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 ski

"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…"