Why Call Them Back from Heaven Page 5

  But his fund against revival and th «second life grew week by week and his whole life centered on the credit book that showed his ownership of stock.

  And this afternoon, he recalled, he had stood ready to sell Forever Center and his position with Forever Center for a quarter million dollars—more money than he could hope to accumulate in his entire initial lifetime. He had been ready, even willing, to take the money, then, if necessary, to deliberately seek death.

  The only thing that had stopped him was the fear that it was a trap.

  And had it been a trap? he wondered.

  If it had been a trap, why had the trap been set? For what reason had Marcus Appleton become his enemy?

  The missing paper? And if that were the case, what made the paper so important—so important that he must be discredited before he tried to use it.

  For if the paper were important and somehow incriminating, they'd expect that in his own good time he'd put it to his use. For that is what they would have done themselves. That was what anyone would do— anything at all to squeeze out that extra dollar, to gain a preferred position that would mean an extra dollar.

  He'd chucked the paper in the desk and now, today, when he'd hunted for it, it had not been there. And if they'd gotten the paper back, then why…

  But wait a minute. Had he chucked the paper in the desk? Or had he stuffed it in his pocket?

  He crouched deeper in the chair and tried hard to remember. But he could not remember with any clarity. He might have put it in his pocket instead of in the church was compromise and expediency, manned by men of little faith.

  If a man could only pray, he thought. But there was no point in praying when the prayer was never more than a mouthful of ritualistic words. Man prayed with his heart, he thought, never with his tongue.

  He stirred uneasily and dropped his hand into the pocket of his cassock. His fingers closed upon the rosary and he pulled it out and laid it on the table.

  The wooden beads were worn and polished from much handling and the metal crucifix was dull and tarnished.

  Men still prayed by such as this, he knew, but not as many as had at one time. For the old established church at Rome, perhaps the one and only church that still retained some remnant of its old significance, had fallen on bad days. Most men today, if they paid any service to formalized religion, paid it to the new church that had j risen—the formalized and impersonal reminder (and j remainder) of what once had been religion.

  Here was faith, he thought, fingering the rosary. Here-was blind and not-quite-understanding faith, but a better thing than no faith at all.

  The rosary had come down to him, down through die family, generation after generation, and there was, he recalled, an old story that went with it—how an old grandmother, many times removed, in some forgotten village in Central Europe, had been bound for church when a sudden rain came up, and how she had sought shelter in a nearby cottage, and after gaining shelter had, on impulse, thrust the rosary out the door, commanding the rain to stop. And the rain had stopped and the sun came out. And how all the days she lived she had held perfect faith that the rosary stopped the rain. And how others, long after she had died, had told of the incident, also in perfect faith.

  This, of course, Knight told himself, was no more than the mere trappings of faith, but it, at least, was something.

  If he had held only a portion of the faith of that old I grandmother, he could have helped the man. The one man, in all the thousands he had known, who had ever felt the need of faith.

  Why should this one man, one in many thousands, SO stand in need of faith? What mental mechanism, what driving spiritual sense had impelled him on his hunt for faith?

  He conjured up the face of the man again—the horror haunted eyes, the unruly shock of hair, the sharp, high cheekbones.

  It was a face he knew. The face, perhaps, of empty man—a lumping together of all the faces he had ever seen.

  But it was not that entirely. It was not the universal face. It was an individual face, a face that he had seen, and not too long ago.

  Suddenly it came clear—the memory sharp and hard — this same face staring out at him from the front page of the morning paper.

  And this, he thought, in sudden terror at his own inadequacy, was the man that he had failed—a man who had nothing left but faith, absolutely nothing in the world but the hope of faith.

  The man who had come into the church and had left again, as empty when he left as when he entered, perhaps emptier, for then even hope was gone, had been Franklin Chapman.

  12

  Frost jerked the door open in a sudden, violent motion, his body tensed and ready for whoever might be standing there and knocking.

