it was the only fair way, for you couldn't put a pric «on extended life. But it makes the chore of revival so much harder and I hate to think of the economic chaos." "It'll be worked out," she said. "It has to be. As you say, it is only fair. You can't have immortality onlv for those who can afford to pay for it."
"But think of India," he said. "Think of Africa and China. People who even now can't earn a decent living, kept from starving by world relief programs. Not a dim, to lay away. Not a cent invested. They'll be revived into a world that, for them, will be no better than this life they know right now. They still will face starvation; they still will stand in line for food handouts. All the social security program gives them is their shot at immortality. It gives them nothing more."
"It's better than death," she said. "It's better than an end to everything."
"I suppose it is," he said.
She glanced at her watch. "I'm sorry," she said, "but it is time to go. It's way past time, in fact. I don't know when I've enjoyed an evening quite so much." "I wish you'd stay a little longer." She shook her head and rose from the table. "I never intended to stay at all. But I am glad I did. I'm glad it worked out the way it did."
"Some other time, perhaps," he suggested. "I could phone you."
"That would be nice of you." "I'll see you home." "I have my car downstairs." "Ann, there's one thing more." Half turned toward the door, she hesitated. "I've been thinking," he said. "You're an attorney. I may have need of one. Would you represent me?"
She turned to face him, half puzzled, half laughing.
"What earthly need would you have of an attorney?"
"I don't know," he said. "I may not really need one.
But I think I have a certain paper. I have a bunch of papers. I'm almost certain it's among them. But I have a feeling it might be better if I didn't look, if I didn't know"
"Dan," she asked, "what in the world are you trying to say?" "I'm not quite sure. You see, I have this paper, or I think I have it."
"Well, what's so great about it? What kind of paper is it?"
"I don't know what kind of paper. Just a note, a memo. But I shouldn't have it. It doesn't belong to me,"
"Get rid of it," she told him. "Burn it. There's no need…"
"No!" he protested. "No, 1 can't do that. It might be important."
"Certainly you must know what is written on it. You must know.."
He shook his head. "I looked at it when it first fell into my hands, but I didn't understand it then. And now I've forgotten what was written on it. At first it didn't seem important…"
"But now it does," she said.
He nodded. "Maybe. I don't know."
"And you don't want to know."
"I guess that's it," he said.
She crinkled up her face at him, half humorously, half seriously. "I can't see how I fit into this."
"I thought that if I took all the papers, the bundle that I spoke of, and put them in an envelope and gave the envelope to you, ,"
"As your attorney?"
He nodded miserably.
She hesitated. "Would I know more about that particular piece of paper? Would you tell me more?"
"I don't think I should," he said. "I wouldn't want to implicate you. I have the papers in my pocket. I was looking for this certain paper—to be sure I had it. I found a bunch of papers I'd taken out of my other suit when you arrived. So I stuffed the papers in my pocket…"
"You were afraid someone was coming to take the paper from you."
"Yes. Something like that. I don't know what I thought, But now I realize that perhaps it would be better if I didn't know what was in the paper or even where it was."
"I'm not too sure," she said, "of either the ethics or legality."
"I understand," he said. "It was a bad idea. Let's forget about it."
"Dan," she said.
"Yes."
"I asked you a favor."
"And I couldn't do it."
"You will when you can."
"Don't count on me. The chances are…"
"You're in trouble, Dan."
"Not yet. I suppose I could be. You used poor judgment. You came to the one man the least likely to be of help to you."
"I don't think so," she said. "I'll gamble on you. Now, let's get that envelope, ,"
15
Amos Hicklin picked up another short length of wood and placed it on the fire. The fire was a woodsman's fire, small and neat.
Supper was finished and the frying pan and coffeepot had been washed at the edge of the moon-burnished river, with a handful of sand serving for the soap. And now was the time, with the darkness settling in, for a man to prop himself against a tree trunk and smoke a pipe as it should be smoked, slowly and leisurely, giving space for thought.
From a wooded hollow a lone whippoorwill took up its evening song, a plaintive questioning call that had something otherworldly in it. Out in the river a fish splashed loudly as it leaped out of the water to snare an insect that had skimmed the water's surface.
Hicklin reached out to his tidy woodpile and picked up two more sticks and placed them carefully on the fire. Then he settled back against his tree trunk and took from his shirt pocket his pipe and tobacco pouch.
This wTas good, he thought—June and pleasant weather, moon shining on the river, an old whippoorwill chunking up the hollow, and the mosquitoes not too bad.
And tomorrow, maybe…
It was a crazy place, he thought, for a man to hide a treasure, on an island in a river. A risky place to hide anything of value, for any fool should know what could happen to an island.
Yet it made a zany sort of sense. The man had been on the lam and was very nearly trapped and he had to hide the stuff any way, or any place, he could. And it had the added advantage of being one of the last places in the world where anyone ever would suspect a treasure had been hidden. For the islands here were little more than sandbars which in the course of time had been overgrown by shallow-rooted willows. They might exist for years or they might vanish in a night, for this was a treacherous river, with shifting currents and changing undertow's.
It well might be a wild goose chase, Hicklin knew, but the stakes were large and he was losing nothing but a year or so of time. A year of time against, roughly estimated, a cool one million dollars.
Jade, he thought. What a crazy thing to steal!
For in the day that it had been stolen there'd have been little chance of getting rid of it—unique museum pieces which would be recognized almost anywhere as stolen offerings.
Yet, perhaps, Steven Furness had never meant to sell it. There was such a thing, perhaps, as falling so in love with beauty that he'd want it for his own. Working for years in the museum, he may have resented, in his twisted mind, pieces of such loveliness suffering exposure to the vulgar public gaze.
He had almost made it. If he had not been recognized in that backwoods crossroad eating place by some farm kid who had seen his picture in a paper, on that day almost two hundred years ago, he would have got away with it. And in a sense, he had got away with it, for he'd not been captured, but had lived out his life, an old, white-haired, doddering man who had scraped out a precarious existence by performing |obs, all highly questionable, in the dives of New Orleans.
Hicklin sat in the night, his legs stretched straight out in front of him, puffing slowly at his pipe, the Bicker of the campfire making light and shadow on his face. A howling wilderness, he thought. All this land, farmed for so long, gone back to wilderness. For there was now no use of land except for living space and the population which had at one time made a living off the land now was congregated where jobs were, in the great metropolitan centers, squeezed together in little rooms and flats, living in another wilderness of the human animal. The entire Eastern seaboard, one vast sea of humans, living cheek by jowl; Chicago, the vast Midwest megalopolis clustered around Lake Michigan as far north as old Green Bay and swinging deep around the eastern shore; and the several other centers of massive populations, great islands of jammed humanity growing ever bigger.