Why Call Them Back from Heaven

34

Frost sat on the steps that led down from the porch and stared out across the valley. The first shadow of evening had fallen on the river and the bottomlands and above the far-off treetops a straggly line of black forms flew raggedly, a flock of crows heading back to their nesting grounds. On the far side of the river a small white ribbon ran like a snake across the rounded hills, the track of an ancient and abandoned road.

Down the slope below him stood the barn, its ridgepole sagging, and beside it the rusted hulk of a piece of farm machinery. At the far end of the long-fallow field a dark form went leaping through the tall grass, a wild dog, more than likely, possibly a coyote.

Once, he remembered, the lawn had been mowed and the bushes trimmed and the flower beds pampered. Once, in his own memory, the fences had been kept in repair and painted, but now all the paint was gone and half of the fence was gone. The front gate hung drunkenly on a single hinge, half pulled from the post.

Outside the gate stood Mona Campbell's car, the tall grass and weeds reaching halfway to the windows and hiding the wheels. It was an incongruous note, he thought. It had no right to be here. Man had fled from this land and now it should be left alone, it should be allowed to rest from man's long tenancy.

Behind him the door closed softly and footsteps came across the porch. Mona Campbell sat down on the step below him.

"It is a pleasant view," she said. "Don't you find it so?"

He nodded.

"I suppose you remember many pleasant days in this place."

"I suppose I do," said Frost, "but it was so long ago."

"Not so long ago," she told him. "Only twenty years or less."

"It's empty. It's lonesome. It is not the same. But I'm not surprised. That's the way I expected it."

"But you came," she said. "You ran for shelter here."

"I came because I had to. Something made me come. I don't pretend to understand what it was that made me, but that's the way it was."

They sat in silence for a moment and he saw that her hands lay idly and quietly in her lap-hands that had some wrinkles in them, but still small and capable. At one time, he thought, those hands had been beautiful, and in a certain way, they had not lost their beauty yet.

"Mr. Frost," she said, without looking at him, "you didn't kill that man."

"No," he said, "I didn't."

"I didn't think you had," she said. "You have nothing to run for except the marks upon your face. Has it occurred to you that you might reinstate yourself if you turned me in?"

"The thought," said Frost, "had crossed my mind."

"You considered it?"

"Not really. When you're driven in a corner, you think of everything. You even think of things you know you couldn't do. But in this instance, of course, it would have been no good."

"I think it might," she said. "I would imagine they want me pretty bad."

"Tomorrow," Frost finally said, "I'll be leaving. You're in trouble enough without my adding to it. After all, I've had a week of rest and food and it's time to be getting on. It might not be a bad idea if you moved on, too. No one on the lam can afford to sit too long."

"There is no need," she said. "There is no danger. They don't know. How could they know?"

"You took Hicklin to the rescue station."

"At night," she said. "They never really got a look at me. Told them I was driving through and found him on the road."

"That's true enough," he said. "But you're forgetting Hicklin. The man could talk."

"I don't think so. He was delirious most of the time, remember. When he talked, he didn't know what he was saying. All that talk about some jade."

"So," he said, "you aren't going back to Forever Center. You're never going back?"

"I'm not going back," she said.

"What are you going to do?"

"I don't know," she said. "But I'm not going back. It's unreal back there. It's a fantasy—a hard, cruel fantasy.

Once you've touched reality, once you've felt the reality of the naked land, once you've lived with dawn and sunset…"

She turned sidewise on the step and looked fully at him. "You don't understand, do you?"

He shook his head. "It may not be the way to live," he said. "I think we all know that. But we're working toward another life and that's important, I believe. It may not be the right way to do it. In other generations, we'll find better ways. But we make out the best we can.."

"Even after what has happened to you, you still can say this? After you were framed and railroaded into ostracism, even after they tried to frame you with a murder, you still can believe in Forever Center?"

"What happened to me," he told her, "must have been the work of a few men. It doesn't mean that the principles on which Center is based are wrong. I have as much reason and as great a right to subscribe to those principles as I ever did."

"I have to make you understand," she said. "I don't know why it is so important, but I have to make you understand."

He looked at her—the intense, old-maidish face with the hair skinned back tight into its bun, the thin, straight lips, the colorless eyes,~the face lighted by some inner glow of human dedication that seemed entirely out of place. A schoolteacherish face, he thought, masking a mind as sharp and methodical as a thousand-dollar watch.

"Perhaps," he said, softly, "the understanding lies in what you haven't told me and what I haven't asked."

"You mean why I ran away. Why I took my notes."

"That would be my guess," he said. "But you needn't tell me. Once I would have wanted you to tell me; now it doesn't seem to matter."

"I ran away," she said, "because I wanted to make sure."

"That what you'd found was right?"

"Yes, I suppose that's it. I'd held off making any kind of progress report and the time was coming when I had to make one and—how do I say this? — I would imagine that in certain rather important things you have a tendency to say nothing, to give no hint of what you think you've learned until you're absolutely sure. So I panicked — well, not really panicked. I thought that if I could go off by myself for a while…"

"You mean you left, intending to come back?"

