Why Call Them Back from Heaven

33

Ann Harrison knew now that once again she had wandered into a dead-end road, but there was little she could do about it except to go on until she found a place she could turn the car around. Then she would retrace her way and try for another road that would lead her west.

Once, long ago, the roads had been numbered and well marked and there had been maps available at any service station. But now the road markers had mostly disappeared and there were no service stations. With cars powered by longlife storage batteries, there was no longer any need of service stations.

Out here in the wilderness it was a matter of making out the best one could, ferreting out the roads that would take one where he wished to go, making many wrong turnings, backtracking to find another way-some days making only a few miles on one's route and seldom being sure of where one really was. Occasionally there were people who could be asked, occasionally there were towns that could be identified. But other than this, it was a matter of good guessing.

The day was warm and the heavy growth that grew close against the road to make a tunnel of it trapped and held the heat. Even with the windows open, it was hard to breathe.

The road had grown narrower in the last mile or so and now was little more than a dugout sliced into the hillside. To the right the hill rose steeply, dense and thick with trees and underbrush, with gray boulders, splotched with moss, poking from the leaf-covered earth beneath the trees. To the left the ground sloped sharply away, studded with boulders and with trees.

Ann made a bargain with herself. If, within another five minutes of driving she did not find a place to turn around, she would back the car to the fork she had taken several miles back. But it would be slow work and perhaps even hazardous because of the narrowness of the track, and she didn't want to do it unless it was necessary.

Ahead of the car tree branches arched and met to make the road a tunnel and some of the branches, drooping low, or leaning out from the side of the road, brushed against the car.

She saw the nest too late, and even seeing it, did not recognize it for what it was. It was a gray ball that looked like a wad of dirty paper hanging from one of the branches that scraped, at windshield height, against the side of the car.

It scraped around the windshield post and bounced suddenly into the open window and as it swung it erupted in a blur of buzzing insects.

And in that instant Ann recognized the wadded ball of paper-a wasp nest.

The insects exploded in her face and swarmed into her hair. She screamed and threw up her hands to fight them off. The car lurched and seemed to stagger, then plunged off the road. It smashed into one tree, bounced off, slammed into a boulder and caromed around it, finally came to rest, still upright, its rear end wedged between two trees.

Ann found a door handle and pushed down on it. The door came open and she threw herself out, rolling off the edge of the seat and hitting the ground. She scrambled to her feet and ran, wildly, blindly. She slapped at her face and neck. She tripped and fell and rolled, was brought up by a fallen tree trunk.

One wasp was crawling on her forehead, another buzzed angrily in her hair. There were two painful, burning areas on the back of her neck and another on her cheek.

The wasp on her forehead flew away. Slowly she sat up and shook her head. The buzzing ceased. That wasp, too, apparently was gone.

She pulled herself to her feet, became aware of many bruises and abrasions and a few more stings. There was a muted throbbing in one ankle. She sat down carefully on the fallen tree trunk and beneath her weight rotted wood crumbled and fell away, dropping to the forest floor.

Around her the wilderness was black and gray and green—and the silence green as well. Nothing stirred. It waited. It crouched and was sure of itself. It did not care.

She felt the mental scream rise in her brain and fought it down. This was no time, she told herself, to give way to nerves. The thing to do was to stay for a moment on this log and get her thoughts together, to make assessment of the situation and then go up the hill and see what shape the car was in. Although she was sure that the car, even if it were in operating order, would not, under its own power, pull itself back onto the road. Cars were built for city streets, not for terrain such as this.

It had been foolish to start out, of course. This was a trip she never should have tried. She had started, she remembered, driven by two motives—the need to escape the surveillance by Forever Center and in the faint belief that she knew where Daniel Frost might be. And why Daniel Frost? she asked herself. A man she had seen but once, a man she had cooked a dinner for and eaten with at a table set with candles and red roses. A man she had found easy to talk with. A man who had promised help even when he knew that he had no help to give, even when he faced some terrible danger of his own. And a man who had said he spent his boyhood summers at a farm near Bridgeport in Wisconsin.

And a man who later had been made a pariah.

Lost dogs, she thought, and homeless cats—although there were no longer many dogs or cats. And lost causes. She was a sucker for lost causes, an inevitable and unremitting champion of misfortune. And what had it gotten her?

It had gotten her this, she thought. Here in the depths of an unknown woods, on a dead-end, dying road, hundreds of miles from anywhere or anyone who counted — bee-stung and bruised and something wrong with one ankle and a complete damn fool.

