A fantasy, she thought—of course it's fantasy, it must be fantasy. For in this place and time, in this dusk, in this smell of new and damp and reawakened earth, it could never be. For here the smell of vital earth, the flitting lantern of the firefly, the appointed fall of dusk and the appointed brightening of the dawn spoke of cycles, and life and death must also be an intrinsic part of such a cosmic cycling. And this was the thought, she told herself, that she must remember through all the aeons that stretched ahead of mankind—not as a race, not as a species, but as individuals. But it was a thought, she knew, that she would not remember. For it was not a thought of youth. Rather, it was the thought of someone such as she—a middle-aged and dowdy woman who too long had been concerned with matters that were unwomanly. Mathematics—what had a woman to do with mathematics other than the basic arithmetic of fitting the family's budget to the family's need? And what had a woman to do with life other than the giving and the rearing of new life? And why must she, Mona Campbell, be compelled to reach a decision, all alone, that only God Himself (if, indeed, there were such an entity as God) should be called upon to make?
If she could only know what the world might be like a thousand years from now—not in its external aspects, for its external aspects would be no more than cultural coloration, but what it might be like in the core of mankind, in the hearts of men and women. What kind of world could there be, or would there be, when all of humankind lived eternally and in the flesh and guise of youth? Would wisdom come without gray hair and wrinkled brow? Would the old, long thoughts of aged people disappear and die in the exuberance of the flesh and gland and muscle that renewed itself? Would the gentleness and the tolerance and the long reflective thought no longer be with mankind? Would man ever again be able to sit in a rocking chair and gaze out an open window at the advent of the evening and find there, in that advancement of the darkness, an occasion for contentment?
Or might youth itself be no more than a trapping and a coloration? Would mankind finally sink into an atmosphere of futility, impatient with the endless days, disillusioned and disappointed with eternity? After the millionth mating, after the billionth piece of pumpkin pie, after a hundred thousand springs with lilac and with daffodil, what would there be left? Did man need more than life? Could he do with less than death? And these were questions, she knew, that she could not answer, but they were questions to which, in fairness to herself, if not to all those others, answers must be found.
She rocked gently back and forth and let the questions and the nagging of them flow out of her, and slowly the soft wonder of the evening flowed in to erase them entirely from her thoughts.
Down in some unknown, darkened hollow folded in the hills the first of the whippoorwills began its evening chant.
24
Now that the beard had grown so heavy that it all but obscured the marks of ostracism on his cheek, Frost did not need to wait for dark, but could venture out when dusk began to fall. With an old battered hat he had retrieved from a trash bin pulled down almost to his eyes, he began his prowling as soon as the streets began to clear of the surging mobs which poured through them in the daylight hours. At dusk the city was left to him. Only a few people then remained upon.the streets and they went scurrying past him, on urgent errands of their own, as if there might be some high reason that they not stay out of doors, but must hurry to get back to their huddling places, somewhere within the interminable warrens of the great apartment houses which rose like ancient monuments reared by brutelike monsters in the primeval past.
Frost, observing them from beneath the brim of his pulled down hat, knew how it was with them, for once it had been the same with him. Hurry and huddle—hurry so that one could gather all the assets he could manage, then huddle in his idle time so that he would not spend a single penny of those assets.
Although now, even had they wished to spend some of the assets on rather foolish things, there was no longer any way to da it. For there were no longer any movies, no longer any athletic contests, and the fabled night life of a century and a half ago had died in the stagnation of the urge to live forever. All of which, of course, pleased Forever Center (if Forever Center, in fact, had not planned it that way) for it meant that there was more money to be invested in Forever stock.
So with the end of the day's activity, the human herd went home and there, for entertainment, read the daily papers, which had ceased long since to be informational, but were frankly and entertainingly sensational. Or read cheap books, cheap in price and often cheap in content. Or sat slack-jawed and fascinated before the family TV set. Or, perhaps, gloated over a stamp collection which had appreciated in value steadily through the years, or perhaps a collection of chess sets, wonderfully carved or fabricated, or many other similar collections in which each owner had carefully (and prayerfully) risked some of his surplus assets.
And there were those, as well, who resorted to hallucinatory drugs, available at any drug counter, using them to give themselves a few hours of an imaginary Me—a life in which they could escape from the drab-ness and the monotony of their regular lives.
For now there was nothing new, as there had been in ages past. Once, back at the beginning of the twentieth century, there had been the phonograph to be excited over… and the telephone. And later there had been the airplane and the radio and later yet, TV. But today there was nothing new. There was no progress except in those areas which advanced the day toward which Forever Center pointed. Now man made do with what he had and in most cases what he had was less than his forebears had. Civilization had ground to a stagnating halt and the Me of man today was in many of its aspects the same cultural pattern as had been the pattern of the Dark Ages of more than a thousand years before.
In those days the peasants had worked the fields in daylight, performing their labors for no more than enough to keep themselves alive, and then had spent the night huddled in their hovels, with doors tight barred against the terrors of the dark.
And it was the same today—hurry through the day, huddle through the night. Hurry and huddle—waiting out the night to hurry once again.
But for Frost there was now no need to hurry. To skulk, perhaps, but never need to hurry. For there were few places he had to go and none of them held great urgency. He went each evening to pick up the package left for him beside the garbage can; he hunted through occasional trash containers for papers to serve his daytime reading, keeping his eyes open for any other discarded items which might be of interest to him. He read and slept through the daylight hours and at dusk again began his prowling.
There were others like himself, prowlers of the darkened and deserted streets, and at times he spoke briefly with them, for he could not harm such as these, he told himself, by talking with them. And once, in a vacant area on the waterfront, where an old building had been newly razed, he had sat around a fire with two other men and had talked with them, but when he went back the next night they were gone and there was no fire. He formed no associations with these other prowlers of the dark, nor did any of them try to prolong an acquaintance with him. Loners, all of them—and at times he wondered who they might be and who they might Jiave been and why they walked the night. But he knew he could not ask and they never told him and this was not strange, for he did not identify himself.
Perhaps it was because he no longer had an identity. No longer Daniel Frost, but a human zero. No better off, of no more consequence than any of those millions \vho slept in the streets of India, who had rags to cover them and, sometimes, not even rags, who had never known any other state than hunger, who long since had given up even the right or the wish to find a private place in which to go about the private functions of the body.