For now there was nothing new, as there had been in ages past. Once, back at the beginning of the twentieth century, there had been the phonograph to be excited over… and the telephone. And later there had been the airplane and the radio and later yet, TV. But today there was nothing new. There was no progress except in those areas which advanced the day toward which Forever Center pointed. Now man made do with what he had and in most cases what he had was less than his forebears had. Civilization had ground to a stagnating halt and the Me of man today was in many of its aspects the same cultural pattern as had been the pattern of the Dark Ages of more than a thousand years before.

In those days the peasants had worked the fields in daylight, performing their labors for no more than enough to keep themselves alive, and then had spent the night huddled in their hovels, with doors tight barred against the terrors of the dark.

And it was the same today—hurry through the day, huddle through the night. Hurry and huddle—waiting out the night to hurry once again.

But for Frost there was now no need to hurry. To skulk, perhaps, but never need to hurry. For there were few places he had to go and none of them held great urgency. He went each evening to pick up the package left for him beside the garbage can; he hunted through occasional trash containers for papers to serve his daytime reading, keeping his eyes open for any other discarded items which might be of interest to him. He read and slept through the daylight hours and at dusk again began his prowling.

There were others like himself, prowlers of the darkened and deserted streets, and at times he spoke briefly with them, for he could not harm such as these, he told himself, by talking with them. And once, in a vacant area on the waterfront, where an old building had been newly razed, he had sat around a fire with two other men and had talked with them, but when he went back the next night they were gone and there was no fire. He formed no associations with these other prowlers of the dark, nor did any of them try to prolong an acquaintance with him. Loners, all of them—and at times he wondered who they might be and who they might Jiave been and why they walked the night. But he knew he could not ask and they never told him and this was not strange, for he did not identify himself.

Perhaps it was because he no longer had an identity. No longer Daniel Frost, but a human zero. No better off, of no more consequence than any of those millions \vho slept in the streets of India, who had rags to cover them and, sometimes, not even rags, who had never known any other state than hunger, who long since had given up even the right or the wish to find a private place in which to go about the private functions of the body.

For a time Frost had expected that one of the Holies would seek him put again, but this did not happen. Although he saw, in his prowling, evidence that they were still about and active—slogans hurriedly chalked upon the vacant walls:

FBIENDS, DON'T FALL FOB it! WHY SETTLE FOB LESS THAN HEAL IMMORTALITY?

WHAT ABOUT GBEAT-GRANDPA? OUR FOREBEARS WEREN'T DOPES—BUT WE ARE DUPES.

and again and again and again, the new one:

WHY CALL THEM BACK FROM HEAVEN?

With the practiced eye of a professional sloganeer, Frost admired the work. Better in many ways, he thought, than the smug, conservative junk that he and his department had figured out and which still flashed off and on in luridly lit letters high atop many of the buildings, the official watchwords of Forever Center—many of them frankly stolen from a day much earlier:

WASTE NOT, WANT NOT. A PENNY SAVED IS A PENNY EARNED.

Even the new ones sweated out in all earnestness

don't kid yourself—you'll need it!

now you can take it with you!

STICK WITH FOREVER; FOREVER STICKS WITH YOU.

seemed rather pallid now that he could view them from an observer's viewpoint. So he prowled the streets alone, without a purpose, with no destination. Not running any longer. Restless at first, but now no longer restless; no longer the nervous pacing of a caged feline, but now the strolling of a man who, for the first time in his life, through no choice of his own, but through shame and outrage, had become something of what it seemed to him a man had ought to be. A man who, for the first time, saw the stars through the city's haze and speculated upon the wonder and distance of them, who listened to the talking of the river as it went rolling down the land, who took the time to appreciate the architecture of a tree.

Not always like this, of course, but many times like this. At other times the rage and the anger and the shame took hold of him and smoldered like a bonfire in his guts, and at times, cold with the selfsame rage and shame, he worked out elaborate and fantastic, and utterly illogical, campaigns for vengeance—never plans for his rehabilitation, for his return to the normal world of men, but always plans for vengeance.

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.