CHILLER

by Gregory Benford

  “I thought the rich wore designer sweat suits.”

  “Never. Psychologists and professional vegetarians, yes.”

  “You think you can dope out who people are by what they wear?”

  The obvious truth of this was a central axiom of her life, of course, but she could see that admitting it would be a tactical error. The nap of fabrics, the heft of shoulder pads, choice of hemline, a subtle gathering at a bodice—all these carried such complex import, freighting every gesture with added meanings, that she was sometimes surprised that people could talk and look at each other at the same time. But she confined herself to saying, “I can read the obvious.”

  “Okay.” He leaned against the wall, arms crossed in a standard judgmental-protective signal. “Read me.”

  “Ummm.” Again she let her eyes run over his face, clothes, posture. “I’d say you were reasonably well educated, probably college degree, work with your hands a lot, have a sense for detail, thirty years old, unmarried but fool around.”

  He blinked. Bull’s-eye! she thought. “What’s that mean, fool around?”

  “It means you’re not dead.” She gestured at the pictures on the wall. “Unlike your clients.”

  “Patients. Suspension patients.” He corrected her automatically, still thinking over her assessment. “You know, you weren’t far wrong.”

  About fooling around? she thought. Let’s hope so, unladylike though that might be. Actually, she could deduce much more about women from their clothes. Men’s wear was so predictable, off-the-shelf, boring. Men looked at cars as glamorous, and clothes as something that got them around. Women looked at cars as something that got them around—preferably to clothes, which were glamorous. Kathryn could glance at a woman wearing a dress on the street and instantly make a good guess at where she’d bought it, and why, what her house looked like, income level, what books she read (if any), and even a fair stab at how often she had sex.

  Kathryn said in a lousy gypsy accent, “I have the all-seeing eye.”

  “Ummm. Couldn’t be that you knew most of it already?” he asked slyly.

  Well, the jig was up. Might as well wring a little more coquettishness out of it, though. “How could I?”

  “Just now, at the door, I figured you were a call-in, somebody who saw that TV program on us last week and wanted to look us over.”

  “Why did you think that?”

  He grinned. “The way you’re dressed.”

  “Pattern turquoise blouse, white sheath skirt, red pumps, no stockings? Everyday wear.”

  “In Hollywood, maybe. Not here.”

  She smiled. “Okay, I’ll ‘fess up. I’m Kathryn Sheffield.”

  The effect was less than ego-boosting. Alex Cowell looked blank, then rolled his eyes skyward, recalling data from long-term storage. “Oh yes. Zeeman told me you’d come by.”

  “Right. I just moved here. I answered your ad for a part-time job. Mr. Zeeman hired me, twenty hours a week.”

  “Oh yeah. You were the only one who applied.”

  “More food for the ego.”

  “Your file’s somewhere around here.” He gestured vaguely. “Med tech trainee, right?”

  “Sort of. General gofer might be closer.”

  “You know much about us?”

  “You’re in the newspapers a lot, mostly about lawsuits.” The State of California was resisting allowing cryonics as a permissible means of “body disposal,” as the L.A. Times put it.

  His jaw stiffened. “We’ll get through it.”

  Cryonics was a beleaguered idea, and only the utterly convinced had held to it through the years, building a few companies devoted to its ideas. She admired his resolute understatement, but on the other hand, this was the time to draw the line. “I, uh, should tell you that I’m not really a…”

  “Believer?” Alex grinned. “Not necessary. Just do your job.”

  “I’m not hostile, don’t get that idea. I mean, it’s interesting. I need the work, to be honest. This recession is pretty bad. But the ideas, they’re… interesting.”

  “Just so you’re not opposed to it.” Alex shrugged with good humor. She saw that beneath the nerdy veneer he was in fact quite a handsome man, with a strong, wedge jaw and dark, intense eyes. Many men poured themselves into interesting jobs and became couch potatoes who looked as though they ate exclusively at McDonald’s, but Alex had a lean, compact grace. Vegetarian, she guessed.

  “Glad to have you here.” He stuck out a hand, glancing back toward the interior.

