A Fine Day for Dying By JOHN MARTIN _Life could be for a whole forest of years, but dying took just as long as one wished. Condemeign reckoned he might as well do the world a bad turn while he was about it. One might as well have one's little joke. The world had had one on him._ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] With a stroke of his pen, Condemeign signed a death sentence on a toffish nephew and condemned an older and even more lethal bore of a brother to a swinish end. The new provisions of the will took most of what Condemeign had left in his bank balance. He sighed. There was just so much undiluted evil that one might create with just about twice the money he had signed away. He might also have written another Greater Testament, one that would have corrupted, instead of admonished. But the unconscious Villons and Des Esseintes of his world were hapless, constricted anachronisms. The universe had expanded, but, somehow, it had also fenced in common elbow room. The other details took only another minute. The apartment would be repossessed by the housing authorities. The car would be melted down into cash to satisfy certain codicils of the wills. Odds and ends were plainly earmarked for the trash chutes, destined to wind up part of a great garbage boat hurtling into the sun, to be reduced to light and warmth. Beyond that, he thought, ruminating on the promises of Nepenthe, Incorporated's slick paper brochure that had fallen into his hand, and barring, of course, what he was wearing at present, there was a comforting zero. Not even the mice would get that. There were no mice, no insects nor even a great variety of bacilli on the great three-mile-square cube spinning its slow orbit one hundred thousand miles beyond the limits of the atmosphere. The brochure had been more than insistent on that point. The little distractions were to vanish. Nothing was to mar the serenity or adventure of the final hours or days. Condemeign did not bother to glance round the tidy, clean room. He took a swig of gin and picked up the telephone receiver, dialing with his free hand. When the receiver clicked and a rather corpsy female voice greeted him at the other end of the wire he spoke his name into the mouthpiece and hung up. Then he finished the gin and waited.