“I’ll be goddamned,” I said, hardly the best chosen First Words of one resurrected from the grave. (Even as a boy addict of horror movies, I never could understand why the revivified mummy or zombie always came back to life so full of malevolence and grudges. Why didn’t it rejoice at having been given a second go-round?) To Harbison I said, “How’d you do it, Bert?”

  He grinned and shrugged. “Lose a few, win a few.”

  “But the last I remember,” I said, struggling to remember, “they were talking about a matter of hours. . . .”

  They?” he said, cocking a bushy eyebrow. “Well, one of these times it will be a near thing, if juggernaut Jeffries persists in waiting until he’s got a sustained temp of one oh four before he calls his pillpusher.”

  Now I knew there was something fluky. Numbers were my business, and vesicular emphysema was my disease. Fever is not one of its terminal symptoms, and I could still hear that unemotional voice: “Vital signs diminishing . . . marked cyanosis . . . temperature ninety-four and falling. . . .”

  “Come on, Bert,” I insisted, and the strong timbre of my voice surprised me. More softly, I repeated, “How did you do it?”

  “Because you demanded I do it,” he said, a trifle irritably. “Hard-driving Greg. Get me in shape for Wednesday’s conference, or else! Just like one of those old-time Chinese emperors. Pay the physician a retainer as long as he keeps you healthy, and then behead him if he lets you get the flu.”

  “A conference?” I said. “The flu?”

  “And every damned influenza that comes along these days is the newest subtype that’s leapfrogged the newest antibiotics. No great sweat, though, in a chap your age, except to avert pulmonary complications. Nevertheless—”

  “Bert,” I said, raising a hand (effortlessly!) to interrupt him. “Are you trying to pretend that influenza was all—?” And then I noticed my hand. No scaly skin, no ropy veins, no brown liver spots.

  “Nevertheless,” Dr. Harbison went on, “you don’t exactly have the lungs of a marathon runner. Could give you trouble, later in life, or if you get another bug like this one. I say again: knock off those three decks a day, or whatever you’re smoking now. I’d also recommend not living in this North Jersey smog.”

  “Jersey?” I echoed. I hadn’t lived in New Jersey since. . . .

  I looked around the room and recognized it: the elegant bedroom in the Englewood house we’d bought when we first married. We had lived there for five years, until the once squeaky-clean suburb was permeated by the effluvia of the industrial areas. We had sold (at a loss) and moved out to. . . .

  There came a light tap at the closed door.

  “Come in, hon!” Bert called. “He’s still groggy, but functional.”

  I stared as she came in, a large leather-bound book under her arm. She was not the woman who had earlier held devoted vigil at my deathbed, her face hanging over me like a melancholy moon. It was not my elderly wife Vera. It was my wife Dinah, blue-eyed and golden-haired, looking exactly (exactly as young and lovely!) as when I had seen her last. That night of the last quarrel. That night before the morning I found her tear-stained farewell note. (I still have it—I mean, I did until I died—her monogrammed and perfumed notepaper still breathing a trace of her fragrance nearly thirty years afterward.) Now here she was, still young, still near, still dear.

  “Good morning, darling,” she said, with a smile. “Feeling better?”

  “No, don’t kiss him,” the doc cautioned. “Let him risk infecting his fellow tycoons, but not you.”

  She had bent toward me. Now she withdrew, still smiling, her eyes tender with wifely concern. I waited anxiously for her face to register some recognition of my aged decrepitude. When it didn’t, I said shakily, “Bert—Dinah—is there a mirror handy?”

  She brought me one from the dresser. With dread but compelling curiosity, I raised it in front of me. Gone were the tired and worried lines, the pouches, the jowls, the gray hair and complexion. I had not just come back; I had shed thirty years on the way.

  “All right, Bert,” I said, as firmly as I could. “I’ll grant a family GP couldn’t have done it. But who did? And how?”

  “I don’t claim you’re ready to try out for the Olympics,” he growled. “Attend that damned conference today, if you must. But then you get right back here to bed again. Rest for a week at least. I’ll be looking in.”

