by Ben Bova
Inevitably, the word of his illness and of his plan to freeze himself leaked out beyond the confines of his executive suite. After all, no one could be trusted to keep such momentous news a secret. Rumors began to circulate up and down Wall Street. Reporters began sniffing around.
Jason realized that his secret was out in the open when a delegation of bankers invited him to lunch. They were fat, sleek-headed men, such as sleep of nights, yet they looked clearly worried as Jason sat down with them in the oak-panelled private dining room of their exclusive downtown club.
“Is it true?” blurted the youngest of the group. “Are you dying?”
The others around the circular table all feigned embarrassment but leaned forward eagerly to hear Jason’s reply.
He spoke bluntly and truthfully to them.
The oldest of the bankers, a lantern-jawed white haired woman of stern visage, was equally blunt.
“Your various corporations owe our various banks several billions of dollars, Jason.”
“That’s business,” he replied. “Banks loan billions to corporations all the time. Why are you worried?”
“It’s the uncertainty of it all!” blurted the youngest one again. “Are you going to be dead or aren’t you?”
“I’ll be dead for a while,” he answered, “but that will be merely a legal fiction. I’ll be back.”
“Yes,” grumbled one of the older bankers. “But when?”
With a shrug, Jason replied, “That, I can’t tell you. I don’t know.”
“And what happens to your corporations in the meantime?”
“What happens to our outstanding loans?”
Jason saw what was in their eyes. Foreclosure. Demand immediate payment. Take possession of the corporate assets and sell them off. The banks would make a handsome profit, and his enemies would gleefully carve up his corporate empire among themselves. His estate—based largely on the value of his holdings in his own corporations—would dwindle to nothing.
Jason went back to his sumptuous office and gulped antacids after his lunch with the bankers. Suddenly a woman burst into his office, her hair hardly mussed from struggling past the cadres of secretaries, executive assistants, and office managers who guarded Jason’s privacy.
Jason looked up from his bottle of medicine, bleary-eyed, as she stepped in and shut the big double doors behind her, a smile of victory on her pert young face. He did not have to ask who she was or why she was invading his office. He instantly recognized that Internal Revenue Service look about her: cunning, knowing, ruthless, sure of her power.
“Can’t a man even die without being hounded by the IRS?” he moaned.
She was good-looking, in a feline, predatory sort of way. Reminded him of his second wife. She prowled slowly across the thickly sumptuous carpeting of Jason’s office and curled herself into the hand-carved Danish rocker in front of his desk.
“We understand that you are going to have yourself frozen, Mr. Manning.” Her voice was a tawny purr.
“I’m dying,” he said.
“You still have to pay your back taxes, dead or alive,” she said. “Take it up with my attorneys. That’s what I pay them for.”
“This is an unusual situation, Mr. Manning. We’ve never had to deal with a taxpayer who is planning to have himself frozen.” She arched a nicely curved brow at him. “This wouldn’t be some elaborate scheme to avoid paying your back taxes, would it?”
“Do you think I gave myself cancer just to avoid paying taxes?”
“We’ll have to impound all your holdings as soon as you’re frozen.”
“What?”
“Impound your holdings. Until we can get a court to rule on whether or not you’re deliberately trying to evade your tax responsibilities.”
“But that would ruin my corporations!” Jason yelled. “It would drive them into the ground.”
“Can’t be helped,” the IRS agent said, blinking lovely golden brown eyes at him.
“Why don’t you just take out a gun and kill me, right here and now?”
She actually smiled. “It’s funny, you know. They used to say that the only two certainties in the world are death and taxes. Well, you may be taking the certainty out of death.” Her smile vanished and she finished coldly, “But taxes will always be with us, Mr. Manning. Always!”
And with that, she got up from the chair and swept imperiously out of his office.
Jason grabbed the phone and called his insurance agent.
