Why Call Them Back from Heaven Page 6

  Nester Belton hugged himself, thin arms wrapped around thin chest.

  This was the time to be alive, he thought.

  And he thought in horror of those days when men had died and stayed dead, when there had been no thought of other life beyond the frail and tottering promise of a medieval faith that tried to make of faith the Very stuff of knowing.

  All those other poor dead people, who had died without assurance that death was only temporary—who had feared death as an end and nothingness, who had feared it in spite of their oft protested faith, who had shrank from it and thrust it back into an obscure place within their minds each time they thought of it, because they did not want to think of it, could not bear to think of it.

  A thin wind fretted at the eaves above him and it was a lonely sound. The shadows of the yard were diluted shadows that seemed to have no substance. The far-off whiteness of Forever Center was a misty light against the night-black sky. As if, he thought, dawn might not be too far distant. And that was how it must have seemed at times, he told himself, to the men of Forever Center working toward the dawn. But encountering setbacks and disappointments when it seemed that the final accomplishments were within their grasp. Now, however, from what one heard, from the filtered rumor spoken everywhere, dawn (no false dawn this time) was at last in sight and man in a few more years would have been brought to that final perfection of purpose and expression that had been inherent in that first feeble thread of life born in the primal seas.

  And he, Nestor Belton, hopefully would have a hand in it. He and the other counselors, when the people were revived, would perform the necessary function oi rehabilitation, so that the revived could fit into the present culture.

  But to do a job like that, a man must know so much, must be so thoroughly trained as an accomplished historian, with an especial knowledge of the last two centuries.

  Six long years of study—if he ranked high enough in the exams that he faced tomorrow.

  He took one last look at the misty whiteness of Forever Center and went back to his books.

  14

  The dinner tapers flickered, almost burned out, and the scent of roses filled the dingy room—although, in the candlelight, the room was not so dingy. And both of them, the tapers and the roses, had spelled extravagance, but Frost found that he could not regret the money they had cost. It was the first time in years that he had not eaten alone and he could not remember any evening as pleasant as this one had turned out to be.

  Ann.Harrison had not again referred to the Chapman matter, but there had been much to talk about—the European art exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (they both, it turned out, had been to see it, on one of the free days); the new historical novel that everyone was talking about, a romance of the early days of space flight; the unreasonable attitude of the traffic cops; the wisdom of investing in other commodities than Forever stock—and themselves.

  Ann had been born and reared in Manhattan, she told him, had completed her law course at Columbia, had spent one vacation in France and another in Japan, but now no longer took vacations, for it was a waste of time and money, and aside from this, her law practice now took all her time—too much work for one person, not enough for two.

  And he, in turn, had told her about the vacations he spent as a boy, on his grandfather's farm in Wisconsin, no longer a farm, of course, for there were no farms, but a sort of family summer place.

  "Although," he said, "it isn't even a summer place now. The family doesn't own it. At the time of my grand-

  — parents' death it was sold to one of the big land companies and the proceeds turned into Forever stock. I went out to Chicago several years ago on business and took a day off and drove up to the place. It's way out west, on the bluffs above a little town named Bridgeport. The buildings still were standing, but there was no one there, of course, and the place is beginning to look shabby and rundown."

  "It seems a shame," said Anne, "that there aren't any farms. All that land going back to wilderness. You'd think that the government would encourage farming. It would supply a lot of people with employment." He shook his head. "I regret it, too. There was something solid about a farm. And a nation without farms seems a sort of shaky setup. But there really was no reason to keep them going and there is all sort of reason to tool up the converter plants to full capacity. We'll need those plants and in operating order, when revivals start. So far as employment is concerned…"

  "Yes, I know," she said. "All the facilities to be built. Block after block of apartments and each one standing empty. Not only here, but in all the world. When I was in Japan they were building acres of them."

  "We'll need them all," he told her. "Almost a hundred billion frozen and a present population not much less than half of that."

  "Where are we going to put them all?" she asked, "I know that…"

  "Bigger buildings, if necessary. Forever Center is a bit better than a mile in height. It was built as a model, really, to see if a building that large could be built and stand. And it seems to be all right. There was a little settling to start with, but nothing too alarming. You can't build that high everywhere, of course. It depends on the basement rock. But the engineers now are saying that if you go deep enough…"

  "You mean living underground?"

  "Well, yes, both under and above. Go deep enough to find good underpinning, then build up from there, as high as you can build. That way, you can take care of, say, several million people in a single building. What would be the equivalent of a small city in a single structure."

  "But there is a limit."

  "Oh, certainly," he agreed. "There will come a time, some centuries from now, even with the best that we can do, when there'll no longer be any room."

  "And then we migrate into time?"

  "Well, yes," he said, "we hope so."

  "You haven't got it yet?"

  "Not yet," he said, "but close."

  "And immortality?"

  "Ten years," he said. "Twenty maybe. Unless we hit a snag."