  His grasp was warm and strong, and he gave her a quick, flashing smile that seemed to imply some acceptance, some unspoken understanding. “It’s Dr. Cowell, isn’t it?”

  He waved this away. “Biochemistry—marginally useful here, at best. I did my thesis in longevity studies, lab rats galore. After a postdoc at Stanford I got tired of routine stuff, wanted to follow my instincts.”

  “You do research here?”

  “Sure. Nothing the National Institutes of Health will fund, though.” Again the broken grin.

  Something told her that he had come to Immortality Incorporated along a hard path. There was a coiled energy in him, the kind of gnarled tension that can lead to great deeds or, turned inward, can simply fray into neurosis, nervous tics, and obsession. Alex didn’t have those signatures. He was casual in his cutoffs, not bottled up inside a lab coat or a three-piece suit, like some Ph.D.’s she knew. After all, Einstein didn’t wear socks.

  So she drew him out, getting the story about how a bomb blast had drawn him into saving lives, leading eventually to cryonics. “Frankly,” she said, “a name like Immortality Incorporated isn’t great public relations—sounds like wackos.”

  “Yeah, I agree. But the company was founded in the first big spurt of enthusiasm for cryonics, the 1960s. The old-timers like Zinnes make us newer types keep the name as a sort of in-your-face raspberry to the state medical board.”

  They spent a half hour filling out paperwork to the strains of Def Leppard. Boyd Zeeman, the president of I2, had hired her in the office of his Huntington Beach pharmacy, after checking her references. Their fragile finances dictated their style, limping along with a few poorly paid on-site people, while volunteers stood ready to assist when a suspension occurred. Their membership was climbing exponentially. “Last year, in ‘ninety-four, we reached five hundred members and did eight suspensions. Most of the time it’s pretty dead around here, though, so you’ll work with just me and a few others.”

  Pretty dead around here? But unconscious humor wasn’t on for today; Alex was focused, quick. By the time he was finished with the details, Kathryn had forgiven him for forgetting about her arrival. He was still distracted and immediately said, “Look, maybe you should start on some simple job first, but I need help right now.”

  “With what?” Games were over.

  “Got a dog back there, need to do some fluid cycling.”

  “I don’t know much—”

  “I’ll show you what to do.”

  He led her back through a maze of medical equipment. I-Squared was the flagship organization of the admittedly rather skimpy cryonics fleet. He pointed out that they had much more equipment than their Northern California competitor, CrossTime Corporation—endless tall steel-gray cabinets of backup gear, gleaming gadgets, ample stocks of supplies. “Beefed up our capability all through the eighties. Started research then, too—until then it was a freeze-and-hope project, I’m afraid. I got into it to explore the basic ideas.”

  “But you could’ve done more, uh—mainstream research.”

  “You nearly said ‘legitimate,’ right?”

  “No, ‘respectable.’”

  “I wanted to be part of a real revolution in how we think about death. See, the thing I learned back in that Tokyo airport was that I think like a cryonicist. I’m not afraid of death—I hate it.”

  His sudden ferocity startled her. “What’s the difference?”

  “Plenty. Fear paralyzes you. Hate y
ou can do something about.”

  They passed through a long, high bay with a sheet metal roof. At first she did not recognize the tall, imposing cylinders there for what they were. Then she saw the heavily Styrofoam-insulated pipes and red-handled gate valves and felt the slight chill. Here they were—the suspension patients. They had given themselves over to Immortality Incorporated after being declared clinically dead, and now they coasted through their dreamless hours in liquid nitrogen. They dwelled in conditions colder than any place in the entire solar system, save the frigid outer planets. Only in such chill would time’s erosions cease.

  Kathryn had already wrestled with the whole spookarama of cryonics, the emotional baggage—associations with empty-eyed zombies and musty graves, creepy spiderweb necrophilia, horrid smells, squishy stuff underfoot, and things that go bump in the night. So she was surprised when she felt a sudden, strong reaction to the cool actuality of this place.

  The blackness clutched at her for an instant then, the old dread feelings. Her eyes squeezed shut.