The man was actually the president of Amalgamated Life Assurance Society, Inc.” the largest insurance company in Hartford, a city that still styled itself as The Insurance Capital of the World. He and Jason had been friends—well, acquaintances, actually-for decades. Like Jason, the insurance executive had fought his way to the top of his profession, starting out with practically nothing except his father’s modest chain of loan offices and his mother’s holdings in AT&T.
“It’s the best move you can make,” the insurance executive assured Jason. “Life insurance is the safest investment in the world. And the benefits, when we pay off, are not taxable.”
That warmed Jason’s heart. He smiled at the executive’s image in his phone’s display screen. The man was handsome, his hair silver, his face tanned, his skin taut from the best cosmetic surgery money could buy.
“The premiums,” he added, “will be kind of steep, Jace. After all, you’ve only got a few months to go.”
“But I want my estate protected,” Jason said. “What if I dump all my possessions into an insurance policy?”
For just a flash of a moment the executive looked as if an angel had given him personal assurance of eternal bliss. “Your entire estate?” he breathed.
“All my worldly goods.”
The man smiled broadly, too broadly, Jason thought. “That would be fine,” he said, struggling to control himself. “Just fine. We would take excellent care of your estate. No one would be able to lay a finger on it, believe me.”
Jason felt the old warning tingle and heard his father’s voice whispering to him.
“My estate will be safe in your hands?”
“Perfectly safe,” his erstwhile friend assured him.
“We’re talking a long time here,” Jason said. “I may stay frozen for years and years. A century or more.”
“The insurance industry has been around for centuries, Jace. We’re the most stable institution in Western civilization.”
Just then the phone screen nickered and went gray. Jason thought that they had been cut off. But before he could do anything about it, a young oriental gentleman’s face came on the screen, smiling at him.
“I am the new CEO of Amalgamated Life,” he said, in perfectly good American English. “How may I help you?”
“What happened to—”
“Amalgamated has been acquired by Lucky Sun Corporation, a division of Bali Entertainment and Gambling, Limited. We are diversifying into the insurance business. Our new corporate headquarters will be in Las Vegas, Nevada. Now then, how can I be of assistance to you?”
Jason screamed and cut the connection.
Who can I trust? he asked himself, over and over again, as his chauffeur drove him to his palatial home, far out in the countryside. How can I stash my money away where none of the lawyers or tax people can steal it away from me?
He thought of Snow White sleeping peacefully while the seven dwarfs faithfully watched over her. I don’t have seven dwarfs, Jason thought, almost in tears. I don’t have anybody. No one at all.
The assassination attempt nearly solved his problem for him.
He was alone in his big rambling house, except for the servants. As he often did, Jason stood out on the glassed-in back porch, overlooking the beautifully wooded ravine that gave him a clear view of the sunset. Industrial pollution from the distant city made the sky blaze with brilliant reds and oranges. Jason swirled a badly needed whisky in a heavy crystal glass, trying to overcome his feelings of dread as he watched the sun go down.
/> He knew that there would be precious few sunsets left for him to see. Okay, so I won’t really be dead, he told himself. I’ll just be frozen for a while. Like going to sleep. I’ll wake up later.
Oh yeah? a voice in his head challenged. Who’s going to wake you up? What makes you think they’ll take care of your frozen body for years, for centuries? What’s to stop them from pulling the plug on you? Or selling your body to some medical research lab? Or maybe for meat!
Jason shuddered. He turned abruptly and headed for the door to the house just as a bullet smashed the curving glass where he had been standing an instant earlier.
Pellets of glass showered him. Jason dropped his glass and staggered through the door into the library.
“A sniper?” he yelped out loud. “Out here?”
No, he thought, with a shake of his head. Snipers do their sniping in the inner city or on college campuses or interstate highways. Not out among the homes of the rich and powerful. He called for his butler.
No answer.
He yelled for any one of his servants.
No reply.
He dashed to the phone on the sherry table by the wing chairs tastefully arranged around the fireplace. The phone was dead. He banged on it, but it remained dead. The fireplace burst into cheery flames, startling him so badly that he nearly fell over the sherry table.
