|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
A Visit to Belindia
| Article
# : |
20230 |
|
|
Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
|
| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1992 |
2,943 Words |
| Author
: |
Frederik Pohl
Frederik Pohl is a science fiction writer residing in
Palatine, Illinois. His books include The Space Merchants
(with C.M. Kornbluth), Gateway, The Year of the City, and The
World at the End of Time. His current book, written with
Isaac Asimov, is Our Angry Earth (published by Tor Books). |
This is the story of Benjamin Brown. He was born in the year 1938, died in 1992, and was born again in the year 2042.
That last statement is not quite literally true. Ben Brown wasn't really "born" again in 2042, of course. That just happened to be the year when the cryonicists were finally able to take him out of the freezer, replace the cancer-ridden pancreas that had killed him in the first place (at the same time performing quite a few other nips, tucks, and replacements in order to take care of other problems that would probably have killed him not much later), and awake him up to tell him that his gamble with cryonic suspension had paid off.
Nevertheless, the fact of the matter was that Ben Brown was alive and well in the middle of the twenty-first century, and if he wasn't really "reborn" what he was was certainly good enough for him . . . at least at first.
Puzzles
The most important cause for rejoicing, of course, was simply that he was alive. Not only that, he wasn't even in pain, he was comfortable and well fed, and when he looked out the window of his hospital room he could see the wonderful world of 2042 spread out before him. Well, not the whole world, of course, but he could at least see the hospital grounds, and they were bright with flowers and fountains, and everything beautifully green.
True, there were some things that puzzled him. There seemed to be a glass roof over the hospital gardens, and he wondered why that was necessary. Then there was the question of the hospital orderlies. When, in the old days, Ben thought about the world he hoped to awaken into, he expected that menial work would be performed by smart machines, maybe even robots. These weren't anything like that. They were just ordinary people. You might even say they were a little less that ordinary, since the orderlies were generally not very big or very strong. They didn't even appear to be very well fed--or so it seemed to Ben, when he noticed that whenever he happened not to eat the rolls, or piece of fruit, that came with his hospital meals, one of the attendants was sure to furtively slip it into a pocket. And the television set in his room was not what he had expected, either. It had a big screen, and it was certainly in brilliant color, but it was just as flat as the ones he had owned back in 1992. (Whatever had happened to 3-D television?) And, although his hospital set had more channels to explore than he had time to look at, they all
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
