The sunny blue sky had turned to scarlet and purple before my host came back, humming a little tune between his teeth. The woman was with him. She left after a minute, and I played possum while he thumbed back my eyelid; then he went across to the wall and got busy poking buttons on a console that swung out on command. He took something out of a slot, held it up to the light and frowned at it, came back over to me and took hold of my arm. That was my signal to take hold of his neck. He squawked and flapped his arms and the thing in his hand hit the floor. I got my feet under me and stood up; he went for a pocket with one hand and I shifted grips and took him up against the wall. His eyes goggled at me.
"What have you got that's good for a lethenol hangover, Jess?" I leaned on him and let him get a swallow of air in past my thumb.
"Let me go. . . ." It was a thin squeak like a rubber rat.
"How long have I been here?"
"Thirty hours—but—"
"Who are you, Jess? What's your racket?"
"Are you. . . . out of your mind? I saw you were in difficulty—"
"Why'd you butt in? It strikes me that park's rough territory for a little fellow like you."
He kicked and made choking sounds and I slacked off a little to let some of the purple drain out of his face.
He twisted his mouth into a grin like a wounded fox. "One has one's little hobbies," he got out, and tried to bite me. I pounded his head on the wall a few times. They both sounded solid. All this effort started my head humming again. "You're tough, Jess," I told him. "I'm tougher."
He tried with a finger for the eye, and I knocked him down and held him on the floor with a knee in his back and slapped his pockets. I found a couple of scented tissues and some plastic tokens. He said a few things, none of them helpful.
"You're making me curious, Jess," I tried to talk without panting. "It must be important dope you're hanging on to."
"If you'll take your thumb out of my throat so that we can talk together like civilized men, I'll tell you what I can. Otherwise, you may kill me and be damned to you!" He said it in a new voice, nothing like the whine he'd been using.
I let him sit up. "Let's start with who they are," I said. "The ones that wanted me alive."
"Blackies. Commission men." He spat the words.
"Make it plainer."
"Death Control, damn you! How plain does it have to be?"
"How do you know it's me they want?"
"I heard them talking. In the park."
"So you snatched me out from under their noses. What made me worth taking the chance?"
He tried out a couple of expressions, settled on a sad smile like a mortician suggesting a more appropriate tribute to a departed loved one.
"Really, you have a suspicious nature. I overheard nothing further than that they had seen you enter the park." He gave me a quick look. "By the way, how did you happen to be there?"
"I wandered in off the street. Maybe I was a little drunk."
He gave me a catty smile. He was getting his wind back fast. "I saw your work. Very clever—except for the carelessness just at the last."
"Yeah. Red fooled me."
"You would have bled to death."
I nodded. "Thanks for sticking me back together. That's one I owe you."
"How are you feeling now?" He cocked his head as if the answer was worth a lot of money and he didn't want to miss any overtones.
"Like it happened to two other guys. By the way, you wouldn't have a drink around the place?"
He looked at my hand holding his ruffled shirt. "May I?"
I stepped back and he got up and went past me to the alcove with the buttons, and punched a couple. He said "ah" and came back with a right-looking glass.
"Better get two."
He followed instructions. I traded glasses, watched him drink half of his, then tried mine. It tasted like perfumed apple juice, but I drank it anyway. Maybe it helped. My head seemed to clear a little. Jess dabbed the blood off his chin with a tissue. He got out a flat case and extracted a thin cigarette no thicker than a matchstick, fitted it into a pair of little silver tongs, took a sip from it like a hummingbird sampling the first nectar of spring. He was looking relaxed now, as if we were old school chums having a cozy chat.
"You're a stranger here in the city," he said, making it casual. "Where do you come from?"
"Well, Jess, I have a little problem there. I don't exactly remember how I got to your town. I was hoping you might tell me."
He looked solemn and alert, like a sympathetic judge just before he hits you with the book. "I?"
"Our gentlemanly arrangement isn't going to work out unless you play, too, Jess."
"Really, you're asking the impossible," he said. "What would I know of you—a perfect stranger?"
I banged my glass on the table and leaned over and put my face an inch from his. "Try a guess," I said.
He looked me in the eye. "Very well," he said. "My guess is that you're an ice case, illegally out of low-O."
"What's that mean?"
"If I'm right," he said, "for the past hundred years or more, your body has been in an ETORP cryothesis vault—frozen solid at absolute zero."
Half an hour later, with a couple more innocent-tasting drinks under my belt, I was still asking questions and getting answers that made me ask more questions.
" . . . . most of the low-O's were placed in a cold stasis by relatives: persons who were ill, with a then-incurable ailment—or injured in an accident. Their hope was that in time a cure would be found, and they'd be awakened. Of course, they never were. The dead stay dead. ETORP owns them now."
