"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."

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.

A stairs built of stone, with a bent and rusted guardrail leading from its top, ran down into the basement.

Ducking swiftly from the alley, Frost went down the stairs. At the bottom a door, still held upright by one rusted hinge, stood propped against the jamb. By some tugging and hauling, Frost got it open, went through it into the basement, then shoved it shut again.

Having done that, he was home—a home that he had found ten days before, after a long succession of other hiding places that had been worse by far than this. For the basement was cool and dry and it had no rats or no other vermin in too noticeable a number and it seemed to be safe and forgotten, perhaps safe because it was forgotten. No one ever came around.

"Hello there," said someone from the dark.

Frost spun on his heels, crouching as he spun, dropping the bundle to the floor.

"Don't worry," said the voice. "I know who you are and I won't cause you any trouble."

Frost did not move. He held his crouch. Hope and fear wrestled his brain. One of the Holies who had sought him out again? Someone from Forever Center? Perhaps a man sent by Marcus Appleton?

"How did you track me down?" he whispered.

"I've been looking for you. I have been asking around. Someone saw you in the alley. You are Frost, aren't you?"

"Yes, I'm Frost."

The man came out of the gloom in which he'd stood. The half-light from a basement window showed the human shape of him, but little else.

"I am glad I found you, Frost," he said. "My name is Franklin Chapman."

"Chapman? Wait a minute! Franklin Chapman is the man…"

"Right," the other said. "Ann Harrison talked with you about me."

Frost felt the wild laughter rising in him and sought to choke it down, but it rose in spite of him and sputtered through his lips. He sat down limply on the floor and let his hands hang helplessly, while he shook with the bitter laughter that came flooding up in him.

"My God," he said, gasping, "you are the man—you are the one I promised I would help!"

"Yes," said Chapman. "At times, events turn out to be rather strange."

Slowly the laughter died away, but Frost still sat limp and weak.

"I'm glad you came," he finally said, "although I can't imagine why you did."

"Ann sent me. She asked if I'd try to find you. She found out what happened to you."

"Found out? It should have been in the papers. All a reporter had to do was look up the record."

"That's what she did, of course. And it was there, all right, but no word in the papers. Not a single line. But all sorts of rumors. The town is full of rumors."