"Stop saying that! I also have my oath as a physician: to do no harm. You want me to take you from perfect health to a high odds of final death."

"I have to do it, Tom. If you won't help me, I'll find someone who will. Probably someone less competent and reliable than you."

"Why do you have to do it? Give me one good reason."

"You know why, if you think about it." Drake spoke slowly, coaxingly. "For Ana's sake. Unless I go on ahead, they may never choose to wake her. She could be one of the last on their list. You and I know her for what she really is, a unique and marvelous woman. But what will the records show? A singer, still not as famous as she would have been, who died young of a devastating disease. I've had time to prepare, I'm sure that they will wake me. And it's an advantage that I'm in good health, because there will be no reason to delay my revival on medical grounds. As soon as I am sure that they have a cure for what killed Ana, I can wake her. We'll start over, the two of us."

Tom Lambert's cheeks had gone from fiery red to pale. "We have to talk about this some more, Drake. The whole idea is crazy. Did you really mean what you said, that if I won't help you will go to someone else?"

"Look at me, Tom. Tell me if you think that I mean it."

Lambert looked. He did not speak again; but his hands slowly came up to cover his eyes.

It took six days of solid argument, another seven to make final preparations. Drake Merlin and Tom Lambert drove together to Second Chance.

Drake took a long last look out of the window at the wind-blown trees and the cloudy sky, then climbed slowly into the thermal tank.

Tom injected the Asfanil.

Drake decided that the easy part was ending. That the hard part, if there was another part, was about to begin.

A few seconds later the long fall began, dropping him steadily down the longest descent that a human can ever make.

Down, down, down.

All the way down, to two degrees absolute; colder than the coldest hell ever conceived by Dante.

Chapter 5.

Awakening.

The great gamble had paid off, more successfully than he had dared to hope. Ana was alive, she was reanimated, she was healthy. But the technology of the future went far beyond health. It had made her, always beautiful, much more vigorous and desirable than she had ever been.

She was dancing, and as she danced she sang; not a serious work by her usual favorites, Mahler or Hugo Wolf or Brahms, but a frothy and light-hearted confection by Gilbert and Sullivan. "My object all sublime, I shall achieve intime," she caroled.

And then she was fading. Her body became as transparent as glass, her rich contralto a vanishing thread of sound.

"To let the punishment fit the crime, The punishment fit the cri-i-ime ..."

She was gone.

Afterward, Drake could never be sure. Had he dreamed some superconducting dream, as he lay in the cryowomb twelve degrees colder than a block of solid hydrogen? Or had he only dreamed that he dreamed, as he came slowly back through the long thaw?

It made little difference. After the vision of Ana, all feelings of peace and certainty bled away. In their place came an eternity of twisted images, a procession of pale and terrifying lights moving against a pitch-dark background. They arrived ahead of consciousness, and they went on forever. He fought his way through them, through torment that went on and on with no promise that it would ever end.

It was daunting to learn later that he had been one of the lucky ones. In his case the freezing process had gone very smoothly. Some revivables awoke armless and legless, some shed their whole epidermis and had to be kept cocooned and motionless until it could re-grow. He lost nothing during the thaw but an insignificant few square centimeters of skin.

But the pain of waking . . . that was something else. The final stages, from three degrees Celsius to normal body temperature, could not be rushed. They occupied a full thirty-six hours. For all that time Drake was pierced with an agony of waking tissues and returning circulation, unable to move or cry out. In the last stages, before full consciousness, hearing came before sight. He could hear speech around him. It was not in any tongue that he could recognize.

How long? How far had he traveled in time? Even before the pain faded, that question filled his mind.

The answer did not come at once. While he was still half-conscious he felt the sting of an injector spray. He blanked out again at once. After another infinite hiatus he came up all the way, opening his eyes to a quiet sunlit room not too different from the Second Chance facility where he had begun the descent.

