“Well,” I admitted, “he prefers it with a dash of bitters, but he’ll drink it straight if he has to.”
“It’ll ruin his kidneys. Look here a moment, friend.”
“At what?”
“Lean back so that your head is close to where mine is. Now look up at the ceiling over each booth...the mirrors up in the decorations. I knew there was a cat there—because I saw it.”
I leaned back and looked. The ceiling of the joint had a lot of junky decoration, including many mirrors; I saw now that a number of them, camouflaged by the design, were so angled as to permit the cashier to use them as periscopes without leaving his station. “We need that,” he said apologetically. “You’d be shocked at what goes on in those booths...if we didn’t keep an eye on ’em. It’s a sad world.”
“Amen, brother.” I went on out.
Once outside, I opened the bag and carried it by one handle; Pete stuck his head out. “You heard what the man said, Pete. ‘It’s a sad world.’ Worse than sad when two friends can’t have a quiet drink together without being spied on. That settles it.”
“Now?” asked Pete.
“If you say so. If we’re going to do it, there’s no point in stalling.”
“Now!” Pete answered emphatically.
“Unanimous. It’s right across the street.”
The receptionist at the Mutual Assurance Company was a fine example of the beauty of functional design. In spite of being streamlined for about Mach Four, she displayed frontal-mounted radar housings and everything else needed for her basic mission. I reminded myself that she would be Whistler’s Mother by the time I was out and told her that I wanted to see a salesman.
“Please be seated. I will see if one of our client executives is free.” Before I could sit down she added, “Our Mr. Powell will see you. This way, please.”
Our Mr. Powell occupied an office which made me think that Mutual did pretty well for itself. He shook hands moistly, sat me down, offered me a cigarette, and attempted to take my bag. I hung onto it. “Now, sir, how can we serve you?”
“I want the Long Sleep.”
His eyebrows went up and his manner became more respectful. No doubt Mutual would write you a camera floater for seven bucks, but the Long Sleep let them get their patty-paws on all of a client’s assets. “A very wise decision,” he said reverently. “I wish I were free to take it myself. But...family responsibilities, you know.” He reached out and picked up a form. “Sleep clients are usually in a hurry. Let me save you time and bother by filling this out for you...and we’ll arrange for your physical examination at once.”
“Just a moment.”
“Eh?”
“One question. Are you set up to arrange cold sleep for a cat?”
He looked surprised, then pained. “You’re jesting.”
I opened the top of the bag; Pete stuck his head out. “Meet my sidekick. Just answer the question, please. If the answer is ‘no,’ I want to sashay up to Central Valley Liability. Their offices are in this same building, aren’t they?”
This time he looked horrified. “Mister— Uh, I didn’t get your name?”
“Dan Davis.”
“Mr. Davis, once a man enters our door he is under the benevolent protection of Mutual Assurance. I couldn’t let you go to Central Valley.”
“How do you plan to stop me? Judo?”
“Please!” He glanced around and looked upset. “Our company is an ethical company.”
“Meaning that Central Valley is not?”
“I didn’t say that; you did. Mr. Davis, don’t let me sway you—”
“You won’t.”
“—but get sample contracts from each company. Get a lawyer, better yet, get a licensed semanticist. Find out what we offer—and actually deliver—and compare it with what Central Valley claims to offer.” He glanced around again and leaned toward me. “I shouldn’t say this—and I do hope you won’t quote me—but they don’t even use the standard actuarial tables.”
“Maybe they give the customer a break instead.”
“What? My dear Mr. Davis, we distribute every accrued benefit. Our charter requires it...while Central Valley is a stock company.”
“Maybe I should buy some of their— Look, Mr. Powell, we’re wasting time. Will Mutual accept my pal here? Or not? If not, I’ve been here too long already.”
“You mean you want to pay to have that creature preserved alive in hypothermia?”
“I mean I want both of us to take the Long Sleep. And don’t call him ‘that creature’; his name is Petronius.”
“Sorry. I’ll rephrase my question. You are prepared to pay two custodial fees to have both of you, you and, uh, Petronius committed to our sanctuary?”
