"Spider Robinson - Too Soon We Grow Old" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

TOO SOON WE GROW OLD

The first awakening was awful, and she enjoyed it.
She was naked and terribly cold. She was in a plastic coffin from whose walls
grew wrinkled plastic arms with gnarled plastic hands that did things to her. Most of
the things hurt dreadfullyтАФbut they were all physical hurts. Her soul was conscious
only of an almost terrifying sense of relief. Until you have had your neck and
shoulders rubbed out for the first time, you can have no conception of how tightly
bunched they were. Tension can only be fully appreciated in its release. To her mind
came a vivid association from long decades past: her first orgasm. A shudder
passed over her body.
A voice spoke, in a language unknown to her. Even allowing for the
sound-deadening coffin walls, it sounded distant.
Eyes appeared over hers, through a transparent panel she had failed to see since it
had showed only a ceiling the same color as the coffin's interior. She refocused. The
face was masked and capped in white, the eyes pouched in wrinkles. He said
something incomprehensible, apparently in reply to the first voice.
"Hi, Doc," she shouted, finding her voice oddly squeaky in the high-helium
atmosphere of the cryogenic capsule. "I made it!" She found that she was grinning.
He started, and moved from view. One of the plastic hands did something to her
left bicep, and she felt her hurts slipping awayтАФbut not her joy. I knew I could beat
it, she thought just before consciousness faded, and then she dreamed of the day her
victory had begun.
She was not at all sure just why she had consented to the interview. She had
rejected them for over twenty years, on an impulse so consistent that it had never
seemed to call for examination. To understand why she had granted this one would,
it seemed to her, call for twenty years' worth of spade-workтАФit was simpler to posit
that impulse had merely changed its sign, from negative to positive.
Yet, although she relied implicitly on the automatic pilot which had made the
decision for her, she found apprehension mounting within her as the appointed day
led her inexorably to the appointed time. An hour before the interviewer was due, she
found herself examining a capsule of an obscure and quite illegal tranquilizer, one
which had not even filtered down to street level yet. It was called Alpha, according
to her source, and he claimed it was preternaturally effective. But she hesitatedтАФhe
had said something about it tending to suppress all the censors, something about it
being a kind of mild truth drug. She turned the capsule end on end in her palm, three
times.
The hell with it, she decided. This is the true measure of my wealth: I can even
afford to be honest with an interviewer. The realization elated her. Besides, she
afterthought, I can always buy the network if I have to.
She washed the capsule down with twice-distilled water.
The lights were not as blinding as she had expected. In fact, none of the external
irritations she had anticipated materializedтАФnot even the obtrusive presence of a
cameraman. The holocamera was not entirely automatic, for newstaping is an art
(with a powerful union)тАФbut its operator was nearly a hundred miles away in the
network's headquarters, present only by inference. She was simply sitting in her own
familiar living room, conversing with a perfect stranger whose profession it was to
seem an old and understanding friend. Although she had never seen his showтАФshe
never watched 3VтАФshe decided he was one of the best in his field. Or was that the
drug? In any case, they went from Ms. Hammond and Mr. Hold to Diana and Owen