The Door Into Summer Part 7

"No. You can have your clothes. I imagine you'll find them out of style, but that is your problem. However, while I send for them, would you mind telling me what it is that is so terribly urgent that you must attend to it right this minute... after it has waited thirty years? That's how long you've been at subtemperature-thirty years. Is it really urgent? Or would later today do as well? Or even tomorrow?"

I started to blurt out that it d.a.m.n well was urgent, then stopped and looked sheepish. "Maybe not that urgent."

"Then as a favor to me, will you get back into bed, let me check you over, have your breakfast, and perhaps talk with me before you go galloping off in all directions? I might even be able to tell you which way to gallop."

"Oh, okay, Doctor. Sorry to have caused trouble." I climbed into bed. It felt good-I was suddenly tired and shaky.

"No trouble. You should see some that we get. We have to pull them down off the ceiling." He straightened the covers around my shoulders, then leaned over the table built into the bed. "Albrecht in Seventeen. Send a room orderly with breakfast, uh... menu four-minus."

He turned to me and said, "Roll over and pull up your jacket; I want to get at your ribs. While I'm checking you, you can ask questions. If you want to."

I tried to think while he prodded my ribs. I suppose it was a stethoscope he used although it looked like a miniaturized hearing aid. But they had not improved one thing about it; the pickup he pushed against me was as cold and hard as ever.

What do you ask after thirty years? Have they reached the stars yet? Who's cooking up "The War to End War" this time? Do babies come out of test tubes? "Doc, do they still have popcorn machines in the lobbies of movie theaters?"

"They did the last time I looked. I don't get much time for such things. By the way, the word is 'grabbie' now, not 'movie.'"

"So? Why?"

"Try one. You'll find out. But be sure to fasten your seat belt; they null the whole theater on some shots. See here, Davis, we're faced with this same problem every day and we've got it down to routine. We've got adjustment vocabularies for each entrance year, and historical and cultural summaries. It's quite necessary, for malorientation can be extreme no matter how much we lackweight the shock."

"Uh, I suppose so."

"Decidedly. Especially in an extreme lapse like yours. Thirty years."

"Is thirty years the maximum?"

"Yes and no. Thirty-five years is the very longest we've had experience with, since the first commercial client was placed in subtemperature in December 1965. You are the longest Sleeper I have revived. But we have clients in here now with contract times up to a century and a half. They should never have accepted you for as long as thirty years; they didn't know enough then. They were taking a great chance with your life. You were lucky."

"Really?"

"Really. Turn over." He went on examining me and added, "But with what we've learned now I'd be willing to prepare a man for a thousand-year jump if there were any way to finance it... hold him at the temperature you were at for a year just to check, then crash him to minus two hundred in a millisecond. He'd live. I think. Let's try your reflexes."

That "crash" business didn't sound good to me. Albrecht went on: "Sit up and cross your knees. You won't find the language problem difficult. Of course I've been careful to talk in 1970 vocabulary-I rather pride myself on being able to talk selectively in the entrance speech of any of my patients; I've made a hypnostudy of it. But you'll be speaking contemporary idiom perfectly in a week; it's really just added vocabulary."

I thought of telling him that at least four times he had used words not used in 1970, or at least not that way, but I decided it wouldn't be polite. "That's all for now," he said presently. "By the way, Schultz has been trying to reach you."

"Huh?"

"Don't you know her? She insisted that she was an old friend of yours."

"'Schultz,'" I repeated. "I suppose I've known several 'Schultzes' at one time and another, but the only one I can place was my fourth-grade teacher. But she'd be dead by now."

"Maybe she took the Sleep. Well, you can accept the message when you feel like it. I'm going to sign a release on you. But if you're smart, you'll stay here for a few days and soak up reorientation. I'll look in on you later. So 'twenty-three, skiddoo' as they used to say in your day. Here comes the orderly with your breakfast."

I decided that he was a better doctor than a linguist. But I stopped thinking about it when I saw the orderly. It rolled in, carefully avoiding Albrecht, who walked straight out, paying no attention to it and making no effort himself to avoid it.

It came over, adjusted the built-in bed table, swung it over me, opened it out, and arranged my breakfast on it. "Shall I pour your coffee?"