“Yes. But not two standard fees. Something extra, of course, but you can stuff us both in the same coffin; you can’t honestly charge as much for Pete as you charge for a man.”
“This is most unusual.”
“Of course it is. But we’ll dicker over the price later...or I’ll dicker with Central Valley. Right now I want to find out if you can do it.”
“Uh...” He drummed on his desktop. “Just a moment.” He picked up his phone and said, “Opal, get me Dr. Berquist.” I didn’t hear the rest of the conversation, for he switched on the privacy guard. But after a while he put down the instrument and smiled as if a rich uncle had died. “Good news, sir! I had overlooked momentarily the fact that the first successful experiments were made on cats. The techniques and critical factors for cats are fully established. In fact there is a cat at the Naval Research Laboratory in Annapolis which is and has been for more than twenty years alive in hypothermia.”
“I thought NRL was wiped out when they got Washington?”
“Just the surface buildings, sir, not the deep vaults. Which is a tribute to the perfection of the technique; the animal was unattended save by automatic machinery for more than two years...yet it still lives, unchanged, unaged. As you will live, sir, for whatever period you elect to entrust yourself to Mutual.”
I thought he was going to cross himself. “Okay, okay, now let’s get on with the dicker.”
There were four factors involved: first, how to pay for our care while we were hibernating; second, how long I wanted us to sleep; third, how I wanted my money invested while I was in the freezer; and last, what happened if I conked out and never woke up.
I finally settled on the year 2000, a nice round number and only thirty years away. I was afraid that if I made it any longer I would be completely out of touch. The changes in the last thirty years (my own lifetime) had been enough to bug a man’s eyes out—two big wars and a dozen little ones, the downfall of communism, the Great Panic, the artificial satellites, the change to atomic power—why, when I was a kid they didn’t even have multimorphs.
I might find 2000 A.D. pretty confusing. But if I didn’t jump that far Belle would not have time to work up a fancy set of wrinkles.
When it came to how to invest my dough I did not consider government bonds and other conservative investments; our fiscal system has inflation built into it. I decided to hang onto my Hired Girl stock and put the cash into other common stocks, with a special eye to some trends I thought would grow. Automation was bound to get bigger. I picked a San Francisco fertilizer firm too; it had been experimenting with yeasts and edible algae—there were more people every year and steak wasn’t going to get any cheaper. The balance of the money I told him to put into the company’s managed trust fund.
But the real choice lay in what to do if I died in hibernation. The company claimed that the odds were better than seven out of ten that I would live through thirty years of cold sleep...and the company would take either end of the bet. The odds weren’t reciprocal and I didn’t expect them to be; in any honest gambling there is a breakage to the house. Only crooked gamblers claim to give the sucker the best of it, and insurance is legalized gambling. The oldest and most reputable insurance firm in the world, Lloyd’s of London, makes n
o bones about it—Lloyd’s associates will take either end of any bet. But don’t expect better-than-track odds; somebody has to pay for Our Mr. Powell’s tailor-made suits.
I chose to have every cent go to the company trust fund in case I died...which made Mr. Powell want to kiss me and made me wonder just how optimistic those seven-out-of-ten odds were. But I stuck with it because it made me an heir (if I lived) of everyone else with the same option (if they died), Russian roulette with the survivors picking up the chips...and with the company, as usual, raking in the house percentage.
I picked every alternative for the highest possible return and no hedging if I guessed wrong; Mr. Powell loved me, the way a croupier loves a sucker who keeps playing the zero. By the time we had settled my estate he was anxious to be reasonable about Pete; we settled for 15 percent of the human fee to pay for Pete’s hibernation and drew up a separate contract for him.
There remained consent of court and the physical examination. The physical I didn’t worry about; I had a hunch that, once I elected to have the company bet that I would die, they would accept me even in the last stages of the Black Death. But I thought that getting a judge to okay it might be lengthy. It had to be done, because a client in cold sleep was legally in chancery, alive but helpless.
I needn’t have worried. Our Mr. Powell had quadruplicate originals made of nineteen different papers. I signed till I got finger cramps, and a messenger rushed away with them while I went to my physical examination; I never even saw the judge.
