Why Call Them Back from Heaven

4

BJ. rapped sharply on the table with a pencil to signal the beginning of the meeting. He looked benevolently around at the people there.

"I am glad to see you with us, Marcus," said BJ. "You don't often make it. I understand you have a little problem."

Marcus Appleton glowered back at B.J.'s benevolence. "Yes, B.J.," he said, "there is a little problem, but not entirely mine."

BJ. swung his gaze on Frost. "How's the new thrift campaign coming, Dan?" Frost said, "We are working on it." "We're counting on you," B J. told him. "It has to have some punch in it. I hear a lot of investment cash is going into stamps and coins…"

"The trouble is," said Frost, "that stamps and coins are a good long-range investment."

Peter Lane, treasurer, stirred uncomfortably in his chair. "The quicker you can come up with something," he said, "the better it will be. Subscriptions to our stock have been falling off quite noticeably." He looked around the table. "Stamps and coins!" he said, as if they were dirty words.

"We could put a stop to it," said Marcus Appleton. "All we need to do is drop a word or two. No more com-memoratives, no more semi-postals, no more fancy air mail issues."

"You forget one tiling," Frost reminded him. "It's not only stamps and coins. It's porcelain, as well, and paintings and a lot of other tilings. Almost anything that will fit into a time vault that is not too large. You can't put a stop to everything that is being bought."

B.J. said, tartly, "We can't stop anything. There's already too much talk about how we own the world."

Carson Lewis, vice-president in charge of facilities, said, "I think it's talk of that kind which keeps the Holies active. Not, of course, that they're causing too much trouble, but they are a nuisance."

"There was a new sign across the street," said Lane. "A rather good one, I must say…"

"It's not there any more," Appleton said, between his teeth.

"No, I imagine not," said Lane. "But simply running around behind these people with a bucket and a brush and scrubbing off their signs is not the entire answer."

"I don't think," said Lewis, "there is any entire answer. The ideal thing, of course, would be to root out the entire Holies operation. But I doubt that's possible. Marcus, I think, will agree with me that all we can do is hold it down a little."

"It seems to me," said Lane, "that we could do more than we are doing. In the last few weeks I've seen more slogans chalked on walls than I've ever seen before. The Holies must have quite a corps of sign painters working surreptiously. And it's not only here. It is everywhere. All up and down the coast. And in Chicago and in the West Coast complex. In Europe and in Africa…"

"Some day," said Appleton, "there'll be an end to it. I can promise that. There are just a few ringleaders. A hundred or so, perhaps. Once we have them pegged, we can put an end to it."

"But quietly, Marcus," BJ. cautioned. "I insist it must be quietly."

Appleton showed his teeth. "Very quiet," he said.

"It's not just the slogans," said Lewis. "There are the rumors, too."

"Rumors can't hurt us," B.J. said.

"Most of them can't, of course," said Lewis. "They're just something that give people something to talk about, to pass away the time. But there are some that have a

basis of truth. And by that I mean that they are based on situations which do exist in Forever Center. They start with a truth and twist it in an ugly way and I think that some of those may hurt us. Rumors of any sort hurt our image. Some of them hurt us quite a lot. But the thing that worries me is how do these Holies learn of the situations upon which they base the rumors? I would suspect that they may have developed many pipelines into this very building and into the other branches of Forever Center and that is something that we should try to put a stop to."

"We can't be sure," Lane protested, "that all the rumors are started by the Holies. I think we are inclined to attribute too much to them. They're just a gang of crackpots.."

"Not entirely crackpots," said Marcus Appleton. "We could clean out the crackpots. This bunch is a group of smart operators. The worst thing we can do is to underestimate them. My office is working on it all the time. We have a lot of information. I have a feeling that we may be closing in…»

"I would agree with you," Lewis told him. "About their being an effective and well-organized opposition. I have often felt they might have some tie-up with the Loafers. Things get too hot, those who have the heat on them can simply disappear into the wilderness and hide out with the Loafers…»

Appleton shook his head. "The Loafers are nothing more or less than they appear to be. You're letting your imagination run away with you, Carson. The Loafers are the unemployables, the chronic no-goods, the misfits. Comprising, what is it, Peter, something like one per cent…"

"Less than a half of one per cent," said Lane. "All right, then, less than one half of one per cent of the population. They've declared themselves free of us, in effect. They roam the wilderness in bands. They scrape out a living somehow…"

"Gentlemen," said B.J. quietly, "I am afraid we're

getting rather far afield into a subject we've discussed many times before, with no particular results. I would imagine we can leave the Holies to the close attention of Security."

Marcus nodded. "Thank you, B.J.," he said.

"Which brings us," said B.J., "to the problem that I mentioned."

Chauncey Hilton, section chief of the Timesearch project, spoke softly, "One of our research people has disappeared. Her name is Mona Campbell. I had a feeling that she was onto something."

