CHILLER

by Gregory Benford

  Alex got up quietly and walked a few paces away, out of his pet’s line of sight. Softly he called, “Sparkle. Sparkle.”

  The dog’s ears perked up. With visible effort she turned her head, found him, and whimpered loudly, her nails scrabbling at her pallet, tail thumping.

  “Good girl. Sleep, Sparkle,” Alex said shakily.

  “So her memories are still there,” she said.

  Alex allowed himself a brimming smile. “Knows her name.”

  It was miracle enough to bring an intact animal back from freezing, she thought, but a further wonder on top of that to have preserved the memories, responses, the self. And she had just walked in, first day at work, and witnessed it.

  Kathryn felt an eerie sensation. Cryonics was weird, she was comfortable with that, but if it could actually work…

  Alex ran his hands over his dog, talking to Sparkle warmly, easily. Kathryn could read in the cast of his mouth and the slight misting of his eyes how much he felt. Love for a pet was commonplace, unremarked, but she could see how deeply it ran in him.

  “That’s the real Sparkle in there,” he whispered wonderingly. “I’ve got her back.”

  She said nothing for a long time. The machinery hummed and worked around them, a halo of sound around a small knot of simple emotion, so quiet and fragile she did not want to fracture the moment. But at last, after Sparkle had drifted into a calm slumber, Alex looked up, as though emerging from somewhere deep within himself.

  “I’ll call Susan Hagerty soon as I wash up.” His voice was laced with tired satisfaction. “Been a long day.”

  “A long four days, I’d say.”

  “Think I might catch some Z’s.”

  “It’s not noon yet.”

  “Why be hemmed in by hidebound convention?” He grinned. “I’m on watch here, but I can sack out upstairs. Ray Constantine can keep an eye on Sparkle.”

  “Oh. I’ll go help Ray in the front.”

  “Look, I need to fill you in on how we operate. By the time I sleep a few hours, I’ll be ready to eat a horse. Let’s meet for dinner.”

  “Mmmmm. I didn’t think vegetarians ate horses.”

  “Only on alternate Wednesdays. I’m no vegetarian, though.”

  “I haven’t been out here long, but it seems like everybody in California is.” Actually, she thought of cryonicists as an extreme kind of health nut, so they should be vegetarians, too. They fit right in with the California oddities.

  “I don’t believe in crank diets.”

  “Ummm. A cryonicist calling others cranks?”

  “What’s cranky about wanting to live longer?”

  “Plenty, where I come from.”

  “Where’s that? From your accent, I’d say it was one of those midwestern states that starts with a vowel.”

  “Accent? I don’t have any accent.”

  “That’s what everybody thinks.”

  “Anyway, you’re wrong. I came from South Dakota.”

  “Traditional values.”

  She made a comic grimace. “Very.”

  “They have their rewards.”

  “I agree, but still, I felt claustrophobic back there. A strict South Dakotan upbringing. It took me a long time to realize we were free to go.”

  Mock horror. “You mean you left the state without raising your hand and asking permission?”

  “ ‘Fraid so.”

  “Good for you. Take some hours off now. See you at seven.”

  “What? Oh—”

  “Little Italian place, great pasta. Just off Harbor in Costa Mesa. I’ll give you the address.”

  “Well, I—”

  “And now I’m beat. Got to run down to the end of the alphabet.”

  “What?”

  “Catch some Z’s, like I said.”

  Moments later, when she stood outside blinking up into the dry sun glare, she thought, Nerd clothes, maybe, but he got that date effortlessly. And it was definitely a date; subtle signals had thronged the air. Yet there were none of the usual bits of warmup business you can pick up, the little gestures and eye maneuvers while a guy you just met is working himself up to ask.

  Maybe there were possibilities here, more possibilities even than the Immortality Incorporated sign suggested.

  She crossed the parking lot with a freshly jaunty set to her stride. New job, new guy. Bright sunshine and far horizons. Sure, a weirdo job, but life wasn’t all retail sales and oatmeal, after all. And the guy was promising, quite—that evasive female cliché—“cute.” Fun to work with, anyway. So in all—

  She stopped at the sight of the man in overalls crouched down beside the side wall. He had a small black object in both hands and was pressing it against the grouting between two cinder blocks. He looked up, startled.

  “What are you doing?” she blurted out. Something in the man’s posture and his sudden scowl told her things weren’t right.

  “Power company, ma’am.” A tight, high voice. “Just checking. Everything’s okay, so I’ll be going.”

  He stood and walked quickly toward a gray pickup truck parked at the edge of the lot. A lean, nervous man, shorter than she was. He clasped the black flashlight-shaped thing to his chest.

