Free Beyond This Horizon by Robert A. Heinlein

honored.”
    Several latecomers were waiting in line. Hazel could see that their hostess was becoming impatient. They moved on. “Enjoy yourselves, my dears,” she invited them. “There are, well, things—” She waved vaguely.
    There were indeed “things.” Two theaters were available, one of which was giving a continuous performance of all the latest and smartest stereo-reels, the other provided the current spot news for anyone who could not relax without knowing what was going on out of his sight. There were gaming rooms, of course, and dozens of little snuggeries where small groups, or couples could enjoy each other’s company tête-à-tête . A currently popular deceiver circulated through the crowd, displaying his jests and deceptions and sophisticated legerdemain to any who cared to watch.
    Food and drink in lavish variety, quality, and quantity were available everywhere.
    The sweeping tesselated ballroom floor was lightly filled. Pattern dancing would come later. The huge room faced, with no wall intervening, into one of the covered gardens, unlighted save for lights below the surface of numerous rocky little pools. The other side of the ballroom was limited by the transparent wall of the swimming bath, the surface of which was on the floor above. In addition to ornate decoration and moving colored lights on the water side of the crystal wall, the swimmers themselves, by virtue of the inescapable gracefulness of underwater movement, gave life and harmony to that side of the room.
    Clifford and Hazel seated themselves at that wall and leaned against the glass. “Shall we dance?” he asked.
    “No, not just yet.” A girl, swimming on the other side of the wall, glided down toward them and blew bubbles against the glass. Hazel followed the girl’s nose with her forefinger, tracing against the glass. The swimmer grinned, she smiled back. “I think I’d like a dip, if you don’t mind.”
    “Not at all.”
    “Join me?”
    “No, thanks.”
    After she had gone he wandered around aimlessly for a few minutes. The recreations at hand left him cold; he was searching half-heartedly for a niche in which he could be alone to nurse his own melancholy and, perhaps, a drink as well. But couples—not melancholy!—had had the same idea; the smaller hide-aways were populated. He gave up and entered a medium-sized lounge, already occupied by a stag group of half a dozen or so. They were engaged in the ancient sport of liquidating world problems in liquid.
    He hesitated at the door, elevated his brows in query, received casual gracious consent from one who caught his eye, came on in and found a seat. The hot-air session went on.
    “Suppose they do release the field?” one of the men present was saying. “What will it amount to? What will it contain? Some artifacts possibly, perhaps some records of the period in which it was set up. But nothing more than that. The notion that life could be preserved in it, unchanged, in absolute stasis, for several centuries is preposterous.”
    “How do you know? It’s certain that they thought they had found a way of suspending, uh, shall we say freezing entropy. The instructions with the field are perfectly plain.”
    Monroe-Alpha began to understand what they were talking about. It was the so-called Adirondack stasis field. It had been a three-day wonder when it was discovered, a generation earlier, in a remote part of the mountain from which it got its name. Not that the field itself was spectacular—it was simply an impenetrable area of total reflection, a cubical mirror. Perhaps not impenetrable, for no real effort had been made to penetrate it—because of the plaque of instructions found with it.
    The plaque stated quite simply that the field contained living specimens of the year 1926 (old style, of course) which could be released by the means given below—but there was nothing below.
    Since the field had not been passed down in the custody of recognized institutions there