I detest lies, but on a clear, autumn evening in the middle years of the twenty-first century they were becoming unavoidable. Worse, they were breeding. I was tidying my desk at the university for the last time. My plan to leave had been announced some months before, and the day had been depressing repetitions of, "Honey, we're going to miss you. Keep in touch. I wish I were going with you." The university was suddenly populated with middle-aged women who wanted to give up their jobs, homes and families in order to head west and start again from scratch. They weren't serious. Neither was I, and the deception was wearing me down.

Going home would have solved the problem, except that there was no home to go to. My rented house was gone, and I still had hours to kill before the 8 PM bus. I told everyone I was being picked-up later--another lie--and spent the day having a last look at what had been my second home for twelve years.

I spent the afternoon in the library, nosing at random through the history section. I would have done better to have browsed the religion columns in the daily newspapers, but that is hindsight.

The feeling of serenity that had come over me the night before when I turned over the house keys was still with me. Everything was ready. There were no more decisions, no more worries. Anything not done just wouldn't get done. When I had locked my door for the last time, I had been turning the lock on all of my past.

My few bits of furniture had been picked up earlier in the day by the auctioneer and the paper signed to send any money to the Student Explorers Club. It wouldn't amount to much, almost everything was second if not third hand, but the SEC could use the money almost as much as it could use something new to explore.

I wasn't a student. That relationship with a university had ended thirty years earlier with my hard-won Bachelor's degree. York was just the place I worked. I left the library and returned to my basement lair after everyone else had gone home. The intention was to straightening out my cubicle, but it would have been a half-hearted attempt. Any real organization would have taken days. I made a cup of coffee and unwrapped the muffin I had bought just before the kiosk closed.

Coffee and a muffin was not the approved diet for the type of work I was about to undertake, but as is so often the case, the people who do the work know a great deal more about what works than the people who write the procedures. Even so, I had a small tussle with my conscience before the muffin was gone. The coffee was the lesser evil, so I saved it for last and took it to the place where I knew I could sit in comfort.

Our staff room was a cozy, cylindrical bit of fancy that added a touch of ivory tower to the building. It extended from the south-west corner, giving a clear view of the university in three directions. The ancient material on the chairs was faded and patched, but the cushions were so large and deep they almost cuddled you when you sank into them. I felt the need for some cuddling. The only downside to our lounge was the students residence directly opposite, from which semi-intelligent yahoos gaped back at you, except during the quiet summer months when it was inhabited by refined, elderly folk--meaning thirty-ish to the average university student. The lounge was empty, and there was no activity in the residence. I sank into one of the chairs and sipped slowly. It would have to last me for some time.

Looking out through the wall of windows, I took in my last view of the campus. The multiple paths that criss-crossed the lawns were empty except for the lone figure of a student who trudged along without once looking up from the spot directly in front of his feet. He was missing a beautiful evening. Tree branches moved to the slightest of breezes, and the low evening sun lit everything with a calming yellow light. The room was so completely silent that I could make out the sound of the distant, unseen traffic in the busy world beyond the campus boundaries.

It was the world that I had been born into, a safe, comfortable, peaceful world in comparison with most periods of history, and a well-fed and prosperous world compared to all of them. There were no major wars in progress and none on the horizon. The world economy was healthy, forests flourished, birds flew and fish still ruled the oceans.

To many people it was a complete disappointment. My grandmother, Heda, would have found it so. After emigrating to Canada from the islands, she had devoted her life to a series of causes to improve the country and the world as a whole. Most of her efforts involved shrieking at one government agency or other and blaming them for the Armageddon that was surely about to befall us. It didn't happen, and because it didn't happen there really was a sense of having missed out on something. History books rate centuries by how badly things go. The twenty-first was turning out to be a colossal disappointment.

I didn't see it that way. I take after my mother, not my grandmother, and my mother's idea of heaven was a nice cup of tea with her feet up. That is the reason I had so much difficulty accounting for my actions. As I finished my coffee and took it all in for the last time, I wondered again what on Earth I was doing. Why would a sane, basically-lazy, well-into-middle-age woman walk away from such a world and risk everything on a gamble where the odds weren't even known? At the time I would have come up with some kind of answer if challenged, but I am infinitely wiser now, and I still do not completely understand. All I can offer is the simple statement that I did so, and that at the time it seemed the right thing to do.

Coffee done. Cup washed. Time to go.

I made it back to the lab without seeing anyone. That was the way I wanted it. That was the reason I was taking the night bus. I dropped my building keys onto Marla's desk. She could return them for me. My duffel bag was packed and waiting.

Pick it up, sling it over my shoulder, walk to the door.

I reached for the lights.

Last look.

Snap the switch.

Check that the door will lock.

Step into the hall.

Listen to the latch snap firmly into position for the last time.

That was the only time I felt doubt. Even one second earlier I could have turned back, but now my keys were on the other side. I stared at the closed door as if for the first time. How often had I pulled my key and opened it without even having to think? Now, the other side of that door was as far away as the other end of the galaxy.

A memory from the early days came back to me. I was leading my mother through that same door to show her the marvelous new place I would be working. Now I could feel butterflies beginning in my stomach, and it made me feel better, more human. The calmness with which I had prepared everything had begun to worry me. My reflections were interrupted by footsteps from further down the hallway.

Four steps to the stairwell and then around, around, around and out.

The cool evening air brought me back to my usual self. The sun was down now. Avoiding the route through the heart of the campus, I cut through the car park and took the long way around the library. It is a strange but wonderful feeling to realize that everything you need, everything in your own private universe, is literally within reach. I had no job, no house and no car. My worldly goods had been sold, my clothes were in my bag, and all the money I owned was in my pocket. I was starting my new life with the equivalent of a week's wages. That was all that was left.