  "Dan," she said, "was it smart, the way we did it— to keep all those people frozen until we could hand them immortality? We know what to do with cancer, how to repair the weakened heart, how to handle old age. We could have started revivals almost a hundred years ago, but we just keep on, stacking up the bodies. We said what difference does it make if they sleep a little longer. They will never know. So let us make it worth their while, let's give them a surprise, those old ones, when they wake up. Let's give them life eternal."

  He laughed. "I don't know. You can't get me to argue that one. Too many words already have been wasted on it. Personally, I don't see what difference it could make."

  "But with all those billions, think of all the time that it will take. Each one of them must be processed…"

  "I know, but there are corps of technicians, thousands of them, ready to start work the moment that the word is given. And there are other corps of counselors standing by."

  "But it will take time."

  "Yes," he said. "It will take a lot of time. It would have been simpler, the way it first was planned. But then along came this social security business. I know

  it was the only fair way, for you couldn't put a pric «on extended life. But it makes the chore of revival so much harder and I hate to think of the economic chaos." "It'll be worked out," she said. "It has to be. As you say, it is only fair. You can't have immortality onlv for those who can afford to pay for it."

  "But think of India," he said. "Think of Africa and China. People who even now can't earn a decent living, kept from starving by world relief programs. Not a dim, to lay away. Not a cent invested. They'll be revived into a world that, for them, will be no better than this life they know right now. They still will face starvation; they still will stand in line for food handouts. All the social security program gives them is their shot at immortality. It gives them nothing more."

  "It's better than death," she said. "It's better than an end to everyth
ing."

  "I suppose it is," he said.

  She glanced at her watch. "I'm sorry," she said, "but it is time to go. It's way past time, in fact. I don't know when I've enjoyed an evening quite so much." "I wish you'd stay a little longer." She shook her head and rose from the table. "I never intended to stay at all. But I am glad I did. I'm glad it worked out the way it did."

  "Some other time, perhaps," he suggested. "I could phone you."

  "That would be nice of you." "I'll see you home." "I have my car downstairs." "Ann, there's one thing more." Half turned toward the door, she hesitated. "I've been thinking," he said. "You're an attorney. I may have need of one. Would you represent me?"

  She turned to face him, half puzzled, half laughing.

  "What earthly need would you have of an attorney?"

  "I don't know," he said. "I may not really need one.

  But I think I have a certain paper. I have a bunch of papers. I'm almost certain it's among them. But I have a feeling it might be better if I didn't look, if I didn't know"

  "Dan," she asked, "what in the world are you trying to say?" "I'm not quite sure. You see, I have this paper, or I think I have it."

  "Well, what's so great about it? What kind of paper is it?"

  "I don't know what kind of paper. Just a note, a memo. But I shouldn't have it. It doesn't belong to me,"

  "Get rid of it," she told him. "Burn it. There's no need…"

  "No!" he protested. "No, 1 can't do that. It might be important."

  "Certainly you must know what is written on it. You must know.."

  He shook his head. "I looked at it when it first fell into my hands, but I didn't understand it then. And now I've forgotten what was written on it. At first it didn't seem important…"

  "But now it does," she said.

  He nodded. "Maybe. I don't know."

  "And you don't want to know."

  "I guess that's it," he said.

  She crinkled up her face at him, half humorously, half seriously. "I can't see how I fit into this."

  "I thought that if I took all the papers, the bundle that I spoke of, and put them in an envelope and gave the envelope to you, ,"

  "As your attorney?"

  He nodded miserably.

  She hesitated. "Would I know more about that particular piece of paper? Would you tell me more?"

  "I don't think I should," he said. "I wouldn't want to implicate you. I have the papers in my pocket. I was looking for this certain paper—to be sure I had it. I found a bunch of papers I'd taken out of my other suit when you arrived. So I stuffed the papers in my pocket…"

  "You were afraid someone was coming to take the paper from you."

  "Yes. Something like that. I don't know what I thought, But now I realize that perhaps it would be better if I didn't know what was in the paper or even where it was."

  "I'm not too sure," she said, "of either the ethics or legality."

  "I understand," he said. "It was a bad idea. Let's forget about it."

  "Dan," she said.

  "Yes."

  "I asked you a favor."

  "And I couldn't do it."

  "You will when you can."

  "Don't count on me. The chances are…"

  "You're in trouble, Dan."

  "Not yet. I suppose I could be. You used poor judgment. You came to the one man the least likely to be of help to you."

  "I don't think so," she said. "I'll gamble on you. Now, let's get that envelope, ,"

  15

  Amos Hicklin picked up another short length of wood and placed it on the fire. The fire was a woodsman's fire, small and neat.

  Supper was finished and the frying pan and coffeepot had been washed at the edge of the moon-burnished river, with a handful of sand serving for the soap. And now was the time, with the darkness settling in, for a man to prop himself against a tree trunk and smoke a pipe as it should be smoked, slowly and leisurely, giving space for thought.