  I thought of all the things I had heard and read, of old men reluctant to perish, and how they had tried to circumvent death. Having themselves put in suspended animation until some Future when medicine could cure their ills or halt the aging process. Having replicas of themselves cloned from a single one of their cells. Astronomically expensive attempts at immortality, and I’d never heard of one succeeding. But I had had the money to try, and Vera was not greedy to inherit. Maybe I had been incapable of a desperate plea for a desperate measure, but she could have. . . .

  Why did Dr. Harbison keep evading my question? I suddenly remembered something, and blurted it out: “Bert, you died in 1997.”

  “I should hope to God,” he said indifferently. “I’ll be going on eighty by then, and no doubt still working my ass off.”

  “I was a pallbearer at your funeral!”

  He and Dinah exchanged an enigmatic glance. The doc shrugged again and told her, “Sometimes a high fever can cause hallucination, even quirks of amnesia. It’ll pass.”

  “Amnesia!” I exclaimed, and laughed. “What’s the opposite of amnesia, doc? When you remember more than should be normal?”

  “Well, that’s one symptom of hebephrenic schizophrenia,” he said. “But that has never been caused by any flu virus. Anyway, it’s out of my field.” He snapped the catches of his black bag. “When you’re back on your feet, I’ll refer you to a good shrink.”

  “Bert, this is me!” I almost pleaded. “Whatever happened was done to me. And I must have paid a wad for it. Surely I’ve got a right to know. Hell, it must have made the medical journals, if not the Times’ front page.”

  Dinah looked at me a little worriedly, but Harbison merely pretended to scribble a headline in the air: “How I Cured My First Millionaire of E-Strain Influenza. Yessir, I’ve made my name and fame. Got to rush off now, Greg, and sign up Farrah Fawcett to be my new receptionist.”

  The door closed behind him, and Dinah and I gazed at each other. A lot of things were going through my mind. If what had apparently happened to me had really happened, it was damned near being a miracle. There should have been an uproar, not a cloak of silence about it. Or was this just one last delirium as I lay dying in Doctors Hospital thirty miles and thirty years from here? No, it was loo circumstantially detailed to be a dream. Besides, one of the things going through my mind was that this was the first time Dinah and I had been together in a bedroom in all those same thirty years.

  I might have followed that thought with a suggestion not exactly suitable for a sickroom. But she scotched the notion when she said, “Hawley’s already waiting with the car. If you must go, and Bert says you can, you’d better be getting dressed.”

  I grumbled, “This must be one important conference.”

  She came and laid the leatherbound book on my lap. It was a daily appointments diary, and I was by now hardly surprised to see the year gold-tooled on the cover: 1978. She opened it to the page headed Wednesday, June 21.

  “An almighty important conference,” I said, “if we’ve convened it on a holiday.”

  Dinah gave me a quizzical look and asked—irrelevantly, I thought—“Have you been having a midsummer night’s dream, Greg?”

  The page was divided according to the morning and afternoon hours. In the slot allotted to 11:00 a.m. was neatly written a list of names—I even recognized the handwriting of my then secretary, Ruby Samuels, deceased 1983—the names of those with whom I was meeting today.

  “Yes, I remember,” I said. “The opening negotiations for the Textron merger.”

  “Do you feel well enough to cope?” Dinah asked.

  “Well, I did, didn’t I?” She gave me another look, not an entirely happy one. I said, “Would you rather I hadn’t? I mean didn’t?”

  “You know how I feel about it.”

  “The same as Whit Baker does?” I probed.

  “I wouldn’t know how Whit feels. It’s been two years since he moved out to open the West Coast office. Can I help you dress?”

  “No, thanks, dear. I’m in the pink. I’ll manage. What’s your own schedule for the day?”

  “Only the hairdresser,” she sighed. “I’ll take my own car. I should be home about the same time you are.”

  “Promise?” I asked. Her ivory forehead crinkled in some perplexity. “Promise you’ll be home?”

  “Why in the world shouldn’t I? But is there some urgency about it?”

