"Miss Harrison," he told her, "you probably came to the one man in Forever Center the least likely to be of help to you."
"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to put you on the spot. If you can be of any help, even if you're no more than willing to try to help, I will appreciate it. For even an expression of a willingness to help will do something to restore my confidence, will let me know that someone still remains who has a sense of fairness."
"If I can be of any help," said Frost, "I'm inclined to do it. But I won't stick out my neck, you understand. Right at the moment, I can afford no trouble."
"That," said Anne, "is good enough for me."
"I'm promising nothing."
"I can't expect you to. You'll do what you can."
It was wrong, thought Frost. He had no right to offer help. He had no business mixing into this at all. And especially he had no right to offer help when he knew there was nothing he could do.
But the clingy room somehow seemed the warmer now, and brighter. It was a sense of life and living such as he had not known before. And he knew it was this woman sitting in the room who gave it warmth and light, but a dying warmth and light, like the warmth and light given off by a dying fire. In time, when she had left, once the memory had worn thin, the room again would become cold and dingy, as it had been before.
"Miss Harrison," he asked suddenly, "could I take you out to dinner?"
She smiled and shook her head.
"I'm sorry," Frost said. "I had hoped, perhaps…"
"Not out," she said. "I can't have you spending that much money on me. But if you have food here, I can cook."
13
Nestor Belton closed the book and shoved it across the desk, away from him. He lowered his head and put up his fists to knuckle at tired eyeballs.
Examinations tomorrow, he thought, and he should get some sleep. But there was so much that he needed to review, if no more than a quick and skimpy check through the pages of the texts.
For these examinations were important. From those scoring highest would be chosen those students wh< would be allowed to enter the School of Counseling. Ever since he could remember he had wanted to be; counselor. And it was more important now than it hat'; ever been, for there was heard from every quarter rumors that in the matter of just a few more years immortality would become a fact, that the men at Forever Center had finally cracked the problem and all that now remained was a perfection of the necessary techniques.
Once immortality became possible, revivals would begin and then the corps of counselors would be put to work. For years they had been held in reserve against the need of them and there had been many of them who had lived out lifetimes of waiting, without a thing to do, and now, themselves, were stored in vaults, waiting for revival.
The counselors and the revival technicians, two groups of men, thousands of them, who had stood by and waited all these years, always ready for the day when the waiting hordes of dead could be brought back to life again. Two corps of men who had been trained at the expense of Forever Center and who had stood by, being paid for doing nothing because there was nothing yet to do.
But ready, always ready. One with the acre after-acre of empty tiers of housing, built against that dav when there would be need of them. One with the great storehouses filled with food, turned out by the converters, stored and waiting against Revival Da}".
For, Nestor Belton told himself, Forever Center thought of everything, had planned only as a devoted institution manned by devoted and unselfish men could plan. For almost two hundred years the Center had been custodian of the dead, guardian of mankind's hope, architect of the life to come.
He rose from his desk and walked to the single \yindow in his student's cubicle. Outside a pale moon, half obscured by floating clouds, made a misty landscape of the dormitory yard. And far off, toward the vvest and north, rose the massive shaft of Forever Center.
He was glad, he told himself for the thousandth time, that he had been so lucky as to have a view of the Center from his window. For it was an inspiration and a promise and a seeming benediction. He had only to look out the window to know what he was working for, to glimpse a reminder of the glory that after almost a million years (although there were some who said more than a million years) would crown the long, slow crawl of man from the mindless primal ooze.
Eternal life, Nestor Belton told himself; no need ever to die, but to keep on and on and in a body that would be always youthful. To have the time to develop one's intellect and knowledge to the full capacity of the human brain. To gather wisdom, but not age. To have the time to carry out all the work that the mind could dream. To compose great music, write great books, to paint finally the kind of canvases that artists had always tried to paint, but usually had failed, to go out to the stars, to explore the galaxy, to dig to the root of meaning in the atom and the cosmos, to watch lofty mountains wear away and others rise, to see rivers dwindle down to nothing and other rivers form, and when, ten billion years from now, flaming death reached out for this solar system, to have been gone to other systems far in the depth of space.
Nester Belton hugged himself, thin arms wrapped around thin chest.
This was the time to be alive, he thought.
And he thought in horror of those days when men had died and stayed dead, when there had been no thought of other life beyond the frail and tottering promise of a medieval faith that tried to make of faith the Very stuff of knowing.
All those other poor dead people, who had died without assurance that death was only temporary—who had feared death as an end and nothingness, who had feared it in spite of their oft protested faith, who had shrank from it and thrust it back into an obscure place within their minds each time they thought of it, because they did not want to think of it, could not bear to think of it.
A thin wind fretted at the eaves above him and it was a lonely sound. The shadows of the yard were diluted shadows that seemed to have no substance. The far-off whiteness of Forever Center was a misty light against the night-black sky. As if, he thought, dawn might not be too far distant. And that was how it must have seemed at times, he told himself, to the men of Forever Center working toward the dawn. But encountering setbacks and disappointments when it seemed that the final accomplishments were within their grasp. Now, however, from what one heard, from the filtered rumor spoken everywhere, dawn (no false dawn this time) was at last in sight and man in a few more years would have been brought to that final perfection of purpose and expression that had been inherent in that first feeble thread of life born in the primal seas.
And he, Nestor Belton, hopefully would have a hand in it. He and the other counselors, when the people were revived, would perform the necessary function oi rehabilitation, so that the revived could fit into the present culture.
But to do a job like that, a man must know so much, must be so thoroughly trained as an accomplished historian, with an especial knowledge of the last two centuries.
Six long years of study—if he ranked high enough in the exams that he faced tomorrow.
He took one last look at the misty whiteness of Forever Center and went back to his books.
14
The dinner tapers flickered, almost burned out, and the scent of roses filled the dingy room—although, in the candlelight, the room was not so dingy. And both of them, the tapers and the roses, had spelled extravagance, but Frost found that he could not regret the money they had cost. It was the first time in years that he had not eaten alone and he could not remember any evening as pleasant as this one had turned out to be.