The physical was the usual tiresome routine except for one thing. Toward the end the examining physician looked me sternly in the eye and said, “Son, how long have you been on this binge?”
“Binge?”
“Binge.”
“What makes you think that, Doctor? I’m as sober as you are. ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled—’ ”
“Knock it off and answer me.”
“Mmm...I’d say about two weeks. A little over.”
“Compulsive drinker? How many times have you pulled this stunt in the past?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, I haven’t. You see—” I started to tell him what Belle and Miles had done to me, why I felt the way I did.
He shoved a palm at me. “Please. I’ve got troubles of my own and I’m not a psychiatrist. Really, all I’m interested in is finding out whether or not your heart will stand up under the ordeal of putting you down to four degrees centigrade. Which it will. And I ordinarily don’t care why anyone is nutty enough to crawl into a hole and pull it in after him; I just figure it is one less damn fool underfoot. But some residual tinge of professional conscience prevents me from letting any man, no matter how sorry a specimen, climb into one of those coffins while his brain is sodden with alcohol. Turn around.”
“Huh?”
“Turn around; I’m going to inject you in your left buttock.” I did and he did. While I was rubbing it he went on, “Now drink this. In about twenty minutes you will be more sober than you’ve been in a month. Then, if you have any sense—which I doubt—you can review your position and decide whether to run away from your troubles...or stand up to them like a man.”
I drank it.
“That’s all; you can get dressed. I’m signing your papers, but I’m warning you that I can veto it right up to the last minute. No more alcohol for you at all, a light supper and no breakfast. Be here at noon tomorrow for final check.”
He turned away and didn’t even say good-bye. I dressed and went out of there, sore as a boil. Powell had all my papers ready. When I picked them up he said, “You can leave them here if you wish and pick them up at noon tomorrow...the set that goes in the vault with you, that is.”
“What happens to the others?”
“We keep one set ourselves, then after you are committed we file one set with the court and one in the Carlsbad Archives. Uh, did the doctor caution you about diet?”
“He certainly did.” I glanced at the papers to cover my annoyance.
Powell reached for them. “I’ll keep them safe overnight.”
I pulled them back. “I can keep them safe. I might want to change some of these stock selections.”
“Uh, it’s rather late for that, my dear Mr. Davis.”
“Don’t rush me. If I do make any changes I’ll come in early.” I opened the overnight bag and stuck the papers down in a side flap beside Pete. I had kept valuable papers there before; while it might not be as safe as the public archives in the Carlsbad Caverns, they were safer than you might think. A sneak thief had tried to take something out of that flap on another occasion; he must still have the scars of Pete’s teeth and claws.
II
MY CAR WAS parked under Pershing Square where I had left it earlier in the day. I dropped money into the parking attendant, set the bug on arterial-west, got Pete out and put him on the seat, and relaxed.
Or tried to relax. Los Angeles traffic was too fast and too slashingly murderous for me to be really happy under automatic control; I wanted to redesign their whole installation—it was not a really modern “fail safe.” By the time we were west of Western Avenue and could go back on manual control I was edgy and wanted a drink. “There’s an oasis, Pete.”
“Blurrrt?”
“Right ahead.”
But while I was looking for a place to park—Los Angeles was safe from invasion; the invaders wouldn’t find a place to park—I recalled the doctor’s order not to touch alcohol.
So I told him emphatically what he could do with his orders.
Then I wondered if he could tell, almost a day later, whether or not I had taken a drink. I seemed to recall some technical article, but it had not been in my line and I had just skimmed it.
Damnation, he was quite capable of refusing to let me cold-sleep. I’d better play it cagey and lay off the stuff.
“Now?” inquired Pete.
“Later. We’re going to find a drive-in instead.” I suddenly realized that I didn’t really want a drink; I wanted food and a night’s sleep. Doc was correct; I was more sober and felt better than I had in weeks. Maybe that shot in the fanny had been nothing but B1; if so, it was jet-propelled. So we found a drive-in restaurant. I ordered chicken in the rough for me and a half pound of hamburger and some milk for Pete and took him out for a short walk while it was coming. Pete and I ate in drive-ins a lot because I didn’t have to sneak him in and out.
