"Robert A. Heinlein - The Door into Summer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

I read all three several times without thinking about them. I knew as much
and as little about suspended animation as everybody else did. I had read a
popular article or so when it was first announced and two or three times a
week IтАЩd get an insurance-company ad about it in the morning mail; I usually
chucked them without looking at them since they didnтАЩt seem to apply to me
any more than lipstick ads did.
In the first place, until shortly before then, I could not have paid for cold
sleep; itтАЩs expensive. In the second place, why should a man who was
enjoying his work, was making money, expected to make more, was in love
and about to be married, commit semi-suicide?
If a man had an incurable disease and expected to die anyhow but thought
the doctors a generation later might be able to cure him-and he could afford to
pay for suspended animation while medical science caught up with what was wrong
with him-then cold sleep was a logical bet. Or if his ambition was to make a
trip to Mars and he thought that clipping one generation out of his personal
movie film would enable him to buy a ticket, I supposed that was logical too-
there had been a news story about a cafe-society couple who got married and went
right straight from city hail to the sleep sanctuary of Western World Insurance
Company with an announcement that they had left instructions not to be called
until they could spend their honeymoon on an interplanetary liner although
I had suspected that it was a publicity gag rigged by the insurance company and
that they had ducked out the back door under assumed names. Spending your
wedding night cold as a frozen mackerel does not have the ring of truth in it.
And there was the usual straightforward financial appeal, the one the
insurance companies bore down on: тАЮWork while you sleep.тАЬ Just hold still and
let whatever you have saved grow into a fortune. if you are fifty-five and your
retirement fund pays you two hundred a month, why not sleep away the years, wake
up still fifty-five, and have it pay you a thousand a month? To say nothing of
waking up in a bright new world which would probably promise you a much longer
and healthier old age in which to enjoy the thousand a month? That one they
really went to town on, each company proving with incontrovertible figures that
its selection of stocks for its trust fund made more money faster than any of
the others. тАЮWork while you sleep!тАЬ
It had never appealed to me. I wasnтАЩt fifty-five, I didnтАЩt want to retire,
and I hadnтАЩt seen anything wrong with 1970.
Until recently, that is to say. Now I was retired whether I liked it or
not (I didnтАЩt); instead of being on my honeymoon I was sitting in a second-rate
bar drinking Scotch purely for anesthesia; instead of a wife I had one much-
scarred tomcat with a neurotic taste for ginger ale; and as for liking right
now, I would have swapped it for a case of gin and then busted every bottle.
 But I wasnтАЩt broke.
I reached into my coat and took out an envelope, opened it. It had two
items in it. One was a certified check for more money than I had ever had before
at one time; the other was a stock certificate in Hired Girl, Inc. They were
both getting a little mussed; I had been carrying them ever since they were
handed to me.
Why not?
Why not duck out and sleep my troubles away? Pleasanter than joining the
Foreign Legion, less messy than suicide, and it would divorce me completely from
the events and the people who had made my life go sour. So why not?