3

After many hours he awoke, calm and rested. He looked at the white bed and white room, and remembered.

He had been killed in an accident and reborn in the future. There had been a doctor who considered the death trauma overrated, and men who recorded his spontaneous reactions and declared them a collector's item, and a pretty girl whose features showed a lamentable lack of emotion.

Blaine yawned and stretched. Dead. Dead at thirty-two. A pity, he thought, that this young life was snuffed in its prime. Blaine was a good sort, really, and quite promising…

He was annoyed at his flippant attitude. It was no way to react. He tried to recapture the shock he felt he should feel.

Yesterday, he told himself firmly, I was a yacht designer driving back from Maryland. Today I am a man reborn into the future. The future! Reborn!

No use, the words lacked impact. He had already grown used to the idea. One grows used to anything, he thought, even to one's death. Especially to one's death. You could probably chop off a man's head three times a day for twenty years and he'd grow used to it, and cry like a baby if you stopped…

He didn't care to pursue that train of thought any further.

He thought about Laura. Would she weep for him? Would she get drunk? Or would she just feel depressed at the news, and take a tranquillizer for it? What about Jane and Miriam? Would they even hear about his death? Probably not. Months later they might wonder why he never called any more.

Enough of that. All that was past. Now he was in the future.

But all he had seen of the future was a white bed and a white room, doctors and a nurse, recording men and a pretty girl. So far, it didn't offer much contrast with his own age. But doubtless there were differences.

He remembered magazine articles and stories he had read. Today there might be free atomic power, undersea farming, world peace, international birth control, interplanetary travel, free love, complete desegregation, a cure for all diseases, and a planned society in which men breathed deep the air of freedom.

That's what there should be, Blaine thought. But there were less pleasant possibilities. Perhaps a grim-faced Oligarch had Earth in his iron grasp, while a small, dedicated underground struggled toward freedom. Or small, gelatinous alien creatures with outlandish names might have enslaved the human race. Perhaps a new and horrible disease marched unchecked across the land, or possibly the Earth, swept of all culture by hydrogen warfare, struggled painfully back to technological civilization while human wolfpacks roamed the badlands; or a million other equally dismal things could have happened.

And yet. Blaine thought, mankind showed an historic ability to avoid the extremes of doom as well as the extremes of bliss. Chaos was forever prophesized and Utopia was continually predicted, and neither came to pass.

Accordingly, Blaine expected that this future would show certain definite improvements over the past, but he expected some deteriorations as well; some old problems would be gone, but certain others would have taken their places.

“In short,” Blaine said to himself, “I expect that this future will be like all other futures in comparison with their pasts. That's not very specific; but then, I'm not in the predicting or the prophesying business.”

His thoughts were interrupted by Marie Thorne walking briskly into his room.

“Good morning,” she said. “How do you feel?”

“Like a new man,” Blaine said, with a perfectly straight face.

“Good. Would you sign this, please?” She held out a pen and a typed paper.

“You’re very damned efficient,” Blaine said. “What am I signing?”

“Read it,” she said. “It's a release absolving us from any legal responsibility in saving your life.”

“Did you save it?”

“Of course. How did you think you got here?”

“I didn't really think about it,” Blaine admitted.

“We saved you. But it's against the law to save lives without the potential victim's written consent. There wasn't opportunity for the Rex Corporation lawyers to obtain your consent beforehand. So we'd like to protect ourselves now.”

“What's the Rex Corporation?”

She looked annoyed. “Hasn't anyone briefed you yet? You’re inside Rex headquarters now. Our company is as well known today as Flyier-Thiess was in your time.”

“Who's Flyier-Thiess?”

“No? Ford, then?”

“Yeah, Ford. So the Rex Corporation is as well known as Ford. What does it do?”

“It manufactures Rex Power Systems,” she told him, “which are used to power spaceships, reincarnation machines, hereafter drivers, and the like. It was an application of the Rex Power Systems that snatched you from your car at the moment after death and brought you into the future.”

“Time travel,” Blaine said. “But how?”

“That'll be hard to explain,” she said. “You don't have the scientific background. But I'll try. You know that space and time are the same thing, aspects of each other.”

“They are?”

“Yes. Like mass and energy. In your age, scientists knew that mass and energy were interchangeable. They were able to deduce the fission-fusion processes of the stars. But they couldn't immediately duplicate those processes, which called for vast amounts of power. It wasn't until they had the knowledge and the available power that they could break down atoms by fission and build up new ones by fusion.”

“I know this,” Blaine said. “What about time travel?”

“It followed the same pattern,” she said. “For a long time we've known that space and time are aspects of the same thing. We knew that either space or time could be reduced to fundamental units and transformed into the other by a power process. We could deduce the warping of space-time in the vicinity of supernovae, and we were able to observe the disappearance of a Wolf-Rayet star when its time-conversion rate accelerated. But we had to learn a lot more. And we had to have a power source exponentially higher than you needed to set off the fusion process. When we had all this, we could interchange time units for space units — which is to say, time distances for space distances. We could then travel the distance of, say, a hundred years instead of the interchangeable distance of a hundred parsecs.”

“I see, after a fashion,” Blaine said. “Would you mind running through it again, slowly?”

“Later, later,” she said. “Will you please sign the release?”

The paper stated that he, Thomas Blaine, agreed not to bring suit against the Rex Corporation for their unauthorized saving of his life in the year 1958 and the subsequent transporting of that life to a Receptacle in the year 2110.

Blaine signed. “Now,” he said, “I'd like to know —”

He stopped. A teen-age boy had come into the room holding a large poster. “Pardon me. Miss Thorne,” he said, “the Art Department wants to know will this do?”

The boy held up the poster. It showed an automobile at the moment of smashup. A gigantic stylized hand was reaching down from the sky and plucking the driver from the burning wreck. The caption read: REX DID IT!

“Not bad,” Marie Thorne said, frowning judiciously. “Tell them to brighten the reds.”

More people were coming into the room. And Blaine was growing angry. “What's going on?” he asked.

“Later, later,” Marie Thorne said. “Oh, Mrs. Vaness! What do you think of this poster for a teaser?”

There were a dozen people in his room now, and more coming. They clustered around Marie Thorne and the poster, ignoring Blaine completely. One man, talking earnestly to a grey-haired woman, sat down on the edge of his bed. And Blaine's temper snapped.

“Stop it!” Blaine shouted. “I'm sick of this damned rush act. What's the matter with you people, can't you behave like human beings? Now get the hell out of here!”