"Yes, please." I did not really want it poured, as I would rather have it stay hot until I'd finished everything else. But I wanted to see it poured.

For I was in a delighted daze... it was Flexible Frank!

Not the jackleg, bread-boarded, jury-rigged first model Miles and Belle had stolen from me, of course not. This one resembled the first Frank the way a turbospeedster resembles the first horseless carriages. But a man knows his own work. I had set the basic pattern and this was the necessary evolution... Frank's great-grandson, improved, slicked up, made more efficient-but the same bloodline.

"Will that be all?"

"Wait a minute."

Apparently I had said the wrong thing, for the automaton reached inside itself and pulled out a stiff plastic sheet and handed it to me. The sheet remained fastened to him by a slim steel chain. I looked at it and found printed on it: VOICE CODE-Eager Beaver Model XVJI-a IMPORTANT NOTICE!! This service automaton DOES NOT understand human speech. It has no understanding at all, being merely a machine. But for your convenience it has been designed to respond to a list of spoken orders. It will ignore anything else said in its presence, or (if any phrase triggers it incompletely or such that a circuit dilemma is created) it will offer this instruction sheet. Please read it carefully.

Thank you, Aladdin Autoengineering Corporation Manufacturers of EAGER BEAVER, WILL! WA W, DRAFTING DAN, BUILDER BILL, GREEN THUMB, and NANNY. Custom Designers and Consultants in Automation Problems "At Your Service!"

The motto appeared on their trade-mark showing Aladdin rubbing his lamp and a genie appearing.

Below this was a long list of simple orders -STOP, GO, YES, NO, SLOWER, FASTER, COME HERE, FETCH A NURSE, etc. Then there was a shorter list of tasks common in hospitals, such as back rubs, and including some that I had never heard of. The list closed abruptly with the statement: "Routines 87 through 242 may be ordered only by hospital staff members and the order phrases are therefore not listed here."

I had not voice-coded the first Flexible Frank; you had to punch b.u.t.tons on his control board. It was not because I had not thought of it, but because the a.n.a.lyzer and telephone exchange for the purpose would have weighed and bulked and cost more than all the rest of Frank, Sr., net. I decided that I would have to learn some new wrinkles in miniaturization and simplification before I would be ready to practice engineering here. But I was anxious to get started on it, as I could see from Eager Beaver that it was going to be more fun than ever-lots of new possibilities. Engineering is the art of the practical and depends more on the total state of the art than it does on the individual engineer. When railroading time comes you can railroad-but not before. Look at poor Professor Langley, breaking his heart on a flying machine that should have flown-he had put the necessary genius in it-but he was just a few years too early to enjoy the benefit of collateral art he needed and did not have. Or take the great Leonardo da Vinci, so far out of his time that his most brilliant concepts were utterly unbuildable.

I was going to have fun here-I mean "now."

I handed back the instruction card, then got out of bed and looked for the data plate. I had halfway expected to see "Hired Girl, Inc." at the bottom of the notice and I wondered if "Aladdin" was a daughter corporation of the Mannix group. The data plate did not tell me much other than model, serial number, factory, and such, but it did list the patents, about forty of them-.and the earliest, I was very interested to see, was in 1970... almost certainly based on my original model and drawings.

I found a pencil and memo pad on the table and jotted down the number of that first patent, but my interest was purely intellectual. Even if it had been stolen from me (I was sure it had been), it had expired in 1987 unless they had changed the patent laws-and only those granted later than 1983 would still be valid. But I wanted to know.

A light glowed on the automaton and he announced: "I am being called. May I leave?"

"Huh? Sure. Run along." It started to reach for the phrase list; I hastily said, "Go!"

"Thank you. Good-by." It detoured around me.

"Thank you."

"You are welcome."

Whoever had dictated the gadget's sound responses had a very pleasant baritone voice.

I got back into bed and ate the breakfast I had let get cold-only it turned out not to be cold. Breakfast four-minus was about enough for a medium-sized bird, but I found that it was enough, even though I had been very hungry. I suppose my stomach had shrunk. It wasn't until I had finished that I remembered that this was the first food I had eaten in a generation. I noticed it then because they had included a menu-what I had taken for bacon was listed as "grilled yeast strips, country style."