"But if she was on the track of something," Lane exploded, "why should she…"

"Peter, please," said B.J. "Let's discuss this as calmly as we can."

He looked about the table. "I am sony, gentlemen, that we did not let you know immediately. I suppose it wasn't something that we should have kept quiet about. But it was something that we didn't want noised around too much and Marcus thought…"

"Marcus has been looking for her, then?" asked Lane.

Appleton nodded. "Six days. There's been no trace of her."

"Mavbe," Lewis said, "she just went off somewhere to be alone and think a problem through."

"We thought of that," said Hilton. "But if that had been the case, she would have spoken to me. A most conscientious person. And her notes are gone."

"If she'd gone off to work," insisted Lewis, "she'd have taken them along."

"Not all of them," said Hilton. "Just the current working notes. Not the entire file. Really, no one is supposed to take anything out of the project. Our security, however, is not as tight as it perhaps should be."

Lane said to Appleton, "You've checked the monitors?"

Appleton nodded curtly. "Of course, we did. That's routine, for all the good it does us. The monitoring system is not set up to deal with identity. Each computer picks up a person when they show up in its quadrant,

but it is simply concerned with the signal which establishes the fact there is a living person there. If one of the signals clicks off, then it knows someone has died and a rescue crew is dispatched at once. But these signals keep shifting all the time as people move about. They shift off one quadrant and are picked up by another."

"But it could indicate a person traveling." "Certainly. But a lot of people travel. And Mona Campbell may have done no traveling. She may have just holed up."

"Or been kidnaped," Lewis said.

"I don't think so," Hilton told him. "You forget the notes are gone."

"You think, then," said Frost, "that she defected. Deliberately quit the project." "She ran away," said Hilton.

Howard Barnes, head of Spacesearch, asked, "You really think she made some sort of breakthrough?"

"I think so," Hilton said. "She told me, rather guardedly, she was following a new line of calculation. I remember that distinctly. She said a new line of calculation rather than a new line of research. I thought it rather strange, but she had an intense look about her and…" "She said calculation?" Lane asked. "Yes. I found out later that she was working with the Hamal math. You remember it, Howard?"

Barnes nodded. "One of our ships brought it back— oh, say, twenty years ago. Found it on a planet that at one time had been occupied by an intelligent race. Probably a planet that we could use, but it would have to be terraformed and the terraforming on this particular planet would be a nasty job that might take a thousand years or more on an all-out effort."

"This math?" asked Lewis. "Anything we could use?"

"Mathematicians tried to figure it out," said Barnes.

"Nothing came of it. It was recognizable as math, all

right, but it was so far from our concept of math that no

one could manage to get his teeth into it. The team that

visited the planet found a lot of other artifacts, but the rest of them didn't seem to mean too much. Interesting, of course, to an anthropologist or to a culturist, but with no immediate practical value. The math, however, was something else again. It was in a—well, I suppose you could call it a book and the book seemed to be intact. It's not often you find any intact, spelled out body of knowledge on an abandoned planet. There was quite a bit of excitement when it was brought home."

"And no one had cracked it," said Lane, "except possibly this Mona Campbell."

"I'm almost sure she did," said Hilton. "She is a rather exceptional person and.."

"You don't require periodic reports of work in progress?" asked Lane.

"Oh, yes, certainly. But we don't look over people's shoulders. You know what that can do."

"Yes," said Barnes. "They have to have some freedom. They have to be allowed to feel that a certain line of research belongs, personally, to them during its development."

B.J. said, "All of you, of course, realize how important this could be. With all respect to Howard, the Space-search program is a long-range project. It's something to look forward to three or four hundred years from now. But the time program we need as soon as we can get it. A breakthrough in the time program would assure us of the living space we will need, perhaps, in another century. Maybe before that. Once we begin revivals, well face a not too distant day when we'll need more space than this present earth affords. And the day we begin revivals may not be too distant. The Immortality boys are coming along quite nicely if I understand what Anson tells me rightly."

"That is right, B.J.," said Anson Graves. "We feel we are getting close. I'd say ten years at most."

"In ten years," said B.J., "we'll have immortality…"

"A lot could go wrong," warned Graves.

"We'll trust there won't," B.J. said. "In ten years we'll

have immortality. The matter converters have solved the problem of materials and food. The housing program is up to schedule. All that we can look forward to as any massive problem is the matter of space. To get that space and get it quickly, we need time travel. Time is critical."

"Perhaps," suggested Lane, "we're looking for the impossible. Time may be something that can't be cracked. There may be nothing there."

"I can't agree with you," said Hilton. "I think Miss Campbell cracked it."

"And ran away," said Lane.

"It all boils down to one thing," said B.J. "Mona Campbell must be found."

