He lived and slept and walked and ate what the man at the restaurant left for him by the garbage cans-a half a loaf of stale bread, the trimmings from a roast, a roll, a dried-out piece of pie, and many other things. Now at times he stood in the alley, waiting, not bothering to hide, until the man put the bundle out, then raised his arm in greeting and in gratitude, and the man would wave back at him. No word and no approach, never more than this wave of greeting, this semaphoring of a common brotherhood, but it seemed to Frost that the man still was known to him and that he was a long-time friend.
Once Frost started on a pilgrimage, heading back toward the neighborhood where he once had lived, but still blocks away from it he had turned around and returned to the alley where he now resided. For halfway there, he had realized that there was nothing for him to go back to, that he had left there nothing of himself. In the entry hall his name now would be replaced upon the board by another name, and another car, exactly like his car (for all cars were alike), would be parked with a row of identical cars, their noses pressed against the blank brick wall back of the apartment house. But his car would be gone, hauled away long days before under confiscatory order. And the building itself meant no more to him than the ramshackle building, the basement of which he occupied. For now the basement was his home. In this age, he knew, any hole was home.
Back in his, basement he sat in the dark and tried once again to think his situation through, trying to marshal the factors into neat progression, hoping to find in all those straightly aligned facets of the position in which he found himself some road along which he most logically should move. But it was a road he had not found as yet and the picket fence of facts spelled nothing but a dead end.
It was no better this time. He was trapped and there was no road but one, that last, desperate, bitter road into the vaults where his body would be stored. That road he would not take until he was forced to take it. For, as things stood now, if he went into the vaults, he would come out of them a pauper, no better equipped to deal with his second Me than the tribesman in Central Africa, no better than the peon from South America, on the selfsame basis as the man who slept in the streets of India. If he stayed alive, perhaps somewhere, somehow—when or how he could not guess—he might stumble onto some opportunity or some situation which might yield a competence, perhaps a very modest one, but at least something upon which he could start his second Me.
Perhaps he would not be able to live the kind of Me the really wealthy ones would live, would not belong among the billionaires. But at least he would not stand in bread Mies or shiver in the street for the lack of shelter. In the kind of world one would waken into, it would be better to be dead than poor.
He shuddered as he thought of what it would be like to be poor in that glittering world of wealth, in that world where men would wake and find their savings many times increased. And wealth such as this would be solid wealth, for it would represent the very earth itself. By the time that the stockholders of Forever Center came back to second life every facility and every material thing upon the entire planet would be represented in that stock. The men who held the stock, with prudence of any kind at all, would go on being rich. And the man who held none of the stock would never have a chance; he would be condemned to remain a pauper through all eternity.
Thinking of it, he knew that for that reason, if no other, he could never think of going to the vaults.
And he would not go to the vaults for another reason. It was the thing that Marcus Appleton had expected him to do.
Looking down the avenue of time, he saw the endless days stretching interminably ahead, like so many trees that lined the avenue. But there was no other road, no other way that he could go other than this blind and endless avenue leading on to nowhere.
He slept away the day and in the evening set out on his prowling once again.
Night had fallen when he walked into the alley to pick up the package beside the garbage can. The package was not there and he knew from this that he had arrived too early. The man had not come out yet.
He retired to the dark angle of a wall that jutted out farther in the alley than the next adjoining wall and hunkered down to wait.
A cat came padding softly in the shadow, alert and anxious. It halted and stared at Frost, crouching in his angle. Apparently deciding that he was no danger to it, the cat sat down and began to wash its face.
Then the back door of the restaurant opened and a shaft of light speared out into the night. The man came out, his white coat shining in the light, a basket of garbage resting on his right hip and clutched by his right hand, a package in his left.
Frost rose and took a step out toward the alley. A flat report smote against the lane of walls and the man in white straightened in a spasm, his head thrown back, his body tensed and straining. The basket dropped and spun slowly on its bottom rim, spilling the dark litter of the garbage.
Frost caught one glimpse of the man's face, in the second before the body crumpled—a white blur with a spreading darkness on it, running from the hairline.
The white-coated man was down, huddled on the pavement, and the basket, still spinning, came to a stop when it rolled against his body.
Frost took another step out toward the alley, then stopped, poised and tensed.
The cat was gone. Nothing stirred. There was no shout, no footstep.
Frost's brain screamed at him: A trap!
A man dead in the alley, gunned down, more than likely with brain damage (darkness sluicing down his face) that would rule out any possibility of a second life.
A man dead in the alley and he waiting in the alley, and, Frost was very sure, a gun that could be found.
This was death for him, he knew. No longer ostracism, but final death—not normal death, but the terminal cancellation that did away with life. For a man who would kill, in cold blood, a man who had befriended him could expect nothing else but death.
And it would make no difference that he hadn't killed the man—no more difference than it had made that he'd not committed treason.
He spun around and stared at the walls.
Both of them were brick, the buildings two stories high, thirty feet or so. But on the one that was farther back from the alley apparently there once had been a shed extending out over the back door. The shed was no longer there, but jutting out from the smooth brick wall was a series of half-bricks, an inverted V, which had at one time formed the support for the roof timbers of the shed.
Frost took three running strides and leaped. His fingers caught and hooked over the lower extending brick and for a breathless micro-second he feared that the brick might break or slide out of its place from the pressure of his weight. But it held and he reached quickly up with his left hand and caught the second brick and hauled himself up, with his right hand closing on the third brick, so his left could reach the fourth.
Driven by a desperate panic, he swarmed up the wall, hand over hand, his muscles powered by a strength he did not know he had, his nerves a hardened knot of urgency.
As he reached the fifth brick up, he got a foot on the lower brick and hurled himself upward in a mighty surge. His elbows caught the top of the wall and he hauled himself swiftly over it and fell flat upon the roof. A two-foot upward projection of the wall hid him from the alley.
He lay there, panting with the exertion of his climb, pressed against the asphalt of the roof, and out in the alley he heard the rapidly running footsteps and the harsh shouts of horror.
He could not stay here, he knew. He must somehow get away, not only from the roof and alley, but from this neighborhood. When they did not find him in the alley, they then would search the rooftops and the buildings on each side of the alley and by that time he must be many blocks away.