“Oh, yes. Of course.”
“Well, then. I had this insurance thing when I died, you see. They banked the money or something, and it’s had six hundred years to grow. Like John Jones’s Dollar, if you know what that was. I didn’t have much to begin with, but by the time they took me out of the cooler it was over a quarter of a million dollars.”
She picked up her new drink, hesitated, then took a sip of it. She said, “As a matter of fact, Charles dear, it was a lot more than that. Two million seven hundred thousand, Hara said. Didn’t you ever look at your statement?”
Forrester stared. “Two million see— Two mill—”
“Oh, yes.” She nodded. “Look it up. You had the papers with you in the tea room yesterday.”
“But—but, Adne! Somebody must’ve—I mean, your kids were with me when I deposited the check! It was only two hundred and some thousand.”
“Dear Charles. Will you please look it up in your statement?” She stood up, looking somewhat annoyed and, he thought, somewhat embarrassed. “Oh, where the devil did you put it? It was a silly joke anyway, and I’m tired of it.”
Numbly he stood up with her, numbly found the folder from the West Annex Discharge Center, and placed it in her hands. What joke? If there was a joke, he didn’t know what it was. But already he didn’t like it.
She fished out the sheaf of glossy sheets in the financial report, glanced at them, began handing them to him. The first was entitled CRYOTHERAPY, MAINTENANCE, SCHEDULE 1. It bore a list of charge under headings like Annual Rental, Biotesting, Cell Retrieval and Detoxification, as well as a dozen or more recurring items with names that meant nothing to him—Schlick-Tolhaus Procedures, Homiletics, and so on. On the second sheet was a list of charges for what appeared to be financial services, presumably investing and supervising his capital. The third sheet covered diagnostic procedures; there were several for what seemed to be separate surgeries, sheets for nursing care and for pharmaceuticals used. . . . There were in all nearly thirty sheets, and the totals at the bottom of each of them were impressive, but the last sheet of all took Forrester’s breath away.
It was a simple arithmetical statement:
AGGREGATE OF CONVERTED ASSETS – $2 706 884.72
AGGREGATE OF SCHEDULES 1-27 – 2 443 182.09
NET DUE PATIENT ON DISCHARGE – $ 263 702.63
Forrester gasped and coughed and cried, half strangled, “Two and a half million dollars for medical—Sweet Jesus God!” He swallowed and looked up unbelievingly. “Holy AMA! Who can afford that kind of money?”
Adne said, “Why, you can, for one. Otherwise you’d still be frozen.”
“Christ! And—” A thought struck him— “Look at this! Even so they’re cheating me! It says two hundred and sixty thousand, and they only gave me two thirty!”
Adne was beginning to look faintly angry again. “Well, after all, Charles. You did go back there for extra treatment. You might get some of that back from Heinzie, I don’t know. . . . Of course, he’s protesting it because you messed things up.”
He looked at her blankly, then back at the statement. He groaned.
“Reach me my drink,” he said and took a long pull of it. He announced, “The whole thing’s crazy. Millions of dollars for doctors! People just can’t have that much money.”
“You did,” she pointed out. “Given time, people can. At compound interest, they can.”
“But it’s—it’s—medical profiteering! I don’t know what they did to me, but surely there should be some attempt to control fees!”
Adne took his arm and drew him down again on the couch beside her. She said with patience, but not very much patience, “Dear Charles, I wish you would learn a little something about the world before you tell us all what’s wrong with it. Do you know what they had to do to you?”
“Well— Not exactly, no. But I know something about what medical treatment costs.” He frowned. “Or used to cost, anyway. I suppose there’s inflation.”
“I don’t think so. I—I think that’s the wrong word,” she said. “I mean, that means things cost more because the money is worth less, right? But that isn’t what happened. Those operations would have cost you just as much in the nineteenth century, but—”
“Twentieth!”