The subway entrance lead me down and into the Toronto underground world. I remember little about the trip downtown. I can see an old woman sitting on a bench in front of glossy yellow tiles at one of the stations. Why I retain that image, I have no idea. I can also remember sitting in a window seat in the bus, looking out and watching to see how many other passengers would board. Luck was with me. The seat beside me would remain empty for the entire trip.

We would be going north, back in the general direction of the university. I wasn't sure of the exact route. I'd always driven before, and whoever had laid out the inter-city bus routes had a fondness for back streets. We reached Yonge street and turned left illegally. The driver showed no inclination to leave the main route, and a small hope grew inside me.

Three or four blocks ahead, there was a gap between the mirrored office towers where a short lane led you to the premises of Sidney Carter, Mods. What Sidney modified was automobiles. Just in front of his run-down, concrete one-story was the heavily-fenced parking lot where he kept the vehicles he was in the process of modifying. His kind of service, marginally legal, had become very popular about the time that city bylaws outlawed the use of internal combustion engines within city limits. The intent had been to improve the quality of the city's air. The immediate result was to bring into existence a whole new industry. Sidney, and all of the others like him, would take your fancy, but now useless, imported vanity piece and modify it as necessary to meet your personal needs. Live just inside the city limits, but do most of your driving outside? Sidney whips out your standard transmission and puts in a generator-motor set and just enough battery power to get you home. Limp out past the city limits the next day, again on battery power, and then whoom! Fire up the turbine and you're driving a real car again. Sidney had done a considerable amount of work for me, and just two days ago I had sold him the vehicle he had practiced his art on. I had to. He had made it a condition of the work that nobody, but no-body, was to get a good look at the inner workings of that machine. He had a license to protect.

The bus approached Sidney's lane, where a malfunctioning intersection brought us to a stop. There it was, still sitting where I had left it: my aging two-ton buddy in army green. Some people get silly and sentimental about machinery. I am one of them. When I parked my pick-up there for the last time and handed over the key-card, I felt as if I were abandoning a child. After all the heavy slogging it had done for me, this was how I showed my gratitude, leaving it to be dismembered at Sid the butcher's. Work had already begun. The phony battery racks had been removed, and the truck's transponder had already been broken away from the windshield and was probably buried in a landfill somewhere. A legal one would have been returned to the transportation ministry in its place.

All of the important events in this testament occurred before I was fourteen or after the evening I am now describing. True, the intervening forty years seemed important to me while they were happening, but they were mostly filler. Still, I have to give some account of those middle years to explain how things turned out the way they did. I will briefly describe how it came to be that I spent my weekends tearing about the countryside in an illegal, army-green, pick-up truck with a transponder of no fixed address.

I grew up as an only child in a happy home where I lived with both of my parents. They had married in their mid-twenties, and remained happily married to each other all of their lives. Amazing as that is in itself, it is doubly amazing when you take into account the presence of Heda ("Heda" to everyone, never "grandma", NEVER "granny"). Heda descended two or three times a year. Her visits should have received names the way hurricanes did. Lesser men would have beaten down the doors of the divorce courts within the first year, but my mother had chosen carefully. Their marriage survived Heda, and during the long periods of calm between her visits, the three of us pulled closer together in preparation for the next coming. I had a grandfather, Heda's ex, as well as grandparents on my father's side, but they were quite normal, and had little effect on my life.

At the age of nine, something happened to upset my happy TV-sitcom existence. I was diagnosed with a minor heart ailment. Nothing to worry about, said the doctors, I would live a normal life with no trouble.

Two years later I was in a hospital and on oxygen for the first of many times. It was decided that a new heart would be needed, and in keeping with the fashion of the times, I was put on the schedule for heart regeneration. A sample of blood was taken, and within a week twelve microscopic hearts began to grow inside a test tube at the heart factory. Of these, four were screened out early as having the same defect that my own had developed. That left eight. Six were put on medication to accelerate their growth to twice the normal speed. They would be available in four years, and one of them would be chosen for re-planting. All I had to do was hang on for four years. I would be a fifteen-year-old with the heart of an eight-year-old, but the doctors said it was nothing to worry about. Just in case my body couldn't wait that long, two were given heavy medication to accelerate their growth to something like four times normal. It was hard on them, but if they survived to resemble a human heart, they would be ready in only two years.

One year later, in the middle of the day, in the middle of my math lesson, my own heart gave out. I hold the view that it was mathematics that triggered my collapse. My father worked in construction all of his life, but he had a natural talent for numbers, one that I inherited. We counted everything we came across. Like all good disciples of Holmes, I knew the number of stairs in our house, the number of cracks in the sidewalk between our house and school, and the number of seconds that I had been alive (updated periodically). During drives we competed to add the numbers and letters on license plates. Our own car's license number, 1F4G7B9T, added to 56. Dad could add any license in three seconds. I rarely took more than two. Our little hobby of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing all types of numbers as we came across them served me well in my early school days. I was the star of all our class arithmetic bees. The trouble came later. My problems can be dated from the day I told my father that we were advancing from arithmetic. We were going to be learning mathematics.

"Mathematics," said my father in a tone that invited no argument, "is a crutch for people who never learned their mental arithmetic properly."

That was all it took to make me suspicious of math in all its forms. I still did well at first, but "word problems" gave way to geometry, which led to trigonometry, algebra, the hated calculus, and eventually the brain-numbing swamp of non-linear, nonsensical, differential equations. My grades degenerated from excellent to merely adequate.

It didn't take calculus to bring on the attack. I was only in grade 6 at the time. The problem that did in my heart involved nothing more complicated than the number of fence posts that farmer Brown required to re-fence his bizarrely shaped fields. I didn't like farms. I didn't know any farmers or children of farmers, and I had no desire to solve a meaningless problem for a non-existent fool who didn't have the sense to count the posts he was replacing to determine how many new ones he would need. I was called on to stand up in class and work it out in front of the rest of my bored class-mates. I stood up. I passed out. I fell flat on my face.

