Deep freeze, p.13
Deep Freeze, page 13
“What about the others.” I sip at the milk shake. It has coagulated.
“Good as golden,” says Tomasso. “Good as golden. Sullivan, Metz, they’re okay, they’re on our side you can be sure of that. Nothing to worry about, Dennis. Nothing to worry about.”
And yet I do. I do.
XXII
New York/February 7, 2009/8:38 A.M.
I hear a scream from the food assembly area, and, half dressed, rush to see the problem. My mind rushes past possibilities, an intruder, a mouse. In a moment I see Janet, standing by the counter, clutching a photophone message. Tears are streaming down her face.
“We’ve won,” she gasps. “It’s over; the case is over and we’ve won. The Court of Appeals decided for us. The trust is yours.” I embrace her; hug her close to me. Even give her a kiss.
I am elated and only slightly surprised. Tomasso has come through, finally, and must be paid; but still there is a fortune, secure enough for me.
I take the message from her hand and scan it. “Judge Wilner,” it says, “rendered the decision granting the entire principal of the trust to Mr. Minton.”
“What’s this Judge Wilner?” I ask. “Who is he?”
The tears have stopped and her composure is returning. “Wilner?” she says. “He’s one of the judges on the court, good legal mind.”
“What about Sullivan,” I say, “Sullivan and Metz?”
She is taking her egg substitute flakes from the dispenser. “Sullivan and Metz? Didn’t I tell you about that accident? In October. I thought I had mentioned it to you. Two of the judges on the court were killed in a freak car accident. Most bizarre thing imaginable. Car swerved into a tree on a clear day. Both judges killed. That was Sullivan and Metz. Why do you ask about them?”
“So they didn’t have anything to do with the decision on this case?” I say.
“No, nothing at all. We had to wait for the appointment of two new judges before we could even argue the case. It was a good bench. Good judicial minds. Why do you ask about Sullivan and Metz?”
I have no reply. There is none. But my mind percolates. It percolates for some time. Through breakfast, even after Janet has left for the office, I am still sitting at the counter, thinking. Putting the pieces together again and again and each time coming up with the same result.
I smell a double cross. I smell Tomasso a-bout to descend on me, to collect three million dollars for doing nothing. He never delivered the appellate court, and his two judges on the court of appeals were dead before the case was heard. We won on the merits, there’s no question about that. Tomasso never reached the judges, never reached any of them.
My mind is determined; Tomasso will not share in my good fortune. It is not an act of courage, more one of desperation. I soon find myself sitting in the office of the Deputy Chief of the Interrogation Agents, telling my story.
“Yes, there is no question about it,” I say, “he is one of the Retrieved. I don’t know why he wants to hide it, but he and I were frozen at the same time at Hudson Bay in Canada.”
“Why was he frozen?” asks the Agent. “He was wanted for murder, the case was to be tried in White Ridge, New York, in September 1978. He was wanted for murder and he escaped, and he took me with him to Hudson Bay.” “Very interesting, but why didn’t you come forward with the story sooner, as soon as you discovered the facts, my good man?”
“Officer,” I explain. “I was scared. I still am scared. The man threatened me. He forced me to sign a statement implicating me in the murder of my wife, at a time when I was hundreds of miles away from here, being thawed. He warned me that if I ever exposed him, he would produce the confession and destroy me.”
“And how come you’re no longer afraid of that, if you don’t mind my asking?” says the officer. He puffs at a large pipe with a curved stem.
’Tomasso did more,” I explain. “He forced me into a scheme to bribe judges, the judges deciding a lawsuit I was involved in. I discovered today that I won that suit, but not with Tomasso’s help. The judges he had bribed were killed in a car accident. Now that I’ve won on the merits, I’m more confident. I want to see Tomasso get his. He doesn’t frighten me as much anymore.”
“It’s a very serious crime,” muses the officer. He is puffing away at the pipe. “Failure to answer a warrant is a capital offense under the Criminal Code of 2003. You realize that if what you say is true, then Tomasso could be sentenced to death?”
I sit very straight in the chair and say, “I understand. You check the records; you’ll find that everything I’ve said is true, and the man is working for you, right here in this department.” “You can be sure, my good man,” says the officer, “we will investigate this thoroughly, I say.”
XXIII
New York/February 10,2009/8:10 P.M.
We eat at home, something simple, soybean cakes and extruded broccoli. In the lounging room we watch the shade screen and listen to the sonophonic sound system.
Janet is quiet, particularly quiet. She has barely responded to my questions during dinner, and now, she sits silently, lost in thought.
The contrast from our two day celebration of the court victory is shocking. The smiles and laughter are gone. I am about to ask her what is bothering me when she looks at me and says, “Dennis, does the name Anthony Tomasso mean anything to you?”
