Mutual Assurance Company

Mutual Assurance Company is the insurer Dan Davis turns to when he considers the Long Sleep, a service that promises both survival through suspended animation and financial management during the years a client is unconscious. The company makes a future-facing promise tangible in advertisements and paperwork, but Dan never completes his contract with it. When he wakes in 2000, Mutual has survived the Great Panic; its survival cannot help him, because he had no executed agreement with the company.

Advertisement and Promise

The company first appears not as an office or a representative but as a changing sign facing the window of a bar. Its message cycles from “WORK WHILE YOU SLEEP” to “AND DREAM YOUR TROUBLES AWAY,” before displaying the company’s name in larger letters. Dan reads the sequence several times without connecting it to his own circumstances. He knows little about suspended animation, and the insurance advertisements that arrive in his morning mail usually seem no more relevant to him than lipstick advertisements.

The sign’s promise is thus present before Dan recognizes it as a possible plan. “Work while you sleep” condenses the Long Sleep’s appeal into an advertisement: absence from ordinary life is framed not as a loss of control, but as a period in which care and financial arrangements can continue. That promise later becomes concrete when Dan visits Mutual and asks for the Long Sleep. The company’s confident language and elaborate arrangements stand in contrast to the uncertainty that will surround his future.

The Long Sleep Proposal

At Mutual’s office, Dan tells a representative that he wants the Long Sleep. The response is immediate respect. The representative explains that the service gives the insurer access to a client’s assets, unlike a comparatively ordinary camera floater, and describes Dan’s decision as wise. He also says that he himself would take the Long Sleep if not for family responsibilities. Mutual presents the arrangement as a serious financial decision as well as a medical procedure.

Dan’s proposal requires decisions on four points: how to pay for his care during hibernation, how long he will sleep, how his money should be invested while he is in the freezer, and what should happen if he never wakes. He settles on the year 2000, thirty years away. The date is a compromise between wanting enough distance for Belle to grow older and fearing that a longer interval would leave him completely out of touch with a changed world. The contract would therefore bind together biological preservation, investment, and the disposition of his assets.

Evidence and Limits of the Service

When questions arise about whether Mutual can sleep with a cat, one of its representatives consults a doctor and reports that the first successful experiments were made on cats. He cites a cat at the Naval Research Laboratory in Annapolis that has remained alive in hypothermia for more than twenty years. Though the laboratory’s surface buildings were destroyed when Washington was taken, the deep vaults survived; automatic machinery cared for the animal unattended for more than two years, and it remained unchanged and unaged. The example is offered as evidence that the procedure can preserve Dan as well as the cat.

The account places a limit around that reassurance: the evidence supports the technique’s capacity to preserve a body, not the successful completion of Dan’s particular financial and legal arrangements. Mutual’s representative moves from the cat’s survival to a promise that Dan, too, can live for whatever period he entrusts to the company. The technical precedent makes the offer persuasive, while Dan’s questions about payment, investment, duration, and death show how much more than the physical procedure the contract must settle.

The Uncompleted Contract

Dan never executes his contract with Mutual. When he later asks how the company fared, he is told that Mutual took a severe loss during the Great Panic but weathered it. Its continued existence offers no remedy: Dan recognizes that he cannot look to Mutual because he never signed the agreement. Nor can he sue Master Insurance, which is bankrupt; pursuing Belle and Miles would also be futile, since he has no proof against them.

The company’s survival sharpens rather than resolves the irony of its earlier promise. Mutual is still there in the future, but institutional continuity is not the same as protection for a client who never completed the necessary transaction. Its advertisements had made sleep look like a way to leave trouble behind while assets continued to work. Dan’s later predicament exposes the condition behind that promise: financial security depends on contracts and evidence, not simply on the possibility of surviving the interval.

Gifts, Shares, and the Company's Context

Mutual’s role belongs to a larger struggle over what Dan’s property transfers mean. He had assigned stock to Belle as a betrothal present while retaining the vote and later insists that he had not intended to give up control of the company. Belle rejects his understanding of their engagement, and a lawyer argues that, if the shares were given in expectation of marriage and she accepted them on that understanding, McNulty v. Rhodes might allow Dan to recover them. Dan does not want to marry her, making the proposed legal remedy an unattractive consequence of the original gift’s disputed terms.

Later, preparing for another long absence, Dan holds up the certificate for all his Hired Girl, Inc. stock and tells Ricky he is giving it to her. He tears up a separate assignment because it could be destroyed and considers using the standard assignment printed on the back of the certificate, with the Bank of America holding it in trust. These transfers distinguish the uncertainty of his earlier dealings from the more deliberate arrangement he now seeks. Mutual’s planned management of assets during sleep belongs to the same world of promises, documents, and contingent futures, but the company cannot repair arrangements that were never formally secured.