Why Call Them Back from Heaven

10

Frost wearily climbed the stairs and let himself into his room. He closed the door behind him and hung up his hat. He slumped into an old and battered easy chair and stared about the room.

And for the first time in his life, the poverty and the squalor of it struck him across the face.

The bed stood in one corner and in another corner a tiny stove and a keeper for his stock of food. A mangy carpet, with holes worn here and there, made an ignoble effort to cover the bareness of the floor. A small table stood before the one lone window and here he ate or wrote. There were several other chairs and a narrow chest of drawers and the open door of a tiny closet, where he stored his clothes. And that was all there was.

This is the way we live, he thought. Not myself alone, but many billion others. Not because we want to, not because we like it. But because it is a wretched way

of life we've imposed upon ourselves, a meanness and a poverty, a down payment on a second life—the fee, perhaps, for immortality.

He sat, sunk in bitterness, half drowsy with his bitterness and hurt.

A quarter million dollars, he thought, and he'd had to turn it clown. Not, he admitted to himself, that he was above the taking of it, not because of any nobleness, but because of fear. Fear that the entire setup had been no more than a trap devised by Marcus Ap-pleton.

Joe Gibbons, he told himself, was a friend and a faithful worker, but Joe's friendship could be bought if the sum were great enough. All of us, he thought, with the sour taste of truth lying in his mouth, can be bought. There was no man in the world who was not up for sale.

And it was, he told himself, because of the price that each must pay for that second life, the grubbing and the saving and the misery that was banked as a stake to start the second life.

It all had started less than two centuries before— in 1964, by a man named Ettinger. Why, asked Ettinger, did man need to die? Die now of cancer, when a cure for cancer might be only ten years off.? Die now of old age when old age was no more than an ailment that in another hundred years might be susceptible to cure?

It was ridiculous, said Ettinger. It was a pity and a waste and fraud. There was no need of death. There was a way to beat it.

Men had talked of it before, had speculated on it, but it had been Ettinger who had said: Let us do something—now!

Let's develop a technique by which those who die can be frozen and stored away against that day when the maladies of which they died can be treated'medically. Then, when this is possible, revive the dead, wipe away the ravages of old age, banish the malignancy of cancer, repair the weakened heart, and give them all a second chance at life.

The idea had been slow to gain acceptance, had been ignored by all except a few, had gathered guffaws on television shows, had been treated gingerly by writers who did not want to identify themselves with the fringe of fanaticism.

Slow to gain acceptance, but it grew. It grew stubbornly as the dedicated few labored day and night to do the necessary basic research, to devise the technology that was necessary, to erect the installations, and to perfect the organization that would hold it all together.

The years went on and the idea crept into the consciousness of men—that death might be defeated, that death was not an end, that not only a spiritual but a physical second life was possible. That it was there for those who wanted it, that it was no longer just a long-range gamble, but a business proposition with a good chance of success.

Still no one would say publicly that they were about to take advantage of it, for in the public image it was still a crackpot scheme. But as the years went on more and more made surreptitious contracts and when they died were frozen and were stacked away against the day of their revival.

And each of those who was stacked away left in trust with the organization built so painfully from nothing, the pittance or the fortune they had scraped together in their lifetime, to be invested until that time when they would be revived.

There had been a congressional inquiry in Washington, which had come to nothing, and a question had been raised on the floor of Commons, which likewise came to nothing. The movement still was regarded crackpot, but it had the virtue of being non-obnoxious. It did not push itself, it did not foist itself upon the public consciousness, it did no preaching. And while more and more it became a matter of private conversation and of public interest, it was paid no official heed, possibly because officialdom did not know just what attitude to take. Or perhaps because, like the ancient UFO squabble, it was too controversial to touch.

Just when it happened, or how it happened, or what brought about the realization, no one now could tell-but there came the day when it became apparent that the little movement of 1964, now called Forever Center, had become the biggest thing the world had ever known.

Big in many ways. Big in the hold it had on the public imagination, which, in many instances, now constituted a firm belief in not only the purpose of the program but in its capacity to carry out the program. Big in the participation in the program, with millions of frozen bodies stored away to await revival. And, perhaps most important of all, big in its assets and investments.

For all those millions who now lay frozen had left their funds in trust with Forever Center. And one day the world woke to find that Forever Center was the largest stockholder of the world and that in many instances it had gained control of vast industrial complexes.