  When she was six years old, her aunt Henny had come back from a trip to Europe with a used bobby’s cape. Just the stylish thing, Aunt Henny had said, and without warning had thrown the heavy woollen weight over Kathryn’s head. Sudden darkness, the thick swarming odor of damp wool, the vanishing of the sunny living room—and the jagged terror had welled up in her, the months of numb politeness stripped away. She had fought against the bobby’s cape, tripped on a chair, fell. But the weight and dark stayed with her, seemed to wriggle up her nostrils with a moist, cloying insistence. She had screamed, My mommy’s dying!—and thrashed and shrieked and grunted against the dark weight, and finally, when they got the cape off her, sobbed. In the still-bright living room the adult faces were white, stiff, big-eyed.

  They had gathered to visit the cancer patient in an atmosphere of bland ordinariness topped off with forced laughter, and now little Kathryn had stripped that gloss away with a single shriek. Their tut-tutting mouths had managed to fill the yawning silence that fell after Kathryn struggled out from under the cape. But they could not shine any of their artificial light into the blackness she had in that instant brought into her own world and that would not leave it, ever.

  Her mother died two months later, and she had gone to her grandmother’s to live, but the swarming inky edge of another world followed her. It was there whenever she paused and thought, really thought. And sometimes it would leap at her, smothering and infinitely opaque. Like now.

  She swallowed hard. Her hand reached out, found the cool stainless steel reassurance of a long cylinder that held four frozen bodies. She opened her eyes, blinked away tears. The shiny steel concentrated the fluorescent’s glare, banishing the black.

  “Hey, you all right?”

  “Yes. Oh yes. Just looking.”

  She blinked and her composure returned. A quick glance at a shiny cylinder confirmed that her mascara was okay. To her surprise a garland of flowers graced the cylinder’s feet. “Relatives?” She pointed.

  “Sure. Those were left by the children of the fellow inside. Sometimes they talk to the tank.”

  “How touching.”

  “No different than a cemetery. Except here we don’t let our people turn to dust.”

  “And this one?” She strolled to another cylinder with a plaque.

  “That’s Dr. Bedford, first person ever frozen. In 1967.”

  Kathryn was startled. “Wow, twenty-eight years! He put aside the money to keep himself frozen, way back then?”

  Alex shook his head, bemused. “No, his children challenged his will and legal expenses ate up the funds. We’re carrying him as a charity case.”

  “I heard that you did that for several people. How can you afford it?”

  Alex smiled ruefully. “Not well, and not often. Really tragic cases—kids with leukemia, say—we try to take. But we’re small, and no business can operate only as a charity.”

  “Ummm. So not just the rich have a shot at the future.”

  To her surprise, Alex gave an easy chuckle. “Everybody thinks you have to be rich. Actually, suspension isn’t so expensive—bargain basement is about a hundred thousand dollars.”

  “A lot more than I’ve got.”

  “Sure, but I’ll bet a life insurance policy for that much costs about what you spend on lipstick.”

  “Hey, that’s a necessity.”

  “So I see.”

  He grinned and she did not know quite how to take the remark. Talk between them had an oddly delicious quality of keeping her off balance. Before she could react he was off, threading through the huge steel cylinders, and she hurried to catch up.

  They passed through the ranks of concrete vaults and steel canisters—state of the art, he said, installed in ‘90—and into a large operating room. On a pallet lay a handsome Irish setter, its coat bedraggled. She knelt and stroked its gray muzzle. The body seemed to quiver in response. Breathing stayed steady and shallow, she noted automatically as she ran her hands over the thin, bony body.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Her. Sparkle’s come back from a long trip,” Alex said, unreeling some electrical sensors.

  “From…” Kathryn studied the equipment deployed around the dog. “You… really—brought her back?”

  “Days at twenty degrees below freezing,” Alex said, matter-of-fact.

  “That’s”—he gestured, and she took the fluid feeder lines from him and began slipping them into the access sites along Sparkle’s body—“wonderful.”