  A woman stood there, cool and poised, the faint light of the hall bulb glinting in the blackness of her hair. "Are you Mr. Frost?" she asked.

  Frost gulped in astonishment, perhaps even in relief, "Yes, I am," he said. "Will you please step in?" She stepped through the doorway.

  "I do hope," she said, "that I'm not intruding. My name is Ann Harrison and I'm an attorney."

  "Ann Harrison," he said, "I am pleased to meet you. Aren't you the one…"

  "Yes, I am," she said. "I defended Franklin Chapman." "I saw the pictures in the paper. I should have recognized you at once."

  "Mr. Frost," she said, "I'll be honest with you. I sneaked up on you. I could have phoned, but you might have refused to see me, so I took the chance of coming here. I hoped you wouldn't throw me out."

  "I wouldn't throw you out," said Frost. "There is no

  reason that I should. Won't you take a chair?"

  She sat down in the chair he had been sitting in.

  She was beautiful, he thought, but there was a strength behind the beauty, and there was a hardness in her, in a polished sort of way.

  "I need your help," she said.

  He went to another chair, sat down, took his time to answer.

  "I don't quite follow you," he said.

  "I got a tip-off you were a decent sort of man, that one could talk to you. You were the man to see, they told me." "They?"

  She shook her head. "It doesn't matter. Just talk around the town. Will you listen to me?"

  "Yes," he said, "I'll listen. As for being any help…" "We'll see," she said. "It's about Franklin Chapman…" "You did all you could for him," said Frost. "He didn't have too much going for him."

  "That's the point," she said. "Someone else might have done better, I don't know. The point is that it wasn't justice."

  "It was law," said Frost.

  "Yes, it was that. And I live by the law. Or I should live by it. But the legal profession is in a good position to distinguish between law and justice and the two are pot the same. There can be no justice in denying a man a second chance at lite. Certainly, due to circumstances beyond his control, Chapman arrived too late at a scene of death and, as a result, a woman lost her second chance at life. But to decree that Chapman also should be denied that second life is wrong. It's the old jungle law, again. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. As an intelligent race, we should be beyond all that. Is there no such a thing as mercy? Is there no compassion? Do we have to go back to tribal law?"

  "We're in an interregnum," said Frost. "We're shifting from our old way of life to a new condition of life. The old rules don't apply and it's too soon to apply any new ones. We had to set up rules which would carry us over the transition period. And those rules had to assure one thing beyond all question, that the new generations take care of the old to the extent that nothing interfered with the revival plan. There had to be some sort of assurance that everyone who died would be guaranteed his chance at revival. If we fail one person, then we've violated a trust and the pledge we've made to everyone. The only way to provide that kind of assurance was to formulate a code of law which provided a penalty harsh enough to make certain the pledge being carried out."

  "It might have been better," said Ann Harrison, "if Chapman had applied f
or trial by drug. I suggested it, I even urged it. But he refused. There are certain kinds of people who rebel against laying themselves, their whole life, all their motives and their drives, open to legal scrutiny. In certain types of crime—treason, for example-trial by drug is mandatory, but in this case it was not. I have a feeling it would have been better if it had been."

  "I still fail to see the point of this," said Frost. "I don't see how I can help you."

  "If I could convince you," she said, "that some sort of mercy were permissible, then you'd be in a position to take it up with Forever Center. If Forever Center indicated to the court…"

  "Now, just a moment," said Frost. "I'm in no position to do a thing like that. I head promotion and publicity and have no concern with policy."

  "Mr. Frost," she said, "I have been quite frank about why I came to you. I understood you were the one man at Center who would give me time, who would I listen to me. So I came to you and I don't mind being j honest with you. I have a selfish purpose. I am fighting: for my client. I'll do anything that's possible to help him."; "Does he know you're here?"

  She shook her head. "He wouldn't like it if he knew. He's a strange man, Mr. Frost. He has a deep and stubborn pride. He would never beg. But I'll beg if I have to."

