“Yes, yes, I know all that,” said Hart. “But what kind of future—?”

“Who knows?” The doctor shrugged. “But I don’t think it will be too hard to adjust. I rather imagine that a smart Roman or Elizabethan Englishman, say, could do very well for himself in the present. Besides, at the rate medical science is advancing, I don’t think anyone will be in here longer than fifty or a hundred years.”

“And making a living—”

“You invested all your money as safely as possible before coming here, didn’t you? You’ll still have it when you awake, then, or the equivalent of it if they change the fiscal system. The Crypt staff will see to that if it isn’t taken care of automatically. You’ll also have quite a bit of accumulated interest.”

Hart nodded his sleek dark head. “It seems as sound a proposition as human ingenuity can make it,” he said. He added wryly, “Anyway, there’s no point in quibbling, not when the old man with the scythe is so close.”

“Quite so,” said the doctor.

They came to the end of the passage, where a great vault door sealed off the Crypt itself. The doctor worked the multiple combination lock, remarking idly, “Even if this whole place should be destroyed, the sleepers would be safe. Literally nothing from outside except a neutralizing field can penetrate the stasis. You could be buried under ten tons of earth without its making any difference—till they dug you out and opened your field.”

“There are things worse than death,” muttered Hart, and then added quickly, “but hardly worse than death by cancer.”

“Quite.” The doctor started the little motor which opened the huge door. “In a way,” he said, “I envy you. You’ll wake up rich, in a society which is better than ours—it must be, it couldn’t be much worse—and has all the great new adventures we’re just beginning to glimpse—the planets, the stars…” He shrugged. “I may see you again, of course. They’re working hard on the cancer problem right now. But I’ll be a pretty old man then.”

Hart nodded. “Benjamin Franklin once said he wished that, after he was dead, somebody would wake him every hundred years and tell him what happened. I see his point.”

They entered the Crypt. The room was a huge one, cold in steel and concrete and the white fluorescent lighting. There was little about to suggest the sensation it was arousing in the outer world. It looked much like a burial vault—a sinister thought, that, and one which Hart did his best to abolish—with its long row on row of steel caskets sliding into the walls. Each box, Hart noticed, had a complete case history engraved on its end.

The doctor followed his eye. “Those supplement our other records, in case they get lost,” he said. “The future physicians can read directly what is the matter with each patient. And just in case something should happen to the Crypt itself, everyone takes another case history into stasis with him, like the one you’re carrying now. So if it should become necessary, if nothing else survived, you could always be ‘wakened’ for the sole purpose of reexamination. But all those precautions are more for the benefit of worriers than because we think they’ll ever be needed.”