Why Call Them Back from Heaven Page 2

  He wondered, sitting there upon the sand, with the morning laughter of the river in his ears, if he had been as wise as he had thought in picking out this tiny island as his place of solitude. It had solitude, all right, but it had little else. The one thing that it lacked, quite noticeably, was comfort. Although comfort, he reminded himself quite sternly, had been a quality that he had not sought. There had been comfort back where he had come from, in that world he'd turned his back upon, and he could have kept it by simply staying there. But he had forsaken comfort, and many other things as well, in this greater search for something which he could sense and feel but which, as yet, he had not come to grips with.

  Although I've tried, he thought. My God, how I have tried!

  He arose and stretched, carefully and gingerly, for he had, it seemed, an ache in eveiy bone and a soreness in each muscle. It's this sleeping out, he thought, that does it, exposed to the wind and to the river damp, without so much as a ragged blanket to drape his huddled self. With almost nothing to cover him, in fact, for the only thing he wore was an ancient pair of trousers, chopped above the knees.

  Having stretched, he wondered if he should set up the cross before his morning prayer, or if the prayer might be as acceptable without a standing cross. After all, he told himself, there would be a cross, a reclining cross, and surely the validity lay in the symbol of the cross itself and not its attitude.

  Standing there, he wrestled with his conscience and tried to look into his soul and into the immutable mystery of that area which stretched beyond his soul, and which still remained illusive of any understanding. And there was still no insight and there was no answer, as there had never been an answer. It was worse this morning than it had ever been. For all that he could think of was the peeling sunburn of his body, the abrasions on his knees from kneeling in the sand, the knot of hunger in his belly, and the wondering about whether there might be a catfish on one of the lines he'd set out the night before.

  If there were no answer yet, he told himself, after months of waiting, of seeking for that answer, perhaps it was because there was no answer and this had been a senseless course upon which he'd set himself. He might be pounding at the door of an empty room; might be calling upon a thing which did not exist and never had existed, or calling upon it by a name it did not recognize.

  Although, he thought, the name would be of no consequence. The name was simply form, no more than a framework within which a man might operate. Really, he reminded himself, the thing he hunted was a simple thing—an understanding and a faith, the depth of faith and the strength of understanding that men of old had held. There must, he argued, be some basis for the belief that it existed somewhere and that it could be found.

  Mankind, as a whole, could not be completely wrong. Religious faith, of any sort, must be something more than a mere device of man's own making to fill the aching void that lay in mankind's heart. Even the old Neanderthalers had laid their dead so that when they rose to second life they would face the rising sun, and had sprinkled in the grave the handsful of red ocher symbolic of that second life, and had left with the dead those weapons and adornments they would need in the life to come.

  And he had to know! He must force himself to know! And he would know, when he had schooled himself to reach deep into the hidden nature of existence. Somewhere in that mystic pool he would find the truth.

  There must be more to life, he thought, than continued existence on this earth, no matter for how long. There must be another eternity somewhere beyond the reawakened and renewed and immortal flesh.

  Today, this very day, he'd rededicate himself. He'd spend a longer time upon his knees and he'd seek the deeper and he'd shut out all else but the search he had embarked upon—and this might be the day. Somewhere in the future lay the hour and minute of his understanding and his faith, and there was no telling when that hour might strike. It might, indeed, be close.

  For this he'd need all his strength and he'd have his breakfast first, even before the morning prayer, and thus reinforced, he'd enter once again with a renewed vigor upon his seeking after truth.

  He went along the sandspit to the willows where he had tied his lines and he pulled them in. They came in easily and there was nothing on them.

  The hard ball of hunger squeezed the tighter as he stared at the empty hooks.

  So it would be river clams again. He gagged at the thought of them.

  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 Hol
ies 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…"