Why Call Them Back from Heaven

24

Now that the beard had grown so heavy that it all but obscured the marks of ostracism on his cheek, Frost did not need to wait for dark, but could venture out when dusk began to fall. With an old battered hat he had retrieved from a trash bin pulled down almost to his eyes, he began his prowling as soon as the streets began to clear of the surging mobs which poured through them in the daylight hours. At dusk the city was left to him. Only a few people then remained upon.the streets and they went scurrying past him, on urgent errands of their own, as if there might be some high reason that they not stay out of doors, but must hurry to get back to their huddling places, somewhere within the interminable warrens of the great apartment houses which rose like ancient monuments reared by brutelike monsters in the primeval past.

Frost, observing them from beneath the brim of his pulled down hat, knew how it was with them, for once it had been the same with him. Hurry and huddle—hurry so that one could gather all the assets he could manage, then huddle in his idle time so that he would not spend a single penny of those assets.

Although now, even had they wished to spend some of the assets on rather foolish things, there was no longer any way to da it. For there were no longer any movies, no longer any athletic contests, and the fabled night life of a century and a half ago had died in the stagnation of the urge to live forever. All of which, of course, pleased Forever Center (if Forever Center, in fact, had not planned it that way) for it meant that there was more money to be invested in Forever stock.

So with the end of the day's activity, the human herd went home and there, for entertainment, read the daily papers, which had ceased long since to be informational, but were frankly and entertainingly sensational. Or read cheap books, cheap in price and often cheap in content. Or sat slack-jawed and fascinated before the family TV set. Or, perhaps, gloated over a stamp collection which had appreciated in value steadily through the years, or perhaps a collection of chess sets, wonderfully carved or fabricated, or many other similar collections in which each owner had carefully (and prayerfully) risked some of his surplus assets.

And there were those, as well, who resorted to hallucinatory drugs, available at any drug counter, using them to give themselves a few hours of an imaginary Me—a life in which they could escape from the drab-ness and the monotony of their regular lives.

For now there was nothing new, as there had been in ages past. Once, back at the beginning of the twentieth century, there had been the phonograph to be excited over… and the telephone. And later there had been the airplane and the radio and later yet, TV. But today there was nothing new. There was no progress except in those areas which advanced the day toward which Forever Center pointed. Now man made do with what he had and in most cases what he had was less than his forebears had. Civilization had ground to a stagnating halt and the Me of man today was in many of its aspects the same cultural pattern as had been the pattern of the Dark Ages of more than a thousand years before.

In those days the peasants had worked the fields in daylight, performing their labors for no more than enough to keep themselves alive, and then had spent the night huddled in their hovels, with doors tight barred against the terrors of the dark.

And it was the same today—hurry through the day, huddle through the night. Hurry and huddle—waiting out the night to hurry once again.

But for Frost there was now no need to hurry. To skulk, perhaps, but never need to hurry. For there were few places he had to go and none of them held great urgency. He went each evening to pick up the package left for him beside the garbage can; he hunted through occasional trash containers for papers to serve his daytime reading, keeping his eyes open for any other discarded items which might be of interest to him. He read and slept through the daylight hours and at dusk again began his prowling.

There were others like himself, prowlers of the darkened and deserted streets, and at times he spoke briefly with them, for he could not harm such as these, he told himself, by talking with them. And once, in a vacant area on the waterfront, where an old building had been newly razed, he had sat around a fire with two other men and had talked with them, but when he went back the next night they were gone and there was no fire. He formed no associations with these other prowlers of the dark, nor did any of them try to prolong an acquaintance with him. Loners, all of them—and at times he wondered who they might be and who they might Jiave been and why they walked the night. But he knew he could not ask and they never told him and this was not strange, for he did not identify himself.

Perhaps it was because he no longer had an identity. No longer Daniel Frost, but a human zero. No better off, of no more consequence than any of those millions \vho slept in the streets of India, who had rags to cover them and, sometimes, not even rags, who had never known any other state than hunger, who long since had given up even the right or the wish to find a private place in which to go about the private functions of the body.

For a time Frost had expected that one of the Holies would seek him put again, but this did not happen. Although he saw, in his prowling, evidence that they were still about and active—slogans hurriedly chalked upon the vacant walls:

FBIENDS, DON'T FALL FOB it! WHY SETTLE FOB LESS THAN HEAL IMMORTALITY?

