrow lifting look at the raised chemise. Why not? Even science might be persuaded that life was unrecognizable from death except in the shifting phantasm and utterly real land of sleep. He drew a deep breath.
"I think so, Miss Froon. It is, simply, that there is no meaning to life, no meaning at all. I think this particular view is disguised under a number of well-known philosophic terms and bodies of thought. One might call it a sort of nihilistic Existentialism, to be more concrete and specific. However," he paused and smiled charmingly and with just a touch of sadness in his eyes, "I would not call myself an Existentialist by any means. That sort of person playing Russian Roulette, for instance, cannot help but manifest an interest in his chances for life. He clings, so to speak, to even a tiny thread that ravels enticingly from the million-threaded rope of ordinary existence. Now, I"—Condemeign watched his left leg go back and forth in a short arc—"I do not see the thread, though I know it is there as I know the rope is there. Both a thread and a rope can hang a man. In fact, in this case, they have."
He watched her, hoping for one flicker of interest, one sign that he had said something original, for, beyond doubt, she was the supreme critic, an unfailing reflection of all the prejudices that Nepenthe had compassed, and even more. There was only the flayed blankness of a blind wall in her eyes. He rocked, suddenly, seeming to see great carven doors shutting him out, shoving him into the remotest corner of a vibrant oblivion. Then, as it always had, silent Homeric laughter saved him. He was an honest Cagliostro after all, an albuminous series of endless, mystical passes that could never pretend to be anything more than motion. Next question he thought. But none came, and then he said, suddenly, "Is it painful, Miss Froon?"
Miss Froon did not bother to smile with all the prejudices of a woman of the world. Her eyes glittered dully like a toad's and he perceived in their depths the first awakening to him as something more than a client, a case, a filing card to be abstracted. Miss Froon's voice, he discovered suddenly, had more in it than the pride of neon and the inexorable drive of continuity.
"It is never painful, Mr. Condemeign." She hesitated and then went on. "It is sometimes interesting and often dramatic, but," and she cracked the roast-brown crust of her face with a corpsy smile, "I think we can safely say it is never painful. If—ah—oblivion were painful, we should have no clients at all."
Done to a turn, he thought, and then a small man with a hint of Mephistophelian humor glinting in his eyes and spraying off from the sharpness of his chin, came in through the door by which his guide had departed. He was smoking an oval cigarette and Miss Froon jumped to her feet and filed Mr. Condemeign's papers in a wall recess before she said anything.
"This is Mr. Condemeign, Dr. Munro," she said, turning to press a few buttons, and Condemeign knew he had come to the end of the line.