“Oh, what’s the difference! Twentieth, then. That is, they would have cost just as much if anybody had been able to do them. Of course, nobody was.”
Forrester nodded unwillingly. “All right, I admit I’m alive and I shouldn’t kick. But still—”
Impatiently the girl selected another document from the sheaf, glanced at it, and handed it to him. Forrester looked, and he was very nearly sick. Full color, nearly life size, he thought at first that it was Lon Chaney made up as the Phantom of the Opera.
But there was no makeup. It was a face. Or what was left of one.
He gagged. “What— What—”
“Do you see, Charles? You were in bad shape.”
“Me?”
“Oh yes, dear. You really must read your report. See here . . . evidently you fell forward into the flames. Besides your being killed, the whole anterior section of the head was destroyed. At least, the soft parts. Mm . . . lucky your brains weren’t cooked, at that.” He saw with incredulity that this tender, charming girl was studying the photograph with as little passion as though the charred meat it represented were a lamb chop. She went on, “Didn’t you say you noticed your eyes were different? New eyes.”
Forrester croaked, “Put that thing away.”
He took a swallow of his drink and immediately regretted it, then fished one of the remaining cigarettes out of his second pack and lit it. “I see what you mean,” he said at last.
“Do you, dear? Good. You know, I bet four or five hundred people worked on you. All sorts of specialists. All their helpers. Using all their equipment. They get a case like yours, it’s like one of those great big enormous jigsaw puzzles. They have to put it all back together, piece by piece—only they don’t have all the pieces, so they have to get or make new ones . . . and of course the stuff spoils so. They have to—”
“Quit it!”
“You’re awfully jumpy, Charles.”
“All right! I’m jumpy.” He took a deep drag on the cigarette and asked the question that had been developing in his mind for ten minutes now. “Look. At a normal rate of expenditure—oh, you know; the way you see me living—roughly how long is my quarter of a million dollars going to last?”
She looked into space and tapped her fingernails against her teeth. “There are those custom items of yours,” she said thoughtfully. “They come high—those things you smoke, and fowl eggs, and—what was that other thing? The oransh juice—”
“Leaving out that kind of stuff! How long?”
She pursed her lips. “Well, it depends—”
“Roughly! How long?”
She said, “Well, maybe the rest of this week.”
He goggled at her. He repressed a laugh that sounded almost like a sob.
The end of the week?
He had been building himself up to hear an answer he wouldn’t like, but this exceeded his expectations. He said wretchedly, “Adne—what am I supposed to do?”
“Well,” she said, “you could always get a job.”
“Sure,” he said bitterly. “Got one up your sleeve? One that pays a million dollars a week?”
To his surprise, she seemed to take him seriously. “Oh, Charles! Not that much. I mean, you’re not skilled. Twenty, twenty-five thousand a day—I don’t think you can really expect more.”
He said, “You can find me a job like that?”
“Well, what do you think Taiko would have paid?”
“Wait a minute! You mean Taiko would have given me a job? But I thought— I mean, he said it was his club. What did he call it, the Ned Lud Society?”
“Yes, that’s right.” She nodded. “What do you think a club’s for, Charles?”
“Why—so that people with like interests can, well, get together and work on their interests.”
“And what did you used to so quaintly call a business company?”
“Why . . . Yeah, but look, a company produces something of value. Something you can sell.”
She sniffed. “We’ve got beyond that sort of consideration. Anything that any reasonably competent people agree is worth doing is worth a salary in exchange for doing it.”
“Gosh,” said Charles Forrester.
“But Taiko was quite astonished at the way you acted, Charles. I don’t know whether he’s angry or not. But I wouldn’t count on the offer still being open.”
“Figures,” said Forrester gloomily, musing over lost possibilities.
“Man Forrester!”
The sound of the joymaker was almost like an alarm wakening him from sleep. It took him a few moments to realize what it was, as he emerged from his bemused state. Then he said, “In a minute, machine. Adne, let me get this straight—”