After all, he asked himself, why should God put Himself to the bother necessary to achieve such intervention? Why should He bother with him, at all? With him, one silly, stupid man when there were so many billion others. Why had he expected it? How could he have expected it? Was not the very fact he had expected it a sign of vanity, which was in itself a sin?
He reached out and picked up one of the pieces tight inside his fist and lifted it and cocked his arm to throw. Sobs shook him and his beard was soaked with tears already shed.
He cocked his arm to throw and he could not throw. His tightened fist came open and the jade slid from it and fell upon the sand.
And in that awful moment he knew that he had lost, that he was wanting in that essential capacity for humility that would unlock the gates of understanding he had sought so earnestly and, now it seemed apparent, priced at a cost too high—a cost that his basic brute humanity would never let him pay.
36
Mona Campbell had left, sometime in the night. The car was gone and there were no tire tracks in the dew-wet grass. And she would not be back, for the coat that had hung on the hook behind the kitchen door was gone and there were no other clothes. The house was bare of anything that could bear testimony she ever had been there.
Now the house seemed empty; not empty because there was no one in it, but empty in the sense that it no longer was a structure meant for human habitation. It belonged to another time, another day. Man had no further use for houses such as this, set in the midst of empty acres. Today men lived in towering blocks of masonry and steel that stood huddled in places where there was no empty ground. Man, who once had been a wanderer and at times a loner, now had joined a pack and in the days to come there would be no separate houses and no separate structures. Rather, the entire world would be a single structure and its swarming billions would live deep underground and high up in the sky. They'd live in floating cities that rode the ocean's surface and in massive domes on the ocean's floor. They'd live in great satellites that would in themselves be cities, circling out in space. And the time would come when they'd go to other planets that had been prepared for them. They'd use space wherever they could find it and they'd achieve other space when there was no more to find. And they would have to do this, for space was all they had. The dream of fleeing into time was dead. Frost stood on the porch and stared across the weed-grown, brushy wilderness that once had been a farm. The old fence row had grown into a windbreak, trees rearing tall into the sky where there had been brush and saplings when he had been a boy and came here for vacations. The fences were broken and sagging and the day was not far off when there would be no fences. And in another century, with no one to care for them or keep them in repair, the house and barn might be gone as well, disappearing gradually into a moldering pile of timbers.
Mona Campbell was gone and now he'd be going, too. Not that he had anywhere to go, but simply because there was no point in staying here. He'd go walking down the road and he'd wander aimlessly, for there would be no purpose in his going. He'd live off the land. He would manage somehow and he'd probably wander south, for in a few more months this country would grow cold and snow would fall.
Southwest, perhaps, he thought. To the desert country and the mountains, for that was a place he had often thought he would like to see.
Mona Campbell was gone and why had she gone? Because, perhaps, she feared that he might betray her in the hope he might be reinstated as a human being. Or, perhaps, because she knew now she should not have told him what she did and through the telling of it now felt that she was vulnerable.
She had fled, not to protect herself, but to protect the world. She walked the lonely road because she could not bear to let mankind know it had been wrong for almost two centuries. And because the hope she had found in the Hamal math was too poor and frail a thing to stand up against the elaborate social structure man himself had forged.
The Holies were right, he thought—as mankind itself had been right for many centuries in the faith it held. Although, he knew, the Holies would reject out of hand the evidence of life's foreverness because it held no promise of everlasting glory, nor the sound of silver trumpets.
For it promised nothing beyond life going on into eternity. It did not say what form that life would take or even if it would have a form. But it was evidence, he thought, and that was better than mere faith, for faith was never more, even at the best, than the implied hope for evidence.
Frost came down off the porch and started across the yard, toward the sagging gate. He could go anywhere he wished and he might as well get started. There was no packing to be done and no plans to make, for everything he had was the clothes upon his back—the clothes that once had belonged to a man named Amos Hicklin—and without a purpose, there was no sense in making plans.
He had reached the gate and was pulling it open when the car came down the road, breaking suddenly out of the woods that grew close up to the house.
He stood astonished, with his hand upon the gate, and the first thing that he thought was that Mona Campbell had come back, that she'd forgotten something, or had changed her mind, and was coming back again.
Then he saw there were two people in the car and that the both of them were men and by that time the car had pulled up before the gate and stopped.
A door of the car came open and one of the men stepped out.
"Dan," said Marcus Appleton, "how good to find you here. And especially when we were least expecting you."
He was affable and jolly, as if they were good friends.
"I suppose," said Frost, "I could say the same of you. There've been times I've expected you to come popping out at me, but surely not today."
"Well, that's all right," said Appleton. "Any time at all. That suits me just fine. I had not expected I'd bag the two of you."
"The two?" asked Frost. "You're talking riddles, Marcus. There is no one here but me."
The driver had gotten out of the other door and now came around the car. He was a big man and he had a face that squinted and he wore a big gun on his hip.
"Clarence," said Appleton, "go on in the house and bring out the Campbell gal."
Frost came through the gate and stood aside so Clarence could go through it. He watched the man go across the yard, climb the stairs, and enter the house. He turned around then, to face Appleton.
"Marcus," he asked, "who do you expect to find?"
Appleton grinned at him. "Don't play dumb," he said. "You must know. Mona Campbell. You remember her."
"Yes. The woman in Timesearch. The one who disappeared."
Appleton nodded. "Boys down at the sector station spotted someone living here several weeks ago. When they flew over on a rescue mission. Then, a week or so ago, the same woman they had seen here came in, bringing a snakebit man. Said she'd found him on the road. Said she was just passing through. It was dark and they didn't get too good a look at her, but it was good enough. We put two and two together."
"You flunked out," Frost told him. "There has been no one here. No one here but me."
"Dan," said Appleton, "there's the matter of a murder charge that could be filed against you. If there's something you can tell us, we might forget we found you. Let you walk away."
"Walk how far?" asked Frost. "To decent bullet range, then get me in the back?"
Appleton shook his head. "A deal's a deal," he said. "We want you, of course, but the one we came looking for, the one we really want, is Mona Campbell."
"There's nothing to tell you, Marcus," said Frost. "If there were, I'd be tempted to pick up your deal— and bet with myself whether you would keep it. But Mona Campbell's not been here. I've never seen the woman."