"And this is why you're not going back. Not because you shrink from telling us time travel is impossible. But because once we know it's impossible, we'll find out about life going on forever."
"That's it," she told him. "I can't make mankind into a pack of fools."
35
Ogden Russell stopped his digging when he hit what he thought to be a rock. All he had to dig with was his hands and the hole was not deep enough and the cross that had plagued him all these days—that cross would beat him yet.
He straightened in the hole, which reached halfway between knee and hip, and looked at the cross stretched upon the ground, the cross piece now affixed by the lengths of grapevine to the longer piece of driftwood he'd found on shore and towed across the river.
There was no question that he had too long an upright that required too deep a hole. A shorter one would have been far better. But there had been little choice; he'd taken what he found. And he had no saw or ax he could use to shorten it.
To hold the cross erect, as now constructed, the hole would have to be twice the depth it was. And now he'd have to start all over at another place, several feet removed, because even if he could dig around the rock, there'd be no way to haul it from the hole.
He leaned wearily against the wall of the hole and pounded petulantly at the rock with a bare heel and as he pounded at it, he became aware that the rock did not seem as hard as a rock should be.
He stopped the pounding and leaned there thinking of the strange non-hardness of the rock, and as he thought about it, he remembered something else, that the rock had seemed far smoother than was the case with the usual rock.
He shook his head in puzzlement. It might not be a rock and if it was not a rock, then what could it be?
He squatted down into the hole again, his body cramped in its close confines and ran his hands over the hardness at its bottom, and he had been right. The rock was smooth. He put a palm against it and pushed and it seemed to him there was a strange sense of resiliency to the smoothness at the bottom of the hole.
Mystified and excited, he dug several handsful of sand out of one side of the hole and found that he could dig below the level of the rock.
He dug some more and his fingers found the edge of the smooth hardness and wrapped themselves around it. He jerked, putting as much power as his cramped position would permit into the effort. The thing he'd thought of as a rock peeled back and upward and he saw it was not a rock, but metal, eroded and pitted and flaking off in tiny specks of brown-red pieces, the old rusted bits of metal that had stayed intact until this moment of disturbance.
Beneath the peeled-back piece of metal was a cavity, half filled with drifted sand, but with objects, wrapped in what appeared to be yellowed paper, thrusting from the sand.
Russell reached down and snatched up one of the paper-wrapped objects. The paper was old and brittle and crumpled at his touch. When he stripped it off, he held in his hand an object carved in an intricate design.
Straightening up and holding out his hand in the full light of the sun, he saw what he had—a piece of carved jade, shaped most cunningly. The blue-green of the base was the water from which the white jade carp arose, with each scale graved in delicate perfection. The workmanship was exquisitely performed and Russell's hand, holding the carving, trembled as he looked at it.
Here was beauty, here was treasure, here, if each of the paper parcels held another piece of jade, was a fortune such as few men ever dreamed.
Carefully he set the carving on the sand outside the hole and quickly bent down to come up with other parcels. In the end, spread out on the sand before him, were more than two dozen of the carvings done in jade.
He looked at them, laid out in solemn rows, and his eyes were misted and tears ran down the stubble of his cheeks.
For weeks he had begged and pleaded, for weeks he'd eaten out his heart with anguish and had fed on clams, which he detested, and all the time, in the sand beneath his feet this treasure had rested, an unexpected and mysterious cache which had waited to be found, for how long no man knew, until he had begun to dig this deeper hole to erect a better cross.
Treasure, he thought. Not the treasure he had sought, but undeniably a treasure and the kind of treasure which would make it possible for a man to enter on his second life on a sound financial footing.
He clambered from the hole and squatted by the jade, staring at it, occasionally reaching out a finger to prod at a certain piece, unable to convince himself that he had really found it.
A treasure, he thought. One he had not sought, but one which he had found while he had sought yet another, perhaps less substantial, treasure.
Was this, he wondered, yet another testing, one with the clams, one with all the discomfort and frustration and misery he had suffered on this island? Had the carvings been placed here, by some method he could not comprehend, to determine whether he might be worthy of that other treasure?
Perhaps he was wrong in hesitating. Perhaps he should snatch up all the carvings and heave them far out into the river as a sign that he renounced all worldly things. And having done that, go back to the digging of the hole so he could plant a cross that would not be blown over by the wind. And after that, perhaps, as a further evidence of faith, rip the transmitter from his chest and also throw it in the river, thus to strip himself of everything that bound him to the world?
He huddled on the sandbar and rocked back and forth, hands clasped around his middle, in the depth of misery.
Would there be no end to it? he asked himself. Would there ever be an end? Was there no limit to the debasement that a man must heap upon himself?
God was kind and merciful—the books all said He was. He yearned to win the souls of men and bind them close to Him. And the way was always open, the road was always clear—all one needed was to travel it to reach eternal glory.
But on this island there had been no mercy. There had been no sign and no encouragement. No road had been revealed and the jade had been in a rusted container of some sort of metal and that would not be the way of it had it been planted by divine intervention.
