CHILLER

by Gregory Benford

  “Congratulations. Well, then, perhaps you would like a checking account with us?”

  “Sure. But I need some cash right away.”

  “I’m sure we can arrange that, too.” She started taking out forms from her files.

  “Don’t have a steady address yet.”

  She frowned, then brightened. “You can use your employer’s address.”

  That was what he got for departing from his standard story. He held his face steady, still working on the worried look, and added a little nervous touch of guilt. “They don’t like us doing that.”

  “I quite understand. I’ll bet Security Pacific wouldn’t like it if I got all my bills here—there are so many.” Her merry little laugh had a mechanical edge to it, as if she had used it too much.

  “How about I just come back in, say in a couple days, and give you my home address, once I’ve got one?”

  “Well—”

  He could see the cogs going around: Customer’s left his card billing address, a P.O. box, no way to find him. Maybe something funny going on with the employer. Could be he didn’t have a job at all now.

  She said, “The assistant manager will probably…”

  Now was the time to show the plastic. An embarrassed bobbing of his head while he held out his plastic accordion card holder, letting them unfold: Optima, Neiman Marcus, American Express, Broadway, MasterCard, Sears, Fuji, Visa, Nordstrom.

  “Look, if these’d be any help…” He didn’t have a dime in any of them, of course.

  “Well, my, you do have a lot.”

  “Yeah, I travel plenty in my business.”

  She pushed back her chair, started to get up. “I’ll just ask—”

  “Do you know if there’s a CitiBank around here?”

  “Why, yes, there’s—”

  “If it’s going to be a hassle, I’ll just try them. I’ve got my main account with them.”

  She licked her lips and he watched her think. The assistant manager would see the customer walk out, figure maybe she had irked him. And how could a customer with that much plastic be a risk?

  She licked her lips again and looked him in the eye. She saw something there, something that George knew he could use when he had to, because the Lord had put it there. It was his, a certain way of giving a window into his soul, so that people saw his inner truth, so that they trusted him.

  She sat down, and he knew he was going to get the max on the card with no trouble. Ten minutes later he walked out with a thousand in his pocket.

  He went three blocks from Security Pacific before he found a men’s store that had light wool jackets in the window. He got two, one that fit right off the rack and another that could be tailored in a day. He got Oxford broadcloth shirts, gray slacks, charcoal socks with extra padding in the soles, two pair each of business shoes in black and brown, some Reeboks on sale, jeans, cotton T-shirts, Jockey shorts.

  The store manager called in on the AmEx card. George stood casually chatting with the sales clerk, not seeming to watch the manager at all. The clerk went on about the weather, which George in his light-headed mood found funny, since they didn’t have anything in California that counted for weather in his book. But he kept his face open and sincere while some talk went back and forth on the phone for long, stretching minutes. He got ready to walk out fast.

  Then the manager hung up and came back all smiles. George had paid off the AmEx three weeks before with a Walter Humphries check on Nippon, so his bill today came in under the five-thousand-dollar limit. Humphries was a paper identity that he used to funnel cash, using a mail service in Nebraska that emptied the post office box once a month. That conduit was dead now too, he figured.

  He walked down a sun-washed street, feeling good. A black-haired mutt lying under a weeping willow barked at him, then trotted over and allowed him to scratch behind its ears. Dogs had always liked George, a fact he had used several times. This one licked his hand and followed him until he had to kick it.

  Two blocks away he got shaving gear, a toilet kit, and a Halliburton suitcase set, the burnished-finish kind he liked because they carried computers well. First-class stuff. The help was short-handed in the shop that day and took his MasterCard without checking it at all.

  While he packed the clothes in the Halliburtons, he saw a service station with a Budget sign across the street. Pretty soon Bruce Prior had rented a Chevy sedan, black, on a transfer from his Fuji card. All his purchases went into the trunk.