But in spite of a thirty-year fast, my mind was not on food; they had sent a newspaper in with breakfast: the Great Los Angeles Times, for Wednesday, 13 December, 2000.

Newspapers had not changed much, not in format. This one was tabloid size, the paper was glazed instead of rough pulp and the ill.u.s.trations were either full color, or black-and-white stereo-I couldn't puzzle out the gimmick on that last. There had been stereo pictures you could look at without a viewer since I was a small child; as a kid I had been fascinated by ones used to advertise frozen foods in the '50s. But those had required fairly thick transparent plastic for a grid of tiny prisms; these were simply on thin paper. Yet they had depth.

I gave it up and looked at the rest of the paper. Eager Beaver had arranged it on a reading rack and for a while it seemed as if the front page was all I was going to read, for I could not find out how to open the d.a.m.ned thing. The sheets seemed to have frozen solid.

Finally I accidentally touched the lower right-hand corner of the first sheet; it curled up and out of the way... some surface charge phenomenon, triggered at that point. The other pages got neatly out of the way in succession whenever I touched that spot.

At least half of the paper was so familiar as to make me homesick-"Your Horoscope Today, Mayor Dedicates New Reservoir, Security Restrictions Undermining Freedom of Press Says N. Y. Solon, Giants Take Double-Header, Unseasonable Warmth Perils Winter Sports, Pakistan Warns India"-et cetera, ad tedium. This is where I came in.

Some of the other items were new but explained themselves: LUNA SHUTTLE STILL SUSPENDED FOR GEMINTDS-Twenty-Four-Hour Station Suffers Two Punctures, No Casualties; FOUR WHITES LYNCHED IN CAPETOWN-UN Action Demanded; HOST-MOTHERS ORGANIZE FOR HIGHER FEES-Demand "Amateurs" Be Outlawed; MISSISSIPPI PLANTER INDICTED UNDER ANTI-ZOMBIE LAW-His Defense: "Them Boys Hain't Drugged, They're Just Stupid!"

I was fairly sure that I knew what that last one meant... from experience.

But some of the news items missed me completely. The "wogglies" were still spreading and three more French towns had been evacuated; the King was considering ordering the area dusted. King? Oh well, French politics might turn up anything, but what was this "Poudre Sarntaire" they were considering using on the "wogglies"? -whatever they were. Radioactive, maybe? I hoped they picked a dead calm day... preferably the thirtieth of February. I had had a radiation overdose myself once, through a mistake by a d.a.m.n-fool WAC technician at Sandia. I had not reached the point-of-no-return vomiting stage, but I don't recommend a diet of curies.

The Laguna Beach division of the Los Angeles police had been equipped with Leycoils and the division chief warned all Teddies to get out of town. "My men have orders to nark first and subspeck afterward. This has got to stop!"

I made a mental note to keep clear of Laguna Beach until I found out what the score was. I wasn't sure I wanted to be subspecked, or subspected, even afterward.

Those are just samples. There were any number of news stories that started out trippingly, then foundered in what was, to me, double talk.

I started to breeze on past the vital statistics when my eye caught some new subheads. There were the old familiar ones of births, deaths, marriages, and divorces, but now there were "commitments" and "withdrawals" as well, listed by sanctuaries. I looked up "Sawtelle Cons. Sanc." and found my own name. It gave me a warm feeling of "belonging."

But the most intensely interesting things in the paper were the ads. One of the personals stuck in my mind: "Attractive still young widow with yen to travel wishes to meet mature man similarly inclined. Object: two-year marriage contract." But it was the display advertising that got me.

Hired Girl and her sisters and her cousins and her aunts were all over the place-and they were still using the trade-mark, a husky girl with a broom, that I had designed originally for our letterhead. I felt a twinge of regret that I had been in such a jumping hurry to get rid of my stock in Hired Girl, Inc.; it looked as if it was worth more than all the rest of my portfolio. No, that was wrong; if I had kept it with me at the time, that pair of thieves would have lifted it and faked an a.s.signment to themselves. As it was, Ricky had gotten it-and if it had made Ricky rich, well, it couldn't happen to a nicer person.