That should have been the end of me. It wasn't. If fate had intended for me to depart from this world at the age of twelve, then fate should have arranged for some other grandmother besides Heda. Heda had dumped her first and only husband, my grandfather, at the early age of eighteen. That gave her plenty of time to join the Singlist movement, get bored with it, change her mind, join and rise to treasurer of the Partners-for-Life movement, get expelled, and finally settle into a long series of relationships with a strange variety of men. At the time of my crisis, she had been the romantic interest of a heart specialist (not a coincidence), and long before they reached the hospital, their plan was in motion. A long-faced doctor was just explaining to my parents that there was no real hope when Heda and boyfriend Dr. Lufkin burst through the doors, each with a Phone-on-the-Go, and hollering instructions at everyone. My bruised and drugged body was subjected to further bruising and drugging, and before anyone had time to explain to my parents exactly what it was they were signing their consent to, I was making history.

Take out your history books. Turn to the page discussing Temporarily Modified Metabolism (TEMM), and read the name indexed against "First Person." If that name is "Anne W Goodwood", all is well and your book is blessed. If the name "Mallory Britton" occurs instead, stroke out that passage and enter the following:

Anne Winnifred Goodwood of Brantford, Ontario became the first person to successfully undergo metabolism modification to the extent of having her physical and mental processes TOTALLY SUSPENDED at the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children on March 12th, 2035.

You may, if you like, make mention of the fact that she was maintained in that strange, rubbery state in an ordinary hospital bed at only a slightly reduced temperature, and that the daughter of a well-known Hollywood actor LATER underwent the same treatment in the type of sealed, cryogenic chamber that soon came to be associated with TEMM in the public mind. Take care to note that Miss Britton was under for only six (well-publicized) weeks, whereas the FIRST time-traveler (Miss Goodwood), was under for an incredible ELEVEN MONTHS. A search in the newspapers and learned journals of the time will substantiate this claim and demonstrate that she received a REASONABLE amount of press coverage for the feat.

It had been touch and go. By the time Heda and Dr. Lufkin reached the hospital, my heart had been restarted three times and was showing no enthusiasm. There was a fast conference during which Dr. Lufkin presented his credentials and explained that his group had received permission to perform TEMM on a human. Lufkin was well known, but doctors are a conservative lot. They would have preferred to think it over for a month or two and check with their lawyers, but I wasn't co-operating, and they had Heda in the room with them.

Dr. Lufkin's team arrived and a decision had to be made. Right then. One of the reluctant physicians developed a spine, took charge and said, "Oh, what the hell." He made his mark. The others followed. Most of the prayers that occurred on my behalf over the next year were performed by the doctors at Sick Kids, who knew that my life wasn't the only thing that would come to a messy end if I couldn't be revived.

Try to imagine the feelings of my parents. I had been sick a long time, and the possibility of death had always been there. It would have been terrible, but they would have understood it. People have been dying ever since there were people, but no one had ever been jelled before. My heart didn't beat. No blood flowed through my veins. My brain didn't function. I wasn't alive, but they couldn't act as if I were dead. Mum said that the worst of it was that there was nothing she could do. There was no point in visiting the hospital. There could be no change in my condition because I didn't have one, and I was covered by a translucent plastic tent, so she couldn't even see me properly. Except for a weekly wipe-down with alcohol, there wasn't even any upkeep involved. The only hope lay in the weekly reports on the condition of my eight new hearts. That was nearly crushed when one of the two being accelerated to meet my awakening just died. There was no reason. One day it just stopped.

Then there was the press. The "jelly-baby" was a god-send to them. I can't say what the interest span of the average reader was back then, but the news people thought it could be stretched to eleven months. I was front page news on the Toronto papers twelve times, four times when I was jelled, twice during the crisis of conscience that overcame some of my doctors halfway through the ordeal, and six times when I was thawed. I made the cover of Time-Blaze and almost made figure of the year in The Canadian Practitioner (Lufkin beat me to it). A great deal of nonsense was written about me as well as some outright lies, but there was some well thought out introspection as well. As Peter Mascht put it in his column "...one small person has made every one of us question just what we mean by life."

My doctors were questioning it as well. Not Lufkin, he was incapable of doubt, but many of the others who had hastily signed that document gave in to the criticism of their colleagues and the media. Two months was all it took for the press to decide that I wasn't a brave soul struggling to hold on to life, but an innocent victim of arrogant, power-mad modern medicine. There were even demands that I be thawed and allowed to die naturally. I bear no ill-will toward those who felt from the beginning that the process was wrong and should never have been used. Their argument has merit even now, but for those doctors who signed the consent form and then caved in to public criticism, I feel no compassion. They should have known what would happen next. What happened? What else? The eleventh month arrived, my new heart was declared ready--it wasn't, but even Lufkin was beginning to sweat--and I was revived. I was under the knife before I had a chance to regain consciousness, and my new heart was dropped in. When I finally opened my eyes and asked for pizza, the press went crazy, leaving several spineless doctors looking extremely foolish.

Remember that I knew nothing about it. One moment I was standing in class trying to remember if fence post problems should require decimals, and the next I was lying in a hospital bed craving pepperoni. The details of my adventure were explained to me a bit at a time over the next few weeks, but it might as well have happened to someone else. I missed all the fun.

Eleven months in limbo hadn't left me in very good shape. My undersized and over-accelerated heart was pumping away as well as could be expected, but I wasn't just recovering from heart surgery. Chemical processes still occur, even in jelly, and my body was trying desperately to catch up with eleven months of unrepaired damage. Lufkin called me a giant bruise.

I languished three months in the hospital, most of it in bed. In mid-May, Dr. Lufkin paid a surprise visit and asked me if I'd like to do the rest of my recuperating in more pleasant surroundings. I wasn't enthusiastic. I'd been promised for three months that I'd be going home soon, and I knew that more pleasant surroundings wouldn't be home. I sulked for a day, but if I had to be bled, pricked and poisoned hourly, it might as well be somewhere pleasant. With the press looking on, my thin--for the only time in my life--body was bundled into an ambulance and trucked out of town.

