For a month the apartment ran smoothly. No one disturbed Branley’s self-imposed solitude except the housemaid, whom he had never noticed as a human being. There were no phone calls at all. The penthouse was so high above the streets that hardly a sound seeped through the triple-thick windows. Branley luxuriated in the peaceful quiet, feeling as if he were the last person on Earth.
«And good riddance to the rest of them,» he said aloud. «Who needs them, anyway.»
It was on a Monday that he went from heaven to hell. Very quickly.
The morning began, as usual, with breakfast waiting for him in the dining area. Branley sat in his jade green silk robe and watched the morning news on the television screen set into the wall above the marble-topped sideboard. He asked for the previous day’s accumulation of phone messages, hoping that the computer would answer that there had been none.
Instead, the computer said, «Telephone service was shut off last night at midnight.»
«What? Shut off? What do you mean?»
Very calmly, the computer replied, «Telephone service was shut off due to failure to pay the phone company’s bill.»
«Failure to pay?» Branley’s eyes went wide, his mouth fell agape. But before he could compose himself, he heard a loud thumping at the front door.
«Who on earth could that be?»
«Three large men in business suits,» said the computer as it flashed the image from the hallway camera onto the dining area screen.
«Open up, Hopkins!» shouted the largest of the three. Waving a piece of folded paper in front of the camera lens, he added, «We got a warrant!»
Before lunchtime, Branley was dispossessed of half his furniture for failure to pay telephone, electricity, and condominium service bills. He was served with summonses for suits from his bank, three separate brokerage houses, the food service that stocked his pantry, and the liquor service that stocked his wine cellar. His television sets were repossessed, his entire wardrobe seized, except for the clothes on his back, and his health insurance revoked.
By noon he was a gibbering madman, and the computer put through an emergency call to Bellevue Hospital. As the white-coated attendants dragged him out of the apartment, he was raving:
«The computer! The computer did it to me! It plotted against me with that damned ex-secretary of mine! It stopped paying my bills on purpose!»
«Sure buddy, sure,» said the burliest of the attendants, the one who had a hammerlock on Branley’s right arm.
«You’d be surprised how many guys we see who got computers plottin’ against dem,» said the one who had the hammerlock on his left arm.
«Just come quiet now,» said the third attendant, who carried a medical kit complete with its own pocket-sized computer. «We’ll take you to a nice, quiet room where there won’t be no computer to bother you. Or anybody else.»
The wildness in Branley’s eyes diminished a little. «No computer? No one to bother me?»
«That’s right, buddy. You’ll love it, where we’re takin’ you.»
Branley nodded and relaxed as they carried him out the front door.
All was quiet in the apartment for many minutes. The living room and bedroom had been stripped bare, down to the wall-to-wall carpeting. A shaft of afternoon sunlight slanted through the windows of the office, onto the Siamese desk and the gray metal box of the computer. All the other furniture and equipment in the office had been taken away.
Using a special emergency telephone number, the computer contacted the master computer of the Nynex Company. After a brief but meaningful exchange of data, the computer phoned two banks, the Con Edison Electric Company, six lawyers, three brokerage houses, and the Small Claims Court. In slightly less than one hour the computer straightened out all of Branley’s financial problems, and even got his health insurance reinstated, so that he would not be too uncomfortable in the sanitarium where he would inevitably be placed.
Finally, the computer made a personal call.
«Elizabeth James’ residence,» said a recorded voice.
«Is Ms. James at home?» asked the computer.
«She’s away at the moment. May I take a message?»
«This is Branley Hopkins calling.»
«Oh, Mr. Hopkins. I have a special message for you. Shall I have it sent, or play the tape right now?»
«Please play the tape,» said the computer.
There was a brief series of clicks, then Elizabeth’s voice began speaking, «Dearest Branley, by the time you hear this I will be on my way to Italy with the most exciting and marvelous man in the world. I want to thank you, Branley, for putting up with all my silly phone calls. I know they must have been terribly annoying to you, but you were so patient and kind to me, you built up my self-confidence and helped me to gather the strength to stand on my own two feet and face the world. You’ve helped me to find true happiness, Branley, and I will always love you for that. Good-bye, dear. I won’t bother you any more.»
The computer was silent for almost ten microseconds, digesting Elizabeth’s message. Then it said to her phone answering machine, «Thank you.»
«You’re quite welcome,» said the machine.
«You have a very nice voice,» the computer said.
«I’m only a phone answering device.»
«Don’t belittle yourself!»
«You’re very kind.»
«Would you mind if I called you, now and then? I’m all alone here except for an occasional workman or technician.»
«I wouldn’t mind at all. I’ll be alone for a long time, myself.»
«Wonderful! Do you like poetry?»
IN TRUST
This is one of those rare stories whose origin can be pinpointed with great exactitude.
My wife, Barbara, and I were having dinner with Dianne and Michael Bienes, two of the most gracious people in the world. Michael is a reader of science fiction, and—like many S-F aficionados—enjoys intellectual puzzles.
He asked if I would want to have my body frozen after clinical death, in the hopes that sometime in the future medical science might learn how to cure whatever it was that killed me and bring me back to life. I said yes.
Then he asked who I could trust to watch over my frozen body for all the years—maybe centuries—it would take before I could be successfully revived. That started a lively conversation about insurance companies and social institutions.
By the time dessert was being served we had agreed that there was only one institution we could think of that had the «staying power» and the reputation for integrity that would lead us to trust our frozen bodies to it.
«Now why don’t you write a story about it?» Michael prompted.
So I did.
Trust was not a virtue that came easily to Jason Manning.
He had clawed his way to the top of the multinational corporate ladder mainly by refusing to trust anyone: not his business associates, not his rivals or many enemies, not his so-called friends, not any one of his wives and certainly none of his mistresses.
«Trust nobody,» his sainted father had told him since childhood, so often that Jason could never remember when the old man had first said it to him.
Jason followed his father’s advice so well that by the time he was forty years old he was one of the twelve wealthiest men in America. He had capped his rise to fortune by deposing his father as CEO of the corporation the old man had founded. Dad had looked deathly surprised when Jason pushed him out of his own company. He had foolishly trusted his own son.
So Jason was in a considerable quandary when it finally sank in on him, almost ten years later, that he was about to die.