Then one morning I felt fine and got out of bed as soon as I woke up. I felt a little dizzy but that was all. I knew who I was, I knew how I had got there, and I knew that all that other stuff had been dreams.
I knew who had put me there. If Belle had given me orders while I was drugged to forget her shenanigans, either the orders had not taken or thirty years of cold sleep had washed out the hypnotic effect. I was blurry about some details but I knew how they had shanghaied me.
I wasn’t especially angry about it. True, it had happened just “yesterday,” since yesterday is the day just one sleep behind you-but the sleep had been thirty years long. The feeling cannot be precisely defined, since it is entirely subjective, but, while my memory was sharp for the events of “yesterday,” nevertheless my feelings about those events were to things far away. You have seen double images in television of a pitcher making his windup while his picture sits as a ghost on top of a long shot of the whole baseball diamond? Something like that . . . my conscious recollection was a close-up; my emotional reaction was to something long ago and far away.
I fully intended to look up Belle and Miles and chop them into cat meat, but there was no hurry. Next year would do-right now I was eager to have a look at the year 2000.
But speaking of cat meat, where was Pete? He ought to be around somewhere . . . unless the poor little beggar hadn’t lived through the Sleep.
Then-and not until then-did I remember that my careful plans to bring Pete along had been wrecked.
I took Belle and Miles out of the “Hold” basket and moved them over to “Urgent.” Try to kill my cat, would they?
They had done worse than kill Pete; they had turned him out to go wild: to wear out his days wandering back alleys in search of scraps, while his ribs grew thin and his sweet pixie nature warped into distrust of all two-legged beasts.
They had let him die-for he was surely dead by now-let him die thinking that I had deserted him.
For this they would pay. . . if they were still alive. Oh, how I hoped they were still alive-unspeakable!
I found that I was standing by the foot of my bed, grasping the rail to steady myself and dressed only in pajamas. I looked around for some way to call someone. Hospital rooms had not changed much. There was no window and I could not see where the light came from; the bed was high and narrow, as hospital beds had always been in my recollection, but it showed signs of having been engineered into something more than a place to sleep-among other things, it seemed to have some sort of plumbing under it which I suspected was a mechanized bedpan, and the side table was part of the bed structure itself. But, while I ordinarily would have been intensely interested in such gadgetry, right now I simply wanted to find the pear-shaped switch which summons the nurse-I wanted my clothes.
It was missing, but I found what it had been transformed into: a pressure switch on the side of the table that was not quite a table. My hand struck it in trying to find it, and a transparency opposite where my head would have been had I been in bed shone out with: SERVICE CALL. Almost immediately it blinked out and was replaced with: ONE MOMENT, PLEASE.
Very quickly the door silently rolled aside and a nurse came in. Nurses had not changed much. This one was reasonably cute, had the familiar firm manners of a drill sergeant, wore a perky little white hat perched on short orchid-colored hair, and was dressed in a white uniform. It was strangely cut and covered her here and uncovered her there in a fashion different from 1970-but women’s clothes, even work uniforms, were always doing that. She would still have been a nurse in any year, just by her unmistakable manner.