Why Call Them Back from Heaven

by Clifford D. Simak

  It had gotten her this, she thought. Here in the depths of an unknown woods, on a dead-end, dying road, hundreds of miles from anywhere or anyone who counted — bee-stung and bruised and something wrong with one ankle and a complete damn fool.

  She pulled herself erect and stood for a moment, testing the ankle. While there was some pain, she found that it would support her.

  She walked slowly up the hill. Her feet sank into the black loam carpeted by the dead leaves which represented the falls of many years. She dodged around boulders and, reaching out, grasped at saplings and hanging branches to help herself along.

  Occasionally an angry wasp went thrumming past, but the swarm appeared to have settled down.

  She reached the car and one glance told her that it was useless. A wheel had struck a boulder squarely and was crumpled.

  She stood and looked at it and thought what she must do.

  Her sleeping bag, of course—it was light in weight, but a little bulky for easy carrying. As much food as she could manage and the hatchet to cut wood for fires, some matches, an extra pair of shoes.

  There was no use staying here. Somewhere, on one of those wild, abandoned roads, she would find some help. Somehow she would work it out. And once she'd worked it out, what would she do then? She had only come a few hundred miles and there were many more to go. Should she continue on her crazy odyssey or go back to Manhattan and Forever Center?

  A sound jerked her around—the soft scraping sound of wood brushing against metal and the faint humming that could only be an electric motor.

  Someone was driving down the road! Someone trailing her?

  Fear flowed over her and her strength and bravery deserted her and she sank into a crouch, huddling there beside her wrecked car, while the other car, screened from her sight by the heavy foliage, crept slowly down the road.

  It must be someone who had followed her, she told herself. For this was a road that seemed to lead to nowhere, a steadily worsening road that in a little while, more than likely, would dwindle down to no road at all.

  In just a few more seconds the car would reach the wasp nest and what would happen then? The insects would not take such a disturbance lightly. Stirred up by their first encounter, they would come swarming out bent upon full vengeance.

  The noise of the branches and the brush scraping against the metal of the car came to an end. The electric motor was humming idly. The car had stopped before it reached the nest.

  A door banged and leaves rustled under the scuffing of deliberate footsteps. The footsteps stopped. The silence stretched out thin. The footsteps began, then stopped again.

  A man cleared his throat, as if he'd been about to speak and then had decided not to.

  The feet upon the road stirred about—not footsteps, but indecisive shuffling.

  A voice spoke tentatively, a normal speaking voice, as one might speak who was reluctant to break the woodland spell.

  "Miss Harrison," asked the voice, "are you anywhere about?"

  She half raised out of the crouch, surprised. She had heard that voice somewhere and she should know it— and suddenly she did.

  "Mr. Sutton," she said, as calmly as she could, determined not to shout, not to sound excited, "I'm down here. Watch out for that wasp nest."

  "What wasp nest?"

  "There's one on the road. Just ahead of you."

  "You're all right?"

  "Yes, I'm all right. Stung up a little. You see, I drove into the nest and the car went off the road and

  She forced herself to stop. The words were coming out too fast, gushing out. She had to hang onto herself. She must fight off hysteria.

  He was off the road now, plunging down the hill toward her. She saw him coming—the big, blunt man with the grizzled face.

  He stopped and stared at the car.

  "Busted up," he said.

  "One wheel is broken. Just caved in."

  "You ran me quite a chase," he said.

  "But why—how did you find me?"

  "Just dumb luck," he said. "There are a dozen of us out looking for some trace of you. Covering different areas. And I was the one to pick up your trail. A day or two ago. When you talked to some people in a village."

  "I stopped several times," she said, "to ask my way."

  He nodded. "Then there was the house up by the fork. They told me you went this way. Said the road petered out. Said you'd get in trouble on it. No proper road at all."

  "I didn't see a house."

  "Maybe not," he said. "It sets back from the road a piece. Up on a knoll. Not an easy thing to see. Dog came out, barking at me. That is how I knew."

  She rose to her feet.

  "Now what?" she asked. "Why come after me?"

  "We need you. There is something that you have to do. Something that we can't do. Franklin Chapman's dead." "DeadI"

  "Heart attack," he said.

  "The envelope!" she cried. "He was the only one who knew…"

  "It's all right," he said. "We have the envelope. We'd been keeping tab on him. A cabdriver picked him up and took him to a post office…"

  "That's where the letter was," she said. "I asked him to rent a box under an assumed name and I gave him the envelope and he mailed it to himself and left it in the box. A legal maneuver. So I wouldn't know where the letter was."

  "The cabbie was one of us," said Sutton. "One way we kept track of him. Looked sick when he got into the cab and…"

  "Poor Franklin," she said.

  "He was dead when he hit the floor. Never knew what happened."

  "But there's no second life for him, no…" "A better second life," said Sutton, "than Forever Center plans."

  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."<
br />
  "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 t
he 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…"