  Within an hour more, Bruce Prior was eating corned beef hash with two poached eggs in a pseudo-fifties diner on Acacia. There were James Dean photographs blown up to make wallpaper in the men’s room. Next to his red vinyl-covered booth with chrome piping there was a poster for the big new teen hit, “Rock Around the Clock.” But the music was halfway decent, a lot of shoo-bop stuff, plenty better than rap-crap.

  As he shoveled in the good salty hash, he smoked with relish the first Camel from a carton he had bought in a ‘Bacco Barn. He put A.1. Sauce on the hash, and it got even better. The hash browns were greasy but he ate them anyway, lighting a second Camel and holding it between the fingers of his left hand while he forked in hash with his right. He liked easing the smoke out through his nostrils while he chewed. It licked the soft membranes there with a scorching tongue.

  When he signaled for a second plastic pitcher of coffee the waitress came over to tell him that this was a nonsmoking section. He stared at her without saying anything until she blinked and looked away. He took two more forkfuls of hash browns and put out the Camel in the yolk of the last poached egg. Without leaving any money he got up and walked out without a word. Nobody followed him.

  He was feeling good and knew that his fortune was no accident. He had planned for this, always had a backup line of cards and credit ready. The Feds could have cut it off if they’d had the right nose for pursuit. But they worked without the help of the Lord.

  George decided to devote the next day to God’s work, just to show he understood. There were tasks to do out here, many more than there had been in Tucson.

  Holy ways were openly laughed at in California. There were evil practices here, lustful ones, family-destroying laws, the cesspool of Hollywood, corrupt judges, unspeakable pornography, and violations of natural order.

  As he stood in the buttery sunshine and put the key into the brand-new night-black car that the Lord had given him today, George knew that this had all been ordained. The events of these days had moral heft, a solemn weight.

  The Feds outside his apartment. The truck that had taken him away from the Bank of America. The Security Pacific woman who had changed her mind.

  They had all been interventions. He saw that now.

  The waitress, too, had been an intervention by the Devil forces that also walked this earth. And he had vanquished her. He could not remember that moment in the alley, only that she had tempted him and his jimmy-john and he had taken care of that somehow.

  That, too, was part of his Calling.

  He had received the Call to come here before, from a great minister, yet he had ignored it. The Reverend Montana himself had summoned him on the telephone.

  George had a deafness, though, for yes, he, too, was a creature steeped in carnal sin, born to it, stupefied by the mesmerizing ornaments of this bestial world. In His silent, holy answer to George’s lack of heed, the Lord had placed His hand upon the world. He had shaped events and brought George here. In the confusion of these last few days he had known that it was his fate to go to the Reverend. A Call had to be answered.

  He got down on the broken asphalt right there in the parking lot of the diner, feeling it bite into his knees as the stones of antiquity had cut the flesh of martyrs, and thanked the Lord for taking a strong hand in his life.

  He apologized for his fear, for his jittery anxiety, for his base and defiled nature, which struggled to climb up from the slime of the body and which could only redeem itself with pristine deeds. All along he should have put his
trust in the infinite. His eyes squeezed tight and sudden tears of ripe joy oozed out onto his cheeks.

  Then he got into his new car and drove away happily, whistling “Abide in Me,” knowing with a granite inner strength that he had come at last to the place where he could fulfill his destiny and perform great works.

  3

  SUSAN

  The emergency room was busy. Two Chicanos were brought in with pelvic fractures from a motorcycle crash. Both were getting prepped to go into surgery. A fifty-eight-year-old man had walked slowly in, complaining of pains shooting down his left arm. A young black woman with corn-row hair had vague cramps in her abdomen and was coughing up blood.

  These occupied the interns at the University of California at Irvine Hospital, while the usual number of quick cases—bruises, fractures, sprains, contusions, foreign bodies inhaled or swallowed, dislocated shoulders, aches of back or head or stomach or ear—passed through like an unremarked, perpetual tide from the Sea of Statistics.

  Business was brisk in the acute psychiatric ward, too. On her way into her office Dr. Susan Hagerty passed through the deceptively calm atmosphere there. Out of professional curiosity and a certain nosiness she allowed herself as a minor vice, she talked to the interns and looked into the three interview rooms.

