Bikini Planet Read online

What about Susie? Was she ready to be reanimated? Could it already have happened? Was she waiting for him?

  Norton knew that he’d been frozen by Mr. Ash to get rid of him, but most people had been cryonically treated when they were very old, even dead—and no one got much older than that.

  If Susie was still around, she’d be really old. What if she was say, fifty?

  They’d sworn to love each other forever, but Norton had never imagined forever would last so long. He still loved Susie, but only as she was in 1968. Not some old grandmother!

  He wouldn’t want to see her like that. He wanted to remember her as she was, so young, so beautiful.

  It would be best if he didn’t remember her at all, if he forgot everything. The past was gone. He was here now, and he had to make the most of it.

  But he wasn’t sure where “here” was. If America didn’t exist, was it because the Union had split apart? Was he in Nevada? Did Nevada still exist?

  That was something else he had to forget. Las Vegas. Nevada. The United States of America. They were history.

  Wayne Norton was also history. He was the oldest person ever to be brought back to life. His age wasn’t measured in the number of years he’d been alive, but in the number he’d been in suspended animation.

  “You can’t have been cryonically frozen in 1947,” Brendan had said.

  “1947 was when I was born,” Norton had told him. “1968 was when I was… er… frozen.”

  “Three hundred and eighteen years ago,” said Brendan.

  “Three hundred and twelve,” said Mandy.

  Brendan shrugged. “What’s four years?”

  “Eight,” said Mandy.

  “No,” said Norton, “six.”

  Brendan shrugged again. “Who’s counting?” he asked.

  No one, thought Norton, because it seemed they couldn’t. But after three centuries, a few years here or there made little difference.

  By now, he’d cleaned himself up and was dressed in a baggy sweater and a pair of loose pants. He’d also eaten, having tried a number of small cookies. They tasted of absolutely nothing, and were very chewy. He chewed and chewed and chewed, then swallowed, taking a mouthful of water each time to make sure they stayed down. They did.

  “Thanks for giving me the clothes and the food,” he said.

  “I haven’t given you them,” said Brendan. “I’ve sold you them.”

  If everything was being billed, then Norton was glad he hadn’t had a shave and haircut. What did barbers charge these days?

  “You owe me your life, John Wayne,” Brendan continued. “How much is that worth?”

  Norton considered his life was worth everything, but unfortunately all he had was nothing. And that was what he said. Nothing.

  The room they were in wasn’t very different from the one where he’d woken from his extended slumber. It was slightly bigger, but almost as sparse. Brendan kept glancing at a gigantic screen which filled one of the walls, and he sipped from a spherical cup.

  Three centuries had gone by, but people were just the same. Brendan could have been on a sofa, watching the TV, drinking a can of beer. Except there wasn’t a sofa—there wasn’t even a chair. He sat cross-legged on a small mat.

  When they arrived, Mandy had joined him on the floor, but Norton stayed standing.

  “It wasn’t cheap to revive you,” said Brendan. “I have to get my money back.”

  He kept saying the same thing in different ways, as if Norton didn’t understand.

  “I’ve got insurance,” Norton said. “The police medical fund will cover everything.”

  “He doesn’t understand, does he?” Brendan said to Mandy.

  “I’ll talk to him,” she said. “I am, after all, a professional communicator.”

  But she communicated via the gadget in her palm. The small disc was called a slate: a simultaneous linguistic and tonal equaliser. It was normally used as a translation device, except none of them was speaking a foreign language.

  Brendan and Mandy spoke a futuristic version of English. It was much faster, syllables were dropped, words run together. A lot of the emphases had changed, compressing vowel sounds and distorting consonants. There were also many new words, some absorbed from different cultures, others having mutated from obsolete adjectives and nouns, prepositions and verbs. Over the centuries, a different but recognisable language had evolved.

  Norton was beginning to get the hang of it. He could say “hello,” for example, which was “ho.” While he was learning, the slate made everything so much easier.

  “You want to interview me?” he said.

  “I am interviewing you,” said Mandy. “Everything you say and do is being recorded.”

  “Where’s the camera?”

  Mandy pointed toward her left eye. ” Here,” she said.

  One of her eyes was a camera? Compared to everything else, that was easy enough to believe.

  “The point Brendan is trying to make,” Mandy continued, “is that as a businessman he must show a profit on his investment.”

  “And I’m his investment?” said Norton. “What kind of businessman owns people?” He hoped Mandy’s way of talking wasn’t infectious.

  “It started with my grandfather,” said Brendan. “Collecting old stuff was a hobby for him. He was crazy. Then my father decided to exploit the monopoly potential, believing the best way to make money was to corner the market in something. That way he could charge any price he wanted. In theory. He established Corpses Unlimited, buying up every cryonic casket found anywhere in the world. He was even crazier than my grandfather. But not as crazy as you.”

  “Me?” said Norton. “Crazy?”

  “You must have been. Why did you have yourself frozen?”

  Norton was about to say he hadn’t, but remembered he should continue to volunteer as little information as possible.

