Why Call Them Back from Heaven

15

Amos Hicklin picked up another short length of wood and placed it on the fire. The fire was a woodsman's fire, small and neat.

Supper was finished and the frying pan and coffeepot had been washed at the edge of the moon-burnished river, with a handful of sand serving for the soap. And now was the time, with the darkness settling in, for a man to prop himself against a tree trunk and smoke a pipe as it should be smoked, slowly and leisurely, giving space for thought.

From a wooded hollow a lone whippoorwill took up its evening song, a plaintive questioning call that had something otherworldly in it. Out in the river a fish splashed loudly as it leaped out of the water to snare an insect that had skimmed the water's surface.

Hicklin reached out to his tidy woodpile and picked up two more sticks and placed them carefully on the fire. Then he settled back against his tree trunk and took from his shirt pocket his pipe and tobacco pouch.

This wTas good, he thought—June and pleasant weather, moon shining on the river, an old whippoorwill chunking up the hollow, and the mosquitoes not too bad.

And tomorrow, maybe…

It was a crazy place, he thought, for a man to hide a treasure, on an island in a river. A risky place to hide anything of value, for any fool should know what could happen to an island.

Yet it made a zany sort of sense. The man had been on the lam and was very nearly trapped and he had to hide the stuff any way, or any place, he could. And it had the added advantage of being one of the last places in the world where anyone ever would suspect a treasure had been hidden. For the islands here were little more than sandbars which in the course of time had been overgrown by shallow-rooted willows. They might exist for years or they might vanish in a night, for this was a treacherous river, with shifting currents and changing undertow's.

It well might be a wild goose chase, Hicklin knew, but the stakes were large and he was losing nothing but a year or so of time. A year of time against, roughly estimated, a cool one million dollars.

Jade, he thought. What a crazy thing to steal!

For in the day that it had been stolen there'd have been little chance of getting rid of it—unique museum pieces which would be recognized almost anywhere as stolen offerings.

Yet, perhaps, Steven Furness had never meant to sell it. There was such a thing, perhaps, as falling so in love with beauty that he'd want it for his own. Working for years in the museum, he may have resented, in his twisted mind, pieces of such loveliness suffering exposure to the vulgar public gaze.

He had almost made it. If he had not been recognized in that backwoods crossroad eating place by some farm kid who had seen his picture in a paper, on that day almost two hundred years ago, he would have got away with it. And in a sense, he had got away with it, for he'd not been captured, but had lived out his life, an old, white-haired, doddering man who had scraped out a precarious existence by performing |obs, all highly questionable, in the dives of New Orleans.

Hicklin sat in the night, his legs stretched straight out in front of him, puffing slowly at his pipe, the Bicker of the campfire making light and shadow on his face. A howling wilderness, he thought. All this land, farmed for so long, gone back to wilderness. For there was now no use of land except for living space and the population which had at one time made a living off the land now was congregated where jobs were, in the great metropolitan centers, squeezed together in little rooms and flats, living in another wilderness of the human animal. The entire Eastern seaboard, one vast sea of humans, living cheek by jowl; Chicago, the vast Midwest megalopolis clustered around Lake Michigan as far north as old Green Bay and swinging deep around the eastern shore; and the several other centers of massive populations, great islands of jammed humanity growing ever bigger.

And here he was, he thought—a man apart from this, one of the few men who were apart from it. But driven by the same motives and same greed as all those other billions. Although there was one difference. He was a gambler and they were drudging slaves.

A gamble, he thought. It could be a gamble. But the letter written on the deathbed and the rude, scrawled map, despite their romantic character, had a strange, sure ring of authenticity. And his search of the records had borne out the facts of the last days of Steven Furness. There was no doubt at all that he had been the man who, in 1972, had stolen from the museum that employed him a collection of jade pieces that were worth a fortune.

Somewhere, on one of the islands in this particular stretch of river, that fortune now lay buried, exquisite carvings packed in paper inside an old steel suitcase.

"… Because I do not wish they be lost forever, 1 now write the facts and pray that you may be able to locate them from the description thai 1 give,"

A letter written and intended for that same museum from which the jade collection had been stolen, but a letter never mailed—perhaps because he never had a chance to mail it, because there was no one to take and mail it for him, not mailed, perhaps, because he had no stamp for the envelope and death was creeping close. Not mailed, but packed away with his other poor possessions in a battered suitcase—a mate, perhaps, to the one in which the jade was buried.

And the suitcase—where had it lain secreted or forgotten ever since the old man died? By what strange route had it finally found its way into that auction house, to be offered on a rainy afternoon along with many other odds and ends? Why had no one ever opened it to see what it might contain? Or might someone have opened it and thought it to be no more than it was— a bunch of junk that had all the appearance of being entirely worthless?

An idle, rainy afternoon, with nothing else to do but seek shelter from the rain. And the mad, illogical, small-boy impulse that had made him start the bidding at a quarter, just for the hel! of it, and then no other bids. Hicklin remembered, sitting there and smoking, how he had thought for a moment he should set it down somewhere and then wander off, affecting absentminded-ness, leaving it behind, thus getting rid of it. But once again, illogically, he had carried it back to his room arid that evening, for lack of anything more interesting to do, had examined its contents and found the letter and been intrigued by it—not believing it, but intrigued enough to make an effort to find out who Steven Furness might have been.

So here he was, beside this river, with the campfire burning and the lament of the whippoorwill sounding from the hollow-the only man in the world who knew (or knew approximately, at least) where the stolen jadelay buried. Perhaps, at this late date, one of the very few who knew about the theft at all.

Even now, he told himself, the jade probably could not be safely placed upon the market. For there would be records still and the museum still existed. But five hundred years from now, a thousand years from now, it could be safely sold. For by then the very fact of the theft would have been forgotten or so deeply buried in the ancient records that it could not be found.

It would make, he told himself, a satisfactory stake for the second life—if he could only find it. Diamonds, he thought, or rubies would be scarcely worth the effort. But jade was different. It would keep its value, as would any work of art. The converters could turn out diamonds by the bushel and they could, in fact, turn out jade as well, by the ton if need be. But they could not turn out carven jade or paintings. Art objects still would retain their value, perhaps appreciate in value. For while the converters could turn out the raw material, any kind of raw material, they could not duplicate a piece of craftsmanship or art.

A man, he told himself, had to use some judgment in selecting what he meant to cache away against Revival Day.

The tobacco had burned out and the pipe made gurgling noises as he sucked at it. He took it from his mouth and tapped out the ash against his boot heel.

Tomorrow morning there'd be fish on the lines that he had set and he still had flour and other makings for a plate of flapjacks. He got up from the ground and went down to the canoe to get his blanket roll.

A good night's sleep and a hearty breakfast and he'd be on his way again—looking for the island with a sandbar at its point shaped somewhat like a fishhook and the two pines just landward of the sandbar. Although, he knew, the sandbar's shape might well have changed or been wiped out entirely. The one hope that he had were the two pine trees, if they still survived.

He stood at the water's edge and glanced up at the sky. The glitter of the stars was unmarred by any cloud and the moon, almost full, hung just above the eastern cliffs. He sniffed the breeze and it was clean and fresh, with a hint of chill in it. Tomorrow, he told himself, would be another perfect day.