Frost had risen, too. He took a step and someone bumped into him, driving him backward in an awkward stumble. And then he felt the floor give way beneath his feet with the faint popping and snapping of long-rotten boards and he was plunging downward. He threw out his arms instinctively, clutching for any support that he might find. The fingers of his left hand closed upon the end of a broken board, but even as he grasped it, the weight of his falling body snapped it and he was through the floor and faffing.
His body landed with a splash and evil-smelling water rose in a sheet and slapped him in the face.
The fall had thrown him forward and now he raised himself so that he squatted in the foulness that was all about him—the darkness and the foulness a part of one another.
He twisted about and glanced up and he could not see the hole through which he'd fallen, but from the floor above him came the thud of running feet and the sound of distant voices, drawing rapidly away.
New thuddings came and new voices, very sharp and angry, and the splintering of boards as someone broke a door. Feet pounded once again on the floor above him and thin beams of light danced across the hole where he had fallen.
Fearful that someone would flash a light directly down the hole and catch him in its beam, he moved slowly forward, water swirling at his ankles.
The feet pounded back and forth and ran into far rooms and returned again and snatches of voices floated down to him.
"Got away again," one voice said. "Someone tipped them off."
"Pretty dismal," said another. "Just the kind of place you would expect…"
And then another voice, and at the sound of it, Frost stiffened and took another involuntary step farther from the hole in the floor above.
"Men," said the voice of Marcus Appleton, "we missed them once again. There'll be another day."
Other voices answered, but the words were indistinct.
"I'll get those sons of bitches," said Marcus Appleton, "if it's the last thing that I do."
The voices and the footsteps moved away and in a little time were gone.
Silence fell, broken only by the slow drip of water falling from some place into the pool in which Frost stood.
A tunnel of some sort, he guessed. Or perhaps a subbasement flooded by seepage from the river.
Now the problem was to get out of here. Although without a light of any sort that might not be easy. And the one way to do it was to try to get out the way he had come in, through the hole in the floor above.
He reached above his head and his fingers touched the rough surface of a beam. He stood on tiptoe and stretched and he could touch the floor above. But he would have to move slowly and try to maintain some sort of orientation, for the place was in utter darkness and his fingers were his eyes.
Slowly he worked his way along and finally found the hole. Now he'd have to jump for it and grab hold of the rotten boards and hope that they would support his weight so he could pull himself into the room above. Once there, he told himself, he'd be safe for a time at least, for Appleton and his men would not be coming back. Neither would the Holies. He would be on his own.
He stood for a moment to catch his breath and suddenly, from all around him, rose a squeaking and a scurrying, the rush of tiny feet, the slithering of bodies rushing through the dark, and the angry squealing of ravening creatures driven by a desperate hunger.
His scalp tightened and it seemed that his hair rose upon his head.
Rats! Rats rushing at him through the dark! Fear powered his muscles and he leaped, driving himself chest high through the hole. Scrambling and kicking, he pulled himself clear and lay panting on the floor.
Underneath him the squeaking and the squealing rose in a wave, then slowly died away.
Frost still lay upon the floor and after a time the trembling stopped and the sweat dried on his body and he got to his hands and knees and crawled until he found a corner and there he huddled against the terror and the loneliness of the new life that he faced.
21
Godfrey Cartwright leaned far back in his padded chair and clasped his hands behind his head. It was the position he assumed when he was about to discuss some weighty matters, but wanted to seem casual in his discussion of them.
"The way I see it," he said, "something queered the deal. No publisher before ever offered the kind of money that I did, and even a stuffed shirt like Frost would have grabbed it if he thought he had a chance of not getting caught at it. But now Frost has disappeared and Joe Gibbons is nowhere to be found. Maybe Appleton had a hand in it. It would have to be someone like Appleton, for there are just a few in Forever Center who know that censorship is being carried on. And if Appleton found out, he's not a man to fool with."
"Tfou mean," said Harris Hastings, plaintively, "that you won't put out my book."
Cartwright stared at him. "Why, bless you, man," he said, "we never said we would."
Hastings squirmed in his chair. He was an unprepossessing sight. His head was round and hairless, looking somewhat like a naked sphere with a face upon it. He wore thick glasses and he squinted. His billiard-ball head rode thrust forward on his shoulders and this, tied in with the squint, gave him the appearance of a man who was more than a bit befuddled, but trying very hard to understand.
"But you said…"
"I said," Cartwright told him, "that I thought your book would sell. I said that if it could be published we'd make a mint of money on it. But I also told you that I had to be sure, before any more was done, that we could get it before the public. I didn't want to run the chance of Frost finding out about it when we had a lot of money in it and then bringing pressure on us. Once we had it published and up for sale, why, then, of course, Frost couldn't do a thing, for if he tried there'd be a public uproar and a public uproar is the one thing Forever Center doesn't want." "But you told me.." Hastings said again. "I told you, sure," said Cartwright, "but we haven't got a contract and the deal is dead. I told you] couldn't give you one until I saw if I could make a deal with Frost. I couldn't take the chance. Frost had a lot of snoopers and I can tell you they were good. Joe Gibbons is one of the best of them and Joe has always made a sort of specialty of us and some half dozen other houses. He kept close tab on us; he had pipelines into us. I don't know who it was. If I had known who I'd have canned them long ago. But the point is that we couldn't have made a move without Joe finding out about it and he did find out about it, just the way I knew he would. The only thing that I could do was try to make a deal. I don't mind telling you that your book was one of the few I ever tried to make a deal to publish."
"But the work," Hastings said, in anguish. "The work I put into it. I put twenty years in it. Do you realize what twenty years of research and writing means? I put my Me into it, I tell you. I made a Me of it. I sold my life for it."
Cartwright said, easily, "You believe it, don't you-this stuff that you wrote."
"Of course I believe it," Hastings exploded. "Can't you see that it's the truth? I searched the records and I know it is the truth. The circumstantial evidence is there for anyone to see. This plan, this Me continuation, this whatever you may call it, is the greatest hoax that ever has been played upon the human race. Its purpose was not, it never was, what it purports to be. It was, instead, a last and desperate measure to bring an end to war. For if you could make people believe that their bodies could be preserved and later be revived, who would go to war—what man would fight in any war? What government or nation would dare become involved in war? For the victims of a war could not hope for preservation of their bodies. In many cases there'd be very little of the bodies to preserve. In cases where there was, facilities for the retrieval and preservation of those bodies could not operate.