The Door into Summer

CHAPTER 6

I got a job the second day, Friday, the fifteenth of December. I also had a mild run-in with the law and had repeated tangles with new ways of doing things, saying things, feeling about things. I discovered that "reorientation" by reading about it is like reading about sex-not the same thing.

I suppose I would have had less trouble if I had been set down in Omsk, or Santiago, or Djakarta. In going to a strange city in a strange land you know that the customs are going to be different, but in Great Los Angeles I subconsciously expected things to be unchanged even though I could see that they were changed. Of course thirty years is nothing; anybody takes that much change and more in a lifetime. But it makes a difference to take it in one bite.

Take one word I used all in innocence. A lady present was offended and only the fact that I was a Sleeper-which I hastily explained-kept her husband from giving me a mouthful of knuckles. I won't use the word here-oh yes, I will; why shouldn't I? I'm using it to explain something. Don't take my word for it that the word was in good usage when I was a kid; look it up in an old dictionary. Nobody scrawled it in chalk on sidewalks when I was a kid.

The word was "kink."

There were other words which I still do not use properly without stopping to think. Not taboo words necessarily, just ones with changed meanings. "Host" for example-"host" used to mean the man who took your coat and put it in the bedroom; it had nothing to do with the birth rate.

But I got along. The job I found was crushing new ground limousines so that they could be shipped back to Pittsburgh as scrap. Cadillacs, Chryslers, Eisenhowers, Lincolns-all sorts of great, big, new powerful turbobuggies without a kilometer on their clocks. Drive `em between the jaws, then crunch! smash! Crash!-scrap iron for blast furnaces.

It hurt me at first, since I was riding the Ways to work and didn't own so much as a gravJumper. I expressed my opinion of it and almost lost my job... until the shift boss remembered that I was a Sleeper and really didn't understand.

"It's a simple matter of economics, son. These are surplus cars the government has accepted as security against price-support loans. They're two years old now and they can never be sold, so the government junks them and sells them back to the steel industry. You can't run a blast furnace just on ore; you have to have scrap iron as well. You ought to know that even if you are a Sleeper. Matter of fact, with high-grade ore so scarce, there's more and more demand for scrap. The steel industry needs these cars."

"But why build them in the first place if they can't be sold? It seems wasteful."

"It just seems wasteful. You want to throw people out of work? You want to run down the standard of living?"

"Well, why not ship them abroad? It seems to me they could get more for them on the open market abroad than they are worth as Scrap."

"What!-and ruin the export market? Besides, if we started dumping cars abroad we'd get everybody sore at us-Japan, France, Germany, Great Asia, everybody. What are you aiming to do? Start a war?" He sighed and went on in a fatherly tone. "You go down to the public library and draw out some books. You don't have any right to opinions on these things until you know something about them."

So I shut up. I didn't tell him that I was spending all my off time at the public library or at U.C.L.A.'s library; I had avoided admitting that I was, or used to be, an engineer-to claim that I was now an engineer would be too much like walking up to du Pont's and saying, "Sirrah, I am an aichymiste. Hast need of art such as mine?"

I raised the subject just once more because I noticed that very few of the price-support cars were really ready to run. The workmanship was sloppy and they often lacked essentials like instrument dials or air conditioners. But when one day I noticed from the way the teeth of the crusher came down on one that it lacked even a power plant, I spoke up about it.

The shift boss just stared at me. "Great jumping Jupiter, son, surely you don't expect them to put their best workmanship into cars that are just surplus? These cars had price-support loans against them before they ever came off the assembly line."

So that time I shut up and stayed shut. I had better stick to engineering; economics is too esoteric for me.

But I had plenty of time to think. The job I had was not really a "job" at all in my book; all the work was done by Flexible Frank in his various disguises. Frank and his brothers ran the crusher, moved the cars into place, hauled away the scrap, kept count, and weighed the loads; my job was to stand on a little platform (I wasn't allowed to sit) and hang onto a switch that could Stop the whole operation if something went wrong. Nothing ever did, but I soon found that I was expected to spot at least one failure in automation each shift, stop the job, and send for a trouble crew.

