Vital Parts (15 page)

“Double-feature Westerns and six cartoons,” Sweet said in a far-off voice.

“We ran on popcorn sales for a year or so before petering out. That's why I went into television sets, joining the competition that beat us, but was too late as usual.”

“Timing is your trouble, Carl. You think the medium of business is money, but you are wrong. It is time. Trading stamps, for example, have peaked, and no longer will pull in a customer. The current thing is those lottery schemes, Double Dollars, Match-a-Bill, and so on, in which the patron gets half of some ticket or chit and must look for the matching part in future purchases.”

“Criterion Gas, which was my franchise,” said Reinhart, “gave matching sets of aluminum pots. They were quite nice. With each purchase and three ninety-eight the customer could get one set of four: pint, pint-and-a-half, quart and—”

“Don't torment yourself with bygone features,” said Sweet. “Time never returns but is always in fresh supply.”

“I took a number of philosophy courses in college,” Reinhart muttered, “but I should have majored in Business Admin. This is no civilization in which to live the life of the mind.”

“But can you,” asked Sweet, ignoring Reinhart's self-serving maunderings, “think of time as never-ending? Of course you can, because we do habitually see it that way. Which makes death so frightening: it cannot be imagined. It cannot be imagined because it is nothing. You can imagine being in excruciating pain—at least you think you can until you are in it, and then you say, ‘Incredible!' and tell your friends it could not be described. But pain is a quantitative value. From a toothache you can project the grand agonies, having your appendix scooped out by a pharmacist's aide with a rusty spoon while on submarine duty in the remote Pacific without anesthesia or sterilization of instruments. A bullet to bite on and a slug of bourbon from the captain's bottle.”

He leaned his head against the high chairback of moss-green leather. Reinhart imagined that he and Sweet sat in a void of the sort represented in movie dream-scenes in which the characters were supported on a cloud and their horizontal locus not established by walls.

“Carl!” Sweet cried sharply.

“I closed my eyes to listen better,” Reinhart explained. “I'm not sleeping.” Raising his lids he looked at the window on his right, giving on a cityscape being smothered by smog but not without resistance: here and there the pall, a kind of vast, science-fiction amoeba come from outer space to devour our world, was punched through by the fist of some commercial structure, or pierced by a churchly stiletto. Sweet's office did not suffer from decorative excesses: one desk, two chairs, no rugs or things to look at on the walls.

Again a signal from the intercom, which Sweet levered over. The girl's voice was a mere electronic vibration, for she happened to be one of those talking robots, Reinhart realized, and would open the door soon and roll in on casters, gesturing jerkily with mechanical arms. Something eerie about this whole setup.

However, he listened to the message: “Bob, now hear this! I'm on a hot line—”

“Get hold of yourself,” said Sweet. “Breathe in deeply through your nose for complete oxygenation, then release it through your mouth.” Static was evidence of her compliance.

Then she said: “He's on hold. Take it on Two.”

“One moment, sir,” Sweet told the mouthpiece, and resting the instrument in a rectangular container, pulled before him what appeared to be a small microphone and was subsequently proved to be by his talking into it. “Now please go ahead. You are speaking to Robert Sweet, president of the Cryon Foundation.”

An amplified human sound emerged from one of the devices.

“My father is near death,” said this voice. “Personally, I don't for a moment hold with this scheme of freezing. He is a crazy old man and—” A hard flat voice, but now it tore like paper. It was sobbing. Grief always seemed quite real to Reinhart; he might be gullible, but he was built that way. Cry at him and you could pick his pocket any old day—unless you were a callow Blaine blubbering over shorn locks. But this sorrow was the right kind, of a son for a father. After all, who usually died first?

“First, may I express my sympathy,” said Bob Sweet into the microphone. “In the past that has often been a hollow sentiment. It used to be cruelly absurd to say anything about death. If I use a platitude now, what I have to suggest is far from routine.”

