“Maybe they give the customer a break instead.”
“What? My dear Mr. Davis, we distribute every accrued benefit. Our charter requires it . . . while Central Valley is a stock company.”
“Maybe I should buy some of their- Look, Mr. Powell, we’re wasting time. Will Mutual accept my pal here? Or not? If not, I’ve been here too long already.”
“You mean you want to pay to have that creature preserved alive in hypothermia?”
“I mean I want both of us to take the Long Sleep. And don’t call him `that creature’; his name is Petronius.”
“Sorry. I’ll rephrase my question. You are prepared to pay two custodial fees to have both of you, you and, uh, Petronius committed to our sanctuary?”
“Yes. But not two standard fees. Something extra, of course, but you can stuff us both in the same coffin; you can’t honestly charge as much for Pete as you charge for a man.”
“This is most unusual.”
“Of course it is. But we’ll dicker over the price later . . . or I’ll dicker with Central Valley. Right now I want to find out if you can do it.”
“Uh. . .” He drummed on his desk top. “Just a moment.” He picked up his phone and said, “Opal, get me Dr. Berquist.” I didn’t hear the rest of the conversation, for he switched on the privacy guard. But after a while he put down the instrument and smiled as if a rich uncle had died. “Good news, sir! I had overlooked momentarily the fact that the first successful experiments were made on cats. The techniques and critical factors for cats are fully established. In fact there is a cat at the Naval Research Laboratory in Annapolis which is and has been for more than twenty years alive in hypothermia.”
“I thought NRL was wiped out when they got Washington?”
“Just the surface buildings, sir, not the deep vaults. Which is a tribute to the perfection of the technique; the animal was unattended save by automatic machinery for more than two years, yet it still lives, unchanged, unaged. As you will live, sir, for whatever period you elect to entrust yourself to Mutual.”
I thought he was going to cross himself. “Okay, okay, now let’s get on with the dicker.”
There were four factors involved: first, how to pay for our care while we were hibernating; second, how long I wanted us to sleep; third, how I wanted my money invested while I was in the freezer; and last, what happened if I conked out and never woke up.
I finally settled on the year 2000, a nice round number and only thirty years away. I was afraid that if I made it any longer I would be completely out of touch. The changes in the last thirty years (my own lifetime) had been enough to bug a man’s eyes out-two big wars and a dozen little ones, the downfall of communism, the Great Panic, the artificial satellites, the change to atomic power-why, when I was a kid they didn’t even have multimorphs.
I might find 2000 A.D. pretty confusing. But if I didn’t jump that far Belle would not have time to work up a fancy set of wrinkles.
When it came to how to invest my dough I did not consider government bonds and other conservative investments; our fiscal system has inflation built into it. I decided to hang onto my Hired Girl stock and put the cash into other common stocks, with a special eye to some trends I thought would grow. Automation was bound to get bigger. I picked a San Francisco fertilizer firm too; it had been experimenting with yeasts and edible algae – there were more people every year and steak wasn’t going to get any cheaper. The balance of the money I told him to put into the company’s managed trust fund.
But the real choice lay in what to do if I died in hibernation. The company claimed that the odds were better than seven out of ten that I would live through thirty years of cold sleep . . . and the company would take either end of the bet. The odds weren’t reciprocal and I didn’t expect them to be; in any honest gambling there is a breakage to the house. Only crooked gamblers claim to give the sucker the best of it, and insurance is legalized gambling. The oldest and most reputable insurance firm in the world, Lloyd’s of London, makes no bones about it-Lloyd’s associates will take either end of any bet. But don’t expect better-than-track odds: somebody has to pay for Our Mr. Powell’s tailor-made suits.