Riki woke up by the river and married Danny

Ricky’s awakening at the Riverside Sanctuary and marriage to Danny complete the long-delayed reunion at the heart of the novel: she has arranged not to be woken until he appears, recognizes him and Pete as soon as she opens her eyes, and marries him in Yuma before they set off together. The event transforms a reunion postponed across decades of cold sleep into an immediate, deliberately chosen future.

The condition for waking

Danny presents himself to the director of the Riverside Sanctuary at ten o’clock the morning after arriving in Riverside. He identifies himself as Daniel B. Davis and asks whether the committed client Frederica Heinicke is scheduled to be withdrawn that day. He is not asking to observe the technical process; he wants permission to be there at the last moment, when she is ready for the final restimulant and consciousness. His question makes the reunion feel precarious: he has reached the place where Ricky sleeps, but does not yet know whether he will be allowed to meet her as she wakes.

The director, Dr. Rumsey, first says that the instructions do not call for Ricky to be woken that day. Danny’s disappointment and hurt follow from the apparent mismatch between his arrival and the sanctuary’s schedule. Then Dr. Rumsey explains the decisive condition: Ricky’s exact wishes are that she not be woken at all until Danny shows up. Her awakening is therefore neither a routine withdrawal nor a coincidence. The delay has been made contingent on his presence, turning the moment of waking into the fulfillment of a personal instruction.

Reunion at the Sanctuary

Dr. Rumsey explains that Ricky is under posthypnotic instruction and prepares to bring her up. He suggests that Danny put Pete outside, but Danny refuses. When Dr. Rumsey begins the waking process, he tells Ricky to wake and says that she must wake now. Her eyelids flutter; she opens her eyes, looks about briefly, and then sees Danny and Pete. Her first words are their names: “Danny and Pete.”

The recognition is immediate, but the scene gives it a physical emblem as well. Ricky raises both arms, and Danny sees that she is wearing his Tech class ring on her left thumb. The ring makes their bond visible before the scene explains anything further: across the long separation, she has kept an object connected to him with her. Pete answers her awakening with an ecstatic welcome, jumping onto the bed and making repeated shoulder dives against her. The returning pair are not reunited in isolation; the cat who has accompanied Danny is part of the greeting she recognizes.

From reunion to marriage

Dr. Rumsey wants Ricky to remain overnight, but she refuses to stay. Danny brings a cab to the door, and they leave for Brawley. Her grandmother, who had lived there, died in 1980; Ricky’s social ties in the town have also faded through attrition, while books and other belongings remain in storage. Danny arranges for the stored books to be sent to Aladdin, in care of John Sutton. Ricky is dazzled by the changes to her former home town and keeps hold of Danny’s arm, but she does not succumb to the homesickness that the narrative identifies as a great hazard of the Sleep. Instead, she wants to leave Brawley quickly.

They take another cab to Yuma. At the county clerk’s office, Danny signs the register with his full name, Daniel Boone Davis, ensuring there can be no ambiguity about which D. B. Davis designed the work for which he is known. Within minutes he is holding Ricky’s hand and taking the marriage vows. The ceremony is brief and practical in its setting, yet it answers the immense interval behind their reunion: waking does not lead to a tentative return to separate lives but to marriage that same day. Pete serves as Danny’s best man, while the witnesses are people the couple gather at the courthouse.

A shared life after the Sleep

The couple leave Yuma at once for a guest ranch near Tucson. They take a cabin away from the main lodge and have an Eager Beaver to fetch and carry, allowing them to avoid having to see anyone. Their privacy is not absolute: Pete fights a major battle with the tom who had been boss of the ranch, so they have to keep Pete indoors or watch him. This comic complication marks the difference between the vast danger of prolonged separation and the small frictions of a life now being lived together.

Ricky takes to being married as if she had invented it; Danny’s simple measure of his own good fortune is that he has Ricky. The ending thus moves from the guarded threshold of the sanctuary to an intimate domestic arrangement, without treating the intervening decades as something that can be recovered. Her old home town has changed, her grandmother is gone, and her former social links have dwindled. But the reunion she stipulated has happened, and the marriage gives it a future. The episode closes the novel’s central separation by making waking, recognition, departure, and marriage successive steps in one continuous return.