Well, it paid twenty-one dollars a day and it kept me eating. First things first.

After social security, guild dues, income tax, defense tax, medical plan, and the welfare mutual fund I took home about sixteen of it. Mr. Doughty was wrong about a dinner costing ten dollars; you could get a very decent plate dinner for three if you did not insist on real meat, and I would defy anyone to tell whether a hamburger steak started life in a tank or out on the open range. With the stories going around about bootleg meat that might give you radiation poisoning I was perfectly happy with surrogates.

Where to live had been somewhat of a problem. Since Los Angeles had not been treated to the one-second slum-clearance plan in the Six Weeks War, an amazing number of refugees had gone there (I suppose I was one of them, although I hadn't thought of myself as such at the time) and apparently none of them had ever gone home, even those that had homes left to go back to. The city-if you can call Great Los Angeles a city; it is more of a condition-had been choked when I went to sleep; now it was as jammed as a lady's purse. It may have been a mistake to get rid of the smog; back in the `60s a few people used to leave each year because of sinusitis.

Now apparently nobody left, ever.

The day I checked out of the sanctuary I had had several things on my mind, principally (1) find a job, (2) find a place to sleep, (3) catch up in engineering, (4) find Ricky, (5) get back into engineering-on my own if humanly possible, (6) find Belle and Miles and settle their hash-without going to jail for it, and (7) a slug of things, like looking up the original patent on Eager Beaver and checking my strong hunch that it was really Flexible Frank (not that it mattered now, just curiosity), and looking up the corporate history of Hired Girl, Inc., etc., etc.

I have listed the above in order of priority, as I had found out years ago (through almost flunking my freshman year in engineering) that if you didn't use priorities, when the music stopped you were left standing. Some of these priorities ran concurrently, of course; I expected to search out Ricky and probably Belle & Co. as well, while I was boning engineering. But first things first and second things second; finding a job came even ahead of hunting

for a sack because dollars are the key to everything else... when you haven't got them.

After getting turned down six times in town I had chased an ad clear out to San Bernardino Borough, only to get there ten minutes too late. I should have rented a flop at once; instead I played it real smart and went back downtown, intending to find a room, then get up very early and be first in line for some job listed in the early edition.

How was I to know? I got my name on four rooming-house waiting lists and wound up in the park. I stayed there, walking to keep warm, until almost midnight, then gave up-Great Los Angeles winters are subtropical only if you accent the "sub." I then took refuge in a station of Wilshire Ways... and about two in the morning they rounded me up with the rest of the vagrants.

Jails have improved. This one was warm and I think they required the cockroaches to wipe their feet.

I was charged with barracking. The judge was a young fellow who didn't even look up from his newspaper but simply said, "These all first offenders?"

"Yes, your honor."

"Thirty days, or take a labor-company parole. Next."

They started to march US Out but I didn't budge. "Just a minute, Judge."

"Eh? Something troubling you? Are you guilty or not guilty?"

"Uh, I really don't know because I don't know what it is I have done. You see-"

"Do you want a public defender? If you do you can be locked up until one can handle your case. I understand they are running about six days late right now... but it's your privilege."

"Uh, I still don't know. Maybe what I want is a labor-company parole, though I'm not sure what it is. What I really want is some advice from the Court, if the Court pleases."

The judge said to the bailiff, "Take the others out." He turned back to me. "Spill it. But I'll warrant you won't like my advice. I've been on this job long enough to have heard every phony story and to have acquired a deep disgust toward most of them."

"Yes, sir. Mine isn't phony; it's easily checked. You see, I just got out of the Long Sleep yesterday and-"

But he did look disgusted. "One of those, eh? I've often wondered what made our grandparents think they could dump their riffraff on us. The last thing on earth this city needs is more people especially ones who couldn't get along in their own time. I wish I could boot you back to whatever year you came from with a message to everybody there that the future they're dreaming about is not, repeat not, paved with gold." He sighed. "But it wouldn't do any good, I'm sure. Well, what do you expect me to do? Give you another chance? Then have you pop up here again a week from now?"

