The Best of Bova

by Ben Bova

  Once he realized that there was no way out of the mounting legal troubles facing him, del Vecchio decided to take his own advice. Carefully, he began to create a medical history for himself that would end in clinical death and cryonic immersion. He explained what he was doing to his most trusted lieutenants, told them that he would personally take the blame and the legal punishment for them all, allowing them to elect a new leader and go on operating as before once he was declared dead. They expressed eternal gratitude.

  But del Vecchio knew perfectly well how long eternal gratitude lasted. So he sent his wife and their teenaged children to live in Switzerland, where most of his personal fortune had been cached with the gnomes of Zurich. He gave his wife painfully detailed instructions on when and how to revive him.

  “Fifteen years will do it,” he told her. “Can you wait for me that long?”

  She smiled limpidly at him, threw her arms around his neck and kissed him passionately. But she said, “I’ll only be fifty-eight when you get out.”

  Del Vecchio wondered if she knew about his playmates in Boston. He realized he would still be his current age, forty-seven, when he was thawed back to life. There would be plenty of other women to play with. But would his wife remain faithful enough to have him revived? To make doubly certain of his future, he flew to Zurich and had a very tight legal contract drawn by the bank which held his personal fortune. The gnomes would free him, if no one else would. Otherwise his money would be donated to charity and the bank would lose control of it.

  “What you’re doing may be legal, Del, but it’s damned immoral.”

  Del Vecchio was having dinner with one of the federal district attorneys who was prosecuting one of the innumerable current cases against him. They were old friends, had been classmates at law school. The fact that they were on opposite sides of the case did not bother either of them; they were too professional to allow such trivialities to get in the way of their social lives.

  “Immoral?” Del Vecchio shot back. “What do I care about that? Morality’s for little guys, for people who’ve got no muscle, no backbone. You worry about morality, I’m worrying about spending the rest of my life in jail.” They were sitting at a small corner table in a quiet little restaurant in downtown Providence, barely a block from the federal courthouse, a place frequented almost exclusively by lawyers who never lifted an eyebrow at a defendant buying dinner for a prosecuting attorney. After all, prosecuting attorneys rarely made enough money to afford such an elegant restaurant; candlelight and leather-covered wine lists were not for the protectors of the public, not on the salaries the public allowed them.

  “If the jury finds you guilty, the judge has to impose the penalty,” the district attorney said, very seriously.

  “Jury,” del Vecchio almost spat. “Those twelve chidrools! I’m supposed to be tried by a jury of my peers, right? That means my equals, doesn’t it?”

  The district attorney frowned slightly. “They are your equals, Del. What makes you think. . .”

  “My equals?” del Vecchio laughed. “Do you really think those unemployed bums and screwy housewives are my equals? I mean, how smart can they be if they let themselves get stuck with jury duty?”

  The attorney’s frown deepened. His name was Christopher Scarpato. He had gone into the profession of law because his father, a small shopkeeper continually in debt to bookmakers, had insisted that his son learn how to outwit the rest of the world. While Chris was working his way through law school, his father was beaten to death by a pair of overly-zealous collection agents. More of a plodder than a brilliant student, Chris was recruited by the Department of Justice, where careful, thorough groundwork is more important than flashy public relations and passionate rhetoric. Despite many opportunities, he had remained honest and dedicated. Del Vecchio found that charming, even noteworthy, and felt quite superior to his friend.

  “And what makes you think they’ll find me guilty?” asked del Vecchio, just a trifle smugly. “They’re stupid, all right, but can they be that stupid?”

  Scarpato finally realized he was being baited. He smiled one of his rare smiles, but it was a sad one. “They’ll find you guilty, Del. They’ve got no choice.”

  Del Vecchio’s grin faded. He looked down at his plate of pasta, then placed his fork on the damask tablecloth alongside it. “I got no appetite. Haven’t been feeling so good.”

  With a weary shake of his head, Chris replied, “You don’t have to put on the act for me, Del. I know what you’re going to do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re going to get some tame doctor to pronounce you dead and then have yourself frozen. Just like Marchetti.”

