by Ben Bova
“Thanks to you,” she said.
Before he could think of a reply, Gregorian raised his glass of amber liquor over his head and bellowed, “To Dr. Alexander Alexandrovich Ignatiev. The man who saved our lives.”
“The man who steers across the stars,” added one of the biologists.
They all cheered.
Ignatiev basked in the glow. They’re children, he said to himself. Only children. Then he found a new thought: But they’re my children. Each and every one of them. The idea startled him. And he felt strangely pleased.
He looked past their admiring gazes, to the display screen and the pinpoints of stars staring steadily back at him. An emission nebula gleamed off in one corner of the view. He felt a thrill that he hadn’t experienced in many, many years. It’s beautiful, Ignatiev thought. The universe is so unbelievably, so heart-brimmingly beautiful: mysterious, challenging, endlessly full of wonders.
There’s so much to learn, he thought. So much to explore. He smiled at the youngsters crowding around him. I have some good years left. I’ll spend them well.
INTRODUCTION TO
“IN TRUST”
Biomedical breakthroughs are taking us to a new frontier right here on Earth. How will the world change when we can live virtually unlimited lifespans? That’s a frontier I wouldn’t mind exploring!
Michael Bienes was a good friend who enjoyed intellectual puzzles. One evening over dinner he asked me if I would want to have my body frozen after clinical death, in the hope that sometime in the future medical science might learn to cure whatever it was that killed me and bring me back to life. I answered yes, tentatively.
Then he asked me who I would trust to watch over my frozen body for all the years—maybe centuries—that it would take before I could be successfully revived. That started a lively conversation about insurance companies and social institutions.
By the time dessert was being served we had agreed that there was only one institution we could think of that had the “staying power” and the reputation for integrity that would lead us to trust our frozen bodies to it.
“Now why don’t you write a story about it?” Michael prompted.
So I did.
IN TRUST
TRUST WAS NOT a virtue that came easily to Jason Manning.
He had clawed his way to the top of the multinational corporate ladder mainly by refusing to trust anyone: not his business associates, not his rivals or many enemies, not his so-called friends, not any one of his wives and certainly none of his mistresses.
“Trust nobody,” his sainted father had told him since childhood, so often that Jason could never remember when the old man had first said it to him.
Jason followed his father’s advice so well that by the time he was forty years old he was one of the twelve wealthiest men in America. He had capped his rise to fortune by deposing his father as CEO of the corporation the old man had founded. Dad had looked deathly surprised when Jason pushed him out of his own company. He had foolishly trusted his own son.
So Jason was in a considerable quandary when it finally sank in on him, almost ten years later, that he was about to die.
He did not trust his personal physician’s diagnosis, of course. Pancreatic cancer. He couldn’t have pancreatic cancer. That’s the kind of terrible retribution that nature plays on you when you haven’t taken care of your body properly. Jason had never smoked, drank rarely and then only moderately, and since childhood he had eaten his broccoli and all the other healthful foods his mother had set before him. All his adult life he had followed a strict regimen of high fiber, low fat, and aerobic exercise.
“I want a second opinion!” Jason had snapped at his physician.
“Of course,” said the sad-faced doctor. He gave Jason the name of the city’s top oncologist.
Jason did not trust that recommendation. He sought his own expert.
“Pancreatic cancer,” said the head of the city’s most prestigious hospital, dolefully.
Jason snorted angrily and swept out of the woman’s office, determined to cancel his generous annual contribution to the hospital’s charity drive. He took on an alias, flew alone in coach class across the ocean, and had himself checked over by six other doctors in six other countries, never revealing to any of them who he truly was.
Pancreatic cancer.
“It becomes progressively more painful,” one of the diagnosticians told him, his face a somber mask of professional concern.
Another warned, “Toward the end, even our best analgesics become virtually useless.” And he burst into tears, being an Italian.
Still another doctor, a kindly Swede, gave Jason the name of a suicide expert. “He can help you to ease your departure,” said the doctor.
“I can’t do that,” Jason muttered, almost embarrassed. “I’m a Catholic.”
The Swedish doctor sighed understandingly.
On the long flight back home Jason finally admitted to himself that he was indeed facing death, all that broccoli notwithstanding. For God’s sake, he realized, I shouldn’t even have trusted Mom! Her and her, “Eat all of it, Jace. It’s good for you.”
If there was one person in the entire universe that Jason came close to trusting, it was his brother, the priest. So, after spending the better part of a month making certain rather complicated arrangements, Jason had his chauffeur drive him up to the posh Boston suburb where Monsignor Michael Manning served as pastor of St. Raphael’s.
Michael took the news somberly. “I guess that’s what I can look forward to, then.” Michael was five years younger than Jason and had faithfully followed all his brother’s childhood bouts with chicken pox, measles, and mumps. As a teenager he had even broken exactly the same bone in his leg that Jason had, five years after his big brother’s accident, in the same way: sliding into third base on the same baseball field.
Jason leaned back in the bottle-green leather armchair and stared into the crackling fireplace, noting as he did every time he visited his brother that Michael’s priestly vow of poverty had not prevented him from living quite comfortably. The rectory was a marvelous old house, kept in tip-top condition by teams of devoted parishioners, and generously stocked by the local merchants with viands and all sorts of refreshments. On the coffee table between the two brothers rested a silver tray bearing delicate china cups and a fine English teapot filled with steaming herbal tea.