"Judge, I don't think I'm likely to. I've got enough money to live until I find a job and-"

"Eh? If you've got money, what were you doing barracking?"

"Judge, I don't even know what that word means." This time he let me explain. When I came to how I had been swindled by Master Insurance Company his whole manner changed.

"Those swine! My mother got taken by them after she had paid premiums for twenty years. Why didn't you tell me this in the first place?" He took out a card, wrote something on it, and said, "Take this to the hiring office at the Surplus & Salvage Authority. If you don't get a job come back and see me this afternoon. But no more barracking. Not only does it breed crime and vice, but you yourself are running a terrible risk of meeting up with a zombie recruiter."

That's how I got a job smashing up brand-new ground cars. But I still think I made no mistake in logic in deciding to job-hunt first. Anywhere is home to the man with a fat bank account-the cops leave him alone.

I found a decent room, too, within my budget, in a part of West Los Angeles which had not yet been changed over to New Plan. I think it had formerly been a coat closet.

I would not want anyone to think I disliked the year 2000, as compared with 1970. I liked it and I liked 2001 when it rolled around a couple of weeks after they wakened me. In spite of recurrent spasms of almost unbearable homesickness, I thought that Great Los Angeles at the dawn of the Third Millennium was odds-on the most wonderful place I had ever seen. It was fast and clean and very exciting, even if it was too crowded... and even that was being coped with on a mammoth, venturesome scale. The New Plan parts of town were a joy to an engineer's heart. If the city government had had the sovereign power to stop immigration for ten years, they could have licked the housing problem. Since they did not have that power, they just had to do their best with the swarms that kept rolling over the Sierras-and their best was spectacular beyond belief and even the failures were colossal.

It was worth sleeping thirty years just to wake up in a time when they had licked the common cold and nobody had a postnasal drip. That meant more to me than the research colony on Venus.

Two things impressed me most, one big, one little. The big one was NullGrav, of course. Back in 1970 I had known about the Babson Institute gravitation research but I had not expected anything to come of it-and nothing had; the basic field theory on which NullGrav is based was developed at the University of Edinburgh. But I had been taught in school that gravitation was something that nobody could ever do anything about, because it was inherent in the very shape of space.

So they changed the shape of space, naturally. Only temporarily and locally, to be sure, but that's all that's needed in moving a heavy object. It still has to stay in field relation with Mother Terra, so it's useless for space ships-or it is in 2001; I've quit making bets about the future. I learned that to make a lift it was still necessary to expend power to overcome the gravity potential, and conversely, to lower something you had to have a power pack to store all those foot-pounds in, or something would go Phzzt!Spung! But just to transport something horizontally, say from San Francisco to Great Los Angeles, just lift it once, then float along, no power at all, like an ice skater riding a long edge.

Lovely!

I tried to study the theory of it, but the math starts in where tensor calculus leaves off; it's not for me. But an engineer is rarely a mathematical physicist and he does not have to be; he simply has to savvy the skinny of a thing well enough to know what it can do in practical applications-know the working parameters. I could learn those.

The "little thing" I mentioned was the changes in female styles made possible by the Sticktite fabrics. I was not startled by mere skin on bathing beaches; you could see that coming in 1970. But the weird things that the ladies could do with Sticktite made my Jaw sag.

My grandpappy was born in 1890; I suppose that some of the sights in 1970 would have affected him the same way.

But I liked the fast new world and would have been happy in it if I had not been so bitterly lonely so much of the time. I was out of joint. There were times (in the middle of the night, usually) when I would gladly have swapped it all for one beat-up tomcat, or for a chance to spend an afternoon taking little Ricky to the zoo... or for the comradeship Miles and I had shared when all we had was hard work and hope.

It was still early in 2001 and I wasn't halfway caught up on my homework, when I began to itch to leave my feather-bedded job and get back to the old drawing board. There were so many, many things possible under current art which had been impossible in 1970; 1 wanted to get busy and design a few dozen.

For example I had expected that there would be automatic secretaries in use-I mean a machine you could dictate to and get back a business letter, spelling, punctuation, and format all perfect, without a human being in the sequence. But there weren't any. Oh, somebody had invented a machine which could type, but it was suited only to a phonetic language like Esperanto and was useless in a language in which you could say: "Though the tough cough and hiccough plough him through."

