"I've been using it," she said. "I didn't think anyone would mind."
"I'm sure no one will," he said.
"You look as if you could use some food yourself," she told him, "and some rest."
"There is something, ma'am," he said, "that I have to tell you. I'm an osty. I've been ostracized and I'm not supposed to talk with anyone and no one is supposed…"
She lifted a hand. "I know what ostracism is. There's no need to explain."
"What I mean to say is, it's only fair to tell you. You can't tell in bad light. I let my beard grow and it hides the worst of the marks. I'll stick around and help you with the man if you want me to and then I'll get out I don't want to get you into any sort of trouble."
"Young man," she said, "ostracism doesn't mean a thing to me.-I doubt it does to anyone out here in the wilderness." "But I don't want…"
"And if you're ostracized and not supposed to have anything to do with anyone, why did you bother with this man?"
"I couldn't leave him there. I couldn't let him die." "You could," she said. "Ostracized, he was no concern of yours." "But ma'am…"
"I've seen you somewhere before," she said. "Without the beard. I thought so the first time I saw your face in the candlelight, but…"
"I don't think you did," he said. "My name is Daniel Frost and…"
"Daniel Frost, of Forever Center?" "That is right. But how…"
"The radio," she told him. "I have a radio and I listen to the news. They said you'd disappeared. They said there'd been some sort of scandal. They never said you'd been ostracized. Later there was an item about some murder and… but I know now where I saw you. It was at the New Year's party just a year ago." "The New Year's party?" "The one at Forever Center in New York. You may not remember me. We were not introduced. I was with the Timesearch project."
"Timesearch!" he almost shouted. For he knew now who this woman was. The one who B.J. said must be found, the one who'd disappeared.
"I'm glad to finally meet you, Daniel Frost," she said. "My name is Mona Campbell."
33
Ann Harrison knew now that once again she had wandered into a dead-end road, but there was little she could do about it except to go on until she found a place she could turn the car around. Then she would retrace her way and try for another road that would lead her west.
Once, long ago, the roads had been numbered and well marked and there had been maps available at any service station. But now the road markers had mostly disappeared and there were no service stations. With cars powered by longlife storage batteries, there was no longer any need of service stations.
Out here in the wilderness it was a matter of making out the best one could, ferreting out the roads that would take one where he wished to go, making many wrong turnings, backtracking to find another way-some days making only a few miles on one's route and seldom being sure of where one really was. Occasionally there were people who could be asked, occasionally there were towns that could be identified. But other than this, it was a matter of good guessing.
The day was warm and the heavy growth that grew close against the road to make a tunnel of it trapped and held the heat. Even with the windows open, it was hard to breathe.
The road had grown narrower in the last mile or so and now was little more than a dugout sliced into the hillside. To the right the hill rose steeply, dense and thick with trees and underbrush, with gray boulders, splotched with moss, poking from the leaf-covered earth beneath the trees. To the left the ground sloped sharply away, studded with boulders and with trees.
Ann made a bargain with herself. If, within another five minutes of driving she did not find a place to turn around, she would back the car to the fork she had taken several miles back. But it would be slow work and perhaps even hazardous because of the narrowness of the track, and she didn't want to do it unless it was necessary.
Ahead of the car tree branches arched and met to make the road a tunnel and some of the branches, drooping low, or leaning out from the side of the road, brushed against the car.
She saw the nest too late, and even seeing it, did not recognize it for what it was. It was a gray ball that looked like a wad of dirty paper hanging from one of the branches that scraped, at windshield height, against the side of the car.
It scraped around the windshield post and bounced suddenly into the open window and as it swung it erupted in a blur of buzzing insects.
And in that instant Ann recognized the wadded ball of paper-a wasp nest.
The insects exploded in her face and swarmed into her hair. She screamed and threw up her hands to fight them off. The car lurched and seemed to stagger, then plunged off the road. It smashed into one tree, bounced off, slammed into a boulder and caromed around it, finally came to rest, still upright, its rear end wedged between two trees.
Ann found a door handle and pushed down on it. The door came open and she threw herself out, rolling off the edge of the seat and hitting the ground. She scrambled to her feet and ran, wildly, blindly. She slapped at her face and neck. She tripped and fell and rolled, was brought up by a fallen tree trunk.
One wasp was crawling on her forehead, another buzzed angrily in her hair. There were two painful, burning areas on the back of her neck and another on her cheek.
The wasp on her forehead flew away. Slowly she sat up and shook her head. The buzzing ceased. That wasp, too, apparently was gone.
She pulled herself to her feet, became aware of many bruises and abrasions and a few more stings. There was a muted throbbing in one ankle. She sat down carefully on the fallen tree trunk and beneath her weight rotted wood crumbled and fell away, dropping to the forest floor.
Around her the wilderness was black and gray and green—and the silence green as well. Nothing stirred. It waited. It crouched and was sure of itself. It did not care.
She felt the mental scream rise in her brain and fought it down. This was no time, she told herself, to give way to nerves. The thing to do was to stay for a moment on this log and get her thoughts together, to make assessment of the situation and then go up the hill and see what shape the car was in. Although she was sure that the car, even if it were in operating order, would not, under its own power, pull itself back onto the road. Cars were built for city streets, not for terrain such as this.
It had been foolish to start out, of course. This was a trip she never should have tried. She had started, she remembered, driven by two motives—the need to escape the surveillance by Forever Center and in the faint belief that she knew where Daniel Frost might be. And why Daniel Frost? she asked herself. A man she had seen but once, a man she had cooked a dinner for and eaten with at a table set with candles and red roses. A man she had found easy to talk with. A man who had promised help even when he knew that he had no help to give, even when he faced some terrible danger of his own. And a man who had said he spent his boyhood summers at a farm near Bridgeport in Wisconsin.
And a man who later had been made a pariah.
Lost dogs, she thought, and homeless cats—although there were no longer many dogs or cats. And lost causes. She was a sucker for lost causes, an inevitable and unremitting champion of misfortune. And what had it gotten her?
It had gotten her this, she thought. Here in the depths of an unknown woods, on a dead-end, dying road, hundreds of miles from anywhere or anyone who counted — bee-stung and bruised and something wrong with one ankle and a complete damn fool.
She pulled herself erect and stood for a moment, testing the ankle. While there was some pain, she found that it would support her.
She walked slowly up the hill. Her feet sank into the black loam carpeted by the dead leaves which represented the falls of many years. She dodged around boulders and, reaching out, grasped at saplings and hanging branches to help herself along.