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 think I’ll acquire a taste for this stuff after all.”
“Never mind that! The Martian! The fellow in orange tights! He’s the one who beat me up, he and his gang!”
Hara looked faintly puzzled. “Why, of course.”
Forrester tipped up his ruby crystal glass and drained the champagne. It was not very good champagne—heaven knew where Hara had found it, after Forrester had mentioned it as being one of the great goods of the past—and it was by no means appropriate to the occasion. It tickled his nose. But at least it contained alcohol, which Forrester felt he needed.
He said, humbly, “Please explain what happened.”
“Sweat, Charles, where do I start? What did you do to Heinzie?”
“Nothing! I mean—well, nothing, really. I might have stepped on his feet when we were dancing.”
Hara said angrily, “A Marsman? You stepped on his feet?”
“What’s so bad about that? I mean, even if I did. I’m not sure I did. Would you blow your stack about something like that?”
“Mars isn’t Shoggo,” Hara said patiently, “and, anyway, maybe I would. Depends. Did you read your orientation book?”
“Huh?”
“The book of information about the year 2527. You got it when you were discharged here.”
Forrester searched his memory. “Oh, that. Maybe I left it at the party.”
“Well, that adds,” Hara said with some disgust. “Will you please try to bear in mind, first, that you’re sort of my responsibility; second, that you don’t know your way around? I’ll see you get another copy of the book. Read it! Come back and see me tomorrow; I’ve got work to do now. On your way out, stop at the discharge office and pick up your stuff.”
He escorted Forrester to the door, turned, then paused.
“Oh. Adne Bensen sends regards. Nice girl. She likes you,” he said, closed the door, and was gone.
Forrester completed his processing and was released by the medical section, receiving as he left a neat white folder with his name imprinted in gold.
It contained four sets of documents. One was a sheaf of medical records; the second was the book Hara had mentioned, slim and bronze-bound, with the title printed in luminous letters:
YOUR GUIDE TO THE 26TH CENTURY [1970-1990 EDITION]
The third document seemed to be a legal paper of some kind. At least, it was backed with a sheet of stiff blue material that gave it the look of a subpoena. Forrester remembered that the doctor who had patched him up had spoken of trouble. This looked like the trouble, though the words were either unfamiliar in context or totally meaningless to him:
You, Charles Daigleish Forrester, uncommitted, undeclared, elapsed thirty-seven years, unemployed-pending, take greeting and are directed. Requirement: To be present at Congruency Hearing, hours 1075, days 15, months 9 . . .
It had the authentic feel of legalese, he saw with dismay. Much of the face of the single sheet of paper that the blue material enclosed was covered with a sort of angular, almost readable lettering—something like the machine script they used to put on checks, Forrester thought, and then realized that that was no doubt what it was.
But the paper had a date on it, and since that date appeared to be a week or more away, as near as Forrester could figure, he tabled it with some relief and turned to the next and last item in the folder.
This was a financial statement. Attached to it was a crisp metallic slip with the same angular printing on it, which Forrester recognized as a check.
He fingered it lovingly and puzzled out the amount.