People won't give up the illogicalities of English to suit the convenience of an inventor. Mohammed must go to the mountain.

If a high-school girl could sort out the cockeyed spelling of English and usually type the right word, how could a machine be taught to do it?

"Impossible" was the usual answer. It was supposed to require human judgment and understanding.

But an invention is something that was "impossible" up to then-that's Why governments grant patents.

With memory tubes and the miniaturization now possible-I had been right about the importance of gold as an engineering material-with those two things it would be easy to pack a hundred thousand sound codes into a cubic foot... in other words, to soundkey every word in a Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. But that was unnecessary; ten thousand would be ample. Who expects a stenographer to field a word like "kourbash" or "pyrophylilte"? You spell such words for her if you must use them. Okay, we code the machine to accept spelling when necessary. We sound-code for punctuation... and for various formats... and to look up addresses in a file... and for how many copies~... and routing and provide at least a thousand blank word-codings for special vocabulary used in a business or profession-and make it so that the owner-client could put those special words in himself, spell a word like "stenobenthic" with the memory key depressed and never have to spell it again.

All simple. Just a matter of hooking together gadgets already on the market, then smoothing it into a production model.

The real hitch was homonyms. Dictation Dairy wouldn't even slow up over that "tough cough and hiccough" sentence because each of those words carries a different sound. But choices like "they're" and "their," "right" and "write" would give her trouble.

Did the L. A. Public Library have a dictionary of English homonyms? It did...and I began counting the unavoidable homonym pairs and trying to figure how many of these could be handled by information theory through context statistics and how many would require special coding.

I began to get jittery with frustration. Not only was I wasting thirty hours a week on an utterly useless job, but also I could not do real engineering in a public library. I needed a drafting room, a shop where I could smooth out the bugs, trade catalogues, professional journals, calculating machines, and all the rest.

I decided that I would just have to get at least a subprofessional job. I wasn't silly enough to think that I was an engineer again; there was too much art I had not yet soaked up-repeatedly I had thought of ways to do something, using something new that I had learned, only to find out at the library that somebody had solved the same problem, neater, better, and cheaper than my own first stab at it and ten or fifteen years earlier.

I needed to get into an engineering office and let these new things soak in through my skin. I had hopes that I could land a job as a junior draftsman.

I knew that they were using powered semi-automatic drafting machines now; I had seen pictures of them even though I had not had one under my hands. But I had a hunch that I could learn to play one in twenty minutes, given the chance, for they were remarkably like an idea I had once had myself: a machine that bore the same relation to the old-fashioned drawing-board-and-Tsquare method that a typewriter did to writing in longhand. I had worked it all out in my head, how you could put straight lines or curves anywhere on an easel just by punching keys.

However, in this case I was just as sure that my idea had not been stolen as I was certain that Flexible Frank had been stolen, because my drafting machine had never existed except in my head. Somebody had had the same idea and had developed it logically the same way. When it's time to railroad, people start railroading.

The Aladdin people, the same firm that made Eager Beaver, made one of the best drawing machines, Drafting Dan. I dipped into my savings, bought a better suit of clothes and a secondhand brief case, stuffed the latter with newspapers, and presented myself at the Aladdin salesrooms with a view to "buying" one. I asked for a demonstration.

Then, when I got close to a model of Drafting Dan, I had a most upsetting experience. D‚j... vu, the psychologists call it-"I have been here before." The damned thing had been developed in precisely the fashion in which I would have developed it, had I had time to do so... instead of being kidnapped into the Long Sleep.

Don't ask me exactly why I felt that way. A man knows his own style of work. An art critic will say that a painting is a Rubens or a Rembrandt by the brushwork, the treatment of light, the composition, the choice of pigment, a dozen things. Engineering is not science, it is an art, and there is always a wide range of choices in how to solve engineering problems. An engineering designer "signs" his work by those choices just as surely as a painter does.

Drafting Dan had the flavor of my own technique so strongly that I was quite disturbed by it. I began to wonder if there wasn't something to telepathy after all.