After all, he asked himself, why should God put Himself to the bother necessary to achieve such intervention? Why should He bother with him, at all? With him, one silly, stupid man when there were so many billion others. Why had he expected it? How could he have expected it? Was not the very fact he had expected it a sign of vanity, which was in itself a sin?
He reached out and picked up one of the pieces tight inside his fist and lifted it and cocked his arm to throw. Sobs shook him and his beard was soaked with tears already shed.
He cocked his arm to throw and he could not throw. His tightened fist came open and the jade slid from it and fell upon the sand.
And in that awful moment he knew that he had lost, that he was wanting in that essential capacity for humility that would unlock the gates of understanding he had sought so earnestly and, now it seemed apparent, priced at a cost too high—a cost that his basic brute humanity would never let him pay.
36
Mona Campbell had left, sometime in the night. The car was gone and there were no tire tracks in the dew-wet grass. And she would not be back, for the coat that had hung on the hook behind the kitchen door was gone and there were no other clothes. The house was bare of anything that could bear testimony she ever had been there.
Now the house seemed empty; not empty because there was no one in it, but empty in the sense that it no longer was a structure meant for human habitation. It belonged to another time, another day. Man had no further use for houses such as this, set in the midst of empty acres. Today men lived in towering blocks of masonry and steel that stood huddled in places where there was no empty ground. Man, who once had been a wanderer and at times a loner, now had joined a pack and in the days to come there would be no separate houses and no separate structures. Rather, the entire world would be a single structure and its swarming billions would live deep underground and high up in the sky. They'd
live in floating cities that rode the ocean's surface and in massive domes on the ocean's floor. They'd live in great satellites that would in themselves be cities, circling out in space. And the time would come when they'd go to other planets that had been prepared for them. They'd use space wherever they could find it and they'd achieve other space when there was no more to find. And they would have to do this, for space was all they had. The dream of fleeing into time was dead. Frost stood on the porch and stared across the weed-grown, brushy wilderness that once had been a farm. The old fence row had grown into a windbreak, trees rearing tall into the sky where there had been brush and saplings when he had been a boy and came here for vacations. The fences were broken and sagging and the day was not far off when there would be no fences. And in another century, with no one to care for them or keep them in repair, the house and barn might be gone as well, disappearing gradually into a moldering pile of timbers.
Mona Campbell was gone and now he'd be going, too. Not that he had anywhere to go, but simply because there was no point in staying here. He'd go walking down the road and he'd wander aimlessly, for there would be no purpose in his going. He'd live off the land. He would manage somehow and he'd probably wander south, for in a few more months this country would grow cold and snow would fall.
Southwest, perhaps, he thought. To the desert country and the mountains, for that was a place he had often thought he would like to see.
Mona Campbell was gone and why had she gone? Because, perhaps, she feared that he might betray her in the hope he might be reinstated as a human being. Or, perhaps, because she knew now she should not have told him what she did and through the telling of it now felt that she was vulnerable.
She had fled, not to protect herself, but to protect the world. She walked the lonely road because she could not bear to let mankind know it had been wrong for almost two centuries. And because the hope she had found in the Hamal math was too poor and frail a thing to stand up against the elaborate social structure man himself had forged.
The Holies were right, he thought—as mankind itself had been right for many centuries in the faith it held. Although, he knew, the Holies would reject out of hand the evidence of life's foreverness because it held no promise of everlasting glory, nor the sound of silver trumpets.
For it promised nothing beyond life going on into eternity. It did not say what form that life would take or even if it would have a form. But it was evidence, he thought, and that was better than mere faith, for faith was never more, even at the best, than the implied hope for evidence.
Frost came down off the porch and started across the yard, toward the sagging gate. He could go anywhere he wished and he might as well get started. There was no packing to be done and no plans to make, for everything he had was the clothes upon his back—the clothes that once had belonged to a man named Amos Hicklin—and without a purpose, there was no sense in making plans.
He had reached the gate and was pulling it open when the car came down the road, breaking suddenly out of the woods that grew close up to the house.
He stood astonished, with his hand upon the gate, and the first thing that he thought was that Mona Campbell had come back, that she'd forgotten something, or had changed her mind, and was coming back again.
Then he saw there were two people in the car and that the both of them were men and by that time the car had pulled up before the gate and stopped.
A door of the car came open and one of the men stepped out.
"Dan," said Marcus Appleton, "how good to find you here. And especially when we were least expecting you."
He was affable and jolly, as if they were good friends.
"I suppose," said Frost, "I could say the same of you. There've been times I've expected you to come popping out at me, but surely not today."
"Well, that's all right," said Appleton. "Any time at all. That suits me just fine. I had not expected I'd bag the two of you."
"The two?" asked Frost. "You're talking riddles, Marcus. There is no one here but me."
The driver had gotten out of the other door and now came around the car. He was a big man and he had a face that squinted and he wore a big gun on his hip.
"Clarence," said Appleton, "go on in the house and bring out the Campbell gal."