  They worked steadily then, Alex showing her how to cycle Sparkle’s blood. They dialyzed out the impurities still entering the circulation from cells that were cleansing themselves. Sopping up the unwanted residues of low-temperature suspension demanded vigilant attention, to temperature and to electrolyte balances and a dozen lesser chemical details. Within minutes she was immersed in the procedure, registering dials and liquid crystal displays as she adjusted balances, checking the dog’s delicate internal equilibrium.

  “Can’t unload the circulation system too fast,” Alex said. “We made that mistake before.”

  “Her brain waves seem steady.”

  “Right. Been that way for three days now.”

  Alex gave orders without seeming bossy. He knew the work well, and under his guidance her initial nervousness dissipated. She found herself learning quickly, free of the anxious uncertainties she had known before when she had been a medical assistant. Alex was a natural, unhurried and utterly solid, the kind of man who lived for and through his labors.

  Ray Constantine, another I2 employee, came in, saw that matters were in hand, and went into the front office to tend to his own job. Alex happened to mention that Ray was vice-president of I2, and when she expressed surprise he showed her the employee roster.

  “Three full-time, three part-time. A small company.”

  “We’re pretty easygoing.”

  “You humbly forgot to mention that you’re general manager.”

  He snorted. “Which means I get to take out the trash on a regular basis. Including the ecologically virtuous task of sorting into the recycling bins.”

  Dr. Susan Hagerty called to see how Sparkle was doing, and Alex reviewed matters with her. Incidentally Kathryn learned that this was his fourth straight day here. Sparkle had come off the heart-lung machine well, was unsteady for a long time, and then seemed to improve. But this was all fresh medical territory, fraught with danger. Alex spoke tersely as he worked, like one holding back a gray wall of fatigue. She saw now that what she had first taken as a certain distance, a coolness, was in fact a careful hoarding of reserves.

  She massaged Sparkle’s legs and trunk to speed the circulation and ease the process of chemical replacement. Then she felt a subtle change, an easing of strain, a curious lightness in Sparkle’s movements. She shot a glance at a nearby oscilloscope. Complexity spread through the dog’s alpha rhythm.

  “Something’s happening,” she said softl
y.

  Alex bent over his old friend. “Hey, girl,” he whispered. “Hey, Sparkle, wanna catch a rabbit?”

  Sparkle’s eyelids trembled. Sluggishly they rose, like fleshy veils lifting under great weight to show a dark kingdom beyond. The deep amber eyes were bloodshot but unglazed.

  “Hiya, girl.” Alex’s whisper was filled with hope.

  Sparkle blinked, and her eyes rolled up, then around, as though the world were whirling for her. Then they steadied, blinked rapidly, and focused on Alex. Kathryn dimmed the lights to lessen the strain, remembering that hospitals did that. Sparkle lifted her muzzle, panting. She whimpered, a high, thin note.

  “I wonder if she remembers anything, anything at all,” Alex said.

  “You think she might have lost all her memories?”

  He nodded sternly. “Could be. In some brain surgeries, patients get cooled down quite a bit to slow their metabolism. Their brain waves vanish—they’re clinically dead. But when they’re warmed up, they come back. Fred is still Fred. And Fred says he just went to sleep for a while—no interrupted visits to heaven, no souls wandering from the body.”

  “But Sparkle was frozen solid.”

  “Not really solid. The protectants kept her so that the water in her cells didn’t actually form ice crystals.”

  “But still…”

  “Right.” He nodded in sympathy at her incredulous expression. “That’s why this is research. Maybe we’ve revived only the basic bodily processes. Maybe the real Sparkle went down the drain when we chilled her.”

  As if in reply, Sparkle whimpered. Quivering, she stretched forward weakly and licked Alex’s hand.

  “She knows you,” Kathryn whispered.

  “Could be. Maybe she just likes my taste. Good girl! Rest now. Just rest.”

  The dog seemed to understand. She settled back. Alex patted and stroked his dog for a long time, the two of them looking into each other’s eyes. Kathryn could see concern in Alex’s thin-drawn lips and narrowed eyes, but he said nothing. He gestured for her to take up the petting herself. She did it gladly, murmuring to Sparkle but letting her hands do most of the communicating. The dog relaxed, snuffling wetly, and seemed to be easing into sleep.