She nodded. "That is what I thought. But now I can't go back. I found out too much. More than I thought I'd find,"

"That traveling back in time involves more than we thought it might. That it…"

"Not more than we thought it might," she said. "Really, there's nothing at all involved. And the answer's very simple. Time travel is impossible."

"Impossible!"

"That's right—impossible. You can't manipulate it. It's too firmly interwoven into what you might call a universal matrix. We are not going to be able to use time travel to take care of our excess population. We either colonize other planets or we build satellite cities out in space or we turn the earth into one huge apartment house—or we may have to do all these things. Time was the easy way, of course. That's why Forever Center was so interested…"

"But are you sure? How can you be so sure?"

"Mathematics," she said. "Non-human math. The Ha-mal math."

"Yes, I know," he said. "I was told you were working with it."

"The Hamalians," she said, softly, "must have been strange people. An entirely logical people who were much concerned, not only with the surface phenomena but the basic roots of the universe. They dug into the fact and the purpose of the universe and to do this they developed mathematics that they used not only to support their logic but as logic tools."

She reached out a hand and laid it on his arm. "I have a feeling," she said, "that eventually they'd arrived at final truth—if there is such a thing as final truth. And I believe there must be."

"But other mathematicians…"

"Yes, other mathematicians used the Hamal math. And were puzzled by it, for they viewed it only as a system of formal axioms. They saw only symbols and formulas and statements. They used it as a physical expression and it is more than that.."

"But this means that we will have to wait," he cried. "It means some of the people in the vaults must wait Must wait until we can build a place-or many places-for them, until we can find other solar systems with earthlike planets. And the planets are there, of course, but they're all like Hamal IV. They have to be terra-formed and while we are terraforming them, the population will keep on expanding."

He looked at her with terror in his eyes. "Well never catch up," he said.

They never would catch up. They had waited far too long. They had waited because immortality had seemed within their grasp. And they had waited because they could afford to wait, because they had all the space they needed once they had cracked time travel—and now time was out of reach.

"Time is one of the factors of the universal matrix," Mona Campbell said. "Space is another factor and matter/energy is the third. They're all bound together, woven together. They can't be separated. They can't be destroyed. We can't manipulate them."

"We got around the Einstein limitations," said Frost. "We did what everyone had believed could not be done. Perhaps we can…"

"Perhaps," she said, "but I don't think so."

"You don't seem to be upset about it"

"There is no need to be," she said. "I haven't told you all of it. Life is a factor, too. Perhaps I should say life/death, in the same sense that we say matter/energy, although I imagine the analogy is not exactly right."

"Life/death?"

"Yes, like matter/energy. You might call it, if you wished, the law of the conservation of life."

He got up shakily from the steps and went down them to the ground. He stood for a moment, looking out across the valley, then turned back to her again.

"You mean that we went to all this trouble, all this work, for nothing?"

"I don't know," she said. "I've tried to think it out, but I don't have the answer yet. Perhaps I never will. All I know is that life is not destroyed, it is not quenched or blown out like a candle flame. Death is a translation of this property that we call life to another form. Just as matter is translated into energy or energy into matter."

"Then we do go on and on?" "Who are we?" she asked. And that is right, he thought. We are we? A mere dot of consciousness that stood up in arrogance against the vastness and the coldness and the emptiness and the uncaring of the universe? A thing (a thing?) that thought it mattered when it did not matter? A tiny, flickering ego that imagined the universe revolved around it—imagined this when the universe did not know that it existed, nor cared that it existed? And that kind of thinking, he told himself, could have been justified at one time. But not any longer. Not if what Mona Campbell said was true. For if what she said was true, then each little flickering ego was a basic part of the universe and a fundamental expression of the purpose of the universe.

"One thing," he said. "What are you going to do about it?"

She shook her head, bewildered now that the question had been asked. "What would happen, do you think, if I published my calculations? What would happen to Forever Center? To the people, both the living and the dead?" "I don't know," he said.

"What could I tell them?" Mona Campbell asked. "No more than I've told you. That life goes on, that it can't be destroyed, no more than energy. That it's as everlasting as time and space itself. Because it is one with time and space in the fabric of the universe. I couldn't hold out any hope or promise beyond the certainty that there is no end to life. I couldn't say to them that death might be the best thing that could happen to them."

"But it could, of course."

"I rather think it could."

"But someone else, twenty years from now," he said, "fifty years from now, a hundred years—someone will find what you have found. Forever Center is convinced that you found something. They know you were working with the Hamal math. They'll put a team to work on it. Someone's bound to find it."

Mona Campbell sat quietly on the step. "That may be," she said. "But they'll be the ones to tell them, not I. I can't, somehow, see myself as the one who tears down everything the race has built in the last two hundred years."

"But you'd be replacing it with new hope. You'd confirm the faith that mankind held through many centuries."

"It's too late for that," she said. "We're fashioning our own immortality, our own foreverness. We have it in our hands. You can't ask mankind to give up something like that for…"

"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."