Frost came through the gate and stood aside so Clarence could go through it. He watched the man go across the yard, climb the stairs, and enter the house. He turned around then, to face Appleton.
"Marcus," he asked, "who do you expect to find?"
Appleton grinned at him. "Don't play dumb," he said. "You must know. Mona Campbell. You remember her."
"Yes. The woman in Timesearch. The one who disappeared."
Appleton nodded. "Boys down at the sector station spotted someone living here several weeks ago. When they flew over on a rescue mission. Then, a week or so ago, the same woman they had seen here came in, bringing a snakebit man. Said she'd found him on the road. Said she was just passing through. It was dark and they didn't get too good a look at her, but it was good enough. We put two and two together."
"You flunked out," Frost told him. "There has been no one here. No one here but me."
"Dan," said Appleton, "there's the matter of a murder charge that could be filed against you. If there's something you can tell us, we might forget we found you. Let you walk away."
"Walk how far?" asked Frost. "To decent bullet range, then get me in the back?"
Appleton shook his head. "A deal's a deal," he said. "We want you, of course, but the one we came looking for, the one we really want, is Mona Campbell."
"There's nothing to tell you, Marcus," said Frost. "If there were, I'd be tempted to pick up your deal— and bet with myself whether you would keep it. But Mona Campbell's not been here. I've never seen the woman."
Clarence came out of the house, walked heavy-footed to the gate.
"There's no one in there, Marcus," he said. "No sign of anyone."
"Well, now," said Appleton, "she must be hiding somewhere."
"Not in the house," said Clarence. "Would you say," asked Appleton, "that this gentleman might know?"
Clarence swung his head around and squinted hard at Frost.
"He might," said Clarence. "There's just a chance he might."
"Trouble is," said Appleton, "he's not of a mind to talk." Clarence swung a beefy hand, so fast there was no time to duck. It caught Frost across the face and drove him backward. He struck the fence and slumped. Clarence stopped and grasped his shirt and lifted him and swung the hand again.
Brightly colored pinwheels exploded inside Frost's head and he found himself crawling on his hands and knees, shaking his head to get rid of the flaming pin-wheels. Blood was dribbling from his nose and there was a salt taste in his mouth.
The hand reached down and lifted him again and set him on his feet. Swaying, he fought to stay erect.
"Not again," Appleton said to Clarence. "Not right away, at least. Maybe now he'll talk."
He said to Frost, "You want some more of it?" "The hell with you," said Frost.
The hand struck again and he was down once more and he wondered vaguely, as he tried to regain his feet, why he'd said exactly what he had. It had been a dumb thing to say. He'd not intended to say it and then he'd said it, and look at what it got him. He crawled to a sitting position and looked at the two men. Appleton had lost his look of easy amusement. Clarence stood poised and watching him.
Frost put up a hand and wiped his face. It came away smeared with dust and blood.
"It's easy, Dan," Appleton said to him. "All you have to do is tell us where Mona Campbell is. Then you can walk away. We haven't even seen you." Frost shook his head.
"If you don't," said Appleton, "Clarence here will beat you to death. He likes that kind of work and it might take quite a little while. And the thought strikes me that the boys from the sector station might not arrive in time. You know that sometimes happens. They're just a little late and it's too bad, of course, b
ut there isn't much that can be done about it." Clarence moved a step closer.
"I mean it, Dan," said Appleton. "Don't think I am fooling."
Frost struggled to get his feet beneath him, poised to rise. Clarence took another step toward him and started to reach down. Frost launched himself at the two treelike legs in front of him, felt his shoulder smash into them and sprawled flat upon his face. He rolled away blindly and got his feet beneath him and straightened. Clarence was stretched upon the ground. Blood flowed across his face from a gash upon his head, apparently inflicted when, falling, he had struck a fence post.
Appleton was charging at him, head lowered. Frost tried to step away, but the man's head hit him and he fell, with Appleton on top of him. A hand caught his throat in a brutal grip and above him he saw the face, the narrowed eyes, the great gash of snarling teeth.
From far off, it seemed, he heard a thunder in the sky. But there was a roaring in his head and he could not be sure. The hand upon his throat had a viselike grip. He lifted a fist and struck at the face, but there was little power behind the blow. He struck again and yet again, but the hand upon his throat stayed and kept on squeezing.
A wind that came out of nowhere swirled dust and tiny pebbles through the air and he saw the face above him flinching in the dust. Then the hand at his throat fell away and the face swam out of sight.
Frost staggered to his feet.
Just beyond the car sat a helicopter, its rotors slowing to a halt. Two men were tumbling from the cabin and each of them had guns. They hit the ground and squared off, with the rifles at their hips. Off to one side, Frost saw Marcus Appleton, standing, with his hands hanging at his side. Clarence still lay upon the ground.
The rotors came to a stop and there was a silence. Across the body of the cabin was the legend: RESCUE SERVICE.
One of the men made a motion with his gun at Marcus Appleton.
"Mr. Appleton," he said, "if you have a gun, throw it on the ground. You are under arrest."
Why Call Them Back from Heaven Page 17