  Del Vecchio tried to look shocked, but instead he broke into a grin. “Is there anything illegal about dying? Or being frozen?”

  “The doctor will be committing a homicide.”

  “You’ll have to prove that.”

  Scarpato said, “It’s an attempt to evade the law. That’s immoral, even if it’s not illegal—yet.”

  “Let the priests worry about morality,” del Vecchio advised his old friend.

  “You should worry about it,” said Scarpato. “You’ve turned into an asocial menace, Del. When we were in school, you were an okay kind of guy. But now. . .”

  “What, I’m going to lose my soul?”

  “Maybe you’ve already lost it. Maybe you ought to be thinking about how you can get it back.”

  Del Vecchio grinned at him. “Listen, Chris: I don’t give a damn about souls. But I’m going to protect my body, you can bet. You won’t see me in jail, old buddy. I’m going to take a step out of time, and when I come back, you’ll be an old man and I’ll still be young.”

  Scarpato said nothing, and del Vecchio knew that he had silenced his friend’s attempts at conscience.

  Still, that little hint of “yet” that Scarpato had dropped bothered del Vecchio as the days swiftly raced by. He checked every aspect of his plan while his health appeared to deteriorate rapidly: the doctors played their part to perfection, his wife was already comfortably ensconced in Switzerland, the bankers in Zurish understood exactly what they had to do.

  Yet as he lay on the clinic table with the gleaming stainless steel cylinder waiting beside him like a mechanical whale that was going to swallow him in darkness, del Vecchio could feel his pulse racing with fear. The last thing he saw was the green-gowned doctor, masked, approaching him with the hypodermic syringe. That, and frigid wisps of vapor wafting up from the tanks of liquid nitrogen. The needle felt sharp and cold. He remembered that parts of Dante’s hell were frozen in ice.

  When they awoke him, there was a long period of confusion and disorientation. They told him later that it lasted only a day or so, but to del Vecchio it seemed like weeks, even months.

  At first he thought something had gone wrong, and they had never put him under. But the doctors were all different, and the room he was in was not the clinic he had known. They kept him in bed most of the time, except when two husky young men came in to force him to get up and walk around the room. Four times around the little hospital room exhausted him. Then they flopped him back on the bed, gave him a mercilessly efficient massage, and left. A female nurse wheeled in his first meal and spoonfed him; he was too weak to lift his arms.

  The second day (or week, or month) Scarpato came in to visit him.

  “How do you feel, Del?”

  Strangely, the attorney seemed barely to have aged at all. There was a hint of gray at his temples, perhaps a line or two in his face that had not been there before, but otherwise the years had treated him very kindly.

  “Kind of weak,” del Vecchio answered truthfully.

  Scarpato nodded. “That’s to be expected, from what the medics tell me. Your heart is good, circulation strong. Everything is okay, physically.”

  A thought suddenly flashed into del Vecchio’s thawing mind. “What are you doing in Switzerland?”

  The attorney’s face grew somber. �
��You’re not in Switzerland, Del. We had your vat flown back here. You’re in New York.”

  “Wh. . . how. . .?”

  “And you haven’t been under for fifteen years, either. It’s only three years.”

  Del Vecchio tried to sit up in the bed, but he was too weak to make it. His head sank back onto the pillows. He could hear his pulse thudding in his ears.

  “I tried to warn you,” Scarpato said, “that night at dinner in Providence. You thought you were outsmarting the law, outsmarting the people who make up the law, who are the law. But you can’t outwit the people for long, Del.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, del Vecchio saw that the room’s only window was covered with a heavy wire mesh, like bars on a jail cell’s window. He choked back a shocked gasp.

  Scarpato spoke quietly, without malice. “Your cute little cryonics trick forced the people to take a fresh look at things. There’ve been a few new laws passed since you had yourself frozen.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as the state has the right to revive a frozen corpse if and when a grand jury feels he’s had himself frozen specifically to evade the law.”

  Del Vecchio felt his heart sink in his chest.

  “But once they got that one passed, they went one step further.”

