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Book Details

Why Call Them Back from Heaven?

78.6% complete
1967
Unknown
Never (or unknown...)
37 chapters
Book Cover
Has a genre Has an extract In my library 
13991
No series
Copyright © 1967 by Clifford D. Simak
No dedication.
The Jury chortled happily.
May contain spoilers
"God has turned His back on us."
No comments on file
Extract (may contain spoilers)
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 on to 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 more when you are revived, for hobbies go in cycles.  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 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 costs necessary to protect the title.

 

Added: 19-Mar-2024
Last Updated: 11-Apr-2024

Publications

 01-Jun-1980
Avon Books
Mass Market Paperback
In my libraryOrder from amazon.comHas a cover imageBook Edition Cover
Date Issued:
Cir 01-Jun-1980
Format:
Mass Market Paperback
Cover Price:
$1.95
Pages*:
191
Catalog ID:
50575
Internal ID:
43541
Publisher:
ISBN:
0-380-50575-4
ISBN-13:
978-0-380-50575-3
Printing:
1
Country:
United States
Language:
English
Credits:
Jan Esteves  - Cover Artist
CLIFFORD D. SIMAK
Winner of the
HUGO and INTERNATIONAL FANTASY AWARDS
and the
GRAND MASTER NEBULA

Immortality - The
Ultimate Reward


To come back to life - and never die again - that's what Forever Center promises the human race.  And that's why, in the year 2148, people spend their whole lives in poverty, giving all their money to Forever Center to ensure their happiness and comfort in the next eternal life.

Daniel Frost is a key man at Forever Center.  When he accidentally stumbles onto some classified documents, Dan incurs the wrath of an unseen enemy who has him framed and denounced as a social outcast.  With the notorious mark of ostracization on his forehead, he is condemned to the desperate life of a hunted animal.  But a few people will risk their lives to help him: Ann Harrison, the beautiful renegade lawyer who is convinced of his innocence, and Mona Campbell, the brilliant mathematician who has discovered some shattering information about Forever Center... and the essence of life itself.
Cover:
Book CoverBook Back CoverBook Spine
Notes and Comments:
First Avon Printing, June, 1980
First printing assumed
Image File
01-Jun-1980
Avon Books
Mass Market Paperback

Related

Author(s)

 Clifford D Simak
Birth: 03 Aug 1904 Millville, Wisconsin, USA
Death: 24 Apr 1988 Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

Notes:
From "About the Author" in The Fellowship of the Talisman

Clifford D. Simak is a newspaperman, only recently retired.  Over the years he has written more than 25 books and has some 200 short stories to his credit.  In 1977 he received the Nebula Grand Master award of the Science Fiction Writers of America and has won several other awards for his writing.  He was born and raised in southwestern Wisconsin, a land of wooded hills and deep ravines, and often uses this locale for his stories.  A number of critics have cited him as the pastoralist of science fiction.

Perhaps the best known of his work is City, which has become a science-fiction classic.

He and his wife Kay have been happily married for almost 50 years. They have two children - a daughter, Shelley Ellen, a magazine editor, and Richard Scott, a chemical engineer.

Awards

No awards found
*
  • I try to maintain page numbers for audiobooks even though obviously there aren't any. I do this to keep track of pages read and I try to use the Kindle version page numbers for this.
  • Synopses marked with an asterisk (*) were generated by an AI. There aren't a lot since this is an iffy way to do it - AI seems to make stuff up.
  • When specific publication dates are unknown (ie prefixed with a "Cir"), I try to get the publication date that is closest to the specific printing that I can.
  • When listing chapters, I only list chapters relevant to the story. I will usually leave off Author Notes, Indices, Acknowledgements, etc unless they are relevant to the story or the book is non-fiction.
  • Page numbers on this site are for the end of the main story. I normally do not include appendices, extra material, and other miscellaneous stuff at the end of the book in the page count.






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