“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly,” I echoed. “Is this all some mind-control experiment? It’s not really 1997, is it?”

“I’m afraid it is.”

“I was born in 1933,” I said, “so if it’s really 1997, I ought to be sixty-four years old. Do I look sixty-four years old?”

“No,” he said without hesitation. “You look about thirty-nine.”

“I am about thirty-nine. And it’s 1972, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s 1997.”

“It’s 1997 and I’m thirty-nine.”

“According to the calendar, you’re sixty-four. But yes, I’m going to agree with your last statement. It is indeed 1997, and you are indeed thirty-nine years old.”

I looked at him. He looked at me. I said, “I give up. How can that be possible?”

“Mr. Tanner,” he said, “have you ever heard of cryonics?”

Well, of course I had. Based on the notion that biological processes ground to a halt at a lower temperature, cryonics postulated that dead people might be frozen for years on end, then thawed when science had advanced to the point of finding a cure for whatever it was that had killed them. Today’s incurable illness might be a mere nuisance twenty or fifty or a hundred years from now, when a pill or a shot or a surgical procedure could make you fit as a fiddle again.

There had been rumors, I remembered, that various prominent persons had had themselves frozen after death. It seemed to me I’d heard it said about Walt Disney, though I couldn’t be sure whether he was ultimately going to be thawed or simply animated.

It sounded nice in theory. It was a new wrinkle in the hopeless war against mortality, and while it might not extend the normal life span, it might serve as a weapon against early death. If your heart failed, well, we’ll just freeze you until artificial hearts have been perfected. Same with the liver and lungs. Whatever’s wrong with you, sooner or later medical science will work out a way to fix it, and when that happens we’ll warm you up and set you straight.