Now, too late, the governments (all the governments) realized they were powerless to do anything about Forever Center, if, in fact, they had wanted to do anything about it. For to investigate it, to license, to restrict it in any way would have been flying not only into the face of an entrenched financial position but also into the face of an awakened public interest.

So there was nothing done and Forever Center became more powerful and more invulnerable. And today, thought Frost, it was the government of the world and the financial institution of the world and the world's one hope.

But a hope that was dearly paid for-a hope that had made tightfisted moneygrubbers of the people of the world.

He'd gone without a pint of milk-a pint of milk he'd wanted, a pint of milk that his body had cried out for-when he ate his lunch. And that lunch had been

two thin sandwiches from a paper bag. And all of this because each week he must put away a good part of his salary in Forever stock, so that during those long years when he lay dead and frozen the funds would multiply by interest and by dividend. He lived in this wretched room and he ate cheap food, he had never married.

But his fund against revival and th «second life grew week by week and his whole life centered on the credit book that showed his ownership of stock.

And this afternoon, he recalled, he had stood ready to sell Forever Center and his position with Forever Center for a quarter million dollars—more money than he could hope to accumulate in his entire initial lifetime. He had been ready, even willing, to take the money, then, if necessary, to deliberately seek death.

The only thing that had stopped him was the fear that it was a trap.

And had it been a trap? he wondered.

If it had been a trap, why had the trap been set? For what reason had Marcus Appleton become his enemy?

The missing paper? And if that were the case, what made the paper so important—so important that he must be discredited before he tried to use it.

For if the paper were important and somehow incriminating, they'd expect that in his own good time he'd put it to his use. For that is what they would have done themselves. That was what anyone would do— anything at all to squeeze out that extra dollar, to gain a preferred position that would mean an extra dollar.

He'd chucked the paper in the desk and now, today, when he'd hunted for it, it had not been there. And if they'd gotten the paper back, then why…

But wait a minute. Had he chucked the paper in the desk? Or had he stuffed it in his pocket?

He crouched deeper in the chair and tried hard to remember. But he could not remember with any clarity. He might have put it in his pocket instead of in the church was compromise and expediency, manned by men of little faith.

If a man could only pray, he thought. But there was no point in praying when the prayer was never more than a mouthful of ritualistic words. Man prayed with his heart, he thought, never with his tongue.

He stirred uneasily and dropped his hand into the pocket of his cassock. His fingers closed upon the rosary and he pulled it out and laid it on the table.

The wooden beads were worn and polished from much handling and the metal crucifix was dull and tarnished.

Men still prayed by such as this, he knew, but not as many as had at one time. For the old established church at Rome, perhaps the one and only church that still retained some remnant of its old significance, had fallen on bad days. Most men today, if they paid any service to formalized religion, paid it to the new church that had j risen—the formalized and impersonal reminder (and j remainder) of what once had been religion.

Here was faith, he thought, fingering the rosary. Here-was blind and not-quite-understanding faith, but a better thing than no faith at all.

The rosary had come down to him, down through die family, generation after generation, and there was, he recalled, an old story that went with it—how an old grandmother, many times removed, in some forgotten village in Central Europe, had been bound for church when a sudden rain came up, and how she had sought shelter in a nearby cottage, and after gaining shelter had, on impulse, thrust the rosary out the door, commanding the rain to stop. And the rain had stopped and the sun came out. And how all the days she lived she had held perfect faith that the rosary stopped the rain. And how others, long after she had died, had told of the incident, also in perfect faith.

This, of course, Knight told himself, was no more than the mere trappings of faith, but it, at least, was something.

If he had held only a portion of the faith of that old I grandmother, he could have helped the man. The one man, in all the thousands he had known, who had ever felt the need of faith.

Why should this one man, one in many thousands, SO stand in need of faith? What mental mechanism, what driving spiritual sense had impelled him on his hunt for faith?

He conjured up the face of the man again—the horror haunted eyes, the unruly shock of hair, the sharp, high cheekbones.

It was a face he knew. The face, perhaps, of empty man—a lumping together of all the faces he had ever seen.

But it was not that entirely. It was not the universal face. It was an individual face, a face that he had seen, and not too long ago.

Suddenly it came clear—the memory sharp and hard — this same face staring out at him from the front page of the morning paper.

And this, he thought, in sudden terror at his own inadequacy, was the man that he had failed—a man who had nothing left but faith, absolutely nothing in the world but the hope of faith.

The man who had come into the church and had left again, as empty when he left as when he entered, perhaps emptier, for then even hope was gone, had been Franklin Chapman.