I was careful to get the number of its first patent. In the state I was in I wasn't surprised to see that the date on the first one was 1970. I resolved to find out who had invented it. It might have been one of my own teachers, from whom I had picked up some of my style. Or it might be an engineer with whom I had once worked. The inventor might still be alive. If so, I'd look him up someday get acquainted with this man whose mind worked just like mine.

But I managed to pull myself together and let the salesman show me how to work it. He hardly need have bothered; Drafting Dan and I were made for each other. In ten minutes I could play it better than he could. At last I reluctantly quit making pretty pictures with it, got list price, discounts, service arrangements, and so forth, then left saying that I would call him, just as he was ready to get my signature on the dotted line. It was a dirty trick, but all I cost him was an hour's time.

From there I went to the Hired Girl main factory and applied for a job.

I knew that Belle and Miles were no longer with Hired Girl, Inc. In what time I could spare between my job and the compelling necessity to catch up in engineering I had been searching for Belle and Miles and most especially for Ricky. None of the three was listed in the Great Los Angeles telephone system, nor for that matter anywhere in the United States, for I had paid to have an "information" search made at the national office in Cleveland. A quadruple fee, it was, as I had had Belle searched for under both "Gentry" and "Darkin."

I had the same luck with the Register of Voters for Los Angeles County.

Hired Girl, Inc., in a letter from a seventeenth vice-president in charge of foolish questions, admitted cautiously that they had once had officers by those names thirty years ago but they were unable to help me now.

Picking up a trail thirty years cold is no job for an amateur with little time and less money. I did not have their fingerprints, or I might have tried the FBI. I didn't know their social-security numbers. My Country `Tis of Thee had never succumbed to police state nonsense, so there was no bureau certain to have a dossier on each citizen, nor was I in a position to tap such a file even if there had been.

Perhaps a detective agency, lavishly subsidized, could have dug through utilities' records, newspaper files, and God knows what, and traced them down. But I didn't have the lavish subsidy, nor the talent and time to do it myself.

I finally gave up on Miles and Belle while promising myself that I would, as quickly as I could afford it, put professionals to tracing Ricky. I had already determined that she held no Hired Girl stock and I had written to the Bank of America to see if they held, or ever had held, a trust for her. I got back a form letter informing me that such things were confidential, so I had written again, saying that I was a Sleeper and she was my only surviving relative. That time I got a nice letter, signed by one of the trust officers and saying that he regretted that information concerning trust beneficiaries could not be divulged even to one in my exceptional circumstances, but he felt justified in giving me the negative information that the bank had not at any time through any of its branches held a trust in favor of one Frederica Virginia Gentry.

That seemed to settle one thing. Somehow those birds had managed to get the stock away from little Ricky. My assignment of the stock would have had to go through the Bank of America, the way I had written it. But it had not. Poor Ricky! We had both been robbed.

I made one more stab at it. The records office of the Superintendent of Instruction in Mojave did have record of a grade school pupil named Frederica Virginia Gentry... but the named pupil had taken a withdrawal transcript in 1971. Further deponent sayeth not.

It was some consolation to know that somebody somewhere admitted that Ricky had ever existed. But she might have taken that transcript to any of many, many thousand public schools in the United States. How long would it take to write to each of them? And were their records so arranged as to permit them to answer, even supposing they were willing?

In a quarter of a billion people one little girl can drop out of sight like a pebble in the ocean.

But the failure of my search did leave me free to seek a job with Hired Girl, Inc., now that I knew Miles and Belle were not running it. I could have tried any of a hundred automation firms, but Hired Girl and Aladdin were the big names in appliance automatons, as important in their own field as Ford and General Motors had been in the heyday of the ground automobile. I picked Hired Girl partly for sentimental reasons; I wanted to see what my old outfit had grown into.

On Monday, 5 March, 2001, I went to their employment office, got into the line for white-collar help, filled out a dozen forms having nothing to do with engineering and one that did... and was told don't-call-us-we'll-call-you.

