Why Call Them Back from Heaven

20

Despite the lighted lantern, the place was dark. The lantern cast no more than a shallow puddle of illumination and the humped shapes of the people in the room were simply darker shadows in the dark vastness they inhabited.

Frost halted and in the dark he felt the impact of eyes he knew were watching him.

Friend or foe? he wondered—although out on the street (how many blocks from here?) the man who'd been his guide had indicated friend. You need help, he'd said, and that is all that matters.

The man who'd guided him walked forward toward the group seated by the lantern. Frost stayed where he was. His feet hurt from all the walking and he was tired clear through and the effects of the drug, he thought, might not have entirely worn off. The needle, or the dart, or whatever it had been that had struck him in the neck must have been really loaded.

He watched the guide squat down and whisper with the others seated by the lantern and he wondered where he was. It was somewhere on the waterfront, for his nose had told him that much, and probably was a cellar or a basement, because they had gone down several flights of stairs before they had arrived. A hideout of some sort, he guessed, the very kind of place he would have hunted on his own.

"Mr. Frost," said an old-man voice, "why don't you come over here and sit down with us. I suspect that you are tired."

Frost stumbled forward and sat down on the floor near the lantern and the voice. His eyes were becoming

somewhat accustomed to the darkness and now the hump5 were human and the faces were white blurs.

"I thank you, sir," he said. "I am a little tired."

"You had a bitter night," said the man.

Frost nodded.

"Leo tells me you've been ostracized."

"Ill leave if you want me to," said Frost. "Just let me rest a little."

"There is no need of that," said the man. "You now are one of us. We are all ostracized."

Frost jerked up his head and stared at the man who spoke. He had a grizzled face, the jowls and chin shining with a two-day stubble of white whiskers.

"I don't mean we wear the mark," the old man said. "But we still are ostracized. We are non-conformists and today you cannot afford to fail to conform. We don't believe, you see. Or, perhaps, on the other hand, you might say that we believe too much. But in the wrong things, naturally."

"I don't understand," said Frost.

The old man chuckled. "It is clear to see you don't know where you are."

"Of course I don't," Frost said testily, impatient with this baiting. "I have not been told."

"You're in a den of Holies," said the man. "Take a good look at us. We are those dirty and unthinking people who go out at night and paint the signs on walls. We are the ones who preach on street corners and in parks, we are the ones who hand out all those filthy and non-Forever tracts. That is, until the cops come and run us all away."

"Look," Frost said, wearily, "I don't mind who you are. I am grateful to you for taking me in, for if you hadn't, I don't know what I'd have done. I was about to look for a place to hide, for I knew I had to hide, but I didn't know how to go about it. And then this man came along and…"

"An innocent," said the old man. "A sheltered innocent thrown out in the street. Of course you wouldn't have known what to do. You'd have gotten into all sorts of trouble. But there really was no need to worry. We've been watching over you." "Watching over me? Why should you do that?" "Rumors," said the man. "There were all sorts of rumors. And we hear all the rumors that there are. We make it our business to hear every sort of rumor anr; to sort them out."

"Let me guess," said Frost. "The rumor said someone was out to get me."

"Yes. Because you knew too much. About something, incidentally, we could not determine."

"You must," said Frost, "watch over many people."

"Not so many," said the grizzled man. "Although we keep well informed about Forever Center. We have some pipelines there."

I bet you do, thought Frost. For somehow, despite his rescue, he didn't like this man.

"But you are tired," said the man, "and likely also hungry."

He rose and clapped his hands. Somewhere a door came open and a shaft of light spread into the room.

"Food," said the man, speaking to the woman who stood in the crack of doorway. "Some food for our guest."

The door closed and the man sat down again, this time close to Frost, almost side by side with him.

The odor of an unwashed body poured out from him. He held his hands limply in his lap and Frost could see that the hands were grimy, the nails untrimmed and with heavy dirt embedded underneath them.

"I would imagine," said the man, "that you may be somewhat chagrined in finding yourself with us. I wish, however, you would not feel that way. We really are good-hearted people. We may be dissenters and protes-tants, but we have a right to make our voice heard in any way we can."

Frost nodded. "Yes, of course, you have. But it seems to me there might have been better ways for you to get a hearing. You've been at it for—how long has it been, fifty years or more?"

"And we haven't gotten very far. That's the point you wdsh to make?"