Two hours after leaving my sterile, white room at Sick Kids hospital, I was sitting in my sterile, white room at Fore Estates Convalescent Home, New Building. I was no longer bedridden, but there was still annoyance with the speed of my recovery. I was even accused of not trying hard enough. My therapist promised me that if I got strong enough, and if the weather allowed, that she would send me down to Devon House for my weekly visit with Lufkin instead of having him come to see me. I didn't take it seriously. By that time I had given up believing anything I was told about getting out.

I was wrong. One warm day in late June a male nurse turned up with a wheelchair and a mound of blankets. I was wrapped, tucked, dropped onto wheels and rolled out. No walls, no windows, no ceiling! For the first time in fifteen months, my skin, mostly just the tip of my nose, was touched by sunlight. The thing I remember most clearly is being able to smell things again. Every breath brought in the wonderful smells of grass, flowers and even diesel exhausts, an extreme case of not realizing what you've lost until it is returned.

We bounced along the uneven sidewalk in the direction of the lake. When the road turned to the right, we followed it, dodging holes and tourists the entire way. I wasn't sure where we were going, only that there was an old clinic building nearby, something left to the local hospital by the original owners when rising land prices "forced" them to close the golf course in order to reap great profit from the building of condominiums. I didn't care how old or rundown it was, as long as it was away from my boring room. The nurse pushed me as far as the gates of a spectacular white mansion. We turned in.

Devon House had been built to impress, and it impressed me. I had been keeping my eye on it all the time we were passing the black iron fence that separated its universe from the ordinary universe occupied by people like Goodwoods, but then it had been someone else's building, grand, but nothing to do with me. When my nurse swung me left, and in through the gate, that changed. He stopped just inside the gate. Nothing was said, but he must have known I was staring, maybe I had said something snotty about going to the old building.

The path from the street to the front door was straight and wide and flat. Then came the steps, wide, white steps that had been built in a time when there were no people of importance in wheelchairs. The steps lifted you up above the surrounding blemish-free lawn to the base of the building itself, a Greek temple sort of place, blinding white in the summer sunlight and set off nicely with polished brass plaques and perfectly formed foliage. My chair moved smoothly forward and circumvented the steps by way of a discreetly hidden ramp. One half of the double door swung open and I was welcomed in. I had come home.

If someone had walked up to me then, handed me the key to the front door and told me that the house was mine, I would not have been surprised. I do not exaggerate. Every detail of the front hall, from the century-old wooden desk of the fifty-year-old receptionist, to the carpet on the broad stairs and the scroll-work on the ceiling, was correct and perfect and right. It could have been built for no other reason than to wait patiently two centuries for me to arrive, and I had arrived.

But how to stay?

While my nurse talked to the receptionist, I looked out through the opening in my blanket-cocoon and tried to work out a plan. First: did patients stay here? Yes, down the hall I could see a pair of scrawny legs poking out the bottom of a dressing gown. Definitely a patient. Second: How did they decide who stayed here and who went to the other place? Importance? If so, I had a scrapbook of newspaper articles to back by case. I was unaware of how quickly my time in the limelight would end.

One month later, Mallory Britton, daughter of the actor Ernest Britton, would collapse in the middle of her arithmetic lesson. Like me, she was as close to gone as you can get, and like me she was rescued by the Temporary Modified Metabolism procedure, but Mallory was already famous and she was an American. In those days, nothing important happened unless it happened to an American.

The clincher was the cryo-chamber. The Americans had developed a different system that allowed them to drop the body temperature to cryogenic temperatures, something Lufkin was unable to do with his already outdated process. Unable to claim the first TEMMy, the American press decided that real TEMM required cryogenic temperatures. Much was made of the fact that she could be kept in suspended animation for years, whereas my doctors had been pushing their luck keeping me under for more than a month with their interim approach. All true, up to a point. What actually happened was that she was revived in only six weeks when a compatible, generic replacement was found, but that made no difference. In the public mind, Mallory Britton, TEMM, and the science-fiction-like cryo-chamber became synonymous. Anne Goodwood and the Lufkin process were shoved out of the limelight and relegated to a footnote in the popular history of medicine. Not that it bothers me.

All of that was still in the future. On the morning I was introduced to Devon House, Mallory Britton was still just a rich brat with a tricky ticker. I was the front-page news. Perhaps that would carry some weight.

Money? Money never crossed my mind. At thirteen, I was still under the impression that there were things that were just supposed to happen. Government health care paid your expenses. Whether it was in a box like New Building or a country club like Devon House, what was the difference?

The receptionist said that Lufkin would see me in five minutes, why don't we go out back and wait there? Wrapping the blankets even more tightly around me, my nurse started me down the hallway. We passed straight through the middle of the building and out into a large, luxuriously furnished common room. The entire outside wall was devoted to glass, not large sheets, but individual windows, each made up of small, square panes. We pushed through a pair of automatic French doors and out onto a sprawling, shaded patio. I was rolled past the edge of the overhang and into the sunlight. Ahead was the greenest lawn I had ever seen. It started just beyond the edge of the patio and began its descent to the lake edge, slowly at first, the top was almost level, but turning into quite an decline until it leveled out again just short of the shoreline. At the edge of the lake was a square, solid concrete pad that projected out into the water, some kind of dock. It was easy to imagine a 1930's tycoon pulling up to the side of it in his launch to spend a sunny afternoon on the lawn with the young, rich and beautiful. Across the lake, barely visible despite the clearness of the day, I could just make out the Toronto skyline. My daydreaming ended with the crack of a cane hitting the wheel of my chair.

"A child!"

I was not a child. I was thirteen.