I don’t see the problem. “Yes,” I say. “He’s somebody from my past. I’ve seen him a few times over the last year. He’s a government interrogation agent now, I believe. Why do you ask?” The knot is forming in my stomach. I start to worry that something has gone wrong, something about Tomasso, about the I.O.U.s, or the bribery or the confession to Mary’s murder. Something.
She looks deeply at me. Her pale blue eyes are set off by black lashes. The eyes are watering, filling with tears, and brimming over.
“What’s the matter?” I am scared.
“Tomasso was tried in connection with the things that went on at Cryo Genius, wasn’t he?” she says, through the tears.
“Yes.”
“And you were supposed to be a witness at the trial, weren’t you?” she continues.
“Yes.”
“And you left to be frozen at Hudson Bay before the trial was over, before you were even called to testify, didn’t you?”
“Yes, so what? What’s the matter?” I ask.
“Oh, Dennis, something terrible has happened!” Her crying turns to deep full sobs. “You see, after you failed to appear at the trial, a warrant was issued. By your failure to respond to the warrant, you became a fugitive.” She continues sobbing.
“So what. That all happened thirty-five years ago!”
She picks her head up. She looks at me and says, “You don’t understand. Failure to respond to a warrant is a capital offense. You could be executed for it. You will be executed for it. The case was described in the Law News today. Apparently someone turned Tomasso in. Your name wasn’t mentioned, but I doubt that it will take more than a week before the authorities are knocking on our door.”
I shake my head in disbelief. I prop Janet up against a lounging cushion and make her repeat the story again and again until I can comprehend it.
The situation is ludicrous. I have turned Tomasso in and the whole things boomerangs. I cannot bring myself to tell Janet that it was I; it would mean explaining too many other things, too many things that had best be left unexplained.
And now I am to be under sentence of death for having failed to appear as a witness to testify in a case more than thirty years ago. The sentence is no different for me than for Tomasso, the culprit.
“Janet,” I say, “couldn’t I plead the unfairness of it all? Couldn’t I get off that way?”
“I wish that was a hopeful route,” she responds. “Unfortunately, it isn’t. The new law is quite clear. Retroactive crimes are permitted. New crimes can carry any penalties the government decides to place on them. It makes no difference that when committed the act wasn’t a crime, you can still be punished. It does seem unfair. It is unfair. But the law serves many functions. Unfortunately, one of those functions is population control. Retroactive capital punishment is our form of legalized Russian roulette. It is a necessary game, however it’s played.”
We talk into the night about solutions. Neither of us can find any. Finally Janet grows weary. I am left alone on the lounging cushion.
I stare out into the night. The lights of the neighboring towers flicker. I concentrate deeply on them and I find my consciousness ebbing. The room dissolves into white and in my mind the whiteness becomes cold and wet. I remember snow and the comfort of ice, and soon my mind is quiet.
When I finally awake, it is late in the morning. Janet has left for the office and has scrawled a note, “See you later, Love, J.”
See you later, I think. Yes, later, much later.
I have no trouble making the amfocraft arrangements. My secret is not yet known. No restrictions have been placed on my travel yet.
It has all been too much, not just the technology, but the society, the whole environment, I think, while the amfocraft carries me back to Hudson Bay. I will go back to sleep for a while, to that cold deep sleep I enjoyed at Hudson Bay, and I’ll tell them to wake me when it is over.
PLANET FINDERS
VERN DERMOTT
The first man to reach a new planet, provided he filed a claim for the minerals or-a new life form, could take possession. The gamble had paid off, in that many new planets had been discovered.
The competition had been more than fierce: many adventurers had been lost in the process.
Now Ted Bicks had actually found an earth type planet, but wasn’t certain he could survive to colonize it!
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LOOK
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THE BEST SELLING AUTHOR OF END AS A MAN AND RAMBLING ROSE TAKES A BITING LOOK AT AMERICAN MORES IN A DEVASTATINGLY FICTIONAL TALE OF AMBITION, SEXUAL ABSURDITY IN THE FUNNIEST, TRAGIC,
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BORN AGAIN!
When wealthy Dennis Minton found that even all his money could not find a cure for his terminal illness he did the next best thing, he had himself frozen until one future day when it was assured a medical breakthrough would take place. What Minton did not count on, however, was that he would be ’thawed’ in the twenty-first century, where he would find a society totally changed, except in one dramatic respect—greed. The problems he thought he had left some forty years earlier were still there—the aftermath of a grasping wife, greed, crime and jealousy.
How one man deals with problems all of us can only imagine is the sardonic thrust of DEEP FREEZE. Some of it is funny, some of it is tragic, all of the story is intriguing and entertaining, and just the slightest bit perceptive as we have a chance to see ourselves as others might sometime during the next century—after we are dead.
H. Walter Whyte, Deep Freeze