A man and a woman in yellow uniforms were watching him, talking softly together. As soon as they saw that he was awake the man pressed a point on a segmented wall panel. The two went on with their work, lining up two complex and incomprehensible pieces of equipment. One sight of that told Drake that he had succeeded in at least one way.

Nothing that he saw was familiar. He was in the future-but how far in the future?

The person who came in presently through the white sliding door was dark haired and oddly androgynous, with a face both clean shaven and also smooth and womanly. The clothing was equally uninformative, a loose-fitting suit of pale gray that concealed body shape. The newcomer stepped to the side of the bed and stood staring down at Drake with a pleased and proprietary air.

"How are you feeling?"

Drake knew then that it was a man. The language was English, oddly pronounced. That was reassuring. Drake had suffered two other worries as he slipped under. What if he were revived in just a few years' time, when nothing at all could be done to cure Ana? Or what if he surfaced after fifty thousand years, a living fossil, quite unable to communicate his needs to the men and women of the future?

"I feel all right." He had trouble speaking. His tongue felt swollen, and his mind was slow to produce the words that he needed. "But I feel very weak and confused." Drake thought of trying to sit up, and knew at once that he could not do it. "I can barely move."

"Naturally. But are you Drake Merlin?"

"I am."

The man had an open eager face, with furry eyebrows and a high forehead. He laughed aloud in delight and rubbed his hands together. "Excellent! My name is Par Leon. Can you understand me easily?"

"Perfectly easily." Drake's second worry returned. "Why do you ask that question? When am I?"

"I ask it because the old languages are not easy, even with augments and much study. For your second question, in your measure we are now in the year 2512 of the prophet Christ."Five centuries! It was longer than Drake had expected and hoped. But better long than short. Before he was frozen he had entertained awful visions of diving down to the bottom of the Pit and clawing his agonized way back up to thawed life, not once but over and over.

"I have waited here through the whole warming and first treatment," Par Leon continued. "Soon I will leave you so you can have rest, more treatment, and first education. But I desired to speak with you at once when you became conscious. It is not rational, but I feared that there might have been a mistake in identity-that it might not be Drake Merlin, the Drake Merlin of my curiosity, who was awakened." Par Leon glanced at the equipment standing at the bedside and shook his head. "You are a strong man, Drake Merlin. Uniquely strong. The record shows that you did not once cry out or complain during all the thawing."

There had been more important things on Drake's mind. Could Ana be cured? Where was she now? Had she been kept safe, for however much time had passed? Was it possible that she had been awakened before him, even long before him? That would be a disaster.

He glanced across at the other two workers, who were still chatting together in an alien tongue. "Language must have changed completely. I can understand you easily, but I cannot understand them at all."

"You mean, understand the doctors?" The stranger Leon replied with a surprised expression on his lean face. "Of course you cannot. Neither can I. They are doctors. To each other they are naturally speaking Medicine."

Drake raised his eyebrows. The look must have survived with its meaning intact across the centuries, because Par Leon went on, "That is right, Medicine. I cannot help you. I myself am fluent in Music and History-and, of course, Universal. And I learned Old Anglic to be able to study your times and to speak with you. But I know little or no Medicine."

"Medicine is a language?" Drake felt that his mind had been slowed by the long sleep and thawing treatment.

"Of course. Like Music or Chemistry or Computing. But surely this was already true in your own time. Did you not have languages specific to each-what is the word you use?-discipline?"

"I suppose that we did; but we didn't realize it." Par Leon's question explained a great deal. No wonder that Drake had found psychologists, professional educators, social scientists, and physicists-to name but a few- incomprehensible. Even in his original time, the special jargon and odd acronyms had been signaling the arrival of new protolanguages, emerging forms as alien as Sanskrit or classical Greek. "How do you speak to the doctors?"

"For ordinary things? We employ Universal, which all understand. I do not attempt to speak actual Medicine. If I am in that subject-matter area, we keep a computer in the circuit to provide exact concept equivalents between language pairs."