"A child! Oi!" he nudged the woman who was nodding in the chair beside him. "Oi, have a look at this."

The man with a cane was sitting in a nest of cushions on one of the wicker chairs that were scattered around the patio. He was dressed for the jungle with khaki balloon shorts, a matching shirt covered with huge pockets to cover a substantial pot belly, and a tattered straw hat. The woman next to him had a rug pulled completely around her. All that showed was a pink powdered face and sun-bleached hair. She stirred reluctantly.

"What?"

"Look at this!" He banged the arm of my wheelchair with the end of his cane. "A child. They're moving children in on us."

"Good grief!" She put on a pair of glasses and pulled back her blanket. "Hello, dear. How long have you been there?"

I explained that I was waiting to see Lufkin.

"You're not staying then," said the man with some relief. "I knew they didn't let children stay here."

"Don't be so rude Willie," said the woman. "Pay no attention to him dear. Where are you from?"

I told her I was staying in the new building. She was familiar with it.

"That horrible place! I have to go there for tests and I dread it, it always seems so dark and dingy. You'd think they could make a modern building with some cheeriness about it. This place is quite nice. If you've got to be ill, this is the place, isn't it Willie?"

Willie grunted.

"Never mind him dear. If you're going in to see Doctor Lufkin, why don't you ask him if you can move in here?"

The direct approach?

"Good God, Ethel. Don't encourage her. Next thing they'll be bringing in babies. They don't allow children in here. I know that for a fact."

"Never mind him, dear. You just ask Doctor Lufkin."

A female nurse came out and said she was going to take me in to see the doctor.

"Just a moment," said the woman called Ethel. "Would it possible for Anne to move to this building? She'd do much better than in that other place."

"Children are not permitted to stay here, Mrs. Prudhomme," said the new nurse as she turned my chair around. There was starch in her voice.

"Why the blazes not?" asked Willie.

"It might annoy some of the more elderly residents, Mr. Pendleton," said nurse Starch.

"Like me, you mean?" asked Willie Pendleton. "Well I'm not elderly, as you call it, and I'm not bothered by the presence of attractive, intelligent young ladies. Never have been. Here! Pay attention."

It was too late. We were already back inside.

"You can put any ideas about staying here out of your head," said the nurturing, health-care professional. "There's a waiting list to get in here, and we don't move people to the top of it just because they have their picture on the cover of Health-Week."

I think people are a lot more honest with children than they are with adults. If I had been thirty instead of thirteen it could have taken me weeks to find out she had more than a touch of the bitch. As it was, within five minutes I had developed what turned out to be accurate impressions about three people at Devon house, and it was two to one in favor of me staying there. Willie Pendleton's early comments were forgotten. I am forgiving toward people who call me intelligent and attractive.

My appointment with Lufkin was a strange one. I stayed in my chair, he remained seated behind his desk. All we did was talk. I knew he was working around to something, but I wasn't sure what. He asked me if I was happy. I said I was. He asked me if I looked forward to my parent's visits. I said I did. This went on for a good fifteen minutes. Finally, he paused and touched his fingers together a few times before continuing (pause for effect).

He had a problem, he said, a big one. I took my cue and asked what it could be. His problem, he said, was me. Great sacrifices had been made on my behalf. Careers had been risked, emotions had been strained beyond normal human endurance, and the hopes of thousands or even millions of critically and terminally ill people had been raised, possibly in vain. I knew what he was getting at, didn't I? I did not, and rather than stretch it out, I told him so.

"The problem, Anne, is that you are not getting better fast enough. I know that you have gone through a lot, the whole world knows what you have gone through, but all that is behind you. You are lagging. Your health is not improving as fast as it should, and I think that is because you are not trying. What do you think, Anne?"

How could such an intelligent man ask such a stupid question? How do you go about getting better? It happens or it doesn't happen, it's not something you do. I had to say something. I put considerable thought into my answer.

"I don't know."

"Well, something has to be done. I didn't want to take any drastic steps, but if I have to, I have to. What do you think I should do?"

I never did find out what the terrible thing was that he had in mind, because my brain had finally thawed. This was my opening! All I had to do was tell him straight out that if I moved into Devon house, I would be cured.

"I think I need more sunlight."

To this day I do not know how, "I want to stay here, "turned into a request for sunlight. Sometimes I have trouble expressing myself.

"Sunlight? I know the weather has been dreadful for the past month, but there isn't much I can do about the weather."

"No, that's not what I mean."

"You mean you want to get out more. That will be no problem if it stays warm. You're too thin to risk a chill."

"No, that's not it either, "deep breath, "I'd think I would get better faster if I stayed here."

It sounded juvenile even as I said it. I could see that Lufkin was completely taken by surprise. I had been half hoping that the real reason for bringing me to Devon House was to see if it would be the cure they wanted. The look on his face revealed that the idea had never occurred to him.

"Well, I don't know about that. What is the problem? Aren't they treating you well at the new building?"

"Yes, they treat me well..."

"Ah, good. No, I'm afraid staying here is out of the question. There is quite a waiting list, and this place is not a hospital, it's more of a nursing home. You have to pay extra to stay here, a lot extra. I'll have a word with the staff at the new building, and we'll see if a little extra sun and fresh air is the cure. Let's get together again in, oh, one week."

The Goodwoods were never a religious lot. I can't even remember mum and dad ever going to church, although we were nominally Anglicans. There was a brief, intense period of religious training when I was eleven, courtesy of Heda, but God never figured into my daily life. Until now.

It had seemed too much of a coincidence that my sudden desire to stay at Devon House had been followed immediately by a suggestion from one of the inmates that I do just that. Then Lufkin had practically invited me to ask him to do so. Divine intervention at its most obvious. Not anymore. I was not going to stay. Lufkin's tone had a note of finality in, and before I could think of anything to counter it, he was wheeling me toward the door, and back to my godless, colorless existence at the new building.