“There’s nothing that can be done?” Michael asked, brotherly concern etched into his face.
“Not now,” Jason said.
“How long…?”
“Maybe a hundred years, maybe even more.”
Michael blinked with confusion. “A hundred years? What’re you talking about, Jace?”
“Freezing.”
“Freezing?”
“Freezing,” Jason repeated. “I’m going to have myself frozen until medical science figures out how to cure pancreatic cancer. Then I’ll have myself thawed out and take up my life again.”
Michael sat up straighter in his chair. “You can’t have yourself frozen, Jace. Not until you’re dead.”
“I’m not going to sit still and let the cancer kill me,” Jason said, thinking of the pain. “I’m going to get a doctor to fix me an injection.”
“But that’d be suicide! A mortal sin!”
“I won’t be dead forever. Just until they learn how to cure my cancer.”
There was fear in Michael’s eyes. “Jace, listen to me. Taking a lethal injection is suicide.”
“It’s got to be done. They can’t freeze me while I’m still alive. Even if they could, that would stop my heart just as completely as the injection would and I’d be dead anyway.”
“It’s still suicide, Jace,” Michael insisted, truly upset. “Holy Mother Church teaches—”
“Holy Mother Church is a couple of centuries behind the times,” Jason grumbled. “It’s not suicide. It’s more like a long-term anesthetic.”
“You’ll be legally dead.”
/> “But not morally dead,” Jason insisted.
“Still…” Michael lapsed into silence, pressing his fingers together prayerfully.
“I’m not committing suicide,” Jason tried to explain. “I’m just going to sleep for a while. I won’t be committing any sin.”
Michael had been his brother’s confessor since he had been ordained. He had heard his share of sinning.
“You’re treading a very fine line, Jace,” the monsignor warned his brother.
“The Church has got to learn to deal with the modern world, Mike.”
“Yes, perhaps. But I’m thinking of the legal aspects here. Your doctors will have to declare you legally dead, won’t they?”
“It’s pretty complicated. I have to give myself the injection, otherwise the state can prosecute them for homicide.”
“Your state allows assisted suicides, does it?” Michael asked darkly.
“Yes, even though you think it’s a sin.”
“It is a sin,” Michael snapped. “That’s not an opinion, that’s a fact.”
“The Church will change its stand on that, sooner or later,” Jason said.
“Never!”
“It’s got to! The Church can’t lag behind the modern world forever, Mike. It’s got to change.”
“You can’t change morality, Jace. What was true two thousand years ago is still true today.”
Jason rubbed at the bridge of his nose. A headache was starting to throb behind his eyes, the way it always did when he and Michael argued.
“Mike, I didn’t come here to fight with you.”
The monsignor softened immediately. “I’m sorry, Jace. It’s just that … you’re running a terrible risk. Suppose you’re never awakened? Suppose you finally die while you’re frozen? Will God consider that you’ve committed suicide?”
Jason fell back on the retort that always saved him in arguments with his brother. “God’s a lot smarter than either one of us, Mike.”
Michael smiled ruefully. “Yes, I suppose He is.”
“I’m going to do it, Mike. I’m not going to let myself die in agony if I can avoid it.”
His brother conceded the matter with a resigned shrug. But then, suddenly, he sat up ramrod straight again.
“What is it?” Jason asked.
“You’ll be legally dead?” Michael asked.
“Yes. I told you—”
“Then your will can go to probate.”
“No, I won’t be…” Jason stared at his brother. “Oh my God!” he gasped. “My estate! I’ve got to make sure it’s kept intact while I’m frozen.”
Michael nodded firmly. “You don’t want your money gobbled up while you’re in the freezer. You’d wake up penniless.”
“My children all have their own lawyers,” Jason groaned. “My bankers. My ex-wives!”
Jason ran out of the rectory.
Although the doctors had assured him that it would take months before the pain really got severe, Jason could feel the cancer in his gut, growing and feeding on his healthy cells while he desperately tried to arrange his worldly goods so that no one could steal them while he lay frozen in a vat of liquid nitrogen.
His estate was vast. In his will he had left generous sums for each of his five children and each of his five former wives. Although they hated one another, Jason knew that the instant he was frozen they would unite in their greed to break his will and grab the rest of his fortune.
“I need that money,” Jason told himself grimly. “I’m not going to wake up penniless a hundred years or so from now.”
His corporate legal staff suggested that they hire a firm of estate specialists. The estate specialists told him they needed the advice of the best constitutional lawyers in Washington.
“This is a matter that will inevitably come up before the Supreme Court,” the top constitutional lawyer told him. “I mean, we’re talking about the legal definition of death here.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have myself frozen until the legal definition of death is settled,” Jason told him.
The top constitutional lawyer shrugged his expensively clad shoulders. “Then you’d better be prepared to hang around for another ten years or so. These things take time, you know.”
Jason did not have ten months, let alone ten years. He gritted his teeth and went ahead with his plans for freezing, while telling his lawyers he wanted his last will and testament made iron-clad, foolproof, unbreakable.
They shook their heads in unison, all eight of them, their faces sad as hounds with toothaches.
“There’s no such thing as an unbreakable will,” the eldest of the lawyers warned Jason. “If your putative heirs have the time—”
“And the money,” said one of the younger attorneys.
“Or the prospect of money,” added a still younger one.
“Then they stand a good chance of eventually breaking your will.”
Jason growled at them.
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-paneled 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.