  An eighteen-year-old black girl stared intently at the glowing end of her cigarette, explaining in a dull, fast monotone how she had tried twice to kill her daughter, first by sleeping pills, then by suffocating her with a pillow. She did it to stop her child from crying. “I mean, I came in here to get some advice, you know? Some help. It’s not natural. Not natural, a kid keeps crying that way alla time.”

  Susan was too experienced to be profoundly shocked by this. She was bothered, though, by the policy of allowing patients to smoke in the interviewing offices.

  The next room held a man who had patiently tried to slash his wrists, using an ordinary paring knife, and seemed to wonder why it had not worked. Maybe there was something about how a knife functioned that he didn’t understand.

  In the end room a woman office worker was explaining why she could not walk. She kept floating up toward the ceiling, so her feet could not reach the floor to get a good grip on the Formica tiles. “That’s why I can’t make my feet work. It’s real simple, you guys prob’ly see it every day. Do you think I can get workmen’s comp?”

  Outside there were patients already admitted and waiting to be seen. One older woman with frosted hair was crying softly into a pillow she held tightly. A teenage boy had a pillow also, but he was punching it hard, rhythmically, while his eyes stared out the window, expressionless but intent. Sitting farther away from them was a man in his twenties who kept himself aloof, ramrod straight and smiling at everyone, turned out in a torn, stained white tuxedo. He looked as though he was aching to tell the story, but he would have to be coaxed some first.

  Susan liked these glancing brushes with the underside of the human psyche. She was well aware that she had burrowed into her work since her husband’s death, and she missed a certain level of human contact. She kept up her connections—friends, membership on the board of the Chamber Music Society, old med school buddies—but the cartilage of sociability was not quite enough. At forty-four she felt awkward on dates, and she truly liked her own company.

  Susan stood watching the man in the tuxedo, ruminating on this, and then headed down the hall. The usual chaos, all under control. Yet it helped somehow to see the range of human weirdness, the splintered pathways of pathology. Still, she could not suppress a sudden shiver. The abyss of the human mind was a murky, brooding riddle. In softly lit therapy rooms like this she sensed huge, shadowy monstrosities lurking unseen, swollen ugliness that rode behind the reeling eyeballs and lurched into the light only in twitches and oddities. Until, in some cases, the grotesque pressures ruptured forth, bile-sour and reeking, spewing into a surprised world.

  She shook herself free of such thoughts, donned again her air of crisp efficiency. Get real, girl.

  Emergency room staff were always fidgety about backup. A well-run hospital like UCI could handle a fresh ER patient every ten minutes. The problem was that they never entered at even intervals. Bleeding bodies and groaning, disoriented cases came at you in bunches, spun off Orange County’s eternal armature. About one in four of those who turned up in the ER needed admission to the hospital. The rest went away with their cuts patched, bones splinted, traumas bandaged. Every time the patients needing admission bunched up, the senior physician immediately called in the ER backup.

  Susan Hagerty was on call today. She had come into her office at UCI Gen in midmorning, poked a nose into the ER mostly to get a cup of the rich, rocket-fuel Colombian coffee they ran on there, and had hardly hung up her coat and started reading the night reports on her patients before her portable phone rang. It popped and went into annunciator mode so that she could not ignore it.

  A disaster call always pumped up her adrenals. The programmed bleat for help circulated down from the chiefs of departments by an automatic phone tree—one of the few cases, in Susan’s opinion, where computerization truly freed hands to do work.

  Trauma center spat out a short report and ETA.

  There had been a multiple car crash accordion-style on Interstate 5 in Irvine, near the border with El Toro. Trucks overturned. Traffic backed up for miles already. Helicopters aloft from police, CalTrans, rescue. This was big. CalTrans had already elected to send heavy lift choppers to pull cars out of the lanes as soon as the rescue teams could shuck the patients free.

