Spider Robinson - Too Soon We Grow Old

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2024-11-23 0 0 59.77KB 10 页 5.9玖币

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TOO SOON WE GROW OLD

The first awakening was awful, and she enjoyed it.

She was naked and terribly cold. She was in a plastic coffin from whose walls

grew wrinkled plastic arms with gnarled plastic hands that did things to her. Most of

the things hurt dreadfully—but they were all physical hurts. Her soul was conscious

only of an almost terrifying sense of relief. Until you have had your neck and

shoulders rubbed out for the first time, you can have no conception of how tightly

bunched they were. Tension can only be fully appreciated in its release. To her mind

came a vivid association from long decades past: her first orgasm. A shudder

passed over her body.

A voice spoke, in a language unknown to her. Even allowing for the

sound-deadening coffin walls, it sounded distant.

Eyes appeared over hers, through a transparent panel she had failed to see since it

had showed only a ceiling the same color as the coffin's interior. She refocused. The

face was masked and capped in white, the eyes pouched in wrinkles. He said

something incomprehensible, apparently in reply to the first voice.

"Hi, Doc," she shouted, finding her voice oddly squeaky in the high-helium

atmosphere of the cryogenic capsule. "I made it!" She found that she was grinning.

He started, and moved from view. One of the plastic hands did something to her

left bicep, and she felt her hurts slipping away—but not her joy. I knew I could beat

it, she thought just before consciousness faded, and then she dreamed of the day her

victory had begun.

She was not at all sure just why she had consented to the interview. She had

rejected them for over twenty years, on an impulse so consistent that it had never

seemed to call for examination. To understand why she had granted this one would,

it seemed to her, call for twenty years' worth of spade-work—it was simpler to posit

that impulse had merely changed its sign, from negative to positive.

Yet, although she relied implicitly on the automatic pilot which had made the

decision for her, she found apprehension mounting within her as the appointed day

led her inexorably to the appointed time. An hour before the interviewer was due, she

found herself examining a capsule of an obscure and quite illegal tranquilizer, one

which had not even filtered down to street level yet. It was called Alpha, according

to her source, and he claimed it was preternaturally effective. But she hesitated—he

had said something about it tending to suppress all the censors, something about it

being a kind of mild truth drug. She turned the capsule end on end in her palm, three

times.

The hell with it, she decided. This is the true measure of my wealth: I can even

afford to be honest with an interviewer. The realization elated her. Besides, she

afterthought, I can always buy the network if I have to.

She washed the capsule down with twice-distilled water.

The lights were not as blinding as she had expected. In fact, none of the external

irritations she had anticipated materialized—not even the obtrusive presence of a

cameraman. The holocamera was not entirely automatic, for newstaping is an art

(with a powerful union)—but its operator was nearly a hundred miles away in the

network's headquarters, present only by inference. She was simply sitting in her own

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Spider Robinson - Too Soon We Grow Old

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