Door Into Summer

While I was asleep I dreamed that Picky was holding me on her lap and saying, "It's all right, Danny. I found Pete and now we're both here to stay. Isn't that so, Pete?"

"YeeeoW)"

The added vocabularies were a cinch; I spent much more time on the historical summaries. Quite a lot can happen in thirty years, but why put it down when everybody else knows it better than I do? I wasn't surprised that the Great Asia Republic was crowding us out of the South American trade; that had been in the cards since the Formosall treaty. Nor was I surprised to find India more Balkanized than ever. The notion of England being a province of Canada stopped me for a moment. Which was the tail and which was the dog? I skipped over the panic of `87; gold was a wonderful engineering material for some uses; I could not regard it as a tragedy to find that it was now cheap and no longer a basis for money, no matter how many people lost their shirts in the change-over.

I stopped reading and thought about the things you could do with cheap gold, with its high density, good conductivity, extreme ductility... and stopped when I realized I would have to read the technical literature first. Shucks, in atomics alone it would be invaluable. The way the stuff could be worked, far better than any other metal, if you could use it in - I stopped, morally certain that Eager Beaver had had his "head" crammed full of gold. I would just have to get busy and find out what the boys had been doing in the "small back rooms" while I bad been away.

The Sawtelle Sanctuary wasn't equipped to let me read up on engineering, so I told Doc Albrecht I was ready to check out. He shrugged, told me I was an idiot, and agreed. But I did stay one more night; I found that I was fagged just from lying back and watching words chase past in a book scanner.

They brought me modern clothes right after breakfast the next morning...and I had to have help in dressing. They were not so odd in themselves (although I had never worn cerise trousers with bell bottoms before) but I could not manage the fastenings without coaching. I suppose my grandfather might have had the same trouble with zippers if he had not been led into them gradually. It was the Sticktite closure seams, of course-I thought I was going to have to hire a little boy to help me go to the bathroom before I got it through my head that the pressure-sensitive adhesion was axially polarized.

Then I almost lost my pants when I tried to ease the waistband. No one laughed at me.

Dr. Albrecbt asked, "What are you going to do?"

"Me? First I'm going to get a map of the city. Then I'm going to find a place to sleep. Then I'm going to do nothing but professional reading for quite a while... maybe a year. Doc, I'm an obsolete engineer. I don't aim to stay that way."

"Mmmm. Well, good luck. Don't hesitate to call if I can help."

I stuck out my hand. "Thanks, Doc. You've been swell. Uh, maybe I shouldn't mention this until I talk to the accounting office of my insurance company and see just how well off I am-but I don't intend to let it go with words. Thanks for the sort of thing you've done for me should be more substantial. Understand me?"

He shook his head. "I appreciate the thought. But my fees are covered by my contract with the sanctuary."

"But-"

"No. I can't take it, so please let's not discuss it." He shook hands and said, "Good-by. If you'll stay on this slide it will take you to the main offices." He hesitated. "If you find things a bit tiring at first, you're entitled to four more days recuperation and reorientation here without additional charge under the custodial contract. It's paid for. Might as well use it. You can come and go as you like."

I grinned. "Thanks, Doc. But you can bet that I won't be back-other than to say hello someday."

I stepped off at the main office and told the receptionist there who I was. It handed me an envelope, which I saw was another phone message from Mrs. Schultz. I still had not called her, because I did not know who she was, and the sanctuary did not permit visits nor phone calls to a revivified client until he wanted to accept them. I simply glanced at it and tucked it in my blouse, while thinking that I might have made a mistake in making Flexible Frank too flexible. Receptionists used to be pretty girls, not machines.

The receptionist said, "Step this way, please. Our treasurer would like to see you."

Well, I wanted to see him, too, so I stepped that way. I was wondering how much money I had made and was congratulating myself on having plunged in common stocks rather than playing it "safe." No doubt my stocks had dropped in the Panic of `87, but they ought to be back up now-in fact I knew that at least two of them were worth a lot of dough now; I had been reading the financial section of the Times. I still had the paper with me, figuring I might want to look up some others.