But not anymore. Ric was gone, and his agent had heard him say that he'd be in Mexico, and I had a document, with his signature on it, saying that he was going to mail in his scripts through me, that I was his mentor and that he wanted me to go to script meetings on his behalf. Another document gave me his power of attorney, with permission to oversee his income while he was away.
And that should have been the end of it. Linda was puzzled but went along. After all, she'd heard Ric on the phone. Ballard was even more puzzled, but he was also enormously pleased with the spec script that I pulled out of a drawer and sent in with Ric's name on it. As far as Ballard was concerned, if Ric wanted to be eccentric, that was fine as long as Ric kept delivering. Really, his speed and the quality of his work were amazing.
So in a way I got what I wanted -the action and the pleasure of selling my work. But there's a problem. When I sit down to do rewrites, when I type "revisions by Eric Potter," I suddenly find myself gazing out the window, wanting to sit in the sun. At the same time, I find that I can't sleep. Like Ric, I've become a night person.
I've sold the spec scripts that I wrote over the years and kept in a drawer. All I had to do was change the titles. Nobody remembered reading the original stories. But I couldn't seem to do the rewrites, and now that I've run out of old scripts, now that I'm faced with writing something new…
For the first time in my life, I've got writer's block. All I have to do is think of the title page and the words "by Eric Potter," and my imagination freezes. It's agony. All my life, every day, I've been a writer. For thirty-five years of married life, except for the last two when Doris got sick, I wrote every day. I sacrificed everything to my craft. I didn't have children because I thought it would interfere with my schedule. Nothing was more important than putting words on a page. Now I sit at my desk, stare at my word processor, and…
Mary had a little…
I can't bear this anymore.
I need rest.
The quick brown fox jumped over…
I need to forget about Ric.
Now is the time for all good men to…
**arial**The relationship between fathers and sons (metaphoric or actual) is a frequent theme in my work. Because I never adjusted to my father's death in World War 11,1 grew up craving the attention of a positive male authority figure, eventually, I found three of them: Stirling Silliphant (whom I've spoken about), Philip Young (the great Hemingway critic), and Philip Klass (under the pen name William Tenn, he was part of the Golden Age of science fiction in the 1950s). In Black Evening and Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing, I discussed at length the many things Philip Klass taught me about writing. Given his specialty, I found it interesting that, of the many genres in which I've worked, I hadn't tried anything in science fiction, After three decades, that changed when writer/editor/anthologist Al Sarrantonio asked me to contribute a story to a science-fiction anthology he was putting together: Redshift (2001). I decided to move the parent-child relationship from algebra into something like quantum physics, exploring it in the most complex way I could imagine. Part of my impetus was that, after my son's death, I no longer identified with sons searching for fathers. Rather, I was a father searching fora son. In this story, reprinted in Year's Best SF 7,1 was able to combine both approaches and even add a third. Philip Klass/William Tenn's collected fiction and nonfiction are now available in three gorgeous volumes from N6SFR Press (www.nesfapress.com).
Resurrection
Anthony was nine when his mother had to tell him that his father was seriously ill. The signs had been there-pallor and shortness of breath-but Anthony's childhood was so perfect, his parents so loving, that he couldn't imagine a problem they couldn't solve. His father's increasing weight loss was too obvious to be ignored, however.
"But… but what's wrong with him?" Anthony stared uneasily up at his mother. He'd never seen her look more tired.
She explained about blood cells. "It's not leukemia. If only it were. These days, that's almost always curable, but the doctors have never seen anything like this. It's moving so quickly, even a bone marrow transplant won't work. The doctors suspect that it might have something to do with the lab, with radiation he picked up after the accident."
Anthony nodded. His parents had once explained to him that his father was something called a maintenance engineer. A while ago, there'd been an emergency phone call, and Anthony's father had rushed to the lab in the middle of the night.
"But the doctors…"
"They're trying everything they can think of. That's why Daddy's going to be in the hospital for a while."
"But can't I see him?"
"Tomorrow." Anthony's mother sounded more weary. "Both of us can see him tomorrow."
When they went to the hospital, Anthony's father was too weak to recognize him. He had tubes in his arms, his mouth, and his nose. His skin was gray. His face was thinner than it had been three days earlier, the last time Anthony had seen him. If Anthony hadn't loved his father so much, he'd have been frightened. As things were, all he wanted was to sit next to his father and hold his hand. But after only a few minutes, the doctors said that it was time to go.
The next day, when Anthony and his mother went to the hospital, his father wasn't in his room. He was having "a procedure," the doctors said. They took Anthony's mother aside to talk to her. When she came back, she looked even more solemn than the doctors had. Everything possible had been done, she explained. "No results." Her voice sounded tight. "None. At this rate…" She could barely get the words out. "In a couple of days.
"There's nothing the doctors can do?" Anthony asked, afraid.
"Not now. Maybe not ever. But we can hope. We can try to cheat time."
Anthony hadn't the faintest idea what she meant. He wasn't even sure that he understood after she explained that there was something called "cryonics," which froze sick people until cures were discovered. Then they were thawed and given the new treatment. In a primitive way, cryonics had been tried fifty years earlier, in the late years of the twentieth century, Anthony's mother found the strength to continue explaining. It had failed because the freezing method hadn't been fast enough and the equipment often broke. But over time, the technique had been improved sufficiently that, although the medical establishment didn't endorse it, they didn't reject it, either.
"Then why doesn't everybody do it?" Anthony asked in confusion.
"Because…" His mother took a deep breath. "Because some of the people who were thawed never woke up."
Anthony had the sense that his mother was telling him more than she normally would have, that she was treating him like a grown-up, and that he had to justify her faith in him.
"Others, who did wake up, failed to respond to the new treatment," she reluctantly said.
"Couldn't they be frozen again?" Anthony asked in greater bewilderment.
"You can't survive being frozen a second time. You get only one chance, and if the treatment doesn't work…" She stared down at the floor. "It's so experimental and risky that insurance companies won't pay for it. The only reason we have it as an option is that the laboratory's agreed to pay for the procedure" – there was that word again-" while the doctors try to figure out how to cure him. But if it's going to happen, it has to happen now." She looked straight into his eyes. "Should we do it?"