I made a note to track down Ricky first thing, top priority. She was all that was left to me of the world I had known and she loomed very large in my mind. Dear little Ricky! If she had been ten years older I would never have looked at Belle... and wouldn't have got my fingers burned.

Let's see, how old would she be now? Forty-no, forty-one. It was hard to think of Ricky as forty-one. Still, that wouldn't be old in a woman these days-or even those days. From forty feet you frequently couldn't tell forty-one from eighteen.

If she was rich I'd let her buy me a drink and we would drink to Pete's dear departed funny little soul.

And if something had slipped and she was poor in spite of the stock I had a.s.signed her, then-by d.a.m.n, I'd marry her! Yes, I would. It didn't matter that she was ten years or so older than I was; in view of my established record for flubbing the dud I needed somebody older to look out for me and tell me no-and Ricky was just the girl who could do it. She had run Miles and Miles's house with serious little-girl efficiency when she was less than ten; at forty she would be just the same, only mellowed.

I felt really warm and no longer lost in a strange land for the first time since I had wakened. Picky was the answer to everything.

Then deep inside me I heard a voice: "Look, stupid, you can't marry Ricky, because a girl as sweet as she was going to be would now have been married for at least twenty years. She'll have four kids... maybe a son bigger than you are-and certainly a husband who won't be amused by you in the role of good old Uncle Danny."

I listened and my jaw sagged. Then I said feebly, "All right, all right-so I've missed the boat again. But I'm still going to look her up. They can't do more than shoot me. And, after all, she's the only other person who really understood Pete."

I turned another page, suddenly very glum at the thought of having lost both Ricky and Pete. After a while I fell asleep over the paper and slept until Eager Beaver or his twin fetched lunch.

While I was asleep I dreamed that Picky was holding me on her lap and saying, "It's all right, Danny. I found Pete and now we're both here to stay. Isn't that so, Pete?"

"Yeeeow!"

The added vocabularies were a cinch; I spent much more time on the historical summaries. Quite a lot can happen in thirty years, but why put it down when everybody else knows it better than I do? I wasn't surprised that the Great Asia Republic was crowding us out of the South American trade; that had been in the cards since the Formosall treaty. Nor was I surprised to find India more Balkanized than ever. The notion of England being a province of Canada stopped me for a moment. Which was the tail and which was the dog? I skipped over the panic of '87; gold was a wonderful engineering material for some uses; I could not regard it as a tragedy to find that it was now cheap and no longer a basis for money, no matter how many people lost their s.h.i.+rts in the change-over.

I stopped reading and thought about the things you could do with cheap gold, with its high density, good conductivity, extreme ductility... and stopped when I realized I would have to read the technical literature first. Shucks, in atomics alone it would be invaluable. The way the stuff could be worked, far better than any other metal, if you could use it in -I stopped, morally certain that Eager Beaver had had his "head" crammed full of gold. I would just have to get busy and find out what the boys had been doing in the "small back rooms" while I bad been away.

The Sawtelle Sanctuary wasn't equipped to let me read up on engineering, so I told Doc Albrecht I was ready to check out. He shrugged, told me I was an idiot, and agreed. But I did stay one more night; I found that I was f.a.gged just from lying back and watching words chase past in a book scanner.

They brought me modern clothes right after breakfast the next morning...and I had to have help in dressing. They were not so odd in themselves (although I had never worn cerise trousers with bell bottoms before) but I could not manage the fastenings without coaching. I suppose my grandfather might have had the same trouble with zippers if he had not been led into them gradually. It was the Stickt.i.te closure seams, of course-I thought I was going to have to hire a little boy to help me go to the bathroom before I got it through my head that the pressure-sensitive adhesion was axially polarized.

Then I almost lost my pants when I tried to ease the waistband. No one laughed at me.

Albrecbt asked, "What are you going to do?"

"Me? First I'm going to get a map of the city. Then I'm going to find a place to sleep. Then I'm going to do nothing but professional reading for quite a while... maybe a year. Doc, I'm an obsolete engineer. I don't aim to stay that way."