"I suppose it is," said Frost.

"We know, of course," said the other, "that we will not win. There is no way of winning. But our conscience tells us that we must bear witness. So long as we can continue to make our feeble voice heard in the wilderness, we will not have failed."

Frost said nothing. He felt his body sinking into a comfortable lethargy and he had no wish to try to pull it out. The man reached out a dirty hand and laid it on

Frost's knees.

"You read the Bible, son?"

"Yes, off and on. I've read most of it."

"And why did you read it?"

"Why, I don't know," said Frost, startled at the question. "Because it's a human document. Perhaps in hope of some spiritual comfort, although I can't be sure of that. Because, I suppose, in many ways, it is good literature."

"But without conviction?"

"I suppose you're right. Without any great conviction."

"There was a time when many people read it with devout conviction. There was a day when it was a light shining in the darkness of the soul. Not too long ago it was Me and hope and promise. And now the best that you can say of it is that it's good literature.

"It's your talk of physical immortality that has brought all this about. Why should people read the Bible any more or believe in it or believe in anything at all if they have the legal—not the spiritual, mind you, but the legal—promise of immortality? And how can you promise immortality? Immortality means going on forever and forever and no one can promise that, no mortal man can promise forever and forever."

"You're mistaken," said Frost. "I have not promised it."

"I'm sorry. I speak too generally. Not you, personally, of course. But Forever Center."

"Not entirely Forever Center, either," said Frost. "Rather man himself. If there had been no Forever Center, man still would have sought immortality. It is a thing that, in the very nature of him, he could not have ignored. It's not in man's nature to do less than he can. He may fail, of course, but he'll always try."

"It's the devil in him," said the grizzled man. "The forces of darkness and corruption work in many ways to thwart man's inherent godliness."

Frost said: "Please, I don't want to argue with you. Some other time, perhaps. But not right now. You must understand that I am grateful to you, and…"

"Would anyone else in all this land," the man demanded, "have held out a hand of fellowship to you at a moment such as this?"

Frost shook his head. "No, I don't imagine there is anyone who would."

"But we did," said the man. "We, the humble ones. We, the true believers."

"Yes," said Frost, "I give you that. You did."

"And you don't ask yourself why we may have done it?"

"Not yet," said Frost, "but I suppose I will." "We did it," said the man, "because we value not the man, not the mortal body, but the soul. You read in old historical writings that a nation numbers not so many people, but so many souls. And this may seem quaint and strange to you, but those old writings are a reflection of how men thought in those days, when the human animal always was aware of God and of the life hereafter and was less concerned with worldliness and the present moment."

The door came open and the light streamed out into the room again. An old and wrinkled woman moved into the range of the lantern light. She carried in her band a bowl and half a loaf of bread and these she banded to the grizzled man. "Thank you, Mary," said the man, and the woman backed away.

"Food," said the man, putting down the bowl in front of Frost and handing him the bread. "I thank you very much," said Frost. He lifted the spoon that was in the bowl and carried a spoonful of the substance to his mouth. It was soup, weak and watery.

"And now I understand," said the grizzled man, "that in just a few more years a man need not even go through the ritual of death to attain immortality. Once Forever Center has this immortality business all written down and the methods all worked out, a man will be made immortal out of hand. He'll just stay young and go on living and there won't be any death. Once you get born, then you will live forever." "It won't be," said Frost, "for a few years yet." "But once it can be done, that will be the way of it?" "I suppose it will," said Frost. "Once you have it it's just plain foolishness to let a man grow old and die before you give him eternal youth and lif e."

"Oh, the vanity of it," the old man wailed. "The terrible waste of it. The impertinencel"

Frost did not answer him. There wasn't much of an answer, actually, to be given. He simply went on eating. The man nudged him in the arm. "One thing more, son. Do you believe in God?" Slowly Frost put the spoon back into the bowl. He asked: "You really want an answer?" "I want an answer," said the man. "I want an honest one."

"The answer," said Frost, "is that I don't know. Not, certainly, in the kind of God that you are thinking of. Not the old white-whiskered, woodcut gentleman. But a supreme being—yes, I would believe in a God of that sort. Because it seems to me there must be some sort of force or power or will throughout the universe.