I had been aware of some commotion in the hall during all of this but I hadn't had time to pay attention. When Lufkin opened the door, the decibels rose, and there was Willie Pendleton, knobby knees and all, waving his cane at Starchy and getting redder in the face as he roared. Lufkin made the mistake of stepping in.

"Here, here, here now! What's all this?"

"Do you or do you not," demanded Willie Pendleton, spitting out the words, "require your staff to show proper respect to the people who pay their inflated salaries? Do You? Well if you do, where does she get off turning her back on me and walking away when I am trying to make a point? It is rude and disrespectful. In most of the places I have lived, and that is a good many places, a woman like that would be publicly flogged and made to show proper respect. Respect seems to be sadly lacking in this institution!"

Through all of this, Starchy stood patiently and quietly, towering over her accuser and showing no emotion whatever. As soon as there was a break (he had to breathe), she said a few words.

"Mr. Pendleton was suggesting that your patient would do better to stay here rather than go back where she belongs. I merely pointed out that it was impossible."

"Impossible? There is no such thing as impossible you silly, er, woman!" He had noticed me listening.

"Mr. Pendleton, I don't think that kind of talk is called for, "added Lufkin, "We expect..."

"Never mind what you expect. Look at that pathetic creature. "He waved his cane at me. "Look at her. She's nothing but skin and bone, and it's been how long since you put her through that hellish business? Something's wrong and it doesn't take a doctor to see that whatever you're doing isn't working. Smarten up man. You've been to that god-awful place she stays at. Built for convicts, not people. What maniac paints a hospital gray and green in this century? Cold as hell on the hottest day and gloomy enough to drive a soul to suicide. Bloody architects should be made to live in the buildings they design. Do you deny that it's far more pleasant here than where she is now? Do you?"

"It isn't the..."

"Damned right it isn't! Now, are you going to show some balls and do something about it, or are you going to hide behind this woman's skirt and say you can't because of some fool rule. You're in charge aren't you? Because if aren't, just tell me who I go to and I'll stir up some proper," he noticed me again, "trouble."

"There isn't any room."

"There's that room on the top floor you put old Buchanan in when that pipe burst in his room. That's not being used, and you sure aren't planning to do so at the rates you charge. Put a real paying customer in that shoe-box and you'll have a law suit on your hands, but she's small. She'll squeeze in nicely."

"That's a staff room, and the elevator doesn't go to the attic," said Lufkin. "She's not strong enough yet to manage the stairs."

"Well?" said Willie, looking directly at me. I didn't mess up this time.

"Yes I am."

Here was a predicament. Lufkin didn't want to give in to Pendleton on principle, on the other hand this was just the kind of attitude he wanted to see in me. The thought of all his colleges watching my progress may have crossed his mind. Whatever it was, something tipped the scales.

"The elevator only goes to the third floor. Do you really think you can manage the rest of the way?"

"Yes!" I said firmly and with no hint of hesitation. Good girl.

"Let's find out then," said Lufkin, and he helped me out of the chair.

The elevator arrived and all four of us got in. When we reached the third floor, Starchy lead the way down the hall and to a broad staircase. I hadn't been sure what to expect. The word "attic" had been used, and that could have meant anything. I needn't have worried. Like everything else in Devon House, the stairs to the attic were handsomely constructed. Halfway up, there was a small landing with a window. There, the staircase reversed direction, reaching the next level almost directly over us.

"Still want to try it?"

"Yes!"

I put one hand on the railing and started up. I could walk all right. Back at the new building I could walk everywhere. The only reason I had been put back in the wheelchair was because of the distance between the two buildings, so the thought of climbing a single floor didn't bother me. What I had overlooked was that at the new building I never had to use stairs. I knew I was in trouble before I reached the landing. I pushed on, trying not to show the fatigue, but it's hard to cover up heavy breathing, and I could feel the color draining from my face. When I reached the landing I stopped and turned toward them to buy some time.

"Half way," I chirped cheerfully.

Inside, I could feel my undersized heart pounding so loudly I was sure they would hear it and tell me to stop, but they remained silent. I started up the remaining stairs, climbing more slowly this time, one foot up first, and then the other foot joining it. It was easier and it gave me more time, but in addition to the light-headedness and pounding heart, I could feel my stomach joining in the rebellion. I began to worry about having a heart attack, throwing up, and fainting at the same time. Step, step, step. The muscles in my legs were burning, and I knew that I couldn't blame that on my new heart. I was simply in poor shape.

I reached the top.

"I made it. Do you want me to come down?" I hoped desperately that the answer would be no.

"Never mind," said Lufkin. "We may as well come up and show you your new room."

He and Starchy were there immediately. Willie took longer and made more noise about it than I had.

"You needn't worry about me sneaking up in the middle of the night to take advantage of you, "he wheezed at me when he reached the top.

"I can guarantee that, "said Starchy. "That's my room, right over there."

"Then you're safe, too," added Willie.

Starchy walked to the door opposite the top of the stairway and opened it for me. It was small. Good grief, it was small! The outside wall had an early encounter with the ceiling because of the slope of the roof. To my left, taking up the full length of the wall next to Starchy's room was a short but neat bed. To my right was an old wooden dressing table with a mirror, but the glory of the room was straight in front of us. There, in the middle of the sloping ceiling, was a dormer window looking directly out over the blue lake. It was perfect.

Lufkin said something about having to tell my parents, but I couldn't imagine any problems there. Starchy said she would arrange to have my things brought over unless I wanted to go back first. I didn't. I noticed then how well she had handled everything. She was always blunt (I' m being polite), and I never saw her smile, but then again, I never saw her lose her temper, either. When I hear the word "professional," I think of Starchy. She turned to me just before following the others downstairs.

"I'll have a chair put on the landing halfway up the stairs. You should rest a bit when you get there, rather than trying to do the whole thing at once. We won't bother mentioning it to Dr. Lufkin." And then she was gone too, and I was left alone in my new room.