  “Were you ill?” continued Brendan. “Was that it? You had some terminal disease you thought could be cured in the future? I’m not going to pay to have you fixed. I’ve spent enough already.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” said Norton.

  “Were you famous?” asked Mandy. “Is that why you did it? Because you didn’t want to grow old and ugly?”

  Norton shook his head.

  “Or were you rich?”

  He shook his head again. No, he hadn’t been rich. But he might be now, he realised.

  “I’ve got enough money to buy my freedom,” he said.

  “How do you figure that?” asked Brendan.

  “I was saving up to get married, I had almost a thousand bucks in the bank. With compound interest, how much is that worth by now? I must be a millionaire at least.” As he thought of it, Norton couldn’t help grinning. “Imagine that. Me with a million dollars!”

  “What’s a dollar?” asked Mandy.

  Norton stopped grinning.

  “Not too long ago,” said Brendan “your bank might still have existed, and they might even have had some record of you. Then came the Crash. Everything fell apart, everyone lost everything.”

  “I used to present the most popular programme on Earth,” said Mandy. “The Mandy and Candy Doubletime News Show. I was a star! Now look at me, doing filler features.”

  She gestured toward the screen. There was some kind of sports match being shown. The sound was turned low, but Brendan had kept at least one eye on the screen all the time. Norton had watched this kind of game before, but couldn’t make much sense of it. All he’d seen of the twenty-third century had been on television, and very little of it made any sense.

  “Money became totally worthless,” said Brendan. “My only asset is what I inherited. When my father died, it was more than just his own body he left. I have to make a living, so every now and then I thaw one of you out.”

  “How many have there been?”

  “I haven’t counted.”

  Norton wasn’t surprised. “What’s happened to them?”

  “They don’t
tend to keep in touch, even after all I’ve done for them. Others don’t survive, of course.”

  “Don’t survive! Why?”

  “I’m not a miracle worker. You should see the state some of them are in. New hope for the dead, yes, but there are limits. Some of them are in worse condition than Egyptian mummies. When they were dug out of the pyramids, no one tried to resurrect them. That’s why you’re the oldest person ever revived. All the mummies ended up in museums. Did you ever consider that might happen to you?”

  “You’re going to sell me to a museum?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. But no, you’re almost as good as new. I wish they were all like you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You should be worth a lot. Your brain’s still working, or so it seems. And if no one buys you, you can be used for spare parts.”

  “What?”

  “Sit down,” said Brendan. “Relax. Watch the game.”

  Norton was growing tired standing up, and now he finally sat on the floor. But there was no way he could relax, and he’d no intention of watching a game he couldn’t understand.

  “No one wants you for spares, John Wayne,” Brendan continued. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

  It was something Norton hadn’t worried about. Until now.

  “New body parts can be grown to order,” Brendan said. “If someone needs a new arm, they usually prefer to have one the same size and colour as the other. A matching pair.”

  “That was before the Crash,” said Mandy. “These days, there’s quite a demand for used parts.”

  “Only at the lower end of the market,” said Brendan. “Second-hand hands are cheap, but they don’t come with a guarantee.”

  “Bodysnatchers are not a myth. I made an in-depth investigative investigation one afternoon.”

  “You mean I might be… cannibalised?” said Norton.

  “No one will eat you,” said Brendan.

  “No one human will,” said Mandy. “Or very few. But some aliens have strange tastes.”

  “Aliens !” said Norton. “There are aliens in the world? Little green men?”

  “Little and green?” said Brendan. “Probably. It takes all kinds to make a universe.”

  “We’ve been invaded by Martians? The flying saucers have landed?”

  Brendan looked away from the screen, first at Norton, then at Mandy, back to Norton again, before returning to the screen.

  “As I was saying,” he continued, “you’ve got a body. Lots of them don’t because they only had their heads frozen. Maybe so storage would be cheaper. But that’s all they are. Heads.”

  “Aliens,” whispered Norton.

  “They might as well be aliens,” said Brendan, “because what good are they to me? Or to anyone? The most vital part of a person is the brain, but without a body there’s no… ah…”

  “Vitality?” offered Mandy.

  “Vitality,” agreed Brendan. “They must have been crazy. What did they think would happen when they were thawed out? That there’d be spare bodies they could be attached to? That we’d chop off someone’s head and give them the body? ‘Sorry to trouble you, but we’ve decided you’re not using your body to its full potential, so we’re giving it to someone who hasn’t got one.’ ”

  “You could have grown a body for each head,” said Mandy.

  “Why should I go to more expense?”

  “What you did was just so, so… oh, words aren’t enough to say how awful it was.” Mandy glanced at Norton. “You know what he did?”

  “No,” muttered Norton, who was still thinking: aliens …

  “I gave them life,” said Brendan. “Some of them. I gave them bodies.”

  “He stuck their heads on animals! On dogs and shigs and monkeys. Isn’t that just the worst scenario you can imagine?”

  “Just the worst,” Norton agreed. A shig must be an alien from another galaxy.

  “I was doing them a favour,” said Brendan. “I revived them, gave them a taste of life. Maybe it did mean partnering them with a non-human body, but what thanks did I get? A threat of prosecution, that’s what.”