  “What?”

  “Well, you know how the country’s been divided about the death penalty. Some people think it’s cruel and unusual punishment; others think it’s a necessary deterrent to crime, especially violent crime. Even the Supreme Court has been split on the issue.”

  Del Vecchio couldn’t catch his breath. He realized what was coming.

  “And there’s been the other problem,” Scarpato went on, “of overcrowding in the jails. Some judges—I’m sure you know who—even let criminals go free because they claim that putting them in overcrowded jails is cruel and unusual punishment.”

  “Oh my God in heaven,” del Vecchio gasped.

  “So—” Scarpato hesitated. Del Vecchio had never seen his old friend look so grim, so purposeful. “So they’ve passed laws in just about every state in the union to freeze criminals, just store them in vats of liquid nitrogen. Dewars, they call them. We’re emptying the jails, Del, and filling them up again with dewars. They’re starting to look like mortuaries, all those stainless steel caskets piled up, one on top of another.”

  “But you can’t do that!”

  “It’s done. The laws have been passed. The Supreme Court has ruled on it.”

  “But that’s murder!”

  “No. The convicts are clinically dead, but not legally. They can be revived. And since the psychologists and sociologists have been yelling for years that crime is a social maladjustment, and not really the fault of the criminal, we’ve found a way to make them happy.”

  “I don’t see. . .”

  Scarpato almost smiled. “Well, look. If you can have yourself frozen because you’ve just died of a heart ailment or a cancer that medical science can’t cure, in the hopes that science will find a cure in the future and thaw you out and make you well again. . . well, why not use the same approach to social and psychological illnesses?”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re a criminal because of some psychological maladjustment,” Scarpato said. “At least, that’s what the head-shrinkers claim. So we freeze you and keep you frozen until science figures out a way to cure you. That way, we’re not punishing you; we’re rehabilitating you.”

  “You can’t do that! I got civil rights. . .”

  “Your civil rights are not being infringed. Once you’re found guilty by a jury of your peers you will be frozen. You will not age a single day while in the liquid nitrogen. When medical science learns how to cure your psychological unbalance, you will be thawed, cured, and returned to society as a healthy, productive citizen. We even start a small bank account for you which accrues compound interest, so that you’ll have some money when you’re rehabilitated.”

  “But that could be a thousand years in the future!” del Vecchio screamed.

  “So what?”

  “The whole world could be completely changed by then! They could revive me to make a slave out of me! They could use me for meat, for Chrissakes! Or spare parts!” He was screeching now, in absolute terror.

  Scarpato shrugged. “We have no control over that, unfortunately. But we’re doing our best for you. In earlier societies you might have been tortured, or mutilated, or even put to death. Up until a few years ago, you would have been sentenced to years and years in prison; a degrading life, filled with violence and drugs and danger. Now— you just take a nap and then someday someone will wake you up in a wonderful new world, completely rehabilitated, with enough money to start a new life for yourself.”

  Del Vecchio broke into uncontrollable sobs. “Don’t. For God’s mercy, Chris, don’t do this to me. My wife. . . my kids. . .”

  Scarpato shook his head. “It’s done. Believe me, there’s no way I could get you out of it, even if I wanted to. Your wife has found herself a boyfriend in Switzerland, some penniless count or duke or something. Your kids are getting along fine. Your girlfriends miss you, though, from what I hear.”

  “You sonofabitch! You dirty, scheming. . .”

  “You did this to yourself, Del!” Scarpato snapped, with enough power in his voice to silence del Vecchio. “You thought you had found a nice fat loophole in the law, so you could get away with almost anything. You thought the rest of us were stupid fools. Well, you made a loophole, all right. But the people—those shopkeepers and unemployed bums and screwy housewives that you’ve walked over all your life—they’ve turned your loophole into a noose. And your neck is in it. Don’t blame me. Blame yourself.”

  His eyes still flowing tears, del Vecchio pleaded, “Don’t do it to me, Chris. Please don’t do it. They’ll never wake me up. They’ll pull the plug on me. . .”