I wanted to look out the window, but something warned me to drop the healthy act and to sit down on the bed for a minute. It gave me time to think, and my mind drifted back to the strange turn of events that had brought me here. Two hours ago I had been lying on my bed in my depressing little room in the new building. Now, here I was, in the most perfect room imaginable, in the most beautiful building I had ever seen, and the whole thing had been accomplished courtesy of three people, all of whom had been dead set against me being there. I was forced once again to consider the possibility of divine intervention, but even at thirteen I had to admit that in a universe governed by well-known laws, direct intervention by God seemed a bit ham-fisted. Fate perhaps? The almost imperceptible nudging of events toward a set goal? Well, hardly imperceptibly in this case. I had the distinct impression that there really was something or someone leaning on the great pinball table of life, and that I had just caught them red-handed. It was so blatant that there was an air of desperation about it.

My first serious reflections on the mystery of life were interrupted by a young nurse carrying a chair. "I've put one on the landing. We thought you should have one in here too, not that there's room. I'll leave it in front of the window, shall I? There's fresh bedding to come as soon as we find sheets the right size. Are you all right then? Have you eaten? Good. You look exhausted, dear. Why don't you lie down for an hour or so? I'll come and get you at five thirty to show you about and take you for dinner."

Bed sounded good, but when the nurse left, it was the window that won out. It was a small, multi-paned affair similar to what I had seen below. In my memory it is single-insulated, but the enviro-police would never have tolerated that. Directly below was the balcony I had been sitting under just an hour ago. In front of that, the immense lawn flowing downhill to the concrete pier and the lake. I remember it clearly, just as I remember the feeling that came over me then, that everything was all right, and that something that had been going wrong was now back on track.

Enough of Devon House. I promised that this would be a brief summary of my life.

I stayed at the convalescent home for three months, getting stronger and chubbier all the time, until Willie Pendleton died. He was very ill, and his death was no surprise, but I was young, and it affected me badly. I was sent home to recover. After that, my life worked its way back toward normal. I went back to school and studied mathematics again with no further difficulty except for being a year behind and having to sit with babies. Some time later I heard my father say to someone that I was quite myself again, and that it was as if nothing unusual had happened. How wrong he was.

I knew that something had changed. It was a feeling that had come over me at Devon House and it stays with me to this day. I knew that I had been chosen. I couldn't have explained it to you then, and I won't try do so now. It wasn't a religious thing. It was just that I knew that I had been singled out for some reason. I settled down to my ordinary day-to-day routine, secure in the knowledge that I was special and that something wonderful was going to happen to me. I waited patiently through public school and high school.

When the time came to go to the university (all special people go to university), I had to put some thought into what I was expected to become. It wasn't difficult, at first. Being special had to have something to do with being the first TEMM patient, so I set to work to study biology with medical school in mind. That lasted less than a year. University is very different from high school. More is expected of you and a great deal more is rammed down your throat in a shorter period of time. I choked on biology. It came as a shock, but I still had my wits about me. My calling wasn't to be a doctor? So be it. After my second year I switched to general science. There was a great more to TEMM than the medical side of it, or so I convinced myself.

My brief fascination with medicine had taught me a great truth about education in general. Suppose that you want to spend your life turning people to jelly and dipping them into liquid helium. You'd think that there would be courses directed toward such a high-profile profession. There were not. TEMM was not even mentioned in the text books, perhaps it was too Hollywood. While taking biology, I had found myself moving with a dull mass of would-be organic chemists, and it was chemistry that dominated every course and lecture. I hated chemistry. Things did not improve noticeably in general science. If all biology students looked like organic chemists to the faculty, then general science students must have looked like calculus freaks. I spent the next year learning a dozen different ways to integrate an equation, something I have never found any use for whatever. After my third year at the university, with my marks dropping rapidly and my blood pressure rising sharply at just the sight of an integral symbol, I switched emphasis again. I had once done some circuit wiring in high-school, and of the three of us working on the project, I had shown the greatest skill in soldering wires together. Engineering was surely my destiny, so I leaned toward electronics and computers as much as the general-science course outline would allow. It got me through. Electronics types couldn't care less about the chemical make-up of the ICs they used, and if they felt the urge to integrate something they just whacked a capacitor onto it.

I staggered off the convocation stage with my cap on crooked, my gown blowing in the wind and my hard-won degree clutched tightly in hand. I was educated, and while my marks indicated that I was not very well educated, I didn't care. Just surviving four years of university had to prove something. As I returned to my seat with the other ex-students, I realized that I could not bring to mind even one of the many great truths that I was supposed to have learned.

My odd assortment of biology, maths and engineering courses prepared me for no known profession, but there was no better route to a life working in TEMM. In the end, it was my history, not my education, that got me a job. Being the first TEMMy gave me an edge. I started work with one of the companies that supplied life-support(?) sub-systems to TEMM centers. Our pride and joy was a module that allowed the body temperature of a frozen TEMMy to be monitored at sixty different positions to an accuracy of .01 degrees, something for which there is absolutely no need. I drifted from company to company with the ebb and flow of the economy and the ability of the TEMM centers to buy new and increasingly expensive equipment.

Throughout all of this I remained patient. While at the university I was too busy to think about it, but afterwards, when I drove to and from my different jobs, the thought would cross my mind that nothing wonderful had happened to me yet. It didn't worry me at thirty. At thirty-six I considered worrying. Forty came and went, so did forty-one. Then one day I got a phone call.

