Why Call Them Back from Heaven

by Clifford D. Simak

  There was little traffic, here on the west edge of the city. Night after night, as he had hunted for a car that he could steal, he had worked his way westward, heading for the city's edge and the wilderness beyond. There, even from the first night of his flight from the alley, he had reasoned he'd have a better chance to hide. Such population as there might be was scattered and there were great areas which had reverted back from farmland to heavy second growth. And also, in the back of his mind, was a persistent feeling that Apple-ton would not suspect that he would leave the city.

  There would be problems, he knew, away from the city. Food, for one thing. But he had a vague confidence, not too well founded, that he could manage. The season for fruit and berries was approaching and he could catch some fish and perhaps devise traps for the snaring of small animals. Thanks to Ann, he was at least partially equipped. Stowed in his pockets, put there in the knowledge that at any moment he might have to leave his basement den, were the small items which she had sent him—fishhooks and line, a pocket lighter with a can of fluid and extra flints and wicks, a heavy pocketknife, a small pair of shears, a comb, a can opener (for which he would have no use, certainly, in the wilderness), and a small medical kit. With these, he was sure that he could manage, although he did not know exactly how.

  He did not allow any of his half-recognized problems worry him too much. All his resources now were directed at leaving the city behind—to find a place where he would not be forever dodging or crouching, always fearful that he would be sighted by some citizen and reported as a suspicious character.

  The idea of fleeing to the wilderness had formed in his mind on the first night of his flight. It was not until later that he had decided he would head further west than he had at first intended-back to the old farm where he had spent vacations in his youth. He had fought against the decision, for the surface of his mind protested it was a silly thing to do, but, even as the surface of his mind protested, some more powerful inner mind drove him on finally to decide against what seemed his better judgment.

  In the daytime, as he huddled in his hiding places, he had tried to unravel the reasons for. the urge that drove him to seek this place out of his youth. Was it, perhaps, a need to identify himself with something? Was it the unrecognized, but crying need to stand on familiar ground, to say this is a place that I know and that knows me and we belong to one another—a seeking after roots, no matter how shallow they might be?

  He did not know. He could not know. He was only aware that something more powerful than his own good common sense impelled him toward this old and abandoned farm.

  And now, finally, he was on his way.

  He could have made better time by using one of the great freeways that leaped in all directions from the city. But these he avoided, these he could not force himself to take. He had hidden and crouched too long to expose himself to the traffic he would encounter there.

  He had no map and no sure notion of where he might be going. The one thing that he knew was that he was heading west. The moon had been sliding down the western sky when he had found the car and nov he followed the moon.

  For an hour or more he had been driving through residential areas, interspersed with small shopping centers. Now he began to encounter large open spaces which lay between little settlements. He found a road, not a street, but a road, narrow and ill-paved, and he followed it.

  The road dwindled to little more than a track and the paving ended and the track was coated with a deep and heavy dust. The houses became fewer, then almost none at all. Great clumps of woods loomed black against the sky.

  At the top of a long, bald ridge which the road climbed with many twistings and turnings, he finally stopped the car and got out, turning to look back.

  Behind him, stretching east and north and south, as far as the eye could see, were the lights of the city he had left. Ahead of him was darkness with no single gleam of light.

  He stood atop the ridge and drew great gulping breaths of air into his lungs—air that had about it the freshness and the chilliness of the open land. And there was, as well, the smell of pine and dust—and he had finally made it. The city was behind him.

  He got back in the car and drove on. The road got no better and he could make no good time on it, but it was still a road and it bored straight into the west.

  At dawn he pulled off it, bumped across a shallow roadside ditch, drove through an old field overgrown with weeds and brush, and parked in a grove of oaks at one end of the field.

  He got out of the car and stretched and his gut was gaunt with hunger, but this morning, he told himself, for the first time in weeks, he'd not have to hunt a hole to hide in.

  27

  After waiting for an hour, Ann Harrison got in to see Marcus Appleton.

  The man was affable. Behind his desk he had the look of a prosperous, efficient businessman.

  "Miss Harrison," he said, "I am so glad to see you. I've read so much about you. In connection, I believe, with a certain point you raised in a trial of some sort."

  "Not that it did my client any good," said Ann.

  "But still it was well worth raising. It's from thinking such as this that the law evolves."

  "I thank you for the compliment," said Ann. "If it was a compliment."

  "Oh, yes," said Appleton. "I was most sincere. And now, I wonder, would you tell me to what I owe this meeting? What can I do for you?"

  "For one thing," said Ann, "you can remove the taps you have upon my phones. For another, you can call off the bloodhounds you have set to follow me. And you can tell me what it's all about."

  "But my dear young lady…"

  "You can save your breath," Ann told him. "I know you have the taps. Perhaps at the central switchboard. I have prepared actions against both you and the communications people which will enjoin you from an invasion of my privacy and the privacy of my clients, which might be much more to the point than my own privacy and…"

  "You can't get away with it," Appleton said, harshly.

  "I think I can," said Ann. "No court would ignore such a situation. It strikes directly at the guarantees which are accorded the relationship of an attorney and the client. And it strikes as well at the roots of justice."