  “Don’t think that everyone’s as dishonest as you are. The convicts will be kept frozen. It only costs a thousandth of what it costs to keep a man in jail. You’ll be safe enough.”

  “But they’ll thaw me out sometime in the future. I’ll be all alone in the world. I won’t know anybody. It’ll be all strange to me. I’ll be a total stranger. . .”

  “No you won’t,” Scarpato said, his face grim. “It’s practically certain that Marchetti and Don Carmine will both be thawed out when you are. After all, you’re all three suffering from the same dysfunction, aren’t you?” That’s when the capillary in del Vecchio’s brain ballooned and burst. Scarpato saw his friend’s eyes roll up into his head, his body stiffen. He slammed the emergency call button beside the bed and a team of medics rushed in. While Scarpato watched, they declared del Vecchio clinically dead. Within an hour they slid his corpse into a waiting stainless steel cylinder where it would repose until some happier day in the distant future.

  “You’re out of time now, Del,” Scarpato whispered as a technician sealed the end of the gleaming dewar. “Really out of time.”

  BÉISBOL

  There are other (better!) ways for nations to compete than by going to war. The Greeks figured that out more than two thousand years ago.

  I got this crazy idea one day—if the United States began its rapprochement with Communist China by sending Ping-Pong players to Peking, maybe someday we would start to make up with Castro’s Cuba by sending a baseball team to Havana. As I mulled it over in my mind, a certain Mr. Lucius J. Riccio, of New York City, suggested the same thing in a letter to The New York Times of March 3, 1985.

  I realized that I could not waste time mulling. The idea would slip away from me if I didn’t get the story onto paper.

  The first draft of the tale was pretty dull. Thank heaven, I was smart enough to look up Alfred Bester, one of the great talents of our age—especiaMy when it comes to sparking up a story idea. Alfie’s mind works in leaps and bounds, and after an evening of swapping ideas and swilling booze, “Béisbol” just about wrote itself.

  So thank y
ou, Alfie. See you at the World Series. (Or maybe not. I’m a Red Sox fan, and I don’t think I could stand another crushing blow like the 1986 Series.)

  Nixon sat scowling in the dugout, his dark chin down on the letters of his baseball uniform, his eyes glaring. It wasn’t us he was mad at; it was Castro.

  Across the infield, the Cubans were passing out cigars in their dugout. Top of the ninth inning and they were ahead, 1-0. We had three more chances at their robot pitcher. So far, all the mechanical monster had done was strike out fourteen of us USA All-Stars and not allow a runner past first base.

  Castro looked a lot older than I thought he’d be. His beard was all gray. But he was laughing and puffing on a big cigar as his team took the field and that damned robot rolled itself up to the mound.

  Nixon jumped to his feet. He looked kind of funny in a baseball uniform, like, out of place.

  “Men,” he said to us, “this is more than a game. I’m sure you know that.”

  We all kind of muttered and mumbled and nodded our heads.

  “If they win this series, they’ll take over all of the Caribbean. All of Central America. The United States will be humiliated.”

  Yeah, maybe so, I thought. And you’ll be a bum again, instead of a hero. But he didn’t have to go up and try to bat against that Commie robot. From what we heard, they had built it in Czechoslovakia or someplace like that to throw hand grenades at tanks. Now it was throwing baseballs right past us, like a blur.

  “We’ve got to win this game,” Nixon said, his voice trembling. “We’ve got to!”

  It had seemed like a good idea. Use baseball to reestablish friendly relations with Cuba, just like they had used Ping-Pong to make friends with Red China. So the commissioner personally picked an All-Star team and Washington picked Nixon to manage us. It would be a pushover, we all thought. I mean, the Cubans like baseball, but they couldn’t come anywhere near matching us.

  Well, pitching may be 80 percent of the game, but scouting is 200 percent more. We waltzed into Havana and found ourselves playing guys who were just about as good as we were. According to a CIA report, their guys were pumped up on steroids and accelerators and God knows what else. They’d never pass an Olympic Games saliva test, but nobody on our side had thought to include drug testing in the ground rules.