What do you ask after thirty years? Have they reached the stars yet? Who’s cooking up “The War to End War” this time? Do babies come out of test tubes? “Doc, do they still have popcorn machines in the lobbies of movie theaters?”
“They did the last time I looked. I don’t get much time for such things. By the way, the word is `grabbie’ now, not `movie.'”
“So? Why?”
“Try one. You’ll find out. But be sure to fasten your seat belt; they null the whole theater on some shots. See here, Mr. Davis, we’re faced with this same problem every day and we’ve got it down to routine. We’ve got adjustment vocabularies for each entrance year, and historical and cultural summaries. It’s quite necessary, for malorientation can be extreme no matter how much we lackweight the shock.”
“Uh, I suppose so.”
“Decidedly. Especially in an extreme lapse like yours. Thirty years.”
“Is thirty years the maximum?”
“Yes and no. Thirty-five years is the very longest we’ve had experience with, since the first commercial client was placed in subtemperature in December 1965. You are the longest Sleeper I have revived. But we have clients in here now with contract times up to a century and a half. They should never have accepted you for as long as thirty years; they didn’t know enough then. They were taking a great chance with your life. You were lucky.”
“Really?”
“Really. Turn over.” He went on examining me and added, “But with what we’ve learned now I’d be willing to prepare a man for a thousand-year jump if there were any way to finance it . . . hold him at the temperature you were at for a year just to check, then crash him to minus two hundred in a millisecond. He’d live. I think. Let’s try your reflexes.”
That “crash” business didn’t sound good to me. Dr. Albrecht went on: “Sit up and cross your knees. You won’t find the language problem difficult. Of course I’ve been careful to talk in 1970 vocabulary-I rather pride myself on being able to talk selectively in the entrance speech of any of my patients; I’ve made a hypnostudy of it. But you’ll be speaking contemporary idiom perfectly in a week; it’s really just added vocabulary.”
I thought of telling him that at least four times he had used words not used in 1970, or at least not that way, but I decided it wouldn’t be polite. “That’s all for now,” he said presently. “By the way, Mrs. Schultz has been trying to reach you.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t you know her? She insisted that she was an old friend of yours.”
“`Schultz,'” I repeated. “I suppose I’ve known several `Mrs. Schultzes’ at one time and another, but the only one I can place was my fourth-grade teacher. But she’d be dead by now.”
“Maybe she took the Sleep. Well, you can accept the message when you feel like it. I’m going to sign a release on you. But if you’re smart, you’ll stay here for a few days and soak up reorientation. I’ll look in on you later. So `twenty-three, skiddoo’ as they used to say in your day. Here comes the orderly with your breakfast.”
I decided that he was a better doctor than a linguist. But I stopped thinking about it when I saw the orderly. It rolled in, carefully avoiding Dr. Albrecht, who walked straight out, paying no attention to it and making no effort himself to avoid it.
It came over, adjusted the built-in bed table, swung it over me, opened it out, and arranged my breakfast on it. “Shall I pour your coffee?”
“Yes, please.” I did not really want it poured, as I would rather have it stay hot until I’d finished everything else. But I wanted to see it poured.
For I was in a delighted daze . . . it was Flexible Frank!
Not the jackleg, bread-boarded, jury-rigged first model Miles and Belle had stolen from me, of course not. This one resembled the first Frank the way a turbospeedster resembles the first horseless carriages. But a man knows his own work. I had set the basic pattern and this was the necessary evolution . . . Frank’s great-grandson, improved, slicked up, made more efficient-but the same bloodline.