WHAT ABOUT GBEAT-GRANDPA? OUR FOREBEARS WEREN'T DOPES—BUT WE ARE DUPES.

and again and again and again, the new one:

WHY CALL THEM BACK FROM HEAVEN?

With the practiced eye of a professional sloganeer, Frost admired the work. Better in many ways, he thought, than the smug, conservative junk that he and his department had figured out and which still flashed off and on in luridly lit letters high atop many of the buildings, the official watchwords of Forever Center—many of them frankly stolen from a day much earlier:

WASTE NOT, WANT NOT. A PENNY SAVED IS A PENNY EARNED.

Even the new ones sweated out in all earnestness

don't kid yourself—you'll need it!

now you can take it with you!

STICK WITH FOREVER; FOREVER STICKS WITH YOU.

seemed rather pallid now that he could view them from an observer's viewpoint. So he prowled the streets alone, without a purpose, with no destination. Not running any longer. Restless at first, but now no longer restless; no longer the nervous pacing of a caged feline, but now the strolling of a man who, for the first time in his life, through no choice of his own, but through shame and outrage, had become something of what it seemed to him a man had ought to be. A man who, for the first time, saw the stars through the city's haze and speculated upon the wonder and distance of them, who listened to the talking of the river as it went rolling down the land, who took the time to appreciate the architecture of a tree.

Not always like this, of course, but many times like this. At other times the rage and the anger and the shame took hold of him and smoldered like a bonfire in his guts, and at times, cold with the selfsame rage and shame, he worked out elaborate and fantastic, and utterly illogical, campaigns for vengeance—never plans for his rehabilitation, for his return to the normal world of men, but always plans for vengeance.

He lived and slept and walked and ate what the man at the restaurant left for him by the garbage cans-a half a loaf of stale bread, the trimmings from a roast, a roll, a dried-out piece of pie, and many other things. Now at times he stood in the alley, waiting, not bothering to hide, until the man put the bundle out, then raised his arm in greeting and in gratitude, and the man would wave back at him. No word and no approach, never more than this wave of greeting, this semaphoring of a common brotherhood, but it seemed to Frost that the man still was known to him and that he was a long-time friend.

Once Frost started on a pilgrimage, heading back toward the neighborhood where he once had lived, but still blocks away from it he had turned around and returned to the alley where he now resided. For halfway there, he had realized that there was nothing for him to go back to, that he had left there nothing of himself. In the entry hall his name now would be replaced upon the board by another name, and another car, exactly like his car (for all cars were alike), would be parked with a row of identical cars, their noses pressed against the blank brick wall back of the apartment house. But his car would be gone, hauled away long days before under confiscatory order. And the building itself meant no more to him than the ramshackle building, the basement of which he occupied. For now the basement was his home. In this age, he knew, any hole was home.

Back in his, basement he sat in the dark and tried once again to think his situation through, trying to marshal the factors into neat progression, hoping to find in all those straightly aligned facets of the position in which he found himself some road along which he most logically should move. But it was a road he had not found as yet and the picket fence of facts spelled nothing but a dead end.

It was no better this time. He was trapped and there was no road but one, that last, desperate, bitter road into the vaults where his body would be stored. That road he would not take until he was forced to take it. For, as things stood now, if he went into the vaults, he would come out of them a pauper, no better equipped to deal with his second Me than the tribesman in Central Africa, no better than the peon from South America, on the selfsame basis as the man who slept in the streets of India. If he stayed alive, perhaps somewhere, somehow—when or how he could not guess—he might stumble onto some opportunity or some situation which might yield a competence, perhaps a very modest one, but at least something upon which he could start his second Me.

Perhaps he would not be able to live the kind of Me the really wealthy ones would live, would not belong among the billionaires. But at least he would not stand in bread Mies or shiver in the street for the lack of shelter. In the kind of world one would waken into, it would be better to be dead than poor.

He shuddered as he thought of what it would be like to be poor in that glittering world of wealth, in that world where men would wake and find their savings many times increased. And wealth such as this would be solid wealth, for it would represent the very earth itself. By the time that the stockholders of Forever Center came back to second life every facility and every material thing upon the entire planet would be represented in that stock. The men who held the stock, with prudence of any kind at all, would go on being rich. And the man who held none of the stock would never have a chance; he would be condemned to remain a pauper through all eternity.

