For an hour or more he had been driving through residential areas, interspersed with small shopping centers. Now he began to encounter large open spaces which lay between little settlements. He found a road, not a street, but a road, narrow and ill-paved, and he followed it.
The road dwindled to little more than a track and the paving ended and the track was coated with a deep and heavy dust. The houses became fewer, then almost none at all. Great clumps of woods loomed black against the sky.
At the top of a long, bald ridge which the road climbed with many twistings and turnings, he finally stopped the car and got out, turning to look back.
Behind him, stretching east and north and south, as far as the eye could see, were the lights of the city he had left. Ahead of him was darkness with no single gleam of light.
He stood atop the ridge and drew great gulping breaths of air into his lungs—air that had about it the freshness and the chilliness of the open land. And there was, as well, the smell of pine and dust—and he had finally made it. The city was behind him.
He got back in the car and drove on. The road got no better and he could make no good time on it, but it was still a road and it bored straight into the west.
At dawn he pulled off it, bumped across a shallow roadside ditch, drove through an old field overgrown with weeds and brush, and parked in a grove of oaks at one end of the field.
He got out of the car and stretched and his gut was gaunt with hunger, but this morning, he told himself, for the first time in weeks, he'd not have to hunt a hole to hide in.
27
After waiting for an hour, Ann Harrison got in to see Marcus Appleton.
The man was affable. Behind his desk he had the look of a prosperous, efficient businessman.
"Miss Harrison," he said, "I am so glad to see you. I've read so much about you. In connection, I believe, with a certain point you raised in a trial of some sort."
"Not that it did my client any good," said Ann.
"But still it was well worth raising. It's from thinking such as this that the law evolves."
"I thank you for the compliment," said Ann. "If it was a compliment."
"Oh, yes," said Appleton. "I was most sincere. And now, I wonder, would you tell me to what I owe this meeting? What can I do for you?"
"For one thing," said Ann, "you can remove the taps you have upon my phones. For another, you can call off the bloodhounds you have set to follow me. And you can tell me what it's all about."
"But my dear young lady…"
"You can save your breath," Ann told him. "I know you have the taps. Perhaps at the central switchboard. I have prepared actions against both you and the communications people which will enjoin you from an invasion of my privacy and the privacy of my clients, which might be much more to the point than my own privacy and…"
"You can't get away with it," Appleton said, harshly.
"I think I can," said Ann. "No court would ignore such a situation. It strikes directly at the guarantees which are accorded the relationship of an attorney and the client. And it strikes as well at the roots of justice."
"You have no proof."
"I think I have," said Ann. "That is not a matter I'll discuss with you. But even if my proof were not quite sufficient, and I believe it is, I still imagine that the court would order an inquiry into the charges that I brought."
"That's preposterous!" exploded Appleton. "The courts haven't got the time, or the purpose, to inquire into every piddling charge someone may bring before them."
"Perhaps not every charge. But a charge of this kind
"You'll probably end up," Appleton told her, coldly, "getting yourself disbarred."
"Perhaps," said Ann. "If you own the courts as thoroughly as you think you own them. I don't think you own them that much."
Appleton sputtered. "Own the courts!" he yelled.
"Why, yes," Ann said, calmly. "The courts and the newspapers. But you don't own the rumors. They're something that you don't control. And if the courts should try to shush me and if the papers remained silent, there still would be a stink. Believe me, Mr. Appleton, I'd see there was a stink such as you've never smelled before."
The sputter died. "You're threatening me?" he asked in a cold voice so sharp it almost squeaked.
"Oh, I don't suppose," said Ann, "it would ever come to that. I still have faith in justice as dispensed by law. I still believe the courts hold forth some hope of remedy. And I'm not too sure you have all the papers muzzled."
"You have no high opinion of Forever Center?" "Why should I have?" she asked. "You've gobbled everything. You've suppressed everything. You've held off progress. You've turned the people into clods. There still are governments, but they are shadow governments that jump at your slightest hint. And against all this you plead that you offer something, and you do offer something, but do you have to place so high a price on it?"
"All right," he said. "If your phones are tapped and we removed the taps and if we called off what you call our bloodhounds, what more would you want?"
"You won't, of course," said Ann, "do any of these things. But if you did, there'd still be one further thing you could do for me. You could tell me why."
"Miss Harrison," said Appleton, "I'll be as frank with you as you have been with me. If we've paid you any undue attention it's because. we're very curious concerning your relationship with Daniel Frost."
"I have no relationship with him. I saw him only once."
"You did go to visit him?"
"I went to ask his help for a client of mine."
"For this Franklin Chapman?"
"When you talk of Franklin Chapman, I wish you'd change your tone of voice. The man was convicted under an obsolete and vicious law that is a part of this terrible reign of frantic desperation Forever Center has imposed upon the world."
"You asked Frost's help for Chapman?"
She nodded. "He told me there was nothing he could do, but that if ever, in the future, there was some way to help my client he would do it."
"Then Frost is not your client."
"He is not," she said.
"He gave you a paper."
"He gave me an envelope. It was sealed. I don't know if anything was in it."
"And he still is not your client?"
"Mr. Appleton, as one human being, he entrusted me, another human being, with an envelope. That is quite a simple matter. It need not become involved in legal complications."
"Where is that envelope?"
"Why," said Ann, in some surprise, "I thought perhaps you had it. Some of your men went through my office very thoroughly. Also my apartment. I had thought of course, you'd found it. If you haven't got it, I can't imagine where it is."
Appleton sat quietly behind his desk, staring at her, so still that even his eyelids didn't move.
"Miss Harrison," he finally said, "you are the coolest customer I have ever met."
"I walk into lions' dens," said Ann. "I'm not afraid of lions."
Appleton idly flipped a hand. "You and I," he said, "talk a common language. You came to make a deal."
"I came," she said, "to get you off my neck."
"The envelope," he said, "and Frost is reinstated."
"His sentence reversed," she said, bitterly. "The tattoos removed. His estate and job restored. His memories wiped away and the rumors stilled."
He nodded. "We could talk about it."
"Why, how wonderful of you," she said. "When you could kill him just as easily."
"Miss Harrison," he said sadly, "you must think that we are monsters."
"Of course I do," she said.
"The envelope?" he asked.
"I imagine that you have it."
"And if we don't?"
"Then I don't know where it is. And all of this is pointless, anyhow. I didn't come here to make what you call a deal."