  “But you weren’t looking at a fusebox or anything,” she insisted. Her impulse was to advance toward him, but something told her to stay put.

  No answer. He yanked open the truck door and slid in, and the engine rumbled to life.

  Her sense of wrongness condensed into irritation. “Hey!”

  He popped it into gear. His constricted face glared at her, the eyes dark slits. The truck peeled rubber, wobbling, and veered off the blacktop. The man jerked at the wheel, and the truck spat gravel at the edge of the lot before he got it back under control. Tires squealed again as they hit the pavement of Santiago Canyon Road, bit hard, and accelerated away with a roar.

  She frowned. Keep driving like that, buster, and you’ll have the lifespan of a cockroach.

  Some gawking curiosity seeker? No, there was a stringy tension in the man’s hurried walk. She bit at her lip. He had left nothing at the wall. Still…

  She turned and walked back toward the front door. Best to at least let them know about it. Then it was their problem, even if she was a brand-new employee.

  TWO

  THE LONG HABIT OF LIVING

  The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.

  —Sir Thomas Browne

  1

  GEORGE

  He marched down the bleached corridors of UCI General, nerves jangling, fingers longing to twitch and grasp. But he kept careful control, did not let any of it break swarming onto his skin surface. Time to be smooth, cool.

  Looking for the doctor.

  The remnants of his morning awakening still clung to him. If he closed his eyes for just a moment, it would replay on the pink screen of his eyelids.

  —The same moist sensation of floating upward, not to heaven but toward a pale sheet of light, the infinitely receding surface of a black lake. Tendrils of waving weed clutched at him, slimy, vainly urging him back, down. But he rose, buoyant, through miraculous fluids running like watered inks. He broke the surface—into a harsh gallery of blaring light, waxy faces hovering, cotton clots billowing in his lungs. Deranged air steamed before his blinking eyes. Needles pin-pricked his canvas skin as he rose toward a ceiling leaking torpid heat. The rotting tiles above split into the wide toothless grin of a hard-boned skull, jawbone creaking as it swung, speaking soundlessly, trying to tell him something ponderous and remote, all while within the gutted eye sockets a black spider slept and stirred, slept and stirred, rustling—

  He shook himself, and the tight images shed from him like skin from a snake. The cool clear part of him had been keeping track, following the directions of the front office, counting the room numbers in this anonymous corridor. Here. Hagerty.

  He checked himself. Suit and tie, neat and clean, creases razor-sharp. Hair freshly combed.

  Knock. No a
nswer. Knock again.

  Abruptly the door swung open on a wise-faced woman. Her broad mouth was reserved, her gray eyes distracted. From her no-nonsense hair and lack of cosmetics, he sized her up as a businesslike type, not one to be pressured. Okay, then—the aw-shucks approach. “Doctor? I’m a friend of a patient you operated on in the emergency room? Patricia Olin?”

  George made his tone rise upward at the end of each question, properly humble. His face he made open and expectant as Dr. Hagerty’s mouth flattened into a severe line. Doctors saw lawsuits everywhere.

  “I was a friend of hers, and well, we’re all just kind of shocked and shook up. You know? I was wondering if I could talk to you, just a li’l bit?”

  Hagerty’s mouth softened as he spoke. Women often did that with him. George knew he didn’t look half-bad himself, he could sling the words okay, and women appreciated a snappy dresser, too. “Well, there isn’t much to tell,” she said. “I did all I could, but she had been in that dumpster for hours with a broken neck, the police told me afterward.”

  “I understand that from the newspapers, ma’am.” The Register’s headline, FREEWAY PILE UP REVEALS DUMPSTER DEATH, had attracted his attention first thing at breakfast this morning, jerking him out of his troubled state, out of the frayed remembrances of his dream. “Awful, just awful. She was so fine, and for somebody to do that—well, I just wondered, for the sake of her mother, you know, if Patricia was able to say something, anything at all? As a last message for her loved ones?”

  Dr. Hagerty frowned. “Her mother was here at the time.”

  George felt a spike of cold alarm but let none of it into his face. The newspaper said nothing about the mother, of course. He should have taken some other line. Too late now. “I heard, but she’s so worked up, you know, I thought I’d take the burden from her, come and ask?”

  “The patient never regained consciousness.” Dr. Hagerty cocked her head skeptically.

  “Now that’s sad, real sad. I’ll not be able to bear last words to comfort her mother.” A mournful downturn of his mouth, then a hopeful jut of his head. “Nothing to help the police find the person who did this thing?”

  “No, nothing. And your name is…?”

  “Martin Jacobson, ma’am.” He didn’t like her glinting eyes. “I thank you muchly, and I’ll take no more of your time.”

  Nod, wheel about, walk away. Clean. He heard the door shut behind him and let out a cleansing whoosh of liberating air.