She pulled herself erect and stood for a moment, testing the ankle. While there was some pain, she found that it would support her.

She walked slowly up the hill. Her feet sank into the black loam carpeted by the dead leaves which represented the falls of many years. She dodged around boulders and, reaching out, grasped at saplings and hanging branches to help herself along.

Occasionally an angry wasp went thrumming past, but the swarm appeared to have settled down.

She reached the car and one glance told her that it was useless. A wheel had struck a boulder squarely and was crumpled.

She stood and looked at it and thought what she must do.

Her sleeping bag, of course—it was light in weight, but a little bulky for easy carrying. As much food as she could manage and the hatchet to cut wood for fires, some matches, an extra pair of shoes.

There was no use staying here. Somewhere, on one of those wild, abandoned roads, she would find some help. Somehow she would work it out. And once she'd worked it out, what would she do then? She had only come a few hundred miles and there were many more to go. Should she continue on her crazy odyssey or go back to Manhattan and Forever Center?

A sound jerked her around—the soft scraping sound of wood brushing against metal and the faint humming that could only be an electric motor.

Someone was driving down the road! Someone trailing her?

Fear flowed over her and her strength and bravery deserted her and she sank into a crouch, huddling there beside her wrecked car, while the other car, screened from her sight by the heavy foliage, crept slowly down the road.

It must be someone who had followed her, she told herself. For this was a road that seemed to lead to nowhere, a steadily worsening road that in a little while, more than likely, would dwindle down to no road at all.

In just a few more seconds the car would reach the wasp nest and what would happen then? The insects would not take such a disturbance lightly. Stirred up by their first encounter, they would come swarming out bent upon full vengeance.

The noise of the branches and the brush scraping against the metal of the car came to an end. The electric motor was humming idly. The car had stopped before it reached the nest.

A door banged and leaves rustled under the scuffing of deliberate footsteps. The footsteps stopped. The silence stretched out thin. The footsteps began, then stopped again.

A man cleared his throat, as if he'd been about to speak and then had decided not to.

The feet upon the road stirred about—not footsteps, but indecisive shuffling.

A voice spoke tentatively, a normal speaking voice, as one might speak who was reluctant to break the woodland spell.

"Miss Harrison," asked the voice, "are you anywhere about?"

She half raised out of the crouch, surprised. She had heard that voice somewhere and she should know it— and suddenly she did.

"Mr. Sutton," she said, as calmly as she could, determined not to shout, not to sound excited, "I'm down here. Watch out for that wasp nest."

"What wasp nest?"

"There's one on the road. Just ahead of you."

"You're all right?"

"Yes, I'm all right. Stung up a little. You see, I drove into the nest and the car went off the road and

She forced herself to stop. The words were coming out too fast, gushing out. She had to hang onto herself. She must fight off hysteria.

He was off the road now, plunging down the hill toward her. She saw him coming—the big, blunt man with the grizzled face.

He stopped and stared at the car.

"Busted up," he said.

"One wheel is broken. Just caved in."

"You ran me quite a chase," he said.

"But why—how did you find me?"

"Just dumb luck," he said. "There are a dozen of us out looking for some trace of you. Covering different areas. And I was the one to pick up your trail. A day or two ago. When you talked to some people in a village."

"I stopped several times," she said, "to ask my way."

He nodded. "Then there was the house up by the fork. They told me you went this way. Said the road petered out. Said you'd get in trouble on it. No proper road at all."

"I didn't see a house."

"Maybe not," he said. "It sets back from the road a piece. Up on a knoll. Not an easy thing to see. Dog came out, barking at me. That is how I knew."

She rose to her feet.

"Now what?" she asked. "Why come after me?"

"We need you. There is something that you have to do. Something that we can't do. Franklin Chapman's dead." "DeadI"

"Heart attack," he said.

"The envelope!" she cried. "He was the only one who knew…"

"It's all right," he said. "We have the envelope. We'd been keeping tab on him. A cabdriver picked him up and took him to a post office…"

"That's where the letter was," she said. "I asked him to rent a box under an assumed name and I gave him the envelope and he mailed it to himself and left it in the box. A legal maneuver. So I wouldn't know where the letter was."

"The cabbie was one of us," said Sutton. "One way we kept track of him. Looked sick when he got into the cab and…"

"Poor Franklin," she said.

"He was dead when he hit the floor. Never knew what happened."

"But there's no second life for him, no…" "A better second life," said Sutton, "than Forever Center plans."