"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.
5
"You see, it's this way," said the little old lady to the mortician. "We both are getting old. It isn't as if we had a lot of years ahead of us. Although our health is good."
The old gentleman banged his cane upon the floor in glee and chuckled.
"That is the thing of it," he said. "Our health is just a bit too good. More than likely the both of us could go on living for another twenty years."
"And we enjoy it, too," the little old lady said. "James worked so hard all his life and we scrimped and saved. Now that he can't work any more, we have time just to sit and take it easy and do a little talking and go visiting and such. But we're going behind, financially, every blessed day. We are using up the little that we've saved and we can't have that."
"It's foolish," the old gentleman declared. "If we put ourselves away, the money that is left would go on earning interest."
The old lady nodded vigorously. "Earning interest," she said, "instead of us just sitting around and eating into it."
The mortician rubbed soft, flabby hands together.
"I quite understand," he said. "There is no need of you to feel embarrassment. People with your problem come in all the time."
6
From the window of his office, on the topmost floor of Forever Center, Frost stared out across the tapestry that was old New York. The Hudson was a strip of silver, shining in the morning sun, and the island of Manhattan was a patchwork of faded colors.
Many times before he had stood at this window and gazed out, seeing the scene below, framed by the blue haze of distance and of water, as a symbolic thine;—a glimpse into the past of mankind from the vantage of the future.
But today the symbolism was not there. There was
nothing but the nagging question and the worry that hammered at his brain.
There was no question but that Appleton had tried, deliberately, to put him on the spot, and while that, in itself, was frightening enough, the crux of the entire question was why Marcus had felt it necessary. Had it been Appleton alone, or had the man been acting for other interests, perhaps more involved?
Office politics-that would be die normal answer. But Frost, through the years, had studiously avoided involvement in office politics. Someone might want his job—perhaps many people did. But none of these, he was fairly certain, could engineer what Appleton had done.
And that left only one thing—that someone was afraid of him, that he knew something or suspected something that could be damaging, perhaps not to Forever Center, but to some of its department heads.
Which was ridiculous on the face of it. He did his job and minded his own business. He was consulted only on matters which touched upon his duties. He was not involved in policy other than whatever implementation of policy he was able to carry out promotionally.
He always had minded his own business, but this morning, he reminded himself, he'd stepped beyond the rule he had placed upon himself. He had told B.J. that it was ridiculous to pretend that Forever Center did not run the world. It was true enough, of course, but he should not have said it. He should have kept his mouth shut. There had been no need to say it. The one excuse he had was that he had been angered by Appleton and had acted in anger rather than in common sense.
What Appleton had said was the truth. There was a network of undercover people, but it was a system which had been handed on to him and it was small and restricted in its purpose. Appleton, for his own purposes, had blown it up far beyond the fact.
Frost turned from the window and went back to his desk. Sitting down, he reached out and pulled in front
of him the stack of papers that Miss Beale had placed there. On top of the pile, as usual, was the deadly report on vital statistics.
He picked it up and glanced at it.
There was simply the date, June 15, 2148, and then two lines of type:
In Abeyance-96,674,321,458 Viable^? 128,932,076
Scarcely glancing at the sheet, he crumpled it in his fist and dropped it in the wastebasket, then picked up the second paper off the stack.
There was a rustle at the door of the outer office and Frost looked up. Miss Beale stood there.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Frost," she said. "You weren't here, so I read the morning paper, then forgot to put it on your desk."
"It's quite all right," he said. "Anything of interest?" "It has the release on the Cygnian expedition. They used it just the way we wrote it. You'll find it on page three."
"Not page one?" he asked. "No. There was this Chapman case." "Chapman case?"
; "Yes, you know. The man whose rescue car broke down."
"Oh, that one. It's been in the news for days." "He was sentenced yesterday. It was on TV." "I missed it. I didn't turn on the set last night." "It was so dramatic," said Miss Beale. "He has a wife and children and now he can't go with them into second life. I feel so sorry for them."
