The door came open and the light streamed out into the room again. An old and wrinkled woman moved into the range of the lantern light. She carried in her band a bowl and half a loaf of bread and these she banded to the grizzled man. "Thank you, Mary," said the man, and the woman backed away.
"Food," said the man, putting down the bowl in front of Frost and handing him the bread. "I thank you very much," said Frost. He lifted the spoon that was in the bowl and carried a spoonful of the substance to his mouth. It was soup, weak and watery.
"And now I understand," said the grizzled man, "that in just a few more years a man need not even go through the ritual of death to attain immortality. Once Forever Center has this immortality business all written down and the methods all worked out, a man will be made immortal out of hand. He'll just stay young and go on living and there won't be any death. Once you get born, then you will live forever." "It won't be," said Frost, "for a few years yet." "But once it can be done, that will be the way of it?" "I suppose it will," said Frost. "Once you have it it's just plain foolishness to let a man grow old and die before you give him eternal youth and lif e."
"Oh, the vanity of it," the old man wailed. "The terrible waste of it. The impertinencel"
Frost did not answer him. There wasn't much of an answer, actually, to be given. He simply went on eating. The man nudged him in the arm. "One thing more, son. Do you believe in God?" Slowly Frost put the spoon back into the bowl. He asked: "You really want an answer?" "I want an answer," said the man. "I want an honest one."
"The answer," said Frost, "is that I don't know. Not, certainly, in the kind of God that you are thinking of. Not the old white-whiskered, woodcut gentleman. But a supreme being—yes, I would believe in a God of that sort. Because it seems to me there must be some sort of force or power or will throughout the universe.
The universe is too orderly for it to be otherwise. When you measure all this orderliness, from the mechanism of the atom at one end of the scale, out to the precision of the operation of the universe at the other end, it seems unbelievable that there is not a supervisory force of some land, a benevolent ruling force to maintain that sort of order."
"Order!" the man exploded. "All you talk about is order! Not holiness, not godliness…"
"I'm sorry," Frost said. "You asked for an honest answer. I gave you an honest one. Please take my word for it—I would give a lot to have the kind of faith you have, blind, unquestioning faith without a single doubt. But even then I wonder if faith would be enough." "Faith is all man has," the man told him, quietly. "You take faith," Frost said, "and make a virtue of it. A virtue of not knowing…"
"If we knew," the man said, positively, "there would be no faith. And we need the faith."
Somewhere someone was shouting and there was the far-off sound of feet pounding rapidly.
The grizzled man rose quickly and in the act of rising one of his feet stepped sidewise and caught the bowl of soup and overturned it. In the light of the lantern, it ran like slow oil across the floor.
"The cops!" someone shouted and everyone was moving very rapidly. Someone grasped the lantern and lifted it and the flame went out. The room was plunged in darkness.
Frost had risen, too. He took a step and someone bumped into him, driving him backward in an awkward stumble. And then he felt the floor give way beneath his feet with the faint popping and snapping of long-rotten boards and he was plunging downward. He threw out his arms instinctively, clutching for any support that he might find. The fingers of his left hand closed upon the end of a broken board, but even as he grasped it, the weight of his falling body snapped it and he was through the floor and faffing.
His body landed with a splash and evil-smelling water rose in a sheet and slapped him in the face.
The fall had thrown him forward and now he raised himself so that he squatted in the foulness that was all about him—the darkness and the foulness a part of one another.
He twisted about and glanced up and he could not see the hole through which he'd fallen, but from the floor above him came the thud of running feet and the sound of distant voices, drawing rapidly away.
New thuddings came and new voices, very sharp and angry, and the splintering of boards as someone broke a door. Feet pounded once again on the floor above him and thin beams of light danced across the hole where he had fallen.
Fearful that someone would flash a light directly down the hole and catch him in its beam, he moved slowly forward, water swirling at his ankles.
The feet pounded back and forth and ran into far rooms and returned again and snatches of voices floated down to him.
"Got away again," one voice said. "Someone tipped them off."
"Pretty dismal," said another. "Just the kind of place you would expect…"
And then another voice, and at the sound of it, Frost stiffened and took another involuntary step farther from the hole in the floor above.
"Men," said the voice of Marcus Appleton, "we missed them once again. There'll be another day."
Other voices answered, but the words were indistinct.
"I'll get those sons of bitches," said Marcus Appleton, "if it's the last thing that I do."
The voices and the footsteps moved away and in a little time were gone.
Silence fell, broken only by the slow drip of water falling from some place into the pool in which Frost stood.
A tunnel of some sort, he guessed. Or perhaps a subbasement flooded by seepage from the river.
Now the problem was to get out of here. Although without a light of any sort that might not be easy. And the one way to do it was to try to get out the way he had come in, through the hole in the floor above.
He reached above his head and his fingers touched the rough surface of a beam. He stood on tiptoe and stretched and he could touch the floor above. But he would have to move slowly and try to maintain some sort of orientation, for the place was in utter darkness and his fingers were his eyes.
Slowly he worked his way along and finally found the hole. Now he'd have to jump for it and grab hold of the rotten boards and hope that they would support his weight so he could pull himself into the room above. Once there, he told himself, he'd be safe for a time at least, for Appleton and his men would not be coming back. Neither would the Holies. He would be on his own.
He stood for a moment to catch his breath and suddenly, from all around him, rose a squeaking and a scurrying, the rush of tiny feet, the slithering of bodies rushing through the dark, and the angry squealing of ravening creatures driven by a desperate hunger.
His scalp tightened and it seemed that his hair rose upon his head.
Rats! Rats rushing at him through the dark! Fear powered his muscles and he leaped, driving himself chest high through the hole. Scrambling and kicking, he pulled himself clear and lay panting on the floor.
Underneath him the squeaking and the squealing rose in a wave, then slowly died away.
Frost still lay upon the floor and after a time the trembling stopped and the sweat dried on his body and he got to his hands and knees and crawled until he found a corner and there he huddled against the terror and the loneliness of the new life that he faced.
21
Godfrey Cartwright leaned far back in his padded chair and clasped his hands behind his head. It was the position he assumed when he was about to discuss some weighty matters, but wanted to seem casual in his discussion of them.
"The way I see it," he said, "something queered the deal. No publisher before ever offered the kind of money that I did, and even a stuffed shirt like Frost would have grabbed it if he thought he had a chance of not getting caught at it. But now Frost has disappeared and Joe Gibbons is nowhere to be found. Maybe Appleton had a hand in it. It would have to be someone like Appleton, for there are just a few in Forever Center who know that censorship is being carried on. And if Appleton found out, he's not a man to fool with."