Glancing at his wristwatch, Jason saw that it was precisely seven-thirty. The house’s computer was still working, he realized. It turned on the gas-fed fireplace on time. But the phones are out and the servants aren’t answering me. And there’s a sniper lurking out in the ravine, taking shots at me.
The door to the library opened slowly. Jason’s heart crawled up his throat.
“Wixon, it’s you!”
Jason’s butler was carrying a silver tray in his gloved hands. “Yes sir,” he replied in his usual self effacing whisper.
“Why didn’t you answer me when I called for you? Somebody took a shot at me and—”
“Yes sir, I know. I had to go out to the ravine and deal with the man.”
“Deal with him?”
“Yes sir,” whispered the butler. “He was a professional assassin, hired by your third wife.”
“By Jessica?”
“I believe your former wife wanted you killed before your new will is finalized,” said the butler.
“Ohhh.” Jason sagged into the wing chair. All the strength seemed to evaporate from him.
“I thought you might like a whisky, sir.” The butler bent over him and proffered the silver tray. The crystal of the glass caught the firelight like glittering diamonds. Ice cubes tinkled in the glass reassuringly.
“No thanks,” said Jason. “I fixed one for myself when I came in.”
“Wouldn’t you like another, sir?”
“You know I never have more than one.” Jason looked up at the butler’s face. Wixon had always looked like a wax dummy, his face expressionless. But at the moment, with the firelight playing across his features, he seemed—intent.
“Shouldn’t we phone the police?” Jason asked. “I mean, the man tried to kill me.”
“That’s all taken care of, sir.” Wixon edged the tray closer to Jason. “Your drink, sir.”
“I don’t want another drink, dammit!”
The butler looked disappointed. “I merely thought, with all the excitement. . .”
Jason dismissed the butler, who left the drink on the table beside him. Alone in the library, Jason stared into the flames of the gas-fed fireplace. The crystal glass glittered and winked at him alluringly. Maybe another drink is what I need, Jason told himself. It’s been a hard day.
He brought the glass to his lips, then stopped. Wixon knows I never have more than one drink. Why would he . . . ?
Poison! Jason threw the glass into the fireplace, leaped up from the chair and dashed for the garage. They’re all out to get me! Five wives, five children, ten sets of lawyers, bankers, the IRS—I’m a hunted man!
Once down in the dimly lit garage he hesitated only for a moment. They might have rigged a bomb in the Ferrari, he told himself. So, instead, he took the gardener’s pickup truck.
As he crunched down the long gravel driveway to the main road, all the library windows blew out in a spectacular gas-fed explosion.
By the time he reached his brother’s rectory, it was almost midnight. But Jason felt strangely calm, at peace with himself and the untrustworthy world that he would soon be departing.
Jason pounded on the rectory door until Michael’s housekeeper, clutching a house robe to her skinny frame, reluctantly let him in.
“The monsignor sound asleep,” she insisted, with an angry frown.
“Wake him,” Jason insisted even more firmly.
She brought him to the study and told him to wait there. The fireplace was cold and dark. The only light in the room came from the green-shaded lamp on Michael’s desk. Jason paced back and forth, too wired to sit still.
As soon as Michael padded into the study, in his bedroom slippers and bathrobe, rubbing sleep from his eyes, Jason started to pour out his soul.
“Give your entire estate to the Church?” Michael sank into one of the leather armchairs.
“Yes!” Jason pulled the other chair close to his brother, and leaned forward eagerly. “With certain provisions, of course.”
“Provisions.”
Jason ticked off on his fingers, “First, I want the Church to oversee the maintenance of my frozen body. I want the Church to guarantee that nobody’s going to pull the plug on me.”
Michael nodded warily.
“Second, I want the Church to monitor medical research and decide when I should be revived. And by whom.”
Nodding again, Michael said, “Go on.”
“That’s it.”
“Those are the only conditions?”
Jason said. “Yes.”
Stirring slightly in his chair, Michael asked, “And what does the Church get out of this?”
“Half my estate.”
