"And it may be that the ends justified the means. It may be that we cannot condemn the trickery. For war was a terrible thing. We today, who had not known war for more than a century, can not know how terrible. There was actual fear, a hundred years ago, that another major war might wipe out all human culture, if not all life, from earth. And in the light of this the hoax may be justified. But in any case, the people should be told, they should be…"
He stopped and looked at Cartwright, still propped back in his chair, with his hands behind his head. "You don't believe any of this, do you?" The publisher took his hands from behind his head and sat forward in the chair, leaning his forearms on the desk top.
"Harris," he said, earnestly, "it doesn't matter whether I believe or not. It's not my business to believe in the books I publish, beyond the one belief that they will make some money. I'd like to publish your book because I know that it would sell. You can't expect more of me than that."
"But now you say you won't publish it." Cartwright nodded. "That is right. Not won't, but can't. Forever Center wouldn't let me." "They couldn't stop you."
"No, not legally. But there can be pressure brought— not only on myself but on the stockholders and the other officers of this company. And you must not forget that Forever Center itself owns some of the stock, as it owns a part, or all, of everything upon the entire earth.
The pressure that they could bring would be unbelieva ble if you hadn't seen it. As I said, if I could have got it published and on sale, then I'd have been in the clear, It would have been Frost's error then, not mine. His neck, not mine. It would have been something that he should have caught, but didn't, something that he slipped up on. The onus of the entire thing would have been shifted off my shoulders. The only thing they could have charged me with was a piece of bad judgment and, perhaps, poor taste, and that I could have stood. But the way it is…" He made a hopeless gesture. "I could try other publishers." "Sure you could," said Cartwright. "By that I suppose you mean none of them would touch it either."
"Not with a ten-foot pole. By now the news is out—that I tried to buy off Frost and failed and now Frost is among the missing. Every publisher in town has heard about it. There are all sorts of whispers flying." "Then I'll never be published."
"I'm afraid you're right. Just go home and sit down in a chair and feel smug and comfortable that you've uncovered something that is too big for anyone to touch, that you're the only man who knows the secret, that you were astute enough to uncover a plot that no one, absolutely no one, ever had suspected." Hastings hunched his head even farther forward. "There is a trace of mockery in your words," he said, "that I'm not too sure I like. Tell me, if you will, what your version is." "My version?"
"Yes. Wat do you really think about Forever Center?" "Why," asked Cartwright, "what's so wrong in thinking that it's exactly the way they say it is?"
"Nothing, I suppose. It's the comfortable viewpoint for one to take, but it isn't true."
"Most people think it is. There's talk, of course, and rumors—you hear them everywhere. But I think most people take the talk and rumors for sheer entertainment. They talk about it and listen to it, but they really don't believe it. There's so little entertainment these days that people hang onto all that they can get. Go and read about the entertainment of two hundred years ago, or even less than that. The night life in the cities, the theater, the opera, the music. And there were sports-baseball and football and a lot of other things. And where are they all now? Strangled to death by the miserly leanings of our present culture. Pay to see a show when you can stay at home and watch TV? Hell, no! Pay to get into a ball game? Who wants to see a ball game when he can buy a share of Forever stock with what the ticket would cost? Pay fancy prices to get some entertainment when you eat? Are you crazy? When you go out to eat now, and not too many do, you go out to eat and nothing else—no frills. That's why books sell as well as they do. We keep them cheap—shoddy, but cheap. When you're through reading a book someone else can read it and after a while you can read it again yourself. But a ball game or a show, you could only see it once. That's why people are newspaper readers and book readers and TV watchers. They can get a lot of entertainment for almost next to nothing. Cheap entertainment, and much of it's cheap, believe me, but it fills up the hours. Hell, that's all we're doing—filling up the hours. Grabbing everything we can and filling up the hours, aiming everything at our second shot at life. That explains die rumors and the stories and the talk. All of it is free and the people suck it dry, get everything they can get out of it before they turn it loose."
"You," said Hastings, "should write a book, yourself." "I may," said Cartwright, contentedly. "By God, I really may. Take the hide off them and their penny-pinching lives. They'd eat it up. They'd like it. Give them stuff to talk about for months."
"You think, then, that my book…"
"That's one," said Cartwright, "that some of them might actually have believed in. You have it all annotated and documented within an inch of its very life. Impressive sort of stuff. I don't see how you did it."
"You still don't believe it," said the author, bitterly. "You have a sneaking hunch I faked it."
"Well, now," said Cartwright, "you can't say I said that. I never asked you, did I?"
He stared off into space, with a lost look on his face.
"Too bad," he said. "Too bad. We could have made a billion. I tell you, boy, no kidding, we could have made a billion."
22
Crouched in the alley, behind a pile of weather-beaten boxes that had been thrown there long ago by some small establishment which fronted on the narrow, dingy street—thrown and forgotten and never removed—Frost waited until the man came out of the back door of the hole-in-the-wall eating place and put the garbage into the cans that stood against the wall.
And when he finally came, he carried, as well as the basket full of garbage, a bundle, wrapped in newspaper, which he placed on the ground beside the cans. Then he took the lids off the cans and lifted the bundles of garbage from the heavy basket in which he carried them and put them in the cans. Having done this, he picked up the bundle he had placed beside the cans and balanced it on the lid of one of the cans. For a moment he stood, looking up and down the alley, a white-smudged figure in the darkness, outlined by the feeble glow that invaded the alley from the street. Then he picked up the basket and went back into the restaurant.
Frost rose and, moving swiftly, picked up the bundle off the can. He tucked it underneath his arm and retreated down the alley, stopping at the alley's mouth. There were a few people on the street and he waited until they had moved a bit away, then darted quickly across the street into the opposite alley.
Five blocks away, following the successive alleys, he came to the rear of a dilapidated building, small and with half the roof torn off it, as if someone at one time had started to raze it and then had figured it wasn't worth the trouble. Now it stood, sad and sagging and abandoned, fust a little farther along the road to ruin than its fellows on either side of it.