（外文电子版资料）Spider Robinson - Too Soon We Grow Old.pdf

TOO SOON WE GROW OLD The first awakening was awful, and she enjoyed it. She was naked and terribly cold. She was in a plastic coffin from whose walls grew wrinkled plastic arms with gnarled plastic hands that did things to her. Most of the things hurt dreadfully—but they were all physical hurts. Her soul was conscious only of an almost terrifying sense of relief. Until you have had your neck and shoulders rubbed out for the first time, you can have no conception of how tightly bunched they were. Tension can only be fully appreciated in its release. To her mind came a vivid association from long decades past: her first orgasm. A shudder passed over her body. A voice spoke, in a language unknown to her. Even allowing for the sound-deadening coffin walls, it sounded distant. Eyes appeared over hers, through a transparent panel she had failed to see since it had showed only a ceiling the same color as the coffins interior. She refocused. The face was masked and capped in white, the eyes pouched in wrinkles. He said something incomprehensible, apparently in reply to the first voice. Hi, Doc, she shouted, finding her voice oddly squeaky in the high-helium atmosphere of the cryogenic capsule. I made it! She found that she was grinning. He started, and moved from view. One of the plastic hands did something to her left bicep, and she felt her hurts slipping away—but not her joy. I knew I could beat it, she thought just before consciousness faded, and then she dreamed of the day her victory had begun. She was not at all sure just why she had consented to the interview. She had rejected them for over twenty years, on an impulse so consistent that it had never seemed to call for examination. To understand why she had granted this on