  "You have no proof."

  "I think I have," said Ann. "That is not a matter I'll discuss with you. But even if my proof were not quite sufficient, and I believe it is, I still imagine that the court would order an inquiry into the charges that I brought."

  "That's preposterous!" exploded Appleton. "The courts haven't got the time, or the purpose, to inquire into every piddling charge someone may bring before them."

  "Perhaps not every charge. But a charge of this kind

  "You'll probably end up," Appleton told her, coldly, "getting yourself disbarred."

  "Perhaps," said Ann. "If you own the courts as thoroughly as you think you own them. I don't think you own them that much."

  Appleton sputtered. "Own the courts!" he yelled.

  "Why, yes," Ann said, calmly. "The courts and the newspapers. But you don't own the rumors. They're something that you don't control. And if the courts should try to shush me and if the papers remained silent, there still would be a stink. Believe me, Mr. Appleton, I'd see there was a stink such as you've never smelled before."

  The sputter died. "You're threatening me?" he asked in a cold voice so sharp it almost squeaked.

  "Oh, I don't suppose," said Ann, "it would ever come to that. I still have faith in justice as dispensed by law. I still believe the courts hold forth some hope of remedy. And I'm not too sure you have all the papers muzzled."

  "You have no high opinion of Forever Center?" "Why should I have?" she asked. "You've gobbled everything. You've suppressed everything. You've held off progress. You've turned the people into clods. There still are governments, but they are shadow governments that jump at your slightest hint. And against all this you plead that you offer something, and you do offer something, but do you have to place
so high a price on it?"

  "All right," he said. "If your phones are tapped and we removed the taps and if we called off what you call our bloodhounds, what more would you want?"

  "You won't, of course," said Ann, "do any of these things. But if you did, there'd still be one further thing you could do for me. You could tell me why."

  "Miss Harrison," said Appleton, "I'll be as frank with you as you have been with me. If we've paid you any undue attention it's because. we're very curious concerning your relationship with Daniel Frost."

  "I have no relationship with him. I saw him only once."

  "You did go to visit him?"

  "I went to ask his help for a client of mine."

  "For this Franklin Chapman?"

  "When you talk of Franklin Chapman, I wish you'd change your tone of voice. The man was convicted under an obsolete and vicious law that is a part of this terrible reign of frantic desperation Forever Center has imposed upon the world."

  "You asked Frost's help for Chapman?"

  She nodded. "He told me there was nothing he could do, but that if ever, in the future, there was some way to help my client he would do it."

  "Then Frost is not your client."

  "He is not," she said.

  "He gave you a paper."

  "He gave me an envelope. It was sealed. I don't know if anything was in it."

  "And he still is not your client?"

  "Mr. Appleton, as one human being, he entrusted me, another human being, with an envelope. That is quite a simple matter. It need not become involved in legal complications."

  "Where is that envelope?"

  "Why," said Ann, in some surprise, "I thought perhaps you had it. Some of your men went through my office very thoroughly. Also my apartment. I had thought of course, you'd found it. If you haven't got it, I can't imagine where it is."

  Appleton sat quietly behind his desk, staring at her, so still that even his eyelids didn't move.

  "Miss Harrison," he finally said, "you are the coolest customer I have ever met."

  "I walk into lions' dens," said Ann. "I'm not afraid of lions."

  Appleton idly flipped a hand. "You and I," he said, "talk a common language. You came to make a deal."

  "I came," she said, "to get you off my neck."

  "The envelope," he said, "and Frost is reinstated."

  "His sentence reversed," she said, bitterly. "The tattoos removed. His estate and job restored. His memories wiped away and the rumors stilled."

  He nodded. "We could talk about it."

  "Why, how wonderful of you," she said. "When you could kill him just as easily."

  "Miss Harrison," he said sadly, "you must think that we are monsters."

  "Of course I do," she said.

  "The envelope?" he asked.

  "I imagine that you have it."

  "And if we don't?"

  "Then I don't know where it is. And all of this is pointless, anyhow. I didn't come here to make what you call a deal."

  "But since you're here?"

  She shook her head. "I have no authority. Any talk of this sort must be with Daniel Frost."

  "You could tell him."

  "Yes," she said, lightly, "I suppose I could."

  Appleton leaned forward just a bit too quickly, like a man who tried to show no eagerness at all, but was trapped into showing it.

  "Then perhaps you should," he said.

  "I was about to add that I could mention it to him if I knew where he was. Really, Mr. Appleton, there is

  so little point to this. I have no interest in it and I doubt that Mr. Frost would have a great deal more."

  "But Frost…"

  "He'd know as well as I," said Ann, "that he couldn't trust you."

  She rose from the chair and walked toward the door. Appleton came awkwardly to his feet and stepped around the desk.

  "On this other matter," he said.

  "I've decided," Ann told him, "that I should file my petitions. It just occurs to me I shouldn't trust you, either."

  Going down the elevator, she had her first moments of deep doubt. What, she asked herself, had she actually accomplished? Well, for one thing, she had placed him on notice that she knew she was being watched. And she had learned, of course, that he knew no more than she did where Daniel Frost might be.

