"Man up the street, fellow at a restaurant, puts it out for me each night. I don't know who he is."
"I talked with him," said Chapman. "Little scrawny man, old, all wizened up. Said he saw you going through the garbage cans. Didn't think anyone should have to get his eats that way."
"Let's go over here and sit down," suggested Frost. "There's an old davenport that someone left down here. I sleep on it. Springs busted and pretty badly beaten up, but it's better than the floor."
Chapman followed him and the two sat down together.
"How bad has it been?" asked Chapman. "Bad to start with," Frost told him. "Some Holies snatched me off the street, saved my Me, more than likely. Talked with a crazy old bastard who asked me if I read the Bible and believed in God. Then Appleton and a bunch of his hoodlums raided the place. Appleton has been trying to catch some of the Holies' ringleaders. I figured the old buzzard I talked with was one of them. I fell through a rotten place in the floor and when they left I crawled out again. Stayed there for a couple of days because I was scared to go out, but I finally got so hungry that I had to go. You ever imagine what it would be like finding, food in a city where you couldn't beg for it and didn't dare to steal it, when you couldn't talk with anyone, when you didn't want to talk with anyone because you might get them into trouble if you did?"
"I never thought about it," Chapman said. "I can imagine what it's like."
"There wasn't anything but the garbage cans. It takes a lot, believe me, to eat something out of a garbage can. The first time, that is. When you get hungry enough, you can manage it. After a day or two, you become something of a garbage connoisseur. And a place to hide, a place to sleep—they aren't easy to find and you have to keep changing around, can't stay in one place too long. People see you and get curious. I've stayed here longer than I should because this is the best I've found. That's why you were able to track me down. If I'd changed around, you wouldn't have found me.
"My beard is growing—no razor, you know. And so is my hair. In a little while the beard will cover the tattoos on my cheeks and I can push the hair down to cover the forehead. Once the hair and beard grow long enough maybe I can even venture out in daylight. Still won't dare to talk with anyone, have anything to do with anyone, but won't have to hide so much. People may stare at me, although maybe not so much, for there are some weird characters down in this area. Haven't had anything to do with them. Afraid to. You have to feel your way along, get the hang of this sort of Me."
He stopped and stared in the darkness at the white blur of Chapman's face.
"Sorry," he said, tersely, "I talk too much. A man gets hungry for it."
"Go ahead," said Chapman. "I'll sit and listen. Ann will want to know how you are."
"That's another thing," said Frost. "I don't want her getting involved in this business. Tell her to keep out of it. She can't help me and she'll end up getting hurt. Tell her to forget about me."
"She won't do that," Chapman told him. "And I won't, either. You were the only man who was willing to go to bat for me."
"I didn't do a thing for you. I couldn't do a thing for you. It was just a four-flushing gesture. I knew at the time I couldn't help you."
"Mister," said Chapman, "that doesn't make a bit of difference. No matter what you could have done, you were willing to commit yourself. You won't get me to forget it."
"Well, then, do me a favor. You and Ann, too. Keep away from me. Don't get messed up with me. I don't want you to get hurt and if you keep fooling around, you will. There is no one who can be of any help. If it ever gets too bad, I have an easy out."
"I won't let you cut yourself off entirely," insisted Chapman. "Let's make a deal. I won't try to contact you again, but if you ever need anything, any kind of help, let's set up a place where you can find me."
"I won't come for help," said Frost, "but if it'll make you feel any better…"
"You'll be staying around this neighborhood?" "I doubt it. But I can always come back to it." "About three blocks from here there's a small neighborhood library. And a bench in front of it." "I know the place," said Frost.
"I'll be there every evening between nine and ten, say on Wednesdays and Saturdays."
"That's too much trouble for you. How long would you keep on coming back? Six months? A year? Two years?"
"So let's make a bargain on that, too. Six months. If you don't show up in six months, I'll know you aren't going to."
"You're a damned fool," said Frost. "I'm not going to contact you. I'm going to make a point not to. I don't want you involved. And, anyhow, six months is too long. In another month or so I'll have to start drifting south. I don't want to get caught up here by winter." "Ann sent you a package," said Chapman, changing the subject to indicate that he would not yield on the contact business. "It's over there by the packing case. Needle and thread. Matches. Pair of scissors. A knife. Stuff like that she thought you might use. I guess there's some cans of food as well."
Frost nodded. "Tell Ann I'm thankful for the package. I'm grateful for what she tried to do. But tell her, for the love of God, to stand clear. Don't do any more. Don't try to do any more."
Chapman said, gravely, "I'll tell her." "And thanks to you, too. You shouldn't have let her talk you into it."
"Once I knew about you," said Chapman, "she couldn't have talked me out of it. But answer me a question, if you will. How did it all happen? You told Ann you were in some sort of trouble. I figure someone framed you."
"Someone did," said Frost. "You want to tell me more?"
"No, I don't. Ann and you probably would go digging into it, trying to prove it. And it can't be done. No one can. It's all down, legal, on the books." "So you'll just sit here doing nothing?" "Not entirely. Some day I'll figure out how to even up the score with Appleton…" "Then it was Appleton?"