The universe is too orderly for it to be otherwise. When you measure all this orderliness, from the mechanism of the atom at one end of the scale, out to the precision of the operation of the universe at the other end, it seems unbelievable that there is not a supervisory force of some land, a benevolent ruling force to maintain that sort of order."

"Order!" the man exploded. "All you talk about is order! Not holiness, not godliness…"

"I'm sorry," Frost said. "You asked for an honest answer. I gave you an honest one. Please take my word for it—I would give a lot to have the kind of faith you have, blind, unquestioning faith without a single doubt. But even then I wonder if faith would be enough." "Faith is all man has," the man told him, quietly. "You take faith," Frost said, "and make a virtue of it. A virtue of not knowing…"

"If we knew," the man said, positively, "there would be no faith. And we need the faith."

Somewhere someone was shouting and there was the far-off sound of feet pounding rapidly.

The grizzled man rose quickly and in the act of rising one of his feet stepped sidewise and caught the bowl of soup and overturned it. In the light of the lantern, it ran like slow oil across the floor.

"The cops!" someone shouted and everyone was moving very rapidly. Someone grasped the lantern and lifted it and the flame went out. The room was plunged in darkness.

Frost had risen, too. He took a step and someone bumped into him, driving him backward in an awkward stumble. And then he felt the floor give way beneath his feet with the faint popping and snapping of long-rotten boards and he was plunging downward. He threw out his arms instinctively, clutching for any support that he might find. The fingers of his left hand closed upon the end of a broken board, but even as he grasped it, the weight of his falling body snapped it and he was through the floor and faffing.

His body landed with a splash and evil-smelling water rose in a sheet and slapped him in the face.

The fall had thrown him forward and now he raised himself so that he squatted in the foulness that was all about him—the darkness and the foulness a part of one another.

He twisted about and glanced up and he could not see the hole through which he'd fallen, but from the floor above him came the thud of running feet and the sound of distant voices, drawing rapidly away.

New thuddings came and new voices, very sharp and angry, and the splintering of boards as someone broke a door. Feet pounded once again on the floor above him and thin beams of light danced across the hole where he had fallen.

Fearful that someone would flash a light directly down the hole and catch him in its beam, he moved slowly forward, water swirling at his ankles.

The feet pounded back and forth and ran into far rooms and returned again and snatches of voices floated down to him.

"Got away again," one voice said. "Someone tipped them off."

"Pretty dismal," said another. "Just the kind of place you would expect…"

And then another voice, and at the sound of it, Frost stiffened and took another involuntary step farther from the hole in the floor above.

"Men," said the voice of Marcus Appleton, "we missed them once again. There'll be another day."

Other voices answered, but the words were indistinct.

"I'll get those sons of bitches," said Marcus Appleton, "if it's the last thing that I do."

The voices and the footsteps moved away and in a little time were gone.

Silence fell, broken only by the slow drip of water falling from some place into the pool in which Frost stood.

A tunnel of some sort, he guessed. Or perhaps a subbasement flooded by seepage from the river.

Now the problem was to get out of here. Although without a light of any sort that might not be easy. And the one way to do it was to try to get out the way he had come in, through the hole in the floor above.

He reached above his head and his fingers touched the rough surface of a beam. He stood on tiptoe and stretched and he could touch the floor above. But he would have to move slowly and try to maintain some sort of orientation, for the place was in utter darkness and his fingers were his eyes.

Slowly he worked his way along and finally found the hole. Now he'd have to jump for it and grab hold of the rotten boards and hope that they would support his weight so he could pull himself into the room above. Once there, he told himself, he'd be safe for a time at least, for Appleton and his men would not be coming back. Neither would the Holies. He would be on his own.

He stood for a moment to catch his breath and suddenly, from all around him, rose a squeaking and a scurrying, the rush of tiny feet, the slithering of bodies rushing through the dark, and the angry squealing of ravening creatures driven by a desperate hunger.

His scalp tightened and it seemed that his hair rose upon his head.

Rats! Rats rushing at him through the dark! Fear powered his muscles and he leaped, driving himself chest high through the hole. Scrambling and kicking, he pulled himself clear and lay panting on the floor.

Underneath him the squeaking and the squealing rose in a wave, then slowly died away.

Frost still lay upon the floor and after a time the trembling stopped and the sweat dried on his body and he got to his hands and knees and crawled until he found a corner and there he huddled against the terror and the loneliness of the new life that he faced.