“Half?” Michael’s eyebrows rose.
“I think that’s fair, don’t you? Half of my estate to the Church, the other half waiting for me when I’m revived.”
“Uh . . . how much is it? I mean, how large is your estate?”
With a shrug, Jason said, “I’m not exactly sure. My personal holdings, real estate, liquid assets should add up to several billion, I’d guess.”
“Billion?” Michael stressed the b.
“Billion.”
Michael gulped.
Jason leaned back in the bottle green chair and let out a long breath. “Do that for me, and the Church can have half of my estate. You could do a lot of good with a billion and some dollars, Mike.”
Michael ran a hand across his stubbly chin. “I’ll have to speak to the cardinal,” he muttered. Then he broke into a slow smile. “By the saints, I’ll probably have to take this all the way to the Vatican!”
When Jason awoke, for a startled instant he thought that something had gone wrong with the freezing. He was still lying on the table in the lab, still surrounded by green-coated doctors and technicians. The air felt chill, and he saw a faint icy mist wafting across his field of view.
But then he realized that the ceiling of the lab had been a blank white, while the ceiling above him now glowed with colors. Blinking, focusing, he saw that the ceiling, the walls, the whole room was decorated with incredible Renaissance paintings of saints and angels in beautiful flowing robes of glowing color.
“Where am I?” he asked, his voice a feeble croak. “What year is this?”
“You are safe,” said one of the green-masked persons. “You are cured of your disease. The year is anno domini two thousand fifty-nine.”
Half a century, Jason said to himself. I’ve done it! I’ve slept more than fifty years and they’ve awakened me and I’m cured and healthy again! Jason slipped into the sweetest sleep he had ever known.
The fact that the man who spoke t
o him had a distinct foreign accent did not trouble him in the slightest.
Over the next several days Jason submitted to a dozen physical examinations and endless questions by persons he took to be psychologists. When he tried to find out where he was and what the state of the twenty-first-century world might be, he was told, “Later. There will be plenty of time for that later.”
His room was small but very pleasant, his bed comfortable. The room’s only window looked out on a flourishing garden, lush trees and bright blossoming flowers in brilliant sunlight. The only time it rained was after dark, and Jason began to wonder if the weather was somehow being controlled deliberately.
Slowly he recovered his strength. The nurses wheeled him down a long corridor, its walls and ceilings totally covered with frescoes. The place did not look like a hospital; did not smell like one, either. After nearly a week, he began to take strolls in the garden by himself. The sunshine felt good, warming. He noticed lots of priests and nuns also strolling in the garden, speaking in foreign languages. Of course, Jason told himself, this place must be run by the Church.
It wasn’t until he saw a trio of Swiss Guards in their colorful uniforms that he realized he was in the Vatican.
“Yes, it’s true,” admitted the youthful woman who was the chief psychologist on his recovery team. “We are in the Vatican.” She had a soft voice and spoke English with a faint, charming Italian accent.
“But why—?”
She touched his lips with a cool finger. “His Holiness will explain it all to you.”
“His Holiness?”
“Il Papa. You are going to see him tomorrow.”
The Pope.
They gave Jason a new suit of royal blue to wear for his audience with the Pope. Jason showered, shaved, combed his hair, put on the silky new clothing and then waited impatiently. I’m going to see the Pope!
Six Swiss Guardsmen, three black-robed priests and a bishop escorted him through the corridors of the Vatican, out into the private garden, through doors and up staircases. Jason caught a glimpse of long lines of tourists in the distance, but this part of the Vatican was off-limits to them.
At last they ushered him into a small private office. Except for a set of French windows, its walls were covered with frescoes by Raphael. In the center of the marble floor stood an elaborately carved desk. No other furniture in the room. Behind the desk was a small door, hardly noticeable because the paintings masked it almost perfectly. Jason stood up straight in front of the unoccupied desk as the Swiss Guards, priests and bishop arrayed themselves behind him. Then the small door swung open and the Pope, in radiant white robes, entered the room.