At the temperature of liquid helium, chemistry stops.
On this fact, and on one reasonable hope, the largest industry of the late twentieth century had been built.
The reasonable hope was that the progress of medicine in past years would be matched by similar progress in the future—so that, no matter what a person might die of, at some future time a way would be found to cure it, to repair it, or at least to make it irrelevant to continuing life and activity (including a method of repairing the damage done by freezing a body to that temperature).
The fact was that freezing stopped time.
And the industry was Immortality, Inc.
In the city of Shoggo in which Forrester had awakened, a city that was nearly eight hundred years old and enormous, a thousand acres of park along a lake front had humped themselves into a hill. All around was flat. The hill itself was an artifact. It was, as a matter of fact, the freezing center for that part of the world.
A hundred and fifty million cubic yards of earth had been eaten out of the ground to make a cold-storage locker for people. After the locker was built, most of the dirt was heaped back on top of it for insulation.
The differential in temperature between ground level and the heart of the frozen hill was nearly five hundred degrees, Fahrenheit, or three hundred and more in the Kelvin scale on which the dormer operated.
When Forrester realized where the white aircraft had taken him, he was instantly submerged in a terror he could not express. Beginning to awaken, he was still terribly weak, as though one of those sprays from the girl’s joymaker had shorted out ninety percent of his volitional muscle control. (As in fact it had.) When he saw the bright featureless ceiling overhead and heard the moan and click of the thousand frightening instruments that brought people back to life, he fugued into a terrifying certainty that they were going to freeze him again. He lay there, groaning inarticulately, while things were done to him.
But they were not freezing him.
They were just patching him up. The blood was washed away. The bruises were scrubbed with something metallic, then touched with a transparent stiff jelly from a long silvery tube that looked something like a large lipstick. His left thigh was pressed for a moment between two glowing screens, which he knew to be a sort of X-ray device, and a fine wash of something that glistened wet and dark was painted over his heart.
This last treatment made him feel better, whatever it was. He found that he was able to speak.
“Thank you,” he said.
The young-looking, red-faced man who was working over him at that moment nodded casually and touched Forrester’s navel with the end of a silvery probe. He glanced at it and said, “All right, I guess we’re through with you. Get up, and let’s see if you can walk to Hara’s office.”
Forrester swung his legs out of the sort of low-walled crib he was lying in and found he could walk as well as ever. Even his bruises didn’t hurt, or not much, although he could detect what seemed to be the beginning return of pain.
The red-faced man said, “You’re fine. Stay out of here for a while, will you? And don’t forget to see Hara, because you’re in some kind of trouble.” He turned away as Forrester started to question him. “How would I know what kind? Just go see Hara.”
Although a slim green arrowhead of light skipped along the floor ahead of him, guiding him to Hara’s office, Forrester thought he could have found it without the arrowhead. Once he left the emergency rooms he was in the part of the dormer he remembered. Here he had awakened out of a frozen sleep lasting half a millennium. There, every day for a week, he had gone bathing in some sort of light, warm oil that had vibrated and tingled, making him feel drowsy but stronger each day. It was on the level below this that he had done his exercises and in the building across the bed of poinsettias (except that these poinsettias were bright gold) that he had slept.
He wondered what had become of the rest of what he thought of as his graduating class. The thawed Lazaruses were processed in batches—fifty at a clip in his group—and, although he had not spent much time with any of them, there was something about this shared experience that had made him know them quickly.
But when they were discharged, they all went in separate directions, apparently for policy reasons. Forrester regretted they had lost touch.
Then he laughed out loud. A blue-jacketed woman, walking toward him along the hall and talking into an instrument on her wrist, looked up at him with curiosity and faint contempt. “Sorry,” he said to her, still chuckling, as the green beacon of light turned a corner and he followed. He didn’t doubt he looked peculiar. He felt peculiar. He was amused that he was missing these fellow graduates of the freezatorium with the fond, distant detachment he had felt for his high school class. Yet it was less than forty-eight hours since he had been with them.
A busy forty-eight hours, he thought. A bit frightening, too. Even wealth was not as secure a buffer against this world as he had thought.
The flickering green light led him into Hara’s office and disappeared.
Hara was standing at the door, waiting for him. “Damned kamikaze,” he said amiably. “Can’t I trust you out of my sight for a minute?”
Forrester, who had never been a demonstrative man, seized his hand and shook it. “Jesus, I’m glad to see you! I’m mixed up. I don’t know what the hell is going on, and—”
“Just stay out of trouble, will you? Sit down.” Hara made a seat come out of the wall and a bottle out of his desk. He thumbed the cork expertly and poured a drink for Forrester, saying, “I expected you under your own power this morning, you know. Not in a DR cart. Didn’t the center warn you somebody was after you?”
“Positively not!” Forrester was both startled and indignant. “What do you mean, somebody was after me? I had no idea—”
Then, tardily, recognition dawned. “Unless,” he finished thoughtfully, “that’s what the joymaker was mumbling about. It was all about bonds and guaranties and somebody named Heinz something of Syrtis Major. That’s on Mars, isn’t it? Say!”
“Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major,” Hara supplied, toasting Forrester with his glass and taking a tiny sip of the drink. Forrester followed suit; it was champagne again. Hara sighed and said, “I don’t know, Charles, but I don’t