"He broke the law," said Frost. "He failed a plain and simple duty. The lives of all of us depend on men like him."
"That is true," Miss Beale admitted, "but I still feel sad about it. Such a dreadful thing. To be only one out of many billions who is condemned to everlasting death, to miss the second chance."
"He is not the first one," Frost reminded her. "And he will not be the last."
She laid the paper on the corner of the desk.
"I heard," she said, "you had some trouble at tnis morning's meeting."
He nodded bleakly, saying nothing.
She had heard, he thought. Already the story of what had happened had been leaked somehow and now was racing like wildfire through the building.
"I hope it's not too bad," she said.
"It's not too bad," he told her.
She turned and started for the door.
"Miss Beale," he said.
She turned around.
"I'll be gone this afternoon," he told her. "There's nothing coming up, is there?"
"You have a couple of appointments. Not important. I can cancel them."
"If you would," he said.
"There may be a confidential file."
"Put it in the safe."
"But they don't like…"
"I know. It should be checked at once and…"
And that was it! he thought.
That was the answer to what Appleton had done.
It was simply something he had not thought about.
"Mr. Frost, is there something wrong?"
"No, not a thing. If a confidential file shows up, just put it in the safe. I'll tend to it, come morning."
"Very well," she said, a little stiffly to express her disapproval.
She swung about and went into the outer office.
He sat limply at his desk, remembering that day three months or so ago—when the messenger boy had somehow left, instead of his own confidential file, the one that should have gone to Peter Lane, and how he had opened it without looking at the name.
He had taken it back, personally, and explained to Lane and it had seemed to be all right. The messenger
boy had been fired, of course, but that was all that happened. It had been a mistake, a grave mistake, on the part of the messenger, and he had deserved the firing. But as between himself and Lane it had seemed the matter was forgotten.
Except, Frost told himself, it had not been forgotten, for there'd been the missing paper, the one that had slipped out of the envelope when he had opened it and which he had found, when he returned, on the floor beside his desk.
He remembered now, standing with the paper in his hand, knowing he should take it back to Lane. But if he took it back it would require another explanation and it would be embarrassing, and the paper did not seem to be of any great importance. Which was the case, he told himself, of half the stuff that went shuttling back and forth in the confidential files.
Some unremembered official, full of pomposity and with a penchant for cloak and dagger games, had started the system many years ago and it had been carried on and on, another of the moldy old traditions of the office routine. Some of it, of course, was of a confidential nature, or at least semi-confidential, but the rest of it was simply inter-office matters with no need of secrecy attached.
So to avoid the embarrassment of another explanation, he had simply chucked the paper in a desk drawer and had forgotten it, knowing that if it had no more value than it seemed to have it would not be missed.
But he had made the wrong decision. Or it seemed so now.
And if what Appleton had done this morning was tied to the missing paper, then it was not only Apple-ton, but Lane involved as well.
He jerked open the center desk drawer and searched through the papers and the other junk and the paper was not there.
If he could only remember what was written on it! Something about putting something on some sort of list.
He wrinkled his brow, trying to remember. But the details still stayed fuzzy.
He searched the other drawers and there was no paper.
And that was how they'd known, he thought.
Someone had searched his desk and found it!
7
The agent waved his arm at the tangle of underbrush and swamp.
"Twenty acres of it," he said. "And at the price we're asking, the best kind of investment that anyone can make. I tell you, friends, there is no better place you can put your money. In a hundred years it will bring ten times the price. In a thousand, if you could hang onto it that long, you'd be billionaires."