  From a wooded hollow a lone whippoorwill took up its evening song, a plaintive questioning call that had something otherworldly in it. Out in the river a fish splashed loudly as it leaped out of the water to snare an insect that had skimmed the water's surface.

  Hicklin reached out to his tidy woodpile and picked up two more sticks and placed them carefully on the fire. Then he settled back against his tree trunk and took from his shirt pocket his pipe and tobacco pouch.

  This wTas good, he thought—June and pleasant weather, moon shining on the river, an old whippoorwill chunking up the hollow, and the mosquitoes not too bad.

  And tomorrow, maybe…

  It was a crazy place, he thought, for a man to hide a treasure, on an island in a river. A risky place to hide anything of value, for any fool should know what could happen to an island.

  Yet it made a zany sort of sense. The man had been on the lam and was very nearly trapped and he had to hide the stuff any way, or any place, he could. And it had the added advantage of being one of the last places in the world where anyone ever would suspect a treasure had been hidden. For the islands here were little more than sandbars which in the course of time had been overgrown by shallow-rooted willows. They might exist for years or they might vanish in a night, for this was a treacherous river, with shifting currents and changing undertow's.

  It well might be a wild goose chase, Hicklin knew, but the stakes were large and he was losing nothing but a year or so of time. A year of time against, roughly estimated, a cool one million dollars.

  Jade, he thought. What a crazy thing to steal!

  For in the day that it had been stolen there'd have been little chance of getting rid of it—unique museum pieces which would be recognized almost anywhere as stolen offerings.

  Yet, perhaps, Steven Furness had never meant to sell it. There was such a thing, perhaps, as falling so in love with beauty that he'd want it for his own. Working for years in the museum, he may have resented, in his twisted mind, pieces of such loveliness suffering exposure to the vulgar public gaze.

  He had almost made it. If he had not been recognized in that backwoods crossroad eating place by some farm kid who had seen his picture in a paper, on that day almost two hundred years ago, he would have got away with it. And in a sense, he had got away with it, for he'd not been captured, but had lived out his life, an old, white-haired, doddering man who had scraped out a precarious existence by performing |obs, all highly questionable, in the dives of New Orleans.

  Hicklin sat in the night, his legs stretched straight out in front of him, puffing slowly at his pipe, the Bicker of the campfire making light and shadow on his face. A howling wilderness, he thought. All this land, farmed for so long, gone back to wilderness. For there was now no use of land except for living space and the population which had at one time made a living off the land now was congregated where jobs were, in the great metropolitan centers, squeezed together in little rooms and flats, living in another wilderness of the human animal. The entire Eastern seaboard, one vast sea of humans, living cheek by jowl; Chicago, the vast Midwest megalopolis clustered around Lake Michigan as far north as old Green Bay and swinging deep around the eastern shore; and the several other centers of massive populations, great islands of jammed humanity growing ever bigger.

  And here he was, he thought—a man apart from this, one of the few men who were apart from it. But driven by the same motives and same greed as all those other billions. Although there was one difference. He was a gambler and they were drudging slaves.

  A gamble, he thought. It could be a gamble. But the letter written on the deathbed and the rude, scrawled map, despite their romantic character, had a strange, sure ring of authenticity. And his search of the records had borne out the facts of the last days of Steven Furness. There was no doubt at all that he had been the man who, in 1972, had stolen from the museum that employed him a collection of jade pieces that were worth a fortune.

  Somewhere, on one of the islands in this particular stretch of river, that fortune now
lay buried, exquisite carvings packed in paper inside an old steel suitcase.

  "… Because I do not wish they be lost forever, 1 now write the facts and pray that you may be able to locate them from the description thai 1 give,"

  A letter written and intended for that same museum from which the jade collection had been stolen, but a letter never mailed—perhaps because he never had a chance to mail it, because there was no one to take and mail it for him, not mailed, perhaps, because he had no stamp for the envelope and death was creeping close. Not mailed, but packed away with his other poor possessions in a battered suitcase—a mate, perhaps, to the one in which the jade was buried.

  And the suitcase—where had it lain secreted or forgotten ever since the old man died? By what strange route had it finally found its way into that auction house, to be offered on a rainy afternoon along with many other odds and ends? Why had no one ever opened it to see what it might contain? Or might someone have opened it and thought it to be no more than it was— a bunch of junk that had all the appearance of being entirely worthless?

  An idle, rainy afternoon, with nothing else to do but seek shelter from the rain. And the mad, illogical, small-boy impulse that had made him start the bidding at a quarter, just for the hel! of it, and then no other bids. Hicklin remembered, sitting there and smoking, how he had thought for a moment he should set it down somewhere and then wander off, affecting absentminded-ness, leaving it behind, thus getting rid of it. But once again, illogically, he had carried it back to his room arid that evening, for lack of anything more interesting to do, had examined its contents and found the letter and been intrigued by it—not believing it, but intrigued enough to make an effort to find out who Steven Furness might have been.