The best thing he could do, Frost told himself, was to stay away from both of them. They should be warned, both of them, but in the warning he'd likely do more harm than if they never knew.
He settled down to a steady, dogged trudging, keeping to the shadows as much as possible. It was essential, he knew, to put as much distance between himself and the alley where the man had died as he could. But well before dawn he must find a place to hide, a den where he could crouch through the daylight hours. And when night came he must push on again to build an even greater distance between himself and the wrath that trailed him.
25
Two old men met in a park for a game of checkers.
"You hear the latest," asked one old codger, "about this Forever business?"
"You hear so much," said the other one, setting up the pieces, "that you hardly know what story to believe. They say now that if they get this immortality business worked out, you won't have to die at all. They'll just line everybody up, every blessed one of us, and jab us in the arm and then we'll get young again and we'll live forever. Won't that be something, now?"
The old codger shook his head. "That ain't what I had in mind. Got this direct. My nephew has a brother-in-law who works in one of them Forever labs and it was him that told it. I can tell you there are a lot of people who'll be in for a big surprise."
"What surprise?" the second asked, impatiently.
"Well, maybe that's not the word exactly. Maybe they won't be surprised. Hard to be surprised, I suppose, when you go on being dead."
"You're rambling on again," complained his partner. "Why can't you ever come right out and say what is on your mind?"
"I was just laying the foundation. Giving you the background."
"Well, get on with it so we can start this game."
"It seems," the old codger told him, "that they've found there is some sort of bacteria—I think that's what he said—some sort of bacteria that lives inside the brain and that this bacteria can go right on living when the body's frozen. The brain is frozen solid, but this bacteria isn't bothered whatsoever. It goes right on living, multiplying all the time, and eating at the brain." "I don't believe it," said the other. "You hear such stories all the time and I tell you, John, there ain't a lick of truth in any one of them. I wouldn't be surprised if them Holies don't start them stories just to befuddle us. If we got this bacteria in the brain, how come it don't eat up the brain while we are still alive?" "Well, that's just it," said John. "When we are alive, there's something in the brain—antibodies, would they be? — that hold them bacteria in check. But when the brain is frozen it can't make them antibodies and the bacteria run wild. I tell you, there are a lot of people in those vaults who have no brain at all, just an empty skull crammed full of bacteria."
26
Frost came to a decision; to carry out the decision, he stole an automobile.
The theft was not an easy task. He had to find a car in which the forgetful owner had left the key. He knew, vaguely, that there was a way by which one could juggle ignition wires to start the motor without a key, but he had no idea how to go about it. Besides, he had an unreasonable fear of electricity and, thus, a disinclination to fool around with wires.
On the fourth night of his search, he found a car parked behind a food market with the key in the ignition. He scouted the area to make sure that no one was around to raise an alarm when he took the car. More than likely, he reasoned, it belonged to someone working late in the market. There were lighted windows in the back of the place, but they were located too high for him to reach them in an attempt to see who might be there.
He slid beneath the wheel and started the motor. Hold-
ing his breath, he eased the machine out of the parking area and down the ramp to the street. It was not until he was a dozen blocks away that he resumed his normal breathing.
Half an hour later he stopped the car and rummaged in the tool kit, coming up with a small screwdriver. A mile or so farther on, in a residential area where the street was dark because of the great elms which lined the boulevard, he parked behind another car. Working without light and by feel, and as quietly as he could, he switched the license plates of the car he'd stolen with the one parked in the street.
Driving off, he told himself it might have'been a waste of time to make the switch of plates, but within a few hours someone would report a stolen car and the switching of the plates might give him a slightly better chance to go on undetected.
There was little traffic, here on the west edge of the city. Night after night, as he had hunted for a car that he could steal, he had worked his way westward, heading for the city's edge and the wilderness beyond. There, even from the first night of his flight from the alley, he had reasoned he'd have a better chance to hide. Such population as there might be was scattered and there were great areas which had reverted back from farmland to heavy second growth. And also, in the back of his mind, was a persistent feeling that Apple-ton would not suspect that he would leave the city.
There would be problems, he knew, away from the city. Food, for one thing. But he had a vague confidence, not too well founded, that he could manage. The season for fruit and berries was approaching and he could catch some fish and perhaps devise traps for the snaring of small animals. Thanks to Ann, he was at least partially equipped. Stowed in his pockets, put there in the knowledge that at any moment he might have to leave his basement den, were the small items which she had sent him—fishhooks and line, a pocket lighter with a can of fluid and extra flints and wicks, a heavy pocketknife, a small pair of shears, a comb, a can opener (for which he would have no use, certainly, in the wilderness), and a small medical kit. With these, he was sure that he could manage, although he did not know exactly how.
He did not allow any of his half-recognized problems worry him too much. All his resources now were directed at leaving the city behind—to find a place where he would not be forever dodging or crouching, always fearful that he would be sighted by some citizen and reported as a suspicious character.
The idea of fleeing to the wilderness had formed in his mind on the first night of his flight. It was not until later that he had decided he would head further west than he had at first intended-back to the old farm where he had spent vacations in his youth. He had fought against the decision, for the surface of his mind protested it was a silly thing to do, but, even as the surface of his mind protested, some more powerful inner mind drove him on finally to decide against what seemed his better judgment.
In the daytime, as he huddled in his hiding places, he had tried to unravel the reasons for. the urge that drove him to seek this place out of his youth. Was it, perhaps, a need to identify himself with something? Was it the unrecognized, but crying need to stand on familiar ground, to say this is a place that I know and that knows me and we belong to one another—a seeking after roots, no matter how shallow they might be?
He did not know. He could not know. He was only aware that something more powerful than his own good common sense impelled him toward this old and abandoned farm.
And now, finally, he was on his way.
He could have made better time by using one of the great freeways that leaped in all directions from the city. But these he avoided, these he could not force himself to take. He had hidden and crouched too long to expose himself to the traffic he would encounter there.
He had no map and no sure notion of where he might be going. The one thing that he knew was that he was heading west. The moon had been sliding down the western sky when he had found the car and no\v he followed the moon.