"But it's just a swamp," the woman said. "No one would ever want to build there and it can't be…"
"You're buying it today," the agent told her, "at so much an acre. Sell it a couple of hundred years from now and you'll be selling it at so much the foot. Just take the number of people there will be in the world by that time and compare their numbers to the total land area and you'll see what I mean. Once they get immortality and begin revivals…"
"But they won't need the land," the woman's husband said. "Once they get time travel, they'll send people back a million years to colonize the land, and when the land back there is filled, they'll send them back two million and…"
"Now, I tell you honestly," said the salesman, "I wouldn't count on that. There are a lot of people who have their doubts about time travel. Forever Center
can get it, certainly, if it is possible, but if it's impossible, they won't get it. And if time travel is impossible, then this land will be worth a fortune. It doesn't matter that it's a little swampy. The human race will need every foot of land there is upon the earth. There'll come a time, perhaps, when the earth will be just one big building and…"
"But there's space travel, too," the woman said. "All those planets out there…"
"Madame," said the salesman, "let's be realistic for a moment. They've been out there for a hundred years or more and they have found no planets that a man could live on. Planets, of course, but nothing that anyone could live on without terraforming and terraforming takes a lot of time and money."
"Well, I don't know," the woman said. "This piece of swamp seems an awful gamble."
"Yes, it does," her husband said. "We just thought we'd look into it. We have been putting most of our money into stamps and we thought it might be a good idea to start spreading it around a little."
"Not that we have so awful much of it," the woman said. "Of money, I mean."
"Well, now, it's this way," said the salesman, smoothly. "I'll agree that stamps may be a good investment. But how do you go about establishing title to them? Sure, you've got them and you put them away in a safety deposit vault or something of the sort. And then, after you're revived, you go and get them and you probably can sell them at a likely profit. But a lot of people are buying stamps. The market might be glutted. Collecting stamps may not be done any more when you are revived, for hobbies go in cycles. You might not get as much as you'd figured. You might, even, not be able to sell them at all. And if something had happened to them, how do you get them back? Say they were stolen, somehow. Even if you knew the one who'd took them and even if he still had them, how could you j prove that they were yours? How could you recover |
them? There isn't any way to establish title to a stamp collection. And what if time had ruined them? What if they'd gotten damp or bacteria had got to work on them or any one of a dozen other things had happened? What have you got then? I tell you, folks. You've got nothing. Absolutely nothing."
"That is right," the husband said. "I never thought of that. But the land would still be here and you'd have legal title."
"That's right," said the agent. "And to protect it through the years, all that you have to do is open an account with Forever Center and give us the right to draw on it to pay the taxes (which won't amount to much) or to cover other costs necessary to protect the title.
"You see," he said, "it's very simple. We have it all worked out…"
"But," the woman said, "if it were only better land. If it weren't swamp."
"Now, I tell you," said the agent, "it doesn't make a bit of difference if it is swamp or not. In time to come, the world will need every foot of land. If not in a hundred years, then in a thousand. And if you want to, you can specify that you're to sleep a thousand years. Forever Center is glad to make that kind of stipulation. It will take them, probably, several hundred years, in any case, to just catch up when they start reviving people."
8
The stamps had been from Switzerland and that meant the park bench in downtown Manhattan, and the time, penciled on the card, had been 1.30.
Joe Gibbons was already there and waiting when Frost came hurrying up the path.
"You're a little late," said Gibbons.
"I had to make sure," said Frost, "that I wasn't followed."
"Who would follow you? You've never worried before about being followed."
"Something came up at the office."
"Marcus sore at you? Afraid you might be undercutting him."
"That's ridiculous," said Frost.
"Yes, of course it is. But with a jerk like Marcus, you can't ever tell."
Frost sat clown on the bench beside Gibbons.
A squirrel came questing down the path. Overhead a bird sang a single liquid note. The sky was polished blue and there was a quietness in the little park, a lazy sort of quietness.
"It's pleasant out here," said Frost. "A man should get out more often. Spend a half a day or so with nothing on his mind."
Gibbons said, "I've got something to tell you and I don't know quite how to go about it."
He had the air of a man with an unpleasant job and in a hurry to get it done. "The same thing has come up before," he said, "but I never mentioned it. I knew you wouldn't go for it. I knew you'd turn it down…»
Why Call Them Back from Heaven Page 3