  She went across the foyer and out into the parking lot and there, beside her car, stood a tall, bony, grizzled man. His hair was gray and his whiskers—not a beard, but simply unshaved whiskers—were salt and pepper shade.

  When he saw her approaching, he opened the door and said, "Miss Harrison, you don't know me, but I am a friend and you need a friend. You have been up to talk with Appleton and…"

  "Please," said Ann. "Please leave me alone."

  "I'm George Sutton," he told her, quietly, "and I'm a Holy. Appleton would give a lot to get his hands on me. I was born a Holy and 111 always be one. If you don't believe me, look."

  He tore his shirtfront open and pointed to the right side of the chest. "No incision scar," he said. "There's no transmitter in me."

  "The scar could have disappeared."

  "You're wrong," he said. "It always leaves a scar. As you grow up, new transmitters must be implanted.

  You get your final transmitter when you're well into your teens."

  "Get in the car," she told him, sharply. "If you don't, someone will notice us. And if you're not a Holy…"

  "You think, perhaps, that I'm a man from Forever Center. You think…"

  "Get in the car," she said.

  Out in the street the car was swallowed by the great flowing traffic river.

  "I saw Daniel Frost," said Button, "that first night. One of my men brought him to our hideout and I talked with him…"

  "What did you say to him?"

  "Many things. We talked about our slogan campaign and he thought poorly of it. And I asked him if he read the Bible and if he believed in God. I always ask that of people. Miss, that was a funny question that you asked—what we talked about. What difference does it make?"

  "Because I know something of what you talked about."

  "You have seen him, then?"

  "No. I haven't seen him."

  "There was another man…"

  "It was the other man," she said. "Dan told him you had asked about the Bible and if he believed in God."

  "So now you're satisfied about me."

  "I don't know," she said, her voice tense and tight. "I suppose I am, although I can't be sure. It all has been a nightmare. Not knowing anything. Being watched. I knew they were watching me; I saw them. And I am positive that my phone was tapped. I couldn't just sit still. I couldn't simply sit and take it. That's why I went to Appleton. And you—you've been watching, too!"

  He nodded. "You and Frost and this other man—this Chapman. Miss, we don't merely paint the slogans on the walls. We do many other things. We fight Forever Center in every way we can."

  "But why?"

  "Because they are our enemies; they're the enemies of mankind. We're all that's left of the old mankind. Ve are the underground. We've been driven underground."

  "I don't mean that. I mean why are you watching us?"

  "I suppose that's part of it. But we can help you, too. We were standing by the night the man was killed, behind the restaurant. We were ready to be of help, but Frost didn't need our help."

  "And you know where he is?"

  "No. We know he stole a car. We figure that he left the city. We lost him, but the last we saw of him he was heading west."

  "And you thought that I might know."

  "Well, no, we didn't think so. We'd not have contacted you if you'd not gone to Forever Center."

  "What has that to do with it? I had the right…"

  "You had the right, of course. But now Apple-ton knows that you know he is watching you. So long as you played stupid and said nothing, you were safe."

  "Now I suppose I'm no longer safe."

  "You can't fight Foreve
r Center," he told her. "No one person can. There'll be an accident, something will happen. We have seen it happen in other instances."

  "But I have something that he wants."

  "Not something that he wants. Something, rather, that he wants no one else to have. The answer is quite simple. With Frost out of the way and you out of the way, he'll be in the clear."

  "You know all about this?"

  "Miss," said Button, "I'd be downright simple if I didn't have my pipelines into Forever Center."

  And this was it, she thought. No ordinary band of religious fanatics, no simple slogan painters, but a well-organized and efficient band of rebels who through the years, working quietly, and no doubt with daring, had caused Forever Center more trouble than anyone realized.

  But doomed to failure. For no one could stand against the force and strength of a structure that, in effect, was owner of the world and that, furthermore, held out the promise of eternal life.

  Into a structure such as this, there surely would be pipelines. Not only by the Holies but by anyone who might stand to gain. And with the greed occasioned by the driving need to establish an estate against the second life, there always would be those who would provide the pipelines.

  "I suppose that I should thank you," said Ann.

  "No thanks are necessary."

  "Where can I drop you?"

  "Miss Harrison," Sutton said, "I have more to say to you and I hope you'll listen to me."

  "Why, of course, I'll listen."

  "This paper that you have…"

  "So you want it, too."

  "If something should happen to you, if…"

  "No," said Ann. "It isn't mine. It belongs to Daniel Frost."

  "But if it should be lost. It's a weapon, don't you see? I don't know what is in it, but we…"

  "I know. You'd use anything that you could get. Anything at all. No matter how you got it. No matter what it was."

  "You're not very complimentary, but I suppose that is the case."

  "Mr. Sutton," Ann said, "I'm going to pull over to the curb. I'll slow up, but I won't stop. And I want you to get out."

  "If you wish, miss."

  "I do wish," she said. "And leave me alone. One is enough, trailing me and spying. I don't need two of you."