It occurred to Drake that multidisciplinary programs must be hell. But not as bad as they had once been. Here at least there was an understanding that the problem existed. And what were computers like, after five more centuries of development? In his day they had been in their infancy. They ought to be able to do anything now, anything at all-like curing Ana. It was almost a surprise to see that there was still a place in the world for humans.

He was beginning to feel oddly and irrationally euphoric, a combination of drugs and the idea that he might succeed more easily than he had dreamed.

He made a more determined effort to sit up. His head lifted maybe five centimeters from the pillow, then fell back despite everything he could do to hold it up.

"Slowly. Rome-was not built-in a day." Par Leon glowed, clearly delighted at coming up with such a prize example of genuine Old Anglic. "It will be moons before you are fully strong. Two more things I will tell you, then I will allow your treatment to continue.

"First, it was I who arranged for you to be brought here and revived. I am a musicologist, interested in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and in particular your own time."

Drake's five-hundred-year-old bet had paid off. He wondered what modern music sounded like. Would he be able to listen to it with pleasure? To compose it?

"Under our laws," Par Leon went on, "you owe me for the cost of your revival and treatment. This amounts to six years of work from you. You are most fortunate that you were healthy and correctly frozen and maintained, or the time of service would have been much longer. However, I also believe that you will find your indenture with me both pleasantand interesting. I am proposing that you and I, together, write the definitive history of your own musical period."

So the question of earning a living was postponed for at least a few years. Par Leon would presumably have to feed Drake Merlin while he was paying off his debt.

"Second, I have good news for you." Par Leon was gazing at Drake expectantly. "When we examined you, our doctors found certain problems-defects is the word that you would use?-with your body and its glandular balance. They hope that they have cured the simpler body malfunctions, and they have provided standard stabilization of your chromosomal telomeres. You will still age, but slowly. You should live between two and three hundred years.

"However, the glandular imbalance represented a more subtle problem. It was likely to manifest itself as some form of madness, some uncontrollable compulsion. The doctors observed this as soon as you were thawed enough to respond to psychoprobes. They made small chemical changes and have, we hope, corrected the difficulty." Par Leon was watching Drake closely. "Please tell me now of your feelings toward your former wife, Anastasia Werlich."

Drake felt his heart racing. He could hear the blood pounding in his ears, and in his weakened condition it was as hard to breathe as if heavy weights had been dropped onto his chest. He closed his eyes for a long moment and thought about Ana. Gradually, he became calm again.

It was obvious what the other wanted to hear; and Ana was worth a million lies. Drake looked up at Par Leon and shook his head feebly. "I feel very little for her. No more than a faint sense that something was once there. I know that she was once very dear to me, but I am not sure how. It is like the scar of an old wound."

"Excellent!" The smile had kept its meaning. "That is most satisfying. The disease that killed the woman was eliminated from the human stock long ago, by careful mating choice-eugenics, as your language put it. We could certainly reanimate her, but according to our doctors it is still not clear that we would be able to cure her. However, we can see no reason to awaken her at all. Like most in the cryowombs, she is of little or no value to us. Most important of all, an involvement with her might interfere with your work for me."

"So her body is still stored?"

"Of course. We keep all the cryocorpses. Although most are of no present value, who knows what our future needs might be? The cryowombs are like a library of the past, to open whenever it will serve a purpose. Two hundred years from now someone may find a use for her, and her disease perhaps easily cured. Then she, too, may live and work again."

"Is Anastasia stored near here?"

"Of course not!" For the first time, Par Leon appeared to be shocked. "What a waste of space and energy that would imply. The cryowombs are maintained on Pluto, where space is cheap, cooling needs are small, and escape velocity is low."

That sentence, more than any other that Par Leon had spoken, wrenched Drake forward in time. What technology was it that could casually ship millions of bodies to the edge of the solar system rather than keep them in cold storage on Earth? If, that is, Pluto was the edge of the solar system. How many planets were known now? Even in his day, there was talk of many more bodies out in a region known as the Kuiper Belt. Five centuries. It was the time from Monteverdi to Shostakovich, from Copernicus to Einstein, from the Columbus discovery of America to the first landing on the Moon. He had come a long, long way.