A half hour later I let the car drift back out of the busy circle, stopped it, lit a cigarette, scratched Pete under the chin, and thought.
Dan, my boy, the doc was right; you’ve been trying to dive down the neck of a bottle. That’s okay for your pointy head but it’s too narrow for your shoulders. Now you’re cold sober, you’ve got your belly crammed with food and it’s resting comfortably for the first time in days. You feel better.
What else? Was the doc right about the rest of it? Are you a spoiled infant? Do you lack the guts to stand up to a setback? Why are you taking this step? Is it the spirit of adventure? Or are you simply hiding from yourself, like a Section Eight trying to crawl back into his mother’s womb?
But I do want to do it, I told myself—the year 2000. Boy!
Okay, so you want to. But do you have to run off without settling the beefs you have right here?
All right, all right!—but how can I settle them? I don’t want Belle back, not after what she’s done. And what else can I do? Sue them? Don’t be silly, I’ve got no evidence—and anyhow, nobody ever wins a lawsuit but the lawyers.
Pete said, “Wellll? Y’know!”
I looked down at his waffle-scarred head. Pete wouldn’t sue anybody; if he didn’t like the cut of another cat’s whiskers, he simply invited him to come out and fight like a cat. “I believe you’re right, Pete. I’m going to look up Miles, tear his arm off, and beat him over the head with it until he talks. We can take the Long Sleep afterward. But we’ve got to know just what it was they did to us and who rigged it.”
There was a phone boo
th back of the stand. I called Miles, found him at home, and told him to stay there; I’d be out.
MY OLD MAN named me Daniel Boone Davis, which was his way of declaring for personal liberty and self-reliance. I was born in 1940, a year when everybody was saying that the individual was on the skids and the future belonged to mass man. Dad refused to believe it; naming me was a note of defiance. He died under brainwashing in North Korea, trying to the last to prove his thesis.
When the Six Weeks War came along I had a degree in mechanical engineering and was in the Army. I had not used my degree to try for a commission because the one thing Dad had left me was an overpowering yen to be on my own, giving no orders, taking no orders, keeping no schedules—I simply wanted to serve my hitch and get out. When the Cold War boiled over, I was a sergeant-technician at Sandia Weapons Center in New Mexico, stuffing atoms in atom bombs and planning what I would do when my time was up. The day Sandia disappeared I was down in Dallas drawing a fresh supply of Schrecklichkeit. The fallout on that was toward Oklahoma City, so I lived to draw my GI benefits.
Pete lived through it for a similar reason. I had a buddy, Miles Gentry, a veteran called back to duty. He had married a widow with one daughter, but his wife had died about the time he was called back. He lived off post with a family in Albuquerque so as to have a home for his stepchild Frederica. Little Ricky (we never called her “Frederica”) took care of Pete for me. Thanks to the cat-goddess Bubastis, Miles and Ricky and Pete were away on a seventy-two that awful weekend—Ricky took Pete with them because I could not take him to Dallas.
I was as surprised as anyone when it turned out we had divisions stashed away at Thule and other places that no one suspected. It had been known since the ’30s that the human body could be chilled until it slowed down to almost nothing. But it had been a laboratory trick, or a last-resort therapy, until the Six Weeks War. I’ll say this for military research: If money and men can do it, it gets results. Print another billion, hire another thousand scientists and engineers, then in some incredible, left-handed, inefficient fashion the answers come up. Stasis, cold sleep, hibernation, hypothermia, reduced metabolism, call it what you will—the logistics-medicine research teams had found a way to stack people like cordwood and use them when needed. First you drug the subject, then hypnotize him, then cool him down and hold him precisely at four degrees centigrade; that is to say, at the maximum density of water with no ice crystals. If you need him in a hurry he can be brought up by diathermy and posthypnotic command in ten minutes (they did it in seven at Nome), but such speed tends to age the tissues and may make him a little stupid from then on. If you aren’t in a hurry two hours minimum is better. The quick method is what professional soldiers call a “calculated risk.”