“It might be weak-minded or fraudulent, though,” the voice replied, recovering its obduracy. “I don't want any pitch. I promised the old man, you see. He has heard of your process. If it gives him hope …”

“I understand,” Sweet said. Already he looked more accessible to Reinhart. He obviously had not yet got around to settling in the office. Soon it would be curtained, carpeted, and traversed by an energetic staff. He might traffic in alleged immortality, but he was a businessman. “I understand your doubts, and I believe I can answer them.”

“I—” the voice began, then collapsed into a snort, shockingly near a giggle in fact. “I never thought I'd say this to any man, but are you in a position to freeze my dad when the moment comes? That's what he wants. Now, I am not a wealthy—”

“Sir,” Bob said, “I am and I will, and furthermore I will not accept your money.” He groped for the pen he had so recently wielded at Reinhart in remonstrance, keeping his eyes on the microphone as if something might escape from it.

Reinhart helpfully located and supplied the pen to Bob's twitching fingers.

“Just don't try to con me,” the voice warned, quavering on the last words. It was interesting to Reinhart that in some people suspicion will contest with sorrow. “I can pay a fair price. What's your setup? Like a crematory?”

“I don't think you have quite the right idea of us,” Bob told the soon-to-be-bereaved. “Can we talk soberly?”

“Sure, shoot,” said the voice.

“I mean face to face, a personal interview.”

“Look, my dad is likely to go at any time. How would it look for me to be off someplace gassing with you when he breathed his last? Can't you quote me a price here and now? What are you hiding, fellow?”

Bob removed his glasses. Now Reinhart remembered why he could not earlier remember how Bob had looked while rinsing his spectacles in Gino's washroom. The face tended to be indistinct, as though looking straight-on you were seeing it from the corner of your eye. Reinhart found it difficult to say why this was so. Only Bob's hair now had authority, the fuzzy gray sideburns, the rich, virile crest. His features were all very regular, like those shown in learn-cartooning-by-mail manuals, but the composite, which then should have been a Steve Canyon or Smilin' Jack, was, inexplicably, not.

Bob said patiently, colorlessly: “I am trying to explain that there will be no charge. This is a nonprofit enterprise.” His fist clenched quickly, then slowly opened like an octopus testing its environment. “I can promise you nothing, but if you permit this experiment to take place, you might have a part in history. …” He lost his voice and raised his eyes hopelessly to Reinhart.

It was the most extraordinary thing. Reinhart wanted to cry: I'm sorry I thought you were a swindler but there are so many extant and, after all, to talk of abolishing Death—but I see you mean it.

Did he have a viable process? Reinhart did not know, or at the moment care, because
Bob was sincere
. Reinhart reached across the desk and seized the mike, a little ball of wire mesh.

He spoke fervently into it: “You just give us your name and address, and where the patient can be found. We'll arrange the rest. Let's set up an appointment. Better have the doctor there. This is a historical occasion. No, that's putting it too lamely. The Wright Brothers were small-time in this light. Your dad may live again! In a hundred, a thousand years, what do petty details matter? Napoleon, Caesar, Alexander the Great, they are all dust to stop a bung-hole or however the quote goes, for Shakespeare too was a transitory incident. Can you understand, sir? Truth may change and Time itself, Life as we know it. Words, words. I beg of you, don't put any obstacles in the path. Don't question, don't doubt. You cannot lose. It finally comes down to that, does it not?”

The voice laughed.

Reinhart joined it, the wind of divine amusement in his sails. “It is crazy and frightening and brave and majestic. Think what man can do without the fear of death. The mind as yet cannot cope with so glorious a concept. But to put it simply: no mistake will be final. The whole idea of termination, of any sort, will be obsolete. Now, where can we find your father? If he is willing, how can you hesitate?”

The voice, which had continued to laugh in the regular rhythm of a machine whose function was to tumble that which it treated, wet wash or concrete, now stopped with a shudder.

“Greenwood Cemetery,” it said. “He died in 1956.”

Reinhart looked questioningly at Bob Sweet. “Well, sir,” he said seriously. “I don't think … Let me check with my associate.” What a horrible disappointment. Surely the process would not … The man was a crank. Reinhart was shrinking.

“Don't bother,” said the voice. “You are as full of shit as a Christmas goose.” And hung up.