  "Would you do this for every client?" asked Frost. "I don't think you would. What's so special about this one?" "It's not the way you may be thinking." she said. "Although I won't resent your thinking it. But the man has something that you so seldom find. An inner dignity, the strength to meet adversity without asking quarter, He fairly breaks your heart. And he was trapped—trapped by a set of laws that we legislated a hundred years or more ago in an excessive burst of enthusiasm and determination that nothing must upset the great millennium. In principle, good laws, perhaps, but they're outmoded now. They worked as a deterrent; they have served their purpose. I've checked and since this particular law was passed less than twenty people have been given death. So it must have served its purpose. It has helped to mold the kind of society that we wanted, or that we thought we wanted. There is no reason for the penalty to be enforced to its full extent.

  "And there's another reason I feel so strongly. I went with him when they removed the transmitter from his chest. Have you ever…"

  "But that," protested Frost, "was far beyond the call of your obligation. There was no reason that you should."

  "Mr. Frost," she said, "when I accept a case I commit myself. I stand by my client all the way. I never quite quit caring."

  "Like now," he said.

  "Like now. I stood there with him and watched the sentence carried out. Physically, of course, it's nothing. Just beneath the skin. Just above the heart. It records the heartbeat and sends out a signal and that signal is recorded on a monitor and when the signal stops a rescue squad is sent. And they took it out and tossed it on a little metal tray that held the instruments and there it was, a little metallic thing, but it wasn't just a piece of metal; it was a man's life laying there. Now there's no indication of his heartbeat on the monitor and when he dies there'll be no rescue squad. They talk about another thousand years of life, another million years of life, they talk about forever. But there's no million years, no forever for my client. He has only forty years, maybe less than that."

  "And what would you do?" asked Frost. "Simply implant the transmitter once again…"

  "No, of course not. The man committed a crime and must pay for it. This is simple justice, but it need not be vicious justice. Why can't the sentence be commuted to ostracism. That is bad enough, but it's not execution, it's not death."

  "Almost as bad as death," said Frost. "Branded on both cheeks and read out of the human race. No one can communicate with you, no one can traffic with you—even for the necessities of life. You are shorn of all possessions, left only with the clothes you stand in."

  "But not death," said Ann Harrison. "You still have the transmitter in your chest. The rescue squad will come."

  "And you expect that I can do this, that I can swing a commutation?"

  She shook her head. "Not just like that," she said. "Not overnight, not tomorrow or the next day. But I need. a friend at Center, Chapman needs a friend at Center. You'd know who to talk with and when to talk with them, you'd know what was going on, you'd know when something could be done—that is, if I can convince you, if I can make you see it as I see it. And don't mistake me. You won't be paid for it. There are no funds to pav you. If you do it, you'll have to do it because you think it's right."

  "I suspected that," said Frost. "I would imagine you've not been paid, yourself."

  "Not a cent," she said. "He wanted to, of course. But he has a family and he's not been able to put away too much. He showed me his holdings and they are pitiful, I couldn't send his wife into the second like a pauper. For himself, of course, there's now no need of savings, He's still got his job, but in the face of public opinion, he won't hold it long. And where does he go to get another job?"

  "I don't know," said Frost. "I could talk with…"

  And then he stopped. For who could he talk with? Not Marcus Appleton. Not after what had happened. Not Peter Lane, if Appleton and Lane were, indeed, involved in the matter of the missing paper, a paper which, incidentally, might be no longer missing. B.J.? It didn t seem too likely that B.J. would listen—or any of the rest of them.

  "Miss Harrison," he told her, "you probably came to the one man in Forever Center the least likely to be of help to you."

  "I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to put you on the spot. If you can be of any help, even if you're no more than willing to try to help, I will appreciate it. For even an expression of a willingness to help will do something to restore my confidence, will let me know that someone still remains who has a sense of fairness."