Par Leon was still gazing at him, now a little suspiciously. "Again you ask about the woman, Anastasia Werlich. Why?

Are you sure that you are in fact fully cured? If not, another course of treatment is easy to arrange."

Drake cursed his own stupidity and did his best to smile reassuringly. "I feel sure that will not be needed. Already her memory fades. As soon as I am strong enough, I am eager to begin my work with you."

"Wonderful." The smile was back, but Par Leon was wagging his finger in warning. "We will certainly work together, but only after yon are fully recovered and have had some essential training. First, you must learn to speak Universal and Music and you must have enough background knowledge to live comfortably in this time. It will also be my responsibility to see that you are able to find suitable activity when your work with me is done, and for that you will need skills that today you lack.

"Rest now, Drake Merlin. I will return tomorrow, or the next day. By that time you will already find yourself stronger.

And you will be far more knowledgeable."As Par Leon left, the medical technicians carried forward a transparent helmet with silvered lines inscribed on its upper part. They lowered it carefully onto Drake's head.

He lost consciousness at once, too quickly to be aware of its cool touch.

Chapter 6.

Brave New World.

He awoke to the sound of two voices. One was an unfamiliar wordless chatter, a high-pitched and irritating tingle more in his brain than in his ear. The other voice he already knew. It was Par Leon, asking what seemed like an odd question after their previous conversation.

"Do you understand me, Drake Merlin?" There was a pause, then, more loudly: "Can you hear me? Do you understand me?"

"Of course I can. Of course I do." But Drake was having trouble controlling his own speech. He had to seek out each word. He opened his eyes. "We already . . . established that we can . . . understand each other."

Leon was standing in front of him, nodding in satisfaction. "We proved yesterday that we could communicate in English. But listen again to me . . . and listen to yourself."

The words were perfectly understandable-but they had been spoken in an alien tongue.

"What happened?" Drake asked. The sense of what he said was clear, but it sounded peculiar. With a deliberate effort, he repeated it in English, and the words came more easily. "What happened?"

"You learned, exactly as I hoped and expected." Leon replied in the same language. "But now"-Drake felt no decrease in his level of comprehension, yet he heard the change in the sounds-"now it is better if we both speak Universal."

"You said yesterday." Drake's shift from one language to the other was labored and sluggish. "You taught me Universal ... in a single day? How were you able to do that?"

"I am the wrong person to ask." Leon shrugged. "If I were to attempt an explanation, beyond saying that the helmet taught you, it would surely be inadequate. A suitable reply would be provided in Electronics or Medicine, possibly using dialects of the latter such as Neurology. I was taught something of those languages, long ago, but I found them uncongenial. If they are to your taste, you will have opportunity to learn them later. For the moment, relax. Go slowly.

In two or three weeks, Universal will come easily to you. But now we have other priorities. Can you stand up?"

Rather than replying, Drake made the experiment. He pushed the helmet away from his head and rose to his feet. As he came upright there was one moment of unsteadiness, then he felt balanced and alert. Yesterday's weakness was gone completely.

"I feel fine," he said, and meant it.

"Splendid. Are you hungry?"

Drake had to pause and consider that question. The prospect of food produced no physical reaction. It was as though during five centuries of sleep his body had forgotten the need for sustenance.

Finally he shook his head. "I'm sorry. I just don't know."

Leon nodded sympathetically. "Let us then make the experiment. We will eat a meal at a restaurant. The world has changed much since your time, and there will be much that is different. But the need for nourishment has not changed.

It will be reassuring for you to learn that some things are still the same."

Par Leon meant what he said; but to Drake, following him along a short corridor into a deserted white-walled room containing an array of cubicles, each equipped with a single chair and some kind of computer terminal, it seemed thatnothing could be less familiar.

This was a restaurant? There were no waiters, no menus, no signs of food or drink. Each cubicle would hold only one person.

His bewilderment showed.