"Who else?" asked Frost. "And maybe you ought to get out of here. You make me talk too much. Stay around and I'll spill my guts and I don't want that."
Chapman got up slowly. "O.K.," he said, Til go. I hate to. Doesn't seem I have done too much."
He started to move away, then stopped and turned around.
"I have a gun," he said. "If you…" Frost shook his head emphatically. "No," he said, fiercely. "What do you want me to do, cancel out the one right that I have? You'd better get rid of it. You know that they're illegal—any kind of gun."
"It doesn't bother me," said Chapman. I'll keep it. I have even less to lose than you have." He turned around and moved toward the door. "Chapman," Frost said softly. "Yes."
"Thanks for coming. It was good of you. I'm not quite myself."
"I understand," said Chapman.
Then he was through the door and pulling it shut behind him. Frost listened to him going up the stairs and out into the alley and finally the footfalls faded into silence.
23
Would the lilacs smell as sweet, Mona Campbell wondered, when spring came around a thousand years from now? Could one still catch the breath in wonder at the sight of a meadow filled with daffodils, a thousand years from now? If there were, a thousand years from now, any room on earth for lilac or for daffodil.
She sat, rocking gently back and forth, in the rocker she'd found up in the attic and had carried down the stairs to wipe the dust and cobwebs off it, looking out the window at the full-leafed wonder of a late June dusk. In a little while there would be lightning bugs and the first faint smell of fog from the river valley.
She sat and rocked and the soft benediction of the summer evening fell in all its fullness on her, and in all the world, for this moment, there was nothing more important than just sitting there, rocking back and forth, looking out the window at the green that turned to black as the shadows deepened and the cool of the night hours settled down to chase away all but the memory of the hot blast of the daytime sun.
But here, right now, whispered one small portion of her brain that fought to stay efficient, was the place and time to start forming the decision that sh
e had to make.
But the whisper died in the silence and the deepening darkness. And the fantasy, although it was far from fantasy, crept in to take the place of the brain's efficiency.
A fantasy, she thought—of course it's fantasy, it must be fantasy. For in this place and time, in this dusk, in this smell of new and damp and reawakened earth, it could never be. For here the smell of vital earth, the flitting lantern of the firefly, the appointed fall of dusk and the appointed brightening of the dawn spoke of cycles, and life and death must also be an intrinsic part of such a cosmic cycling. And this was the thought, she told herself, that she must remember through all the aeons that stretched ahead of mankind—not as a race, not as a species, but as individuals. But it was a thought, she knew, that she would not remember. For it was not a thought of youth. Rather, it was the thought of someone such as she—a middle-aged and dowdy woman who too long had been concerned with matters that were unwomanly. Mathematics—what had a woman to do with mathematics other than the basic arithmetic of fitting the family's budget to the family's need? And what had a woman to do with life other than the giving and the rearing of new life? And why must she, Mona Campbell, be compelled to reach a decision, all alone, that only God Himself (if, indeed, there were such an entity as God) should be called upon to make?
If she could only know what the world might be like a thousand years from now—not in its external aspects, for its external aspects would be no more than cultural coloration, but what it might be like in the core of mankind, in the hearts of men and women. What kind of world could there be, or would there be, when all of humankind lived eternally and in the flesh and guise of youth? Would wisdom come without gray hair and wrinkled brow? Would the old, long thoughts of aged people disappear and die in the exuberance of the flesh and gland and muscle that renewed itself? Would the gentleness and the tolerance and the long reflective thought no longer be with mankind? Would man ever again be able to sit in a rocking chair and gaze out an open window at the advent of the evening and find there, in that advancement of the darkness, an occasion for contentment?
Or might youth itself be no more than a trapping and a coloration? Would mankind finally sink into an atmosphere of futility, impatient with the endless days, disillusioned and disappointed with eternity? After the millionth mating, after the billionth piece of pumpkin pie, after a hundred thousand springs with lilac and with daffodil, what would there be left? Did man need more than life? Could he do with less than death? And these were questions, she knew, that she could not answer, but they were questions to which, in fairness to herself, if not to all those others, answers must be found.
She rocked gently back and forth and let the questions and the nagging of them flow out of her, and slowly the soft wonder of the evening flowed in to erase them entirely from her thoughts.
Down in some unknown, darkened hollow folded in the hills the first of the whippoorwills began its evening chant.
24
Now that the beard had grown so heavy that it all but obscured the marks of ostracism on his cheek, Frost did not need to wait for dark, but could venture out when dusk began to fall. With an old battered hat he had retrieved from a trash bin pulled down almost to his eyes, he began his prowling as soon as the streets began to clear of the surging mobs which poured through them in the daylight hours. At dusk the city was left to him. Only a few people then remained upon.the streets and they went scurrying past him, on urgent errands of their own, as if there might be some high reason that they not stay out of doors, but must hurry to get back to their huddling places, somewhere within the interminable warrens of the great apartment houses which rose like ancient monuments reared by brutelike monsters in the primeval past.