I hung around and managed to bull myself in to see an assistant hiring flunky. He reluctantly looked over the one form that meant anything and told me that my engineering degree meant nothing, since there had been a thirty-year lapse when I had not used my skill.

I pointed out that I had been a Sleeper.

"That makes it even worse. In any case, we don't hire people over forty-five."

"But I'm not forty-five. I'm only thirty."

"You were born in 1940. Sorry."

"What am I supposed to do? Shoot myself?"

He shrugged. "If I were you, I'd apply for an old-age pension."

I got out quickly before I gave him some advice. Then I walked three quarters of a mile around to the front entrance and went in. The general manager's name was Curtis; I asked for him.

I got past the first two layers simply by insisting that I had business with him. Hired Girl, Inc., did not use their own automatons as receptionists; they used real flesh and blood. Eventually I reached a place several stories up and (I judged) about two doors from the boss, and here I encountered a firm pass-gauge type who insisted on knowing my business.

I looked around. It was a largish office with about forty real people in it, as well as a lot of machines. She said sharply, "Well? State your business and I'll check with Mr. Curtis's appointment Secretary."

I said loudly, making sure that everybody heard it, "I want to know what he's going to do about my wife!"

Sixty seconds later I was in his private office. He looked up. "Well? What the devil is this nonsense?"

It took half an hour and some old records to convince him that I did not have a wife and that I actually was the founder of the firm. Then things got chummy over drinks and cigars and I met the sales manager and the chief engineer and other heads of departments. "We thought you were dead," Curtis told me. "In fact, the company's official history says that you are."

"Just a rumor. Some other D. B. Davis."

The sales manager, Jack Galloway, said suddenly, "What are you doing now, Mr. Davis?"

"Not much. I've, uh, been in the automobile business. But I'm resigning. Why?"

"`Why?' Isn't it obvious?" He swung around toward the chief engineer, Mr. MeBee. "Hear that, Mac? All you engineers are alike; you wouldn't know a sales angle if it came up and kissed you. `Why?' Mr. Davis. Because you're sales copy, that's why~ Because you're romance. Founder of Firm Comes Back from Grave to Visit Brain Child. Inventor of the First Robot Servant Views Fruits of His Genius."

I said hastily, "Now wait a minute-I'm not an advertising model nor a grabbie star. I like my privacy. I didn't come here for that; I came here for a job... in engineering."

Mr. McBee's eyebrows went up but he said nothing.

We wrangled for a while. Galloway tiled to tell me that it was my simple duty to the firm I had founded. Mr. McBee said little, but it was obvious that he did not think I would be any addition to his department-at one point he asked me what I knew about designing solid circuits. I had to admit that my only knowledge of them was from a little reading of non-classified publications.

Curtis finally suggested a compromise. "See here, Mr. Davis, you obviously occupy a very special position. One might say that you founded not merely this firm but the whole industry. Nevertheless, as Mr. McBee has hinted, the industry has moved on since the year you took the Long Sleep. Suppose we put you on the staff with the title of... uh, `Research Engineer Emeritus."

I hesitated. "What would that mean?"

"Whatever you made it mean. However, I tell you frankly that you would be expected to co-operate with Mr. Galloway. We not only make these things, we have to sell them."

"Uh, would I have a chance to do any engineering?"

"That's up to you. You'd have facilities and you could do what you wished."

"Shop facilities?"

Curtis looked at McBee. The chief engineer answered, "Certainly, certainly...ithin reason, of course." He bad slipped so far into Glasgow speech that I could hardly understand him.

Galloway said briskly, "That's settled. May I be excused, B.J.? Don't go away, Mr. Davis-we're going to get a picture of you `with the very first model of Hired Girl."

And he did. I was glad to see her...he very model I had put together with my own pinkies and lots of sweat. I wanted to see if she still worked, but MeBee `wouldn't let me start her up-I don't think he really believed that I knew how she worked.

I had a good time at Hired Girl all through March and April. I had all the professional tools I could want, technical journals, the indispensable trade catalogues, a practical library, a Drafting Dan (Hired Girl did not make a drafting machine themselves, so they used the best on the market, which was Aladdin's), and the shoptalk of professionals: music to my ears!

