Danny and Pete entered the cold sleep again

Danny Davis and Pete’s second Long Sleep carries them toward 2001 after Danny’s return to 1970, turning cold sleep from a forced loss of agency into a journey he chooses and carefully schedules. The departure is urgent, but the arrangements reveal how much that choice depends on contracts, court procedure, and money—and how little those systems can guarantee across time.

Legal and Financial Conditions

Cold sleep leaves its client alive but helpless and legally in chancery, so Danny’s original arrangements required court consent as well as a physical examination. The procedure was not merely a medical transaction: it placed a person unable to act for himself within a structure of custody and legal oversight. That vulnerability helps explain why the Sanctuary’s contract separated its responsibilities from those of the company managing the client’s estate.

The Sanctuary’s agreement with Master Insurance Company of California covered hypothermia, custody, and revivification. Its fee was paid in advance into escrow under the supervision of the superior-court division handling chancery matters, then released to the Sanctuary quarterly as earned. The arrangement was presented as protection for a client during helplessness, but it could secure only the services funded by the contract; it could not preserve Danny’s wider property interests indefinitely.

That distinction becomes concrete when Danny learns that he has no assets. He remembers having had a car, closing his checking account in Mojave, and possessing little beyond clothes, books, and a slide rule; those things are gone, and he tells Mr. Doughty he does not even have a bus transfer. The stocks he expects to own no longer belong to him, because Master Insurance has gone broke. Its failure followed the collapse of the Mannix Group and, Doughty explains, resulted from systematic looting that left the insurer an empty shell before the perpetrators could be brought back from beyond extradition. Danny’s body has endured; his financial identity has not.

The Changed Plan

Danny’s second departure follows an abrupt change of arrangements. After saying goodbye to Ricky, he reaches the village and finds a helicopter bus due to leave for the city in twenty-five minutes. He sells his car at a used-car lot for half its value in exchange for immediate cash, a sacrifice dictated by the need to act that day rather than wait for a better price. He has just enough time to smuggle Pete aboard—the bus operators are fussy about airsick cats—and they reach Powell’s office shortly after eleven.

Powell is angry that Danny has canceled his arrangements for Mutual to handle his estate and has lost his papers. He objects that he cannot ask the same judge to approve Danny’s committal twice in twenty-four hours. Danny does not allow the procedural rebuke to delay him: he puts cash on the table and makes clear that he will go to Central Valley if Powell will not provide what he wants. The encounter shifts the balance between client and administrator. Danny may have lost his stocks, but he still has money in hand and a destination he is determined to reach.

Fixing the Awakening Date

Powell’s next objection concerns both the duration and the uncertainty of the new contract. He grumbles about adding six months to the cold-sleep period and resists guaranteeing a precise awakening date, since the ordinary contracts allow a one-month margin on either side for administrative hazards. Danny insists that this one must specify 27 April 2001. He is indifferent to whether the contract names Mutual or Central Valley; what matters is that the company sell him the exact arrangement he is buying. Powell changes the document, and both men initial it.

The date makes the second Long Sleep more than a decision to disappear into the future. It is a timed passage toward a specific reunion horizon, chosen by Danny rather than left to a provider’s standard allowance. The precision contrasts with the failures surrounding his earlier life: the estate arrangements that did not preserve his holdings and the lost papers that now complicate his committal. A date can be written into a contract; whether the larger world will still honor what the contract promises remains a different question.

Departure with Pete

At noon, Danny returns for a final examination. The medical examiner asks whether he stayed sober and, after examining him, remarks that he is in much better shape than the previous day. Danny answers that the doctor does not know half of it. The brief exchange registers the physical contrast between the two examinations without turning it into a guarantee about what awaits him during another long sleep.

Before the procedure, Danny holds Pete and soothes him while the cat receives his first sedative. Danny then lies back and lets the staff work on him. He could have waited another day or longer, but he is frantically eager to get back to 2001. At about four in the afternoon, with Pete’s flat head resting on his chest, he goes happily to sleep again.

This departure completes a pointed reversal. The first cold sleep was something done to Danny while he was helpless; this time he chooses the destination, presses for the date, and brings Pete with him. Yet choice does not remove dependence: Danny must negotiate with Powell, submit to medical examination, and trust an institution to preserve and revive them. The sequence ends not with the future reached but with the two companions asleep in transit, their planned reunion still ahead and the exact date serving as the promise on which the journey rests.