Frost, observing them from beneath the brim of his pulled down hat, knew how it was with them, for once it had been the same with him. Hurry and huddle—hurry so that one could gather all the assets he could manage, then huddle in his idle time so that he would not spend a single penny of those assets.
Although now, even had they wished to spend some of the assets on rather foolish things, there was no longer any way to da it. For there were no longer any movies, no longer any athletic contests, and the fabled night life of a century and a half ago had died in the stagnation of the urge to live forever. All of which, of course, pleased Forever Center (if Forever Center, in fact, had not planned it that way) for it meant that there was more money to be invested in Forever stock.
So with the end of the day's activity, the human herd went home and there, for entertainment, read the daily papers, which had ceased long since to be informational, but were frankly and entertainingly sensational. Or read cheap books, cheap in price and often cheap in content. Or sat slack-jawed and fascinated before the family TV set. Or, perhaps, gloated over a stamp collection which had appreciated in value steadily through the years, or perhaps a collection of chess sets, wonderfully carved or fabricated, or many other similar collections in which each owner had carefully (and prayerfully) risked some of his surplus assets.
And there were those, as well, who resorted to hallucinatory drugs, available at any drug counter, using them to give themselves a few hours of an imaginary Me—a life in which they could escape from the drab-ness and the monotony of their regular lives.
For now there was nothing new, as there had been in ages past. Once, back at the beginning of the twentieth century, there had been the phonograph to be excited over… and the telephone. And later there had been the airplane and the radio and later yet, TV. But today there was nothing new. There was no progress except in those areas which advanced the day toward which Forever Center pointed. Now man made do with what he had and in most cases what he had was less than his forebears had. Civilization had ground to a stagnating halt and the Me of man today was in many of its aspects the same cultural pattern as had been the pattern of the Dark Ages of more than a thousand years before.
In those days the peasants had worked the fields in daylight, performing their labors for no more than enough to keep themselves alive, and then had spent the night huddled in their hovels, with doors tight barred against the terrors of the dark.
And it was the same today—hurry through the day, huddle through the night. Hurry and huddle—waiting out the night to hurry once again.
But for Frost there was now no need to hurry. To skulk, perhaps, but never need to hurry. For there were few places he had to go and none of them held great urgency. He went each evening to pick up the package left for him beside the garbage can; he hunted through occasional trash containers for papers to serve his daytime reading, keeping his eyes open for any other discarded items which might be of interest to him. He read and slept through the daylight hours and at dusk again began his prowling.
There were others like himself, prowlers of the darkened and deserted streets, and at times he spoke briefly with them, for he could not harm such as these, he told himself, by talking with them. And once, in a vacant area on the waterfront, where an old building had been newly razed, he had sat around a fire with two other men and had talked with them, but when he went back the next night they were gone and there was no fire. He formed no associations with these other prowlers of the dark, nor did any of them try to prolong an acquaintance with him. Loners, all of them—and at times he wondered who they might be and who they might Jiave been and why they walked the night. But he knew he could not ask and they never told him and this was not strange, for he did not identify himself.
Perhaps it was because he no longer had an identity. No longer Daniel Frost, but a human zero. No better off, of no more consequence than any of those millions vho slept in the streets of India, who had rags to cover them and, sometimes, not even rags, who had never known any other state than hunger, who long since had given up even the right or the wish to find a private place in which to go about the private functions of the body.
For a time Frost had expected that one of the Holies would seek him put again, but this did not happen. A
lthough he saw, in his prowling, evidence that they were still about and active—slogans hurriedly chalked upon the vacant walls:
FBIENDS, DON'T FALL FOB it! WHY SETTLE FOB LESS THAN HEAL IMMORTALITY?
WHAT ABOUT GBEAT-GRANDPA? OUR FOREBEARS WEREN'T DOPES—BUT WE ARE DUPES.
and again and again and again, the new one:
WHY CALL THEM BACK FROM HEAVEN?
With the practiced eye of a professional sloganeer, Frost admired the work. Better in many ways, he thought, than the smug, conservative junk that he and his department had figured out and which still flashed off and on in luridly lit letters high atop many of the buildings, the official watchwords of Forever Center—many of them frankly stolen from a day much earlier:
WASTE NOT, WANT NOT. A PENNY SAVED IS A PENNY EARNED.
Even the new ones sweated out in all earnestness
don't kid yourself—you'll need it!
now you can take it with you!
STICK WITH FOREVER; FOREVER STICKS WITH YOU.
seemed rather pallid now that he could view them from an observer's viewpoint. So he prowled the streets alone, without a purpose, with no destination. Not running any longer. Restless at first, but now no longer restless; no longer the nervous pacing of a caged feline, but now the strolling of a man who, for the first time in his life, through no choice of his own, but through shame and outrage, had become something of what it seemed to him a man had ought to be. A man who, for the first time, saw the stars through the city's haze and speculated upon the wonder and distance of them, who listened to the talking of the river as it went rolling down the land, who took the time to appreciate the architecture of a tree.
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