Sweet wore his glasses again. “Not the first hoaxer, and not the last. Don't give it another thought.”

Reinhart said: “I can understand an eccentric better than a joker, a demented or deluded person. But how do you explain a guy like this? All that trouble for a laugh?”

“Well, that's America, isn't it?” Sweet noted lightly as he pushed away the gadgets that had made the call public to the room at large, though actually privy only to himself and Reinhart. Why, in fact, had Sweet done that? When just previously he had been showing a definite disinclination to give Reinhart a role?

Jealously Reinhart said: “I believe he took you in for a while.”

“He certainly did,” Sweet admitted, seeming not to mind. “You learn to accept these things. One day someone will call who seems bogus, but will be serious. When the police get a bomb threat they have to check it out. The ‘public' is a collection of individuals though politicians pretend otherwise.”

Reinhart shrugged knowingly though he still did not quite get it. “Bob,” he said, “is there really a sound scientific basis for this freezing process?”

Sweet stared at him. “You seemed to have no doubts when exhorting our friend just now.”

“A lot of that was the excitement of the moment, I guess. It is a wonderful vision when you're caught up in it. And the really formidable argument is that one cannot lose: he'll die anyway. Unless his heirs have to put out a lot of money. But you answered that objection, didn't you?”

“Not a penny for the first volunteer,” Sweet said. “Now, if that is not an expression of good faith, I don't know what is.”

“Especially from a man who understands money,” Reinhart said. “That makes it all the more impressive. Just how did you get into this in the first place?”

A clout sounded against the door, and the big girl lumbered into the room. Reinhart had been prepared on arrival that morning for a row with her, but impassively she had sent him right in to Sweet. She wore an orange jersey dress, thin as a Navy skivvy shirt and hardly longer than the tail thereof.

“Excuse me, Bob,” she said. “But I'm dying of suspense.”

Sweet explained, and she dropped her massive mane in despair.

“Why are they so square?” she asked the floor. “People are dying every minute. Why can't we have one, just one?”

Sweet smiled gently at her, and then said to Reinhart: “Why don't you make up to Eunice? She's quite a nice girl.”

Embarrassing Reinhart, of course. The bad blood between them was scarcely his fault. But, gallant as he instinctively was, he got out of the chair, nodded, murmured, and was prepared to shake hands if she extended hers.

“An old, old friend of mine,” Sweet told her, leaning back with his hands on his nape, and, for Reinhart, “The best secretary I have ever had.”

She kept her hands to herself, but peeped sideways through the edge of her hair. Reinhart wished she would wear a brassiere. Her protuberant nipples were large as percolator caps.

“Hi,” she said, then glanced at her boss.

Sweet said easily: “Why don't you guys get to know each other?”

Why
, thought Reinhart, an awful lot of
why's
are cropping up, amid a famine of
because
.

Sweet said: “People sometimes say cruel things through ignorance. Carl, for example, was being malicious about you earlier, but I'm sure he can revise his opinion.”

Reinhart froze though not a corpse. Through gelid lips he mumbled: “Not true, miss. A sick joke, believe me.”

“God,” said she without apparent offense, “I was a little kid when those were in. I had a hula hoop. ‘Can I interest you in a pair of Bermuda shorts, Mr. Toulouse-Lautrec?' That was one, wasn't it? I happened to understand it because I had seen the movie played by the man walking on his knees.”

Sweet was smirking. What a swine he was, in some complicated way.

“I dote on movies,” Eunice said humorlessly. “They seem to me to present the characteristic atmosphere of our kinetic time, along with rock. Words are out.”

Reinhart was still humiliated. He sidled away to the window and looked on the characteristic atmosphere of our time, the smog-boa around the city's neck.

“Why don't you guys see a film together?” Sweet persisted. He was some kind of pervert. An air-conditioning outlet below the window was chilling Reinhart's genitals. He moved away.

“Look, Bob,” he said. “Can we talk business?”

“What do you think?” Sweet asked Eunice. “Can we use this big hunk of man?” He smiled at Reinhart. “He is at liberty. He has no other current ties.”