This was done, and the guard units along the riverbank were increased, and everyone passed a miserable night.
In the morning, the King was awakened by cries of alarm. Hurrying to the riverbank, the King beheld that the water had been transformed as though by an act of magic. No longer did the brown- gray waters move and lap. They had been changed overnight into a different substance. This substance was white in some spots, transparent in others. But strangest of all, it gave the appearance of being perfectly solid.
“My Gods!” cried the King. “Some demon has bewitched the river!”
“Not at all, Lord,” the Chief Scientist replied. “My assistants have been keeping close watch on the river all night, as befits followers of the scientific method. I can say with certainty that, in response to the unprecedented cold, the water has congealed—though that may not be quite the right term. In any event, the water has changed into a solid substance. We have long known the theoretical possibility of this—it is what we call transformation—but this is the first time we’ve had experimental corroboration.”
“Then it’s not witchcraft?” the King asked.
“Certainly not. We have just discovered a new natural law. Water, it seems, responds to extremes of cold by turning into a solid.”
The forces of the barbarians were moving onto the glittering white surface, cautiously at first, then with increasing confidence when they discovered it bore their weight. The King’s ships, frozen fast, stood in the river like isolated forts, easily bypassed. The barbarians flowed around them, a mighty horde of armed men. And the King, watching them cross the river in their myriads, and seeing his soldiers run, knew that all was lost.
Turning to his chief scientist, the King said, “You have deceived me! You said you could predict everything! And now look at what has happened!”
“My Lord,” the Chief Scientist said, “I regret this as much as you do. But you must not blame science for what has so unexpectedly taken place. There is a word in science, my Lord, to describe what has taken place here.”
“And what is that?”
“This sort of thing is generally referred to as an anomaly. An anomaly is something perfectly natural which could not have been predicted on the basis of what has gone before.”
“You never told me about anomalies,” the King said.
“Why should I burden you with the unknowable, O King, when so much of the knowable is available to us?”
By now the barbarians were drawing near. The King and his scientists turned to their horses in order to take flight.
“It is the end of the world,” the King said sadly, mounting.
“Not at all, sire,” the Chief Scientist said, also mounting. “It is a sad thing to lose a kingdom. But it may be of some comfort to you to know that you have reigned during the beginning of something new and unprecedented in the history of Atlantis.”
“And what is that?” asked the King.
“That white substance,” the scientist said, “we are now tentatively naming ‘ice.’ And unless I miss my guess, we have witnessed the beginning of Earth’s very first Ice Age.”
“Small comfort,” said the King, and galloped off in search of a new kingdom and better weather.
Dial-A-Death
You never think it can happen, do you? You’re going along fine in the middle of your life. Time stretches endlessly ahead of you, and a serious matter such as dying will just have to wait because you haven’t time now even to consider it.
And then it happens. The glitch in the system. The little pain in your head becomes piercing. Whammo, cerebral hemorrhage. The car, out of control, mounts the curb and carries you screaming through the plate glass window. The guy behind you on the subway platform gives a nervous little twitch and a push and there you are, dancing on air under the thunderous headlight of the Broad- way-7th Avenue Express. I don’t mean to be morbid, but these things happen. Then it’s too late to think of Dial-a-Death.
Jack Stanton made page 3 of the Times when a furniture sling parted and a grand piano landed on him from ten stories up. Jack didn’t have time to think about it, didn’t even know what happened. There was a sudden rush of air blowing straight down, and then whammo—a fast, clean death, and not unmusical.
You may have thought the transition between living and death would be instantaneous, but you’d be wrong. Latest research shows that once the body realizes that it’s outward bound on a one-way trip to whatever comes next, it goes into its own special time. A few seconds can elongate and stretch into the feeling of hours. That’s the time when you really need Dial-a-Death.
Jack Stanton never felt a thing. One minute he was walking down 57th Street in Manhattan thinking about how he could raise ten million dollars for a merger (he was a lawyer specializing in corporate finances) when there was something like a puff of air above his head and he found himself somewhere else.
He was standing on a landscaped lawn near a big gracious old house, like his parents used to have when he was a kid. A party was going on inside. He could hear the music, and through the windows he could see people dancing. Somebody waved to him from the house. A pretty redhaired girl was beckoning to him.
He went in. It looked like a really good party. There were a lot of people there and they all seemed to be having fun. They were square dancing inside. Jack hadn’t seen square dancing in twenty years. He joined in. Unexpectedly, he found that he was an expert at it. The crowd moved back to give him and his partner room. The girl he was dancing with was buxom and pretty and light on her feet. They were great together. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers! They finished with a flourish and went hand in hand upstairs.
The girl led him into one of the back rooms. There were coats stacked two feet high on the big double bed. They got up on top of them. The girl was so astonishingly pretty that it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d been cold, indifferent, or even blew a pink chewing gum bubble at the moment of supreme ecstasy. With her looks she couldn’t do anything wrong, not the first time, anyhow. And in fact she was amazingly responsive, tender, fiery, unfathomably and endlessly delicious. She was what you’d have to call a peak experience anyway you slice it.
Jack floated upward through the intensities of mounting excitement. His orgasm was tremendous, gargantuan, exemplary, incomparable, and he fell back on the bed exhausted, sated, pleased beyond telling, dropping into that delicious time when exhaustion steals over you like a gift from Psyche and there is nothing ahead but a sweet floating fall through endless layers of soft-scented sleep.
Maybe he did sleep for a while. When he opened his eyes the girl was gone. The party was gone, even the house had vanished. Now he was standing alone in a long corridor, facing a closed door, and he was stark mother naked.
A voice came from nowhere: “Jack—go through the door.”
“Who is this?” Jack says. “Where am I?”
“Don’t ask questions. Just go through the door. Everything will be all right.”
Still drowsy and happy, Jack had an impulse to obey the voice. But he resisted. He had always been cantankerous, cross-grained, self-directed. He hadn’t gotten to where he was by taking orders from people. He was Jack Stanton. People did what he told them to do, not the other way around.
“Whoever you are,” Jack said, “quit kidding around and come out here and tell me what’s going on.”
“Mr. Stanton, please—”
“Who are you? What is all this?”
“I am Doctor Gustaffson from the Institute. Do you remember now?”
Jack nodded slowly. It was coming back to him. “The guy with the new medical thing. What was it?”
“Dial-a-Death. The Institute for Harmonious Dying.”
“I hired you?”
“That’s right.”
“To arrange my death?”