  “Since it all went—if it all goes well at the conference, we ought to celebrate,” I said awkwardly. “In some way. Some private way.” Her look made me feel like a callow collegian trying clumsily to seduce a girl on the first date. Abashed, I could only mumble, “It’s been a long time.”

  “You’ve been ill,” she said matter-of-factly. “You may be tired when you get back from New York. But I’ll put a bottle of champagne to chill.”

  I studied the papers in my attaché case and kept the glass partition up between me and chauffeur Hawley—(deceased 1980, along with the Mercedes, when he went for a drunken joyride in it on his day off)—while he drove me across the George Washington Bridge and into midtown Manhattan. All was familiar to me, though a lot of long-gone landmark buildings still stood, and a lot of newer ones hadn’t been built yet. The only thing odd was the crowds of people on the streets, obviously bent on business. As I remember, most of them would have been lolling at home or on the beaches today.

  Except for that small anomaly, my sense of disorientation—even my feeling of awed wonderment—was wearing off. It was like replaying a long-misplaced but well-remembered videocassette. I recognized every one of the old office gang, and they evinced no surprise at seeing me. Or seeing me alive. Or seeing me in my former aspect of thirty-year-old “boy wizard of electronics.”

  In my office, Ruby told me, “They’re assembling in the conference room, but there’s a slight delay. Michaelman is held up at Textron, waiting for some Xeroxes to be run off that should’ve been done days ago.”

  “I’ll make a note to comment acidly on Textron efficiency,” I said. “You never know what slightest advantage might win you a major concession. Do I have a few minutes free, then?”

  “Yes. They’re all occupied with coffee and Danish.”

  “Then ask what’s-his-name—that young hotshot who handles our hospital-equipment contracting—”

  “Rolf Erikssen.”

  “Yes. Ask him if he can spare me a quick confab.”

  “What can I do for you, chief?” he asked, as soon as he was in my office.

  “I have a couple of hypothetical questions, Rolf, that ought to be in your line. The way I’ve heard it, if a man is incurably ill, he can be preserved—a sort of life-suspension process—until science catches up with whatever’s killing him. Then he’s awakened and cured. Right?”

  “Well, that’s the theory. There was quite a fad for it, for a while, and the labs are still in business. I suppose there are quite a few old coots tucked away in those freezers, waiting for the resurrection. I bet it’s costing the heirs their inheritance, if not causing them apoplexy.”

  “Suppose the old coot says screw the heirs and screw the cost. Would it work?”

  “Who knows? A guy wouldn’t opt for cryogenic hibernation unless he’s already a hopeless case. For hopeless, read cancer. And there haven’t been any recent cancer-cure breakthroughs. So I haven’t heard of anybody being revived lately for any revolutionary treatment.”

  “If it worked, Rolf—on me, say—would I come awake with all my faculties and memories intact? Would I remember everything prior to the time I got freeze-dried or whatever the hell they do?”

  “I’d assume so. Er, chief, is this confidential? Are you, er, ailing?”

  “No,” I said, but Erikssen’s expression indicated that he wasn’t too sure. “What would I look like, after revival? Would I look younger?”

  “No. How could you? The process only slows your metabolism Your heart beats once a week or something like that. But the aging goes on, however slowly. And I’d imagine being stashed in an icebox for years or centuries wouldn’t improve you. Even if you came out good for another lifetime, you’d probably come out bent with rheumatism and wrinkled like a prune.”

  “Okay, then that wasn’t involved,” I muttered, “even if there was some way to account for the clock turning backward.” Erikssen goggled at me. I asked him, “What about cloning?” and his eyeballs practically ping-ponged across the desk at me. “How far have they got with that?”

  He swallowed and said, “Practically perfected, chief, if you want a lot of identical frogs and asparagus. There’s been considerable horseshit published about human clones, but if you’re thinking of populating the world with Gregory Jeffries, it’s still in the realm of science fiction.”

  “So was a moon landing, ten years ago. But a human clone is not an impossibility?”

  “Hell, nothing’s an impossibility. As Oppenheimer once said, the amount of scientific knowledge is doubling every seven years or so. That’s a geometric progres—”

  “What will be the state of the art in, say, the year 2000?”

