Then one morning I felt fine and got out of bed as soon as I woke up. I felt a little dizzy but that was all. I knew who I was, I knew how I had got there, and I knew that all that other stuff had been dreams.
I knew who had put me there. If Belle had given me orders while I was drugged to forget her shenanigans, either the orders had not taken or thirty years of cold sleep had washed out the hypnotic effect. I was blurry about some details but I knew how they had shanghaied me.
I wasn't especially angry about it. True, it had happened just "yesterday," since yesterday is the day just one sleep behind you-but the sleep had been thirty years long. The feeling cannot be precisely defined, since it is entirely subjective, but, while my memory was sharp for the events of "yesterday," nevertheless my feelings about those events were to things far away. You have seen double images in television of a pitcher making his windup while his picture sits as a ghost on top of a long shot of the whole baseball diamond? Something like that... my conscious recollection was a close-up; my emotional reaction was to something long ago and far away.
I fully intended to look up Belle and Miles and chop them into cat meat, but there was no hurry. Next year would do-right now I was eager to have a look at the year 2000.
But speaking of cat meat, where was Pete? He ought to be around somewhere... unless the poor little beggar hadn't lived through the Sleep.
Then-and not until then-did I remember that my careful plans to bring Pete along had been wrecked.
I took Belle and Miles out of the "Hold" basket and moved them over to "Urgent." Try to kill my cat, would they?
They had done worse than kill Pete; they had turned him out to go wild: to wear out his days wandering back alleys in search of scraps, while his ribs grew thin and his sweet pixie nature warped into distrust of all two-legged beasts.
They had let him die-for he was surely dead by now-let him die thinking that I had deserted him.
For this they would pay... if they were still alive. Oh, how I hoped they were still alive-unspeakable!
I found that I was standing by the foot of my bed, grasping the rail to steady myself and dressed only in pajamas. I looked around for some way to call someone. Hospital rooms had not changed much. There was no window and I could not see where the light came from; the bed was high and narrow, as hospital beds had always been in my recollection, but it showed signs of having been engineered into something more than a place to sleep-among other things, it seemed to have some sort of plumbing under it which I suspected was a mechanized bedpan, and the side table was part of the bed structure itself. But, while I ordinarily would have been intensely interested in such gadgetry, right now I simply wanted to find the pear-shaped switch which summons the nurse-I wanted my clothes.
It was missing, but I found what it had been transformed into: a pressure switch on the side of the table that was not quite a table. My hand struck it in trying to find it, and a transparency opposite where my head would have been had I been in bed shone out with: SERVICE CALL. Almost immediately it blinked out and was replaced with: ONE MOMENT, PLEASE.
Very quickly the door silently rolled aside and a nurse came in. Nurses had not changed much. This one was reasonably cute, had the familiar firm manners of a drill sergeant, wore a perky little white hat perched on short orchid-colored hair, and was dressed in a white uniform. It was strangely cut and covered her here and uncovered her there in a fashion different from 1970-but women's clothes, even work uniforms, were always doing that. She would still have been a nurse in any year, just by her unmistakable manner.
"You get back in that bed!"
"Where are my clothes?"
"Get back in that bed. Now!"
I answered reasonably, "Look, nurse, I'm a free citizen, over twenty-one, and not a criminal. I don't have to get back into that bed and I'm not going to. Now are you going to show me where my clothes are or shall I go out the way I am and start looking?"
She looked at me, then turned suddenly and went out; the door ducked out of her way.
But it would not duck out of my way. I was still trying to study out the gimmick, being fairly sure that if one engineer could dream it up, another could figure it out, when it opened again and a man came in.
"Good morning," he said. "I'm Dr. Albrecht."
His clothes looked like a cross between a Harlem Sunday and a picnic to me, but his brisk manner and his tired eyes were convincingly professional; I believed him. "Good morning, Doctor. I'd like to have my clothes."
He stepped just far enough inside to let the door slide into place behind him, then reached inside his clothes and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He got one out, waved it briskly in the air, placed it in his mouth and puffed on it; it was lighted. He offered me the pack. "Have one?"
"Uh, no, thanks."
"Go ahead. It won't hurt you."
I shook my head. I had always worked with a cigarette smoldering beside me; the progress of a job could be judged by the overflowing ash trays and the bums on the drafting board. Now I felt a little faint at the sight of smoke and wondered if I had dropped the nicotine habit somewhere in the slept-away years. "Thanks just the same."
"Okay. Mr. Davis, I've been here six years. I'm a specialist in hypnology, resuscitation, and like subjects. Here and elsewhere I've helped eight thousand and seventy-three patients make the comeback from hypothermia to normal life-you're number eight thousand and seventy-four. I've seen them do all sorts of odd things when they came out-odd to laymen; not to me. Some of them want to go right back to sleep again and scream at me when I try to keep them awake. Some of them do go back to sleep and we have to ship them off to another sort of institution. Some of them start weeping endlessly when they realize that it is a one-way ticket and it's too late to go home to whatever year they started from. And some of them, like you, demand their clothes and want to run out into the street."
"Well? Why not? Am I a prisoner?"
"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 damn 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. "Dr. 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.