Jupiter was calling again, and another plan was under way to explore the increasingly weird small-scale structures that had been puzzling scientists since the first unmanned probes had landed on Jupiter's moons. This time they were thinking big. That implied sending people as well as machines, a lot of people, and that meant big ships and an unreasonable quantity of supplies, unless the travelers were jelled going and coming. I arrived at York at the very beginning of the project. Excitement was high, budgets were bulging and nothing was impossible. My part was a small one at first, but that didn't matter. Something big was happening and I was part of it. We set to work to turn the complex, multi-million-dollar machines that had somehow become so necessary for TEMM into compact, simple, multi-billion-dollar devices. My job, besides soldering together wires when required, was to help develop a method to predict which of a hundred thousand possible chemical misadventures a given body would fall victim to.

You can't just freeze a person and let it go at that, not if the period of suspended animation is to be measured in years. In addition to the damage caused by background radiation, there are quantum effects that lead to the degeneration of the nervous system. It was supposed to be the limiting factor in increasing the duration of people-freezing beyond two or three years, and it was generally assumed to be too complex to solve, but the people at NASA were a conservative lot. If a space traveler were to be frozen for three or four years, then they wanted the process to be good for decades.

One day, entirely out of the blue, I saw a way to give them a century. Where the idea came from, I'm not sure. It seemed familiar, almost as if I'd seen it applied in some other field, but I was never able to pin down the source of the inspiration. It was a bit of biology, a bit of math and a bit of electronics. I astounded everyone, including myself, when I came up with it, but I was given the opportunity to try it, and it worked. I avoided the complexity in predicting the changes that would take place in a body over a long period of time by forcing the body into a known, easily measured, chemical state just before freezing. That made it possible to have the correct drugs ready once the subject was revived. The reason no one had thought of it before was that the necessary chemical state just happened to be a lethal one, but before you had a chance to die properly, you were frozen, and once you were thawed there was enough time to counteract the poisons.

"Predetermination," that was my big contribution. I dreamed up the method, I made it practical, I wrote the papers and gave the talks that brought the acclaim. I had never worked so hard in my life, but I had never been so satisfied. For five wonderful years, there was no need to wonder about the great thing that was supposed to happen to me. I was living it. Some similar kind of feeling must have been shared by the spacecraft designers who had been working just as hard to design better and faster spaceships. How unfortunate for us that they, too, succeeded.

One day, a delegation of the astronauts came for one of their frequent visits. They looked and they listened as we demonstrated the results of the latest round of improvements, but this time they were unusually quiet. They thanked us and they left. One week later we got the word. Time-of-flight had been reduced to a point where it was possible to consider sending everyone in up mode, and the astronauts had made it clear that up was how they preferred to travel. None of them fancied the temporary death that TEMM implied, and now that it was not strictly necessary, the idea was to be dropped.

We hadn't seen it coming. One man actually committed suicide. It wasn't just the loss of a job, or a project. This had been something special. We had been about to make history. My supervisor called me into his office just before the layoff notices were to be handed out. Much of what we had done could be used to make hospital TEMM equipment smaller and more automatic, and I was to be kept on to work on it. I thanked him and left his office to walk back to my work station, past the cubicles occupied by devastated and soon to be unemployed engineers, past the mock-ups and prototypes and past the posters showing our brave astronauts TEMMing their way to Jupiter. The shock took weeks to wear off. I don't think anything useful was accomplished over the next two months, the same period of time it had taken us to completely re-design and rebuild the MK III into the MK IV. I managed to do no more than tidy up the lab.

My own bouts of depression never reached the depths of that poor man who killed himself, but they were rough. The worst came one day when one of our people mentioned that after spending over a billion dollars, we had almost managed to make the equipment as simple as it had been when I had first been put under. That reminded me of Dr. Lufkin, and he reminded me of Devon House. I returned home that night to catch a glimpse in the mirror of a tired, over-weight woman who was now forty-seven, not thirteen, and whose life had just reached the end of a long, billion-dollar dead end. Nothing wonderful had happened or was going to happen. My private life was non-existent. The project had consumed most of our social lives. Heda and my father were both gone. My mother was in deteriorating health, and the only man in my life had just been laid off and was heading for California. It hadn't been serious, but it had been something.

I collapsed into my arm chair and scanned the book shelf for something to poke at. One of my favorite books was within reach, H. G. Wells' The Time Machine. It had become my favorite just after going to Devon House, in fact it was the copy from their library, not quite stolen, just never returned. Willie Pendleton had been the first to point out to me that I was the world's first time traveler. When they revived me, I was the same age as the day I had been jelled. All my life I have been eleven months younger, physically, than I should be for my age. I flipped through the slim volume and tried to remember the last time I had read it. Twenty years ago? Thirty? I turned to the best part, the one where the traveler pushes the machine ahead to see what the world will look like at the end. He stops in a world of perpetual evening, with the dying sun low on the horizon and the hint of eternal winter on the wind.

I wanted to be there. I knew that scientifically, Wells' version was all wrong, but one day there would be an end of some sort, and I was suddenly seized by the desire to know what it would be like. I wanted to travel to the future, again. It took only two cups of tea to work out how to do it. Not that I could reach the end of the world, but I had traveled into the future once before, and I knew what was involved.

There were a lot of silly people who asked to be TEMMed indefinitely for the same reason, but no professional center treated them seriously. TEMM was only used to prolong the life of patients who needed to wait for some medical process to be completed. The record was four years, not much of a time trip, and the cost of keeping someone under was prohibitive. Constant supervision of a lot of fancy equipment was involved, but that's where I had the advantage. I had just spent five years helping design equipment to automatically keep astronauts frozen for decades, and not only did I know where to get my hands on working equipment, I was the person responsible for clearing the now useless junk out of our lab. I did a quick mental audit to see if I had thrown out anything I shouldn't have. Not so far.

Putting the book back in the shelf, I went to the kitchen and broke open a bottle of sherry. I took the glass out onto the balcony and drank a toast to the world around me, the world I had just decided to leave. If that magic something that was supposed to happen to me wasn't going to happen on its own, it would have to be forced. I would travel to the future, certainly into the next century, maybe even well into it.