  “He tried to sell the poor creatures as hybrids.”

  “Oh,” said Norton.

  “Animal lovers!” Brendan spat. “What do you think happened to the heads after the ruling?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “They’re still alive, if you can call it that. Kept on a shelf in some archive. They can’t move. Not without bodies. They can’t talk. They can’t do anything. Nothing. Ever. If they weren’t crazy to begin with, they’re stark staring mad by now. Staring! That’s all they can do, stare at each other.”

  Brendan and Mandy and Wayne Norton all stared at each other for a while, then Brendan watched the screen again.

  “So,” said Mandy, ” what did you do?”

  “When?” asked Norton.

  “In your first life. You weren’t rich and you weren’t famous, but you were put into suspended animation, so what did you do?”

  “I was a police officer.”

  Mandy and Brendan looked at each other. She laughed. Then so did he.

  Norton knew he should have lied. His experience in the police force had proved that honesty was the worst policy, but after three centuries it had temporarily slipped his mind.

  “You were in the police?” said Brendan.

  “Really?” said Mandy.

  Norton said, “Well…”

  For a moment, he’d thought Mandy and Brendan were showing some interest in him and the twentieth century. But all they wanted to know was what skills and talents might make him worth more on the labour market.

  “Could be worse,” said Brendan. “I suppose.”

  “Really?” said Mandy.

  They both laughed again.

  “Let’s be serious,” said Brendan. “I want this ready to go out tomorrow.”

  “It will be,” said Mandy. “I’m always serious about my work.”

  “Why the rush?” asked Norton. After so many years, what was a day or two?

  “Because,” answered Brendan, “you might be one of those who doesn’t survive very long.”

  Wayne Norton suddenly felt icy cold again, and he shivered.

  It was as if someone had stepped on his cryonic grave.

  Norton survived long enough to see the programme Mandy had made about him, and they watched it together in his room. They sat side by side on his bed, and for the first time he was glad there seemed to be no chairs in the future.

  The size of the screen made it more like watching himself at the movies than on television. He knew the plot, but the film was difficult to follow. Everything happened very fast, there was so much going on at once, with weird images and strange music. It was part documentary, part commercial, its purpose to sell a product: a man from the twentieth century.

  Norton saw himself waking up, presumably after oversleeping for three hundred years. Mandy was there, speaking to him as he opened his eyes. It hadn’t happened like that, of course. In fact, very little happened the way he remembered.

  Mandy stared at the screen, at herself, but Norton found it very hard to concentrate because he kept thinking of what she’d told him a few minutes ago.

  “I’ve got a good feeling about this, John Wayne,” she’d said. “It could be a new beginning for me. And if I feel good, I want to share that feeling. How about it?”

  “How about what?” asked Norton.

  “You and me, that’s what!”

  “Oh. You and me. Yeah. Me and you. Sure. You think we should go on a date?”

  “What’s all this about dates? It’s long gone.”

  “So you don’t want to go out with me?”

  There was a whole new world outside. It was called the future. Norton had watched this amazing world on television, and it both frightened and fascinated him. Even if aliens and cannibals—or cannibal aliens—did exist,
he had to go out there and see everything for himself.

  And he would. He had no intention of being sold. As soon as he had the chance, he was going to escape; and Mandy looked like his best chance.

  “Not out!” Mandy had said. “I want to stay in with you. We watch the show together, then we have sex together.”

  “You mean…?” Norton shrugged because he wasn’t sure what she did mean. “You don’t mean…?”

  A hot date, perhaps. Even a Death Valley, midsummer, midday date. He wished he was more used to the speeded-up, stripped-down language. It sounded as if Mandy was promising to go all the way. What girl would do that on a first date?

  “I’ve had sex with old men,” said Mandy, “but none as old as you.” She smiled. “Maybe there’s something you can teach me, some little trick that’s been forgotten.” Her smiled widened. “But I bet I can teach you a lot more.”

  Having grown up in Vegas, Norton never gambled. Whatever the odds, Mandy was bound to win.

  He looked at her. She looked at him. Her smile grew even wider.

  And he knew he couldn’t lose.

  What a strange and wonderful place he’d woken into.

  He was the oldest virgin in the world, but not for much longer.

  Then he’d begun to panic, thinking he should have a shave and haircut. How much would that be? Whatever the cost, it was worth paying. Not that he’d ever pay. Before Brendan could add up the bill, Norton would have escaped.

  Perhaps he should buy Mandy some flowers. Were there still such things as flowers? Or a box of candy. Did candy still exist?

  His long hair and beard didn’t matter. Mandy believed in free love. The hippies had taken over the world. Flower power meant that flowers were unnecessary. Wanting to give her something because of what she was going to give him was probably far too outdated.

  While she watched the screen, Norton watched her. Over the centuries, the world had changed. Separate nations might have vanished, and different races now lived together, but despite her crazy hair and strange clothes, Mandy still matched his original impression: she could have been a regular all-American blue-eyed girl. Even if one of her eyes was a camera.

  “So,” asked Mandy, on screen, “what did you do in your first life?”

  “I was a police officer.”

  “Really?”