"I was never sick a day in my life. Outside of that, it sounds like a good story."
Jess shook his head. "The difficulty is that there hasn't been an authorized thaw for over fifty years, to my knowledge. And if you'd been revived under official sanction, you'd have awakened in an ETORP 'doc ward, with a cephalotaper clamped to your skull, pumping you full of a canned ETORP briefing, not wandering the streets in an amnesiac condition."
"Maybe a relative did the job."
"Relatives—of a corpse who's been on ice for a century? Not even your own great-great-grandchildren would know anything of you—and if they did—would they give up their own visas for you?" Jess wagged his head. "And in any event, laws have been passed. We can't have the dead waking up, they tell us; there's no room for them, with a world population of twenty billion. And they cite the legal complications, hold up the specter of old diseases released. They make a good case, but the real reason is. . . ." he looked at me, watching for my reaction. "Spare parts," he said crisply.
"Go on."
"Consider it!" He leaned toward me, slitted his eyes. "Perfectly good arms and legs and kidneys, going to waste—and outside—people needing them, dying for want of them! They're ready to pay ETORP's price, perform any service in return for life and health!"
"What's this ETORP?"
"Eternity, Incorporated."
"Sounds like a cemetery."
"A. . . . ?"
"Where you bury the dead ones."
"The Blackies would gather you in for a trick like that." He sounded a little indignant. "The minerals are valuable, even if the hulk is useless."
"You were telling me about ETORP."
"ETORP controls the most precious commodity of all: life. It issues birth permits and life visas, performs transplants and cosmetic surgery, supplies rejuve and longevity treatments and drugs. Technically, it's a private corporation, operating under the Public Constitution. In fact, it rules our society with an iron hand."
"What about the government?"
"Pah! A withered organ, dangling anachronistically from the body politic. What power is there that compares with life? Money? Military force? What are they to a dying man?"
"Nice business. How did ETORP get the monopoly?"
"The company began simply enough, with patented drugs and techniques, invented in their own laboratories and closely controlled. Then they developed the frozen organ banks; then whole-body cryothesia. After the development of the cancer cures and the perfection of ex-utero cultures, there was a last-ditch legal fight with a group calling themselves the Free Life Party. They charged the company with murder and abortion, sacrilege, desecration of the dead, all manner of crimes. They lost, of course. The bait ETORP had to dangle over judges' heads was irresistible. After that, ETORP's power burgeoned at geometric rates. It bought and sold legislators like poker chips. It became a tyrant that ruled with a whip in one hand and a sweet in the other! And all the while, its vaults were filling with freeze cases, waiting for a resurrection that would never come."
"So Uncle Elmer never woke up after all. . . ."
"So sad," Jess said. "All those trusting souls, saying goodbye, kissing their children and wives and going off to the hospital, leaving pitiful little notes to be opened on anniversaries, going under the anesthetic babbling of the parties they'd stage when they came back. . . . and now—a century later—sawed apart to be sold from open stock to the lucky ones with negotiable skills, or handed out as door prizes to faithful company hacks. And bodies! Whole bodies, an almost unlimited supply, something that had never been plentiful. That was where the power was, Steve—that was what made ETORP! What was a billion dollars to a ninety-year-old mummy in a wheelchair? He'd pay it all for a twenty-year-old body—possibly keeping a million or two in reserve for a new stake."
"Maybe I'm slow. What good would a dead body do him?"
"Dead?" Jess' eyebrows went up. "It's the living body that's valuable, Steve. A young hulk, cured of its once-fatal ailments, will fetch its weight in graymarket chits." I was still frowning at him, and he added, "For brain transfer, you understand."
"Do I?"
He looked surprised. "There are always wealthy Crusters and Dooses with lapsed visas. For a price, it's easy enough to arrange new papers—but those are worthless to a man with a dying body. And prime hulks are in short supply. Dirties won't do, of course; riddled with defects."
"You're talking about scooping out a man's brains and putting somebody else's in?"
"Even in your day the surgical transplant of limbs and organs was practiced. The brain is simply another organ."
"OK; so I'm wanted by the law for illegally rising from the dead. Where does that leave us? Who thawed me? And why?"
Jess thought about it for three puffs of his dope stick. "Steve—how old were you—are you?"
I felt the question over in my mind. I had the feeling the answer was on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn't quite pin it down. "About fifty," I said. "Middle-aged."
Jess got up and went across to a table, came back with a hand mirror and an ivory handle.
"Look at yourself."
I took the mirror. It was a good glass, nine inches square. It showed me a face that was mine, all right; but the hairline was an inch lower on the forehead than it should have been, and the lines I'd collected in a lot of years were gone like the shine on five-dollar shoes. I looked like a new recruit for the freshman grid squad, turned down for underage.