The Best of Bova: Volume II by Ben Bova

Author:Ben Bova [Bova, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781625795106
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2016-07-05T14:00:00+00:00

When they awoke him, there was a long period of confusion and disorientation. They told him later that it lasted only a day or so, but to del Vecchio it seemed like weeks, even months.

At first he thought something had gone wrong, and they had never put him under. But the doctors were all different, and the room he was in was not the clinic he had known. They kept him in bed most of the time, except when two husky young men came in to force him to get up and walk around the room. Four times around the little hospital room exhausted him. Then they flopped him back on the bed, gave him a mercilessly efficient massage, and left. A female nurse wheeled in his first meal and spoonfed him; he was too weak to lift his arms.

The second day (or week, or month) Scarpato came in to visit him.

“How do you feel, Del?”

Strangely, the attorney seemed barely to have aged at all. There was a hint of gray at his temples, perhaps a line or two in his face that had not been there before, but otherwise the years had treated him very kindly.

“Kind of weak,” del Vecchio answered truthfully.

Scarpato nodded. “That’s to be expected, from what the medics tell me. Your heart is good, circulation strong. Everything is okay, physically.”

A thought suddenly flashed into del Vecchio’s thawing mind. “What are you doing in Switzerland?”

The attorney’s face grew somber. “You’re not in Switzerland, Del. We had your vat flown back here. You’re in New York.”

“Wh. . . how. . .?”

“And you haven’t been under for fifteen years, either. It’s only three years.”

Del Vecchio tried to sit up in the bed, but he was too weak to make it. His head sank back onto the pillows. He could hear his pulse thudding in his ears.

“I tried to warn you,” Scarpato said, “that night at dinner in Providence. You thought you were outsmarting the law, outsmarting the people who make up the law, who are the law. But you can’t outwit the people for long, Del.”

Out of the corner of his eye, del Vecchio saw that the room’s only window was covered with a heavy wire mesh, like bars on a jail cell’s window. He choked back a shocked gasp.

Scarpato spoke quietly, without malice. “Your cute little cryonics trick forced the people to take a fresh look at things. There’ve been a few new laws passed since you had yourself frozen.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the state has the right to revive a frozen corpse if and when a grand jury feels he’s had himself frozen specifically to evade the law.”

Del Vecchio felt his heart sink in his chest.

“But once they got that one passed, they went one step further.”

“What?”

“Well, you know how the country’s been divided about the death penalty. Some people think it’s cruel and unusual punishment; others think it’s a necessary deterrent to crime, especially violent crime. Even the Supreme Court has been split on the issue.”

Del Vecchio couldn’t catch his breath.

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