I got acquainted especially with Chuck Freudenberg, components assistant chief engineer. For my money Chuck was the only real engineer there; the rest were overeducated slipstick mechanics including McBee, for the chief engineer was, I thought, a clear proof that it took more than a degree and a Scottish accent to make an engineer. After we got better acquainted Chuck admitted that he felt the same way. "Mac doesn't really like anything new; he would rather do things the way his grandpa did on the bonnie banks of the Clyde."

"What's he doing in this job?"

Freudenberg did not know the details, but it seemed that the present firm bad been a manufacturing company which had simply rented the patents (my patents) from Hired Girl, Inc. Then about twenty years ago there had been one of those tax-saving mergers, with Hired Girl stock swapped for stock in the mauufacturing firm and the new firm taking the name of the one that I had founded. Chuck thought that MeBee had been hired at that time. "He's got a piece of it, I think."

Chuck and I used to sit over beers in the evening and discuss engineering, what the company needed, and the whichness of what. His original interest in me had been that I was a Sleeper. Too many people, I had found, had a queasy interest in Sleepers (as if we were freaks) and I avoided letting people know that I was one. But Chuck was fascinated by the time jump itself and his interest was a healthy one in what the world had been like before he was born, as recalled by a man who literally remembered it as "only yesterday."

In return be was willing to criticize the new gadgets that were always boiling up in my head, and set me straight when I (as I did repeatedly) would rough out something that was old hat... in 2001 Ad). Under his friendly guidance I was becoming a modem engineer, catching up fast.

But when I outlined to him one April evening my autosecretary idea he said slowly, "Dan, have you done work on this on company time?"

"Huh? No, not really. Why?"

"How does your contract read?"

"What? I don't have one." Curtis had put me on the payroll and Galloway had taken pictures of me and had a ghost writer asking me silly questions; that was all.

"Mmm... pal, I wouldn't do anything about this until you are sure where you stand. This is really new. And I think you can make it work."

"I hadn't worried about that angle."

"Put it away for a while. You know the shape the company is in. It's making money and we put out good products. But the only new items we've brought out in five years are ones we've acquired by license. I can't get anything new past Mac. But you can bypass Mac and take this to the big boss. So don't... unless you want to hand it over to the company just for your salary check."

I took his advice. I continued to design but I burned any drawings I thought were good-I didn't need them once I had them in my head. I didn't feel guilty about it; they hadn't hired me as an engineer, they were paying me to be a show-window dummy for Galloway. When my advertising value was sucked dry, they would give me a month's pay and a vote of thanks and let me go.

But by then I'd be a real engineer again and able to open my own office. If Chuck wanted to take a flyer I'd take him with me.

Instead of handing my story to the newspapers, Jack Galloway played it slow for the national magazines; he wanted Life to do a spread, tying it in with the one they had done a third of a century earlier on the first production model of Hired Girl. Life did not rise to the bait but he did manage to plant it several other places that spring, tying it in with display advertising.

I thought of growing a beard. Then I realized that no one recognized me and would not have cared if they had.

I got a certain amount of crank mail, including one letter from a man who promised me that I would burn eternally in hell for defying God's plan for my life. I chucked it, while thinking that if God had really opposed what had happened to me, He should never have made cold sleep possible. Otherwise I wasn't bothered.

But I did get a phone call, on Thursday, 3 May, 2001. "Mrs. Schultz is on the line, sir. Will you take the call?"

Schultz? Damnation, I had promised Doughty the last time I had called him that I would take care of that. But I had put it off because I did not want to; I was almost sure it was one of those screwballs who pursued Sleepers and asked them personal questions.

But she had called several times, Doughty had told me, since I had checked out in December. In accordance with the policy of the sanctuary they had refused to give her my address, agreeing merely to pass along messages.

Well, I owed it to Doughty to shut her up. "Put her on."

"Is this Danny Davis?" My office phone had no screen; she could not see me.

"Speaking. Your name is Schultz?"

"Oh, Danny darling, it's so good to hear your voice!"

I didn't answer right away. She went on, "Don't you know me?"

I knew her, all right. It was Belle Gentry.