"You have a couple of appointments. Not important. I can cancel them."
"If you would," he said.
"There may be a confidential file."
"Put it in the safe."
"But they don't like…"
"I know. It should be checked at once and…"
And that was it! he thought.
That was the answer to what Appleton had done.
It was simply something he had not thought about.
"Mr. Frost, is there something wrong?"
"No, not a thing. If a confidential file shows up, just put it in the safe. I'll tend to it, come morning."
"Very well," she said, a little stiffly to express her disapproval.
She swung about and went into the outer office.
He sat limply at his desk, remembering that day three months or so ago—when the messenger boy had somehow left, instead of his own confidential file, the one that should have gone to Peter Lane, and how he had opened it without looking at the name.
He had taken it back, personally, and explained to Lane and it had seemed to be all right. The messenger
boy had been fired, of course, but that was all that happened. It had been a mistake, a grave mistake, on the part of the messenger, and he had deserved the firing. But as between himself and Lane it had seemed the matter was forgotten.
Except, Frost told himself, it had not been forgotten, for there'd been the missing paper, the one that had slipped out of the envelope when he had opened it and which he had found, when he returned, on the floor beside his desk.
He remembered now, standing with the paper in his hand, knowing he should take it back to Lane. But if he took it back it would require another explanation and it would be embarrassing, and the paper did not seem to be of any great importance. Which was the case, he told himself, of half the stuff that went shuttling back and forth in the confidential files.
Some unremembered official, full of pomposity and with a penchant for cloak and dagger games, had started the system many years ago and it had been carried on and on, another of the moldy old traditions of the office routine. Some of it, of course, was of a confidential nature, or at least semi-confidential, but the rest of it was simply inter-office matters with no need of secrecy attached.
So to avoid the embarrassment of another explanation, he had simply chucked the paper in a desk drawer and had forgotten it, knowing that if it had no more value than it seemed to have it would not be missed.
But he had made the wrong decision. Or it seemed so now.
And if what Appleton had done this morning was tied to the missing paper, then it was not only Apple-ton, but Lane involved as well.
He jerked open the center desk drawer and searched through the papers and the other junk and the paper was not there.
If he could only remember what was written on it! Something about putting something on some sort of list.
He wrinkled his brow, trying to remember. But the details still stayed fuzzy.
He searched the other drawers and there was no paper.
And that was how they'd known, he thought.
Someone had searched his desk and found it!
7
The agent waved his arm at the tangle of underbrush and swamp.
"Twenty acres of it," he said. "And at the price we're asking, the best kind of investment that anyone can make. I tell you, friends, there is no better place you can put your money. In a hundred years it will bring ten times the price. In a thousand, if you could hang onto it that long, you'd be billionaires."
"But it's just a swamp," the woman said. "No one would ever want to build there and it can't be…"
"You're buying it today," the agent told her, "at so much an acre. Sell it a couple of hundred years from now and you'll be selling it at so much the foot. Just take the number of people there will be in the world by that time and compare their numbers to the total land area and you'll see what I mean. Once they get immortality and begin revivals…"
"But they won't need the land," the woman's husband said. "Once they get time travel, they'll send people back a million years to colonize the land, and when the land back there is filled, they'll send them back two million and…"
"Now, I tell you honestly," said the salesman, "I wouldn't count on that. There are a lot of people who have their doubts about time travel. Forever Center
can get it, certainly, if it is possible, but if it's impossible, they won't get it. And if time travel is impossible, then this land will be worth a fortune. It doesn't matter that it's a little swampy. The human race will need every foot of land there is upon the earth. There'll come a time, perhaps, when the earth will be just one big building and…"
"But there's space travel, too," the woman said. "All those planets out there…"
"Madame," said the salesman, "let's be realistic for a moment. They've been out there for a hundred years or more and they have found no planets that a man could live on. Planets, of course, but nothing that anyone could live on without terraforming and terraforming takes a lot of time and money."
"Well, I don't know," the woman said. "This piece of swamp seems an awful gamble."
"Yes, it does," her husband said. "We just thought we'd look into it. We have been putting most of our money into stamps and we thought it might be a good idea to start spreading it around a little."
"Not that we have so awful much of it," the woman said. "Of money, I mean."
"Well, now, it's this way," said the salesman, smoothly. "I'll agree that stamps may be a good investment. But how do you go about establishing title to them? Sure, you've got them and you put them away in a safety deposit vault or something of the sort. And then, after you're revived, you go and get them and you probably can sell them at a likely profit. But a lot of people are buying stamps. The market might be glutted. Collecting stamps may not be done any more when you are revived, for hobbies go in cycles. You might not get as much as you'd figured. You might, even, not be able to sell them at all. And if something had happened to them, how do you get them back? Say they were stolen, somehow. Even if you knew the one who'd took them and even if he still had them, how could you j prove that they were yours? How could you recover |
them? There isn't any way to establish title to a stamp collection. And what if time had ruined them? What if they'd gotten damp or bacteria had got to work on them or any one of a dozen other things had happened? What have you got then? I tell you, folks. You've got nothing. Absolutely nothing."
"That is right," the husband said. "I never thought of that. But the land would still be here and you'd have legal title."
"That's right," said the agent. "And to protect it through the years, all that you have to do is open an account with Forever Center and give us the right to draw on it to pay the taxes (which won't amount to much) or to cover other costs necessary to protect the title.
"You see," he said, "it's very simple. We have it all worked out…"
"But," the woman said, "if it were only better land. If it weren't swamp."
"Now, I tell you," said the agent, "it doesn't make a bit of difference if it is swamp or not. In time to come, the world will need every foot of land. If not in a hundred years, then in a thousand. And if you want to, you can specify that you're to sleep a thousand years. Forever Center is glad to make that kind of stipulation. It will take them, probably, several hundred years, in any case, to just catch up when they start reviving people."
8
The stamps had been from Switzerland and that meant the park bench in downtown Manhattan, and the time, penciled on the card, had been 1.30.