He looked hard at Marcus Appleton. "You understand," he said. "Mona Campbell must be found!"

"I agree," said Appleton. "I would like to request, however, all the assistance that anyone can give me. In time, of course, we'll find her, but we might find her sooner if…"

"I don't quite understand," said Lane. "The matter of security is something that rests entirely in your hands." "As a working proposition," said Appleton, "as an everyday affair, that is entirely true. But the treasury department also has its agents…"

"But for a different sort of work," exploded Lane. "Not for routine…"

"I agree with you," said Appleton, "although it is conceivable that they could be of help. There is one other department that I am thinking of."

He switched about in his chair and looked straight at Frost.

"Dan," he said, "you've developed a rather fine extracurricular intelligence that might be a lot of help. You have all sorts of tipsters and undercover boys and…" "What is this?" B.J. demanded.

"Oh, I forgot," said Appleton. "You may not know about it. It's entirely a departmental affair. Dan has done a fine job in organizing this group of people

and it's most effective. He finances it, I understand, out of something called publication research that doesn't necessarily come up for review. Which is true, of course, of a number of other activities and projects."

Why, you bastard, Frost said to himself. You dirty, lousy bastard!

"Dan," B.J. yelped, "is this the truth?"

"Yes," said Frost. "Yes, of course it is."

"But why?" demanded B.J. "Why should you have…"

"B.J.," said Frost, "if you are really interested I can cite you chapter and verse on why it's done and why it's necessary. Do you have any idea how many books, how many magazine articles, would have been published in the past year, or the past ten years-all of them purporting to expose Forever Center—if something hadn't been done to head them off?"

"No," yelled B.J. "And I'm not interested. We can survive those kind of attacks. We've survived them all before."

"We've survived them," said Frost, "because only a few slipped through. The worst of them were stopped. Not only by myself, but by the men who preceded me. There are some I've stopped that would have hurt us badly."

"B.J.," said Lane, "I think Dan has something on his side. I think that…"

"Well, I don't," B.J. stormed. "We shouldn't try to stop anything, manage anything, censor anything. We are being accused of trying to run the world. It is being said…"

"B.J.," Frost said, angrily, "there is no use in our pretending that Forever Center doesn't run the earth. There are nations still, and governments, but we own the earth. We have soaked up all the investment capital and we own all the big enterprises and utilities and…"

"I could give you argument on that," roared B.J.

"Of course you could. It's not our capital. It's only money that we hold in trust. But we manage all that

money and we decide how to invest it and no one can question us."

"I submit," said Lane, uneasily, "that we've wandered off the track."

"I hadn't meant," said Appleton, "to stir up a hornet's nest."

"I think you did," Frost told him levelly. "I don't know what the pitch is, Marcus, but you never did a thing in all your life that you didn't plan to do."

"Marcus, I believe, asked cooperation," said Lane, trying to calm the situation. "For my part, I'm willing to cooperate."

"For my part, I am not," said Frost. "I won't cooperate with a man who walked in here deliberately and tried to put me on the spot for doing a job that was being done long before I took over, and was conducted, as I've conducted it, in a decent secrecy…" "I don't like it, Dan," B.J. told him. "I knew you wouldn't like it," said Frost. "You are — you'll pardon the expression—our front man and I had no wish to embarrass you…" "You knew?" B.J. asked of Lane.

Lane nodded. "Yes. The treasury had to supply the funds. And Marcus knew because he makes it his business to know everything. But there were just the three of us. I'm sorry, sir."

"I'll talk to the three of you about this later," said BJ. "I still am of the opinion that we should always operate openly and aboveboard. We hold a sacred trust. This organization has held that trust for a long, long time and we've held it in close honor. There will come a day when we will be called upon to make an accounting to all those people who are waiting for the day that we work toward. And when that day comes, I would hope we might be able to open, not only our books, but our hearts, for all the world to see…»

B.J. was off on a topic that was dear to him. He could talk on it for hours. He droned on and on.

Frost glanced at Appleton. The man was hunched tensely in his chair and scowling.

So it didn't work, thought Frost. Not the way you thought it would. You came in here primed and cocked and you let me have it and it didn't work entirely. And I wish I knew what was back of it, why you tried to get me.

For there had never been bad blood between himself and Marcus. Not that he'd been friendly with the man, for no man ever was a friend of Marcus Appleton. But they had been, if not friends, at least colleagues, each respectful of the other.

There must be something going on, he thought, something not apparent to the eye, some development somewhere that he had failed to catch. For if something were not going on, why had Appleton tried to ruin him?

He became conscious once again of B.J.'s words.

"And that is why, I say, we must bend all our resources to finding Mona Campbell. She may have something that we need, that we've needed all these years."

He stopped and looked inquiringly around the table. No one said a thing.

B.J. rapped on the table with his pencil.

"That is all," he said.