  No point in choppers from UCI; the accident was close. Ambulances would be here within three minutes, coming toward the hospital from the Sand Canyon offramp.

  So it was back to the ER, on the double. As she walked rapidly through the bleached light of the corridor, interns, residents, and other specialists such as Susan began converging on the ER. Some wore wrinkled scrub suits, stained from tasks they had finished off in a hurry. Others were like Susan, in long white coats still starched stiff.

  Nurses and staff were hustling ordinary patients out of the way, clearing the corridors and filling carts with fresh supplies. Her portable phone rasped again. There was a conference on the UCI campus that had called away most of the senior people. Bad timing. The chief of operations had put in a quick call to campus. Susan could imagine how it had gone. The secretary he had reached was unsure whether she should interrupt the seminar, until the chief barked into the telephone. UCI was nearby in miles, but not in mindset. It would probably be at least fifteen minutes before help arrived. Until then there was no more backup.

  Distant sirens sounded like odd, strident bird calls. As Susan entered the ER she passed by the small black detector that alerted Trauma Central that she was on board. She picked up a headset and slipped it on, her portable phone going dead simultaneously, to avoid interference. She got an update on the spectrum of cases speeding toward them and frowned. Lots of damage. Five deaths already.

  Trauma Central asked for help getting teams with the right skill balance for each case. Susan assigned at least one resident to each of the injured—wondering how long they could afford that luxury, as more cases came in—and then took a particularly bad case herself.

  She studied the prelim, a computerized list on the ER data screen that dominated one wall. Her case was a woman, neck broken, multiple lesser injuries. And a police warning note strobed in red beside it.

  The first bodies from the smashup arrived. Susan caught up to her self-assigned team at the entry ramp and helped the ambulance crew wheel her case in. The woman on the gurney seemed sturdy, her face tanned, probably had looked the picture of health only minutes ago. Now she was slack-jawed and pale beneath her layers of makeup.

  Neck at an odd angle. Pupils dilated. She was already intubated, and a nurse was bagging her—driving air in and out of the lungs by pulsing a plastic bag.

  Into the ER, working on her as they went.

  “What’s the police alert on
this patient for?” she asked an ambulance attendant.

  “She was in a dumpster truck that overturned in the accident.”

  “Driving a truck? What’s—”

  “No, she was in the garbage. Cops figure somebody chucked her, thinking she was dead. Truck empties the dumpster, doesn’t notice her.”

  She thought of the acute psychiatric ward. So here it was—grotesque pressures finally spewing, foul and reeking, into a surprised world. A body—a person—thrown away, then spilled onto a freeway with the rest of the trash.

  Then she swallowed her revulsion and said, “Ah. Then this neck injury could be hours old.”

  “I guess. She got awful banged up on the roadway, too.”

  That was clear. The rescue team had attached a physiological monitor to her, a book-size black hard-plastic slab with EEG and EKG leads. They had put into her an arterial stick carrying microelectrodes. These sampled blood chemistry, pressure, and flow. Susan punched its SPEAK button, and the monitor squirted its data to Trauma Central. Within two seconds Trauma Cen stretched the digital sandwich and translated the facts into a calm, flat voice speaking through her headset.

  “Nonspecific slowing of EEG, consistent with concussion and metabolic injury. No sign of focal ischemia to brain.”

  Probable broken neck, Susan thought as they moved her to their work station, but no sign of cerebral bleeding.

  Deep cuts in legs and arms. Angry red abrasions. The ambulance crew had done a good job with those; she checked the fresh white bandages quickly. Then, with the suddenness that to Susan was always like stepping off a step into free-fall nothingness, the intricate diagnostics dissolved before the stick alarm: the woman’s heart had stopped.

  A red light flashed on the jet-black telltale monitor. The Expert Systems Diagnostics Logic Package began muttering about cardiac arrest in her headset. The computer-generated voice was infuriatingly calm, she thought, cool and serene and remorselessly logical.

  “Damn,” Susan said. “Patient’s gone into V-fib.”