rocket ship, big and powerful enough to take his body into orbit, where it would circle Earth, preserved by the absolute zero of space, until the end of time. After a while, it all came about as he planned. He died. His executor had his unembalmed corpse loaded into the rocket, they lit the fuse, and zap , there went all that was mortal of Professor Jameson right into orbit.
But there was more. The Earth rolled along. Time passed. The human race became extinct, the sun itself grew cold—and yet Jameson was still there in the deepfreeze. And then, in the fullness of time, strangers came poking around. They were machine-men called Zoromes. They had once had fleshly bodies, more or less like you and me (except that they had tentacles and a few other peculiarities of anatomy), and when they discovered the Jameson satellite with its cargo of still-fresh meat, it was no trouble for them to do with the human corpse what they had done with their own bodies long and long ago: They built him a machine body, took out his brain, thawed it, and stuck it into the machine. And so thereafter, for endless adventures, Professor Jameson lived once again as the Zorome called 21MM392.
The Zorome stories were among the most popular series of the 1930s, and not just with me. There was another reader, a youngster named Bob Ettinger, who liked them as much as I did. A few decades later, when Ettinger was grown up and a scientist on the faculty of a Midwest university, he remembered old Professor Jameson's deepfreeze and wondered just how much science was in that science fiction. So he dug into the biochemistry and the physics, checked out what was known about the effects of liquid gas temperatures on animal tissue, even costed the current quotations for liquid helium and triply insulated containers big enough to hold you and me . . . and evolved the proposal described in his book, The Prospects of Immortality , for freezing everyone who dies until such time as medical science figures out how to thaw him out and repair him. Right now there are a couple of dozen corpsicles in the United States (Walt Disney is supposed to be one of them) waiting for that great thawing-out day. It is not yet clear whether they will make it or not; as Bob Ettinger says, they're halfway there; they've frozen quite a few but haven't thawed any out yet. * But if they do make it, they will owe quite a bit to Neil R. Jones and 21MM392.
* Ettinger is an admirably levelheaded scientist, with an engaging sense of humor. When I asked him once how come there were so few frozen prospects, he shrugged and said, "Many are cold, but few are frozen."
In my personal scale of priorities, the fact that Sloane gave the world the freezing program is somewhat overshadowed by the fact that he gave me my first paid publication ever. It wasn't a story, it was a poem (called "Elegy to a Dead Planet: Luna," and if you feel for any reason that you must read it—I don't know why that would be so—you can find it in a book called The Early Pohl ). People ask me from time to time when I made my first sale. For me, that's hard to answer. I wrote the poem in 1935, Sloane accepted it in 1936. It was published in 1937. And I was paid for it in 1938.
Funny thing. I never had another line in Amazing , from that day to this. Sloane actually accepted another poem, and I had bright hopes of laying stories on him as well, but before anything could be published, much less paid for, Amazing too was sold to the knackers, and Sloane disappeared from the science-fiction scene. The new owners made it sell better than it ever had, but by publishing fairly simple-minded stories—or so I judged them; the objective facts are that I didn't care much for what they published, and they didn't care much for what I wrote, and after a while I stopped even trying them. By then I had found more hospitable markets, anyway. But there's a certain nostalgia. You never forget your first sale.
But I am ahead of
But there was more. The Earth rolled along. Time passed. The human race became extinct, the sun itself grew cold—and yet Jameson was still there in the deepfreeze. And then, in the fullness of time, strangers came poking around. They were machine-men called Zoromes. They had once had fleshly bodies, more or less like you and me (except that they had tentacles and a few other peculiarities of anatomy), and when they discovered the Jameson satellite with its cargo of still-fresh meat, it was no trouble for them to do with the human corpse what they had done with their own bodies long and long ago: They built him a machine body, took out his brain, thawed it, and stuck it into the machine. And so thereafter, for endless adventures, Professor Jameson lived once again as the Zorome called 21MM392.
The Zorome stories were among the most popular series of the 1930s, and not just with me. There was another reader, a youngster named Bob Ettinger, who liked them as much as I did. A few decades later, when Ettinger was grown up and a scientist on the faculty of a Midwest university, he remembered old Professor Jameson's deepfreeze and wondered just how much science was in that science fiction. So he dug into the biochemistry and the physics, checked out what was known about the effects of liquid gas temperatures on animal tissue, even costed the current quotations for liquid helium and triply insulated containers big enough to hold you and me . . . and evolved the proposal described in his book, The Prospects of Immortality , for freezing everyone who dies until such time as medical science figures out how to thaw him out and repair him. Right now there are a couple of dozen corpsicles in the United States (Walt Disney is supposed to be one of them) waiting for that great thawing-out day. It is not yet clear whether they will make it or not; as Bob Ettinger says, they're halfway there; they've frozen quite a few but haven't thawed any out yet. * But if they do make it, they will owe quite a bit to Neil R. Jones and 21MM392.
* Ettinger is an admirably levelheaded scientist, with an engaging sense of humor. When I asked him once how come there were so few frozen prospects, he shrugged and said, "Many are cold, but few are frozen."
In my personal scale of priorities, the fact that Sloane gave the world the freezing program is somewhat overshadowed by the fact that he gave me my first paid publication ever. It wasn't a story, it was a poem (called "Elegy to a Dead Planet: Luna," and if you feel for any reason that you must read it—I don't know why that would be so—you can find it in a book called The Early Pohl ). People ask me from time to time when I made my first sale. For me, that's hard to answer. I wrote the poem in 1935, Sloane accepted it in 1936. It was published in 1937. And I was paid for it in 1938.
Funny thing. I never had another line in Amazing , from that day to this. Sloane actually accepted another poem, and I had bright hopes of laying stories on him as well, but before anything could be published, much less paid for, Amazing too was sold to the knackers, and Sloane disappeared from the science-fiction scene. The new owners made it sell better than it ever had, but by publishing fairly simple-minded stories—or so I judged them; the objective facts are that I didn't care much for what they published, and they didn't care much for what I wrote, and after a while I stopped even trying them. By then I had found more hospitable markets, anyway. But there's a certain nostalgia. You never forget your first sale.
But I am ahead of
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