Part 4 (2/2)
”That theory's been discredited,” the specialist said.
”It works.”
”In isolated cases, but-”
”I'm one of them.”
”Of the few. At your son's age, he might not survive the procedure.”
”Are you refusing to make the arrangements?”
”I'm trying to explain that with the expense and the risk-”
”My son will be dead by tomorrow. Being frozen can't be worse than that. And as far as the expense goes, he worked hard. He saved his money. He can afford it.”
”But there's no guarantee that a treatment will ever be developed for brain cells as damaged as your son's are.”
”There's no guarantee it won't be developed, either.”
”He can't give his permission.”
”He doesn't need to. He made me his legal representative.”
”All the same, his children need to be consulted. There are issues of estate, a risk of a lawsuit.”
”I'll take care of his children. You take care of the arrangements.”
They stared at him.
Anthony's father couldn't tell if they resisted his idea because they counted on their inheritance. ”Look, I'm begging. He'd have done this for you. He did it for me. For G.o.d's sake, you can't give up on him.”
They stared harder.
”It's not going to cost you anything. I'll work harder and pay for it myself. I'll sign control of the estate over to you. All I want is, don't try to stop me.”
Anthony's father stood outside the cryochamber, studying the stick-on plaque that he'd put on the hatch. It gave Anthony's name, his birth-date, when he'd had his first stroke, and when he'd been frozen. ”Sweet dreams,” it said at the bottom. ”Wake up soon.”
Soon was a relative word, of course. Anthony had been frozen six years, and there was still no progress in a treatment. But that didn't mean there wouldn't be progress tomorrow or next month. There's always hope, Anthony's father thought. You've got to have hope.
On a long narrow table in the middle of the corridor, there were tokens of affection left by loved ones of other patients: family photographs and a baseball glove, for example. Anthony's father had left the disc of the computer game that he and Anthony had been playing. ”We'll play it again,” he'd promised.
It was Anthony's father's birthday. He was forty-nine. He had gray in his sideburns, wrinkles in his forehead. I'll soon look like Anthony did when I woke up from being frozen and saw him leaning over me, he thought.
He couldn't subdue the discouraging notion that one of these days he'd be the same age as Anthony when he'd been frozen. But now that he thought about it, maybe that notion wasn't so discouraging. If they found a treatment that year, and they woke Anthony up, and the treatment worked... We'd both be sixty-six. We could grow old together.
I'll keep fighting for you, Anthony. I swear you can count on me. I couldn't let you die before me. It's a terrible thing for a father to outlive his son.
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