"Mmmm. Well, good luck. Don't hesitate to call if I can help."

I stuck out my hand. "Thanks, Doc. You've been swell. Uh, maybe I shouldn't mention this until I talk to the accounting office of my insurance company and see just how well off I am-but I don't intend to let it go with words. Thanks for the sort of thing you've done for me should be more substantial. Understand me?"

He shook his head. "I appreciate the thought. But my fees are covered by my contract with the sanctuary."

"But-"

"No. I can't take it, so please let's not discuss it." He shook hands and said, "Good-by. If you'll stay on this slide it will take you to the main offices." He hesitated. "If you find things a bit tiring at first, you're ent.i.tled to four more days recuperation and reorientation here without additional charge under the custodial contract. It's paid for. Might as well use it. You can come and go as you like."

I grinned. "Thanks, Doc. But you can bet that I won't be back-other than to say h.e.l.lo someday."

I stepped off at the main office and told the receptionist there who I was. It handed me an envelope, which I saw was another phone message from Schultz. I still had not called her, because I did not know who she was, and the sanctuary did not permit visits nor phone calls to a revivified client until he wanted to accept them. I simply glanced at it and tucked it in my blouse, while thinking that I might have made a mistake in making Flexible Frank too flexible. Receptionists used to be pretty girls, not machines.

The receptionist said, "Step this way, please. Our treasurer would like to see you."

Well, I wanted to see him, too, so I stepped that way. I was wondering how much money I had made and was congratulating myself on having plunged in common stocks rather than playing it "safe." No doubt my stocks had dropped in the Panic of '87, but they ought to be back up now-in fact I knew that at least two of them were worth a lot of dough now; I had been reading the financial section of the Times. I still had the paper with me, figuring I might want to look up some others.

The treasurer was a human being, even though he looked like a treasurer. He gave me a quick handshake. "How do you do, Davis. I'm Doughty. Sit down, please."

I said, "Howdy, Doughty. I probably don't need to take that much of your time. Just tell me this: does my insurance company handle its settlements through your office? Or should I go to their home offices?"

"Do please sit down. I have several things to explain to you."

So I sat. His office a.s.sistant (good old Frank again) fetched a file folder for him and he said, "These are your original contracts. Would you like to see them?"

I wanted very much to see them, as I had kept my fingers crossed ever since I was fully awake, wondering if Belle had figured out some way to bite the end off that certified check. A certified check is much harder to play hanky-panky with than is a personal check, but Belle was a clever gal.

I was much relieved to see that she had left my commitments unchanged, except of course that the side contract for Pete was missing and also the one concerning my Hired Girl stock. I supposed that she had just burned those, to keep from raising questions. I examined with care the dozen or more places where she had changed "Mutual a.s.surance Company" to "Master Insurance Company of California."

The gal was a real artist, no question. I suppose a scientific criminologist armed with microscope and comparison stereo and chemical tests and so forth could have proved that each of those doc.u.ments had been altered, but I could not. I wondered how she had coped with the closed endors.e.m.e.nt on the back of the certified check, since certified checks are always on paper guaranteed nonerasable. Well, she probably had not used an eraser-what one person can dream up another person can outsmart... and Belle was very smart.

Doughty cleared his throat. I looked up. "Do we settle my account here?"

"Yes."

"Then I can put it in two words. How much?"

"Mmm... Davis, before we go into that question, I would like to invite your attention to one additional doc.u.ment and to one circ.u.mstance. This is the contract between this Sanctuary and Master Insurance Company of California for your hypothermia, custody, and revivification. You will note that the entire fee is paid in advance. This is both for our protection and for yours, since it guarantees your safe-being while you are helpless. The funds-all such funds-are placed in escrow with the superior-court division handling chancery matters and are paid quarterly to us as earned."

"Okay. Sounds like a good arrangement."

"It is. It protects the helpless. Now you must understand clearly that this sanctuary is a separate corporation from your insurance company; the custodial contract with us was a contract entirely separate from the one for the management of your estate."

"Doughty, what are you getting at?"

"Do you have any a.s.sets other than those you entrusted to Master Insurance Company?"