B.J. said to Frost, "You'll be coming back with us?"
Frost hesitated. "Why, I don't know…"
"The marks can be removed," said B.J. There'll be an official announcement that will give you full credit for all that you have done. Your job is waiting for you. We have evidence that the trial and sentence was irregular and arranged by Marcus. And I would presume that Forever Center may find a means to show, in somewhat substantial manner, its gratitude for the interception of the paper.."
"But I didn't intercept it."
"Now, now," said B.J., reprovingly, "don't try to quibble with me. Miss Harrison informed us fully. She was the one who brought it to us, with the proof of what it was. Forever owes the two of you a debt it never can repay."
He turned abruptly and walked toward the helicopter.
"It was not really me," said Ann, "although I can't tell him who it was. It was George Sutton. He was the one who figured it all out, who ran it down and got the facts."
"Wait a minute, there," said Frost. "George Sutton? I don't know…"
"Yes, you do," she said. "The man who took you off the street that night. The Holy. The old gentleman who asked you if you believed in God."
"Dan!" B.J. had turned back toward them when he reached the foot of the stairs leading to the cabin.
"Yes, B.J."
"Marcus came out here hunting Mona Campbell. Said he had good evidence he would find her out here. Said an old farmhouse. I imagine it might have been this one."
"That is what he told me," Frost said evenly. "He seemed to think that I knew about her."
"And did you?"
Frost shook his head. "Not a thing," he said.
"Well," said B.J., "another wild goose chase. One of these days we'll catch up with her."
He went heavily up the steps.
"Just think," said Ann, "you'll be coming back. I can cook another dinner for you."
"And I," said Frost, "will go out and buy red roses and some candles."
He was remembering once again the warmth and comfort and the sense of Me this woman could lend to a dowdy room—remembering, too, how the emptiness and bitterness of life had faded in her presence and how there had been companionship and friendliness such as he'd never known before.
Love? he wondered. Was this love? How was a man to know? In this first Me that man lived there was scarcely time for love—nor the time, perhaps, to find out what it was. And would there be time in the second life? Time, surely, for there'd be all the time there was, but would one carry over into that infinitude of time the same sense of economic desperation, the same bleak materialism as he had held in the first Me that he lived? Would he be a different man or the same as he had been—would the first Me have set the pattern for all Me yet to come?
She had turned her face to him and he saw her cheek was wet with tears. "It will be the same," she said.
"Yes," he promised. "It will be the same."
Although, he knew, it could not be the same. The earth would never be quite the same again. Mona Campbell had found a truth that she might never speak, but in a few years more there would be others who would find it and then the world would know. And once again the world would know the agony of conscience. Then the old solid certainty and the smug complacency would be riddled and Forever Center would have a rival in its promise—and this other promise would be one of mystery and faith, and once again the world of men would be ground between the millstones of opinion.
"Dan," said Ann, "please kiss me and then let us get aboard. B.J. will wonder what has happened to us."
37
The man sat beside the road and stared into distance, but his eyes, one knew, saw nothing, and yet they were not empty eyes.
He wore only a pair of trousers, cut off well above the knees. His hair was long and hung down about his face. His beard was tangled and was full of sand. He was gaunt and his skin burned black by the sun.
Mona Campbell stopped her car and got out of it and stood, for a moment, watching him. There was no sign that he was aware of her and her heart welled up with pity at the sight of him, for there was about him a lostness and an emptiness that robbed existence of all meaning.
"Is there anything," she asked, "that I can do for you?"
His eyes changed at the sound of her voice. His head moved slightly and the eyes stared out at her.
"What is wrong?" she asked.
"What is wrong?" he asked, his voice rising sharply on the question. "What is right? Can you tell what's wrong or right?"
"Sometimes," she said. "Not always. The line is often fine."
"If I had stayed," he said. "If I had prayed a little harder. If I had dug the deep hole and put up the cross. But it was no use…"
His voice trailed off into nothingness and his eyes once again stared off into a distance where there was nothing one might see.
She noticed then, for the first time, the sack that lay on the ground beside him, apparently made out of material he'd ripped off his trouser legs. It lay half open and inside it she saw the jumbled figures of the carven jade.
"Are you hungry?" she asked. "Are you ill? You're quite sure there's nothing I can do?"
It was insane, she thought, that she should have stopped, that she should be standing in this road talking to this lost and empty man.
He stirred slightly. His lips began to open, as if he meant to speak, then pressed tight again.
"If there's nothing I can do," she said, Til be moving on."
She turned back to the car.
"Wait," he said.
She turned back.
The stricken eyes were staring at her.
"Tell me," asked the man, "is there such a thing as truth?"
It was not an idle question. She sensed that it was not.
"I think there is," she said. "There's truth in mathematics."
"I asked for truth," he said, "and all I got were these."
His foot thrust out and kicked the bag. The jade lay scattered on the grass.
"Is that the way it always is?" he asked. "You hunt for truth and you get a booby prize. You find something that is not the truth, but take it because it is better than finding nothing."
She backed away. The man was plainly mad.
"That jade," she said. "There was another man who was hunting for the jade."
"You don't understand," he said.
She shook her head, anxious to be off.
"You said there was truth in mathematics. Is God a page of math?"
"I wouldn't know," she said. "I only stopped to see if I could help you."
"You can't," he said. "You can't help yourself. We had it once—that help of which all of us stand in need— and we lost it somewhere. There's no way to get it back. I know, because I tried."
"There may be a way," she told him softly. "There is an equation from a long forgotten planet…"
He half rose and his voice cracked and shrieked. "No way, I tell you. No wayl There was never more than one way and now it doesn't work."
She turned and fled. At the car she stopped and turned back toward him. He had slumped down again, but his eyes still stared at her, with a terrible horror in them.
She tried to speak, but the words clogged in her throat.
And across the space between them, he whispered at her, as if it may have been a secret that he meant to tell her.
"We have been abandoned," the ghastly whisper said. "God has turned His back on us."