  “Chief, that art deals with germ plasm and DNA and nutrient soups, not electronics. Not yet, anyway. I couldn’t even make an educated guess.”

  “Assuming that a human’s identical clone could be grown, identical in every particular, would it have the host human’s identical memories?”

  Rolf Erikssen, beginning to perspire slightly, thought about it and finally said, “I don’t see how. A clone could have only the most rudimentary instincts basic to any human being. The instinctive fear of falling, for instance. Not meaning to be impudent, chief, but if I’m talking right now to a clone of Gregory Jeffries, can you tell me what the real Greg and I were talking about last week, before the flu took you out of action?”

  “Our last talk? Weren’t we discussing a feedback problem in that new spectrum-analyzer we’re developing for Houston Diagnostic?”

  “Yeah,” Rolf said, and added drily, “you’re not a clone.”

  Ruby announced that Michaelman had arrived with the overdue Xeroxes and that the conference awaited only me. She and I paused in the doorway, while I scanned the men and women seated around the long zebra-wood table. I had no trouble recognizing Jeffco’s own executives, or Forbush and Michaelman and Carrara from Textron. There were a couple of additional and minor Textron flunkies whose names I had never bothered to catch, and so would be excused for not remembering.

  “Whit Baker’s not here,” I said quietly to Ruby.

  She looked surprised. “He told you he wouldn’t be. Remember?” She seemed slightly embarrassed. “He said he’ll come in from California for the final signatures, when and if. But he said—er—he’d be damned if he’d help you scuttle Jeff co.”

  “Scuttle!” I snorted. “Jeffco heads for the heights, and Whit can’t take the altitude.”

  Ruby made no comment. We took our seats, and the assemblage waited politely for me to open the proceedings.

  “Well, ladies and gentlemen,” I said, “some of you might call it bad timing that we’ve convened this conference on Independence Day.” There were some blank looks. “But I call it timely, in the sense that we’re here to determine how much independence Jeffco can maintain when it’s merged into the world’s biggest conglomerate.” The blank looks turned to comprehension, and there were a few appreciative chuckles.

  No need for me to recount the conference in detail. The general terms were to be such-and-such. The details of this-and-that remained to be ironed out by our separate law firms. The SEC could be expected to take so-and-so much time to study and approve the merger. Et cetera. For me, again, it was like replaying an antique videocassette. No, it was more like playing chess against Capablanca, from an old book of his tournament games, where I had only to look down the page to know his White’s next moves. The only thing that could change the outcome of the game would be for me to make a Black move that wasn’t on the page. This conference was just the first of many that would culminate in the Jeffco-Textron amalgamation; I played it by the book that I had helped write this day thirty years ago.

  Afterward I took Ruby back to my corner office, to dictate a few further notes—and to scrawl a few reminders-to-myself in my desk calendar. When that was done, I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. The more trivial business out of the way, I could return to meditating on the one great, overriding question: how had I, strangling by millimeters in the year 2009, suddenly come to be what and where and when I now found myself? If it was revivification and/or rejuvenation—if it had been accomplished by some yet-to-be-discovered mode of medicine or hypnosis or time travel—evidently no one among my acquaintances knew of it. Or would admit it. But there had to be a clue someplace. Then it occurred to me:

  “There’s one piece of the puzzle missing,” I said aloud.

  “Sir?”

  My eyes snapped open. I had totally ignored poor Ruby, still sitting there waiting to be dismissed. “And on a holiday, too,” I apologized, which made her give me another of the odd looks I’d been getting all day. “Go on home, kid.”

  “As soon as I’ve cleared away. But you said something about something missing, Mr. J.”

  “Just wool-gathering, Ruby. But have you ever heard of a Vera Schell?”

  “Sure. I’ve seen her at your house. And she answers the phone occasionally, when I call there. Your cook. That sort of plain-faced young woman.”

  “Horse-faced,” I said, then hastily added, “but a heart of gold, a good worker. . . .”

  “What about her, then?” asked Ruby.

  “Oh, nothing,” I temporized. “I was just wondering if she might be capable of more responsibility. Maybe promote her to housekeeper.”

 

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