Thinking of it, he knew that for that reason, if no other, he could never think of going to the vaults.

And he would not go to the vaults for another reason. It was the thing that Marcus Appleton had expected him to do.

Looking down the avenue of time, he saw the endless days stretching interminably ahead, like so many trees that lined the avenue. But there was no other road, no other way that he could go other than this blind and endless avenue leading on to nowhere.

He slept away the day and in the evening set out on his prowling once again.

Night had fallen when he walked into the alley to pick up the package beside the garbage can. The package was not there and he knew from this that he had arrived too early. The man had not come out yet.

He retired to the dark angle of a wall that jutted out farther in the alley than the next adjoining wall and hunkered down to wait.

A cat came padding softly in the shadow, alert and anxious. It halted and stared at Frost, crouching in his angle. Apparently deciding that he was no danger to it, the cat sat down and began to wash its face.

Then the back door of the restaurant opened and a shaft of light speared out into the night. The man came out, his white coat shining in the light, a basket of garbage resting on his right hip and clutched by his right hand, a package in his left.

Frost rose and took a step out toward the alley. A flat report smote against the lane of walls and the man in white straightened in a spasm, his head thrown back, his body tensed and straining. The basket dropped and spun slowly on its bottom rim, spilling the dark litter of the garbage.

Frost caught one glimpse of the man's face, in the second before the body crumpled—a white blur with a spreading darkness on it, running from the hairline.

The white-coated man was down, huddled on the pavement, and the basket, still spinning, came to a stop when it rolled against his body.

Frost took another step out toward the alley, then stopped, poised and tensed.

The cat was gone. Nothing stirred. There was no shout, no footstep.

Frost's brain screamed at him: A trap!

A man dead in the alley, gunned down, more than likely with brain damage (darkness sluicing down his face) that would rule out any possibility of a second life.

A man dead in the alley and he waiting in the alley, and, Frost was very sure, a gun that could be found.

This was death for him, he knew. No longer ostracism, but final death—not normal death, but the terminal cancellation that did away with life. For a man who would kill, in cold blood, a man who had befriended him could expect nothing else but death.

And it would make no difference that he hadn't killed the man—no more difference than it had made that he'd not committed treason.

He spun around and stared at the walls.

Both of them were brick, the buildings two stories high, thirty feet or so. But on the one that was farther back from the alley apparently there once had been a shed extending out over the back door. The shed was no longer there, but jutting out from the smooth brick wall was a series of half-bricks, an inverted V, which had at one time formed the support for the roof timbers of the shed.

Frost took three running strides and leaped. His fingers caught and hooked over the lower extending brick and for a breathless micro-second he feared that the brick might break or slide out of its place from the pressure of his weight. But it held and he reached quickly up with his left hand and caught the second brick and hauled himself up, with his right hand closing on the third brick, so his left could reach the fourth.

Driven by a desperate panic, he swarmed up the wall, hand over hand, his muscles powered by a strength he did not know he had, his nerves a hardened knot of urgency.

As he reached the fifth brick up, he got a foot on the lower brick and hurled himself upward in a mighty surge. His elbows caught the top of the wall and he hauled himself swiftly over it and fell flat upon the roof. A two-foot upward projection of the wall hid him from the alley.

He lay there, panting with the exertion of his climb, pressed against the asphalt of the roof, and out in the alley he heard the rapidly running footsteps and the harsh shouts of horror.

He could not stay here, he knew. He must somehow get away, not only from the roof and alley, but from this neighborhood. When they did not find him in the alley, they then would search the rooftops and the buildings on each side of the alley and by that time he must be many blocks away.

He turned his head on one side and looked across the roof. A small projection above the level rooftop caught his eye and he crawled toward it.

Down in the alley the shouting was louder now and added to it was the distant howling of the rescue wagon's siren. Right on time, thought Frost, but little good it would do the man lying in the alley. The bullet must have caught him squarely in the brain. He reached the projection and saw that it was a square cap, made of wood and covered by metal, apparently covering a hatch.