  "If I can be of any help," said Frost, "I'm inclined to do it. But I won't stick out my neck, you understand. Right at the moment, I can afford no trouble."

  "That," said Anne, "is good enough for me."

  "I'm promising nothing."

  "I can't expect you to. You'll do what you can."

  It was wrong, thought Frost. He had no right to offer help. He had no business mixing into this at all. And especially he had no right to offer help when he knew there was nothing he could do.

  But the clingy room somehow seemed the warmer now, and brighter. It was a sense of life and living such as he had not known before. And he knew it was this woman sitting in the room who gave it warmth and light, but a dying warmth and light, like the warmth and light given off by a dying fire. In time, when she had left, once the memory had worn thin, the room again would become cold and dingy, as it had been before.

  "Miss Harrison," he asked suddenly, "could I take you out to dinner?"

  She smiled and shook her head.

  "I'm sorry," Frost said. "I had hoped, perhaps…"

  "Not out," she said. "I can't have you spending that much money on me. But if you have food here, I can cook."

  13

  Nestor Belton closed the book and shoved it across the desk, away from him. He lowered his head and put up his fists to knuckle at tired eyeballs.

  Examinations tomorrow, he thought, and he should get some sleep. But there was so much that he needed to review, if no more than a quick and skimpy check through the pages of the texts.

  For these examinations were important. From those scoring highest would be chosen those students wh< would be allowed to enter the School of Counseling. Ever since he could remember he had wanted to be; counselor. And it was more important now than it hat'; ever been, for there was heard from every quarter rumors that in the matter of just a few more years immortality would become a fact, that the men at Forever Center had finally cracked the problem and all that now remained was a perfection of the necessary techniques.

  Once immortality became possible, revivals would begin and then the corps of counselors would be put to work. For years they had been held in reserve against the need of them and ther
e had been many of them who had lived out lifetimes of waiting, without a thing to do, and now, themselves, were stored in vaults, waiting for revival.

  The counselors and the revival technicians, two groups of men, thousands of them, who had stood by and waited all these years, always ready for the day when the waiting hordes of dead could be brought back to life again. Two corps of men who had been trained at the expense of Forever Center and who had stood by, being paid for doing nothing because there was nothing yet to do.

  But ready, always ready. One with the acre after-acre of empty tiers of housing, built against that dav when there would be need of them. One with the great storehouses filled with food, turned out by the converters, stored and waiting against Revival Da}".

  For, Nestor Belton told himself, Forever Center thought of everything, had planned only as a devoted institution manned by devoted and unselfish men could plan. For almost two hundred years the Center had been custodian of the dead, guardian of mankind's hope, architect of the life to come.

  He rose from his desk and walked to the single yindow in his student's cubicle. Outside a pale moon, half obscured by floating clouds, made a misty landscape of the dormitory yard. And far off, toward the vvest and north, rose the massive shaft of Forever Center.

  He was glad, he told himself for the thousandth time, that he had been so lucky as to have a view of the Center from his window. For it was an inspiration and a promise and a seeming benediction. He had only to look out the window to know what he was working for, to glimpse a reminder of the glory that after almost a million years (although there were some who said more than a million years) would crown the long, slow crawl of man from the mindless primal ooze.

  Eternal life, Nestor Belton told himself; no need ever to die, but to keep on and on and in a body that would be always youthful. To have the time to develop one's intellect and knowledge to the full capacity of the human brain. To gather wisdom, but not age. To have the time to carry out all the work that the mind could dream. To compose great music, write great books, to paint finally the kind of canvases that artists had always tried to paint, but usually had failed, to go out to the stars, to explore the galaxy, to dig to the root of meaning in the atom and the cosmos, to watch lofty mountains wear away and others rise, to see rivers dwindle down to nothing and other rivers form, and when, ten billion years from now, flaming death reached out for this solar system, to have been gone to other systems far in the depth of space.