His fingers worked at the edge of it, seeking for a hold, but the cap was fitted tight. With a hand on each side of it, he twisted and it seemed to give. He twisted again and it seemed to lift. He put more power into the twist and suddenly the cap was free and lifting. And even as he lifted it, he wondered what he would find on that floor below.

Slowly he tilted the cap up and the area under it was dark. He breathed a little easier, although he knew that he was not entirely in the clear. There might be someone down there. It could be merely the top floor of a store or it could be living quarters.

He lifted the cap entirely off and set it to one side, then lowered himself into the hatch. He hung by his arms for a moment, his body extended. The place was dark, although a little light seemed to come from somewhere. Reason said there must be a floor beneath him, but he felt, as he hung there, that he was poised above a pit.

He let loose and dropped. He fell two feet or so. Something that he bumped into went over with a crash. The wind half knocked out of him, Frost crouched on the floor, ears strained for any sound.

Outside, the siren of the rescue wagon ground to a shuddering silence. Someone, bull-throated, was shouting, but the muffled words were lost. Within the room itself there was no sound at all.

Darker shapes became evident as his eyes became accustomed to the gloom. Faint light seeped into the area, which he now saw was no partitioned room, but the entire space of the second floor, from the tall, narrow windows that fronted on the street.

He saw the shapes were furniture, crouching chairs, embattled chests, squat tables. The display floor of a small and dingy furniture establishment.

He should replace the cap, he thought, for searchers, finding it, would guess where he had gone. But it might be hard to do and would take more time than he coulc afford. He'd have to find something to stand on to reach the hatch, would have to wrestle the cap into position, with the good possibility that it would fail, despite all that he could do, to fall into full position.

He couldn't take the time, he told himself. He must be out of here before the hunt shifted from the alley to spread, perhaps, to the street outside.

He stumbled about the area, finally found the stairs, and went down them to the lower floor.

Here the light filtering through the display windows in the front was stronger than it had been upstairs.

At the door he turned back the knob of the night lock, released the regular latch, and pulled the door partway open, staring through the grimy glass at the street outside. The street seemed to be empty.

He opened the door and slid outside, pulling it to, but not latching it. He might need to get back through that door and thus under cover very quickly. Squeezing tight against the front of the building, he glanced quickly up and down the street.

There was no one.

Sprinting, he crossed the street, reached the corner, went around it, slowed to a rapid walk. Two blocks away he met another walker, but the man went past with barely a glance. There were a few cars and he slid into shadowed doorways until they'd gone past.

Half an hour later he began to feel he'd made it, that for the moment he was safe.

Safe, but running once again.

He could not, he knew, go back to the basement. For Appleton and his men would know about that hideout, must have watched him while they fabricated their conspiracy against him, the masterstroke that was intended to erase forever whatever threat he might represent to Appleton and Lane.

And what was that threat? he wondered. What did the paper mean? And had the paper actually been among the papers he'd put in the envelope for Ann?

Thinking about the envelope and Ann, he felt a pang of panic. If Appleton knew she had that paper, or suspected that she had it, she was in deadly danger. As everyone whose life touched his seemed in deadly danger. The man at the restaurant had done no more than a compassionate act for an unknown fellowman and now, because of this, lay dead, shot down with no other thought than how his death might contribute to the entrapment and the death of the man he had befriended.

Appleton must know that Ann had talked with him. More than likely it had been her appearance on the scene (signaling the belief that he was about to make some move?) which had triggered his seizure and his condemnation.

Perhaps, he thought, he should somehow warn her. But how was he to warn her? A phone call, but he had no money for a call. And a phone call, in any case, would be a stupid move, for in all probability her phone would be tapped. And she, herself, watched.

Or contact Chapman? But that, as well, was dangerous—not only to himself but to Chapman and to Ann. For it was likely that Appleton knew Chapman had come to see him and it would need no great imagination to connect Chapman with Ann.

The best thing he could do, Frost told himself, was to stay away from both of them. They should be warned, both of them, but in the warning he'd likely do more harm than if they never knew.

He settled down to a steady, dogged trudging, keeping to the shadows as much as possible. It was essential, he knew, to put as much distance between himself and the alley where the man had died as he could. But well before dawn he must find a place to hide, a den where he could crouch through the daylight hours. And when night came he must push on again to build an even greater distance between himself and the wrath that trailed him.