  He still had no memory of what happened with the waitress, of what she had done to provoke him so. A girl notices, she had said.

  And maybe after all she had broken her neck when the dumpster-collector truck racked over onto the freeway. That could be it, despite what all these know-it-all doctors said.

  So he was safe. Coming here had been a momentary impulse, and his cool self had voted against doing it, but now he was glad. He was sure, consolidated, able to make his new home here without a shadow hanging like a hawk in the back of his mind. He walked out of the hospital with a springing step.

  2

  ALEX

  For their second date she wanted to go to a cemetery.

  “Not just any cemetery, mind you,” Kathryn said when Alex looked startled. “The best. The biggest.”

  “Ah. Forest Lawn,” Alex supplied.

  Their first date, the week before, had been almost disquietingly successful. The moments when you both realized that somehow, unexpectedly, you agreed about the most remote subjects: favorite movies, interest rates, Stilton cheese. The small realizations that, unaccountably, you simply fit. The sudden moments of pulse-pounding possibility, freighted in seemingly innocent phrases. The symphony of unconscious signals had gone on, culminating in a goodnight kiss that started warm and turned quite hot before he broke it off, more unsettled than he wanted to reveal. A kiss, he thought, with a future in it.

  “I’ve heard about it so much. Great day out,” she said helpfully. “Not much traffic on a Sunday.”

  “Ummmm,” he said.

  “Still no leads on that guy I found outside?”

  “Nope. He’d already bored a hole through, and I filled it up with quick-dry cement. Probably he was trying to slip some detector in, maybe a mini-TV camera or something.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “Who knows? Cryonics brings out the crazies.”

  “Most people think you’re the crazies.”

  “Exactly—so maybe he was some sleazoid reporter, snooping for sensational photos. But without license plates to go on—”

  “I told you, they were taped over.”

  “Without anything more, what can we do? The cops, they’d just laugh.”

  “Well, he looked… serious.” She bit at her lip, uneasy.

  Alex’s face clouded. “You mean dangerous?”

  “Look, let’s forget him.” She busied herself with some filing, obviously to break the mood. Alex smiled; already he could read her maneuvers. But he didn’t like her undercurrent of apprehension. She had picked up something ominous in the guy, he guessed, something she could not quite convey.

  They were sitting in the front office of Immortality Incorporated. Kathryn had “just dropped by” to pick up some paperwork about joining I-Squared. The quiet of the facility was only occasionally broken by a crew moving equipment around in the back. Though there were three full-time employees, much of the labor was done by volunteers on weekends. Company rules demanded that a full-time employee be on duty at all times, to man the phones, top off the liquid nitrogen in the suspension cylinders, and deal with the usual traffic of deliveries and curiosity seekers. They could take short naps at night if they liked, the company’s one concession to bodily rhythms. Alex liked to work in long stints, when he could get some repair work done and tinker with the gadgets he kept running. He put in twelve-hour sessions four times a week.

  She said brightly, “You’re off work in five minutes, right?”

  Alex tried to look casual. He was a little tired; as usual at Immortality Incorporated, he had gotten less nap time than he had hoped. “Well, I thought I’d take Sparkle for a walk.”

  “Let’s do it together. Come on—enough of this watchman stuff.”

  “My job description includes ‘maintenance engineer,’ I’ll have you know.”

  “I thought that’s what they called janitors.”

  “Right, and garbage is ‘postsecondary-use consumer goods.’ Sparkle!”

  A rusty-brown mass came bounding in from the back room. When she saw Kathryn, Sparkle barked twice, moist nose twitching. A shiver of anticipation ran along her body, and she looked ready to leap up, but her good-dog demeanor asserted itself and she simply licked Kathryn’s hand, whimpering. Still, she knew something was up and stood with eager-eyed energy, glancing from Alex to her leather leash, which hung near the door.

  Kathryn petted Sparkle’s sleek, shiny coat. “Wow, what a recovery.” She looked up at Alex with open respect. “Y’know, I thought you were kidding about taking her for a walk.”

  Alex grinned, glad that his little surprise had come off. “She’s come back fast.”

  Kathryn took the lean head in her hands and made a face. “You’re sure no zombie, Spark.”

  Sparkle’s tail whacked on the cement floor in agreement. “C’mon, humans”—Kathryn spoke for her—“let’s bomb outa here.”

  As Alex leashed her, he said, “A real high-tech dog, this one.”

  Kathryn ruffled Sparkle’s fur, blowing in her ear. “I hear some biologists are developing a new breed of dog for the next century. Half pit bull and half collie. It sees you, it rips your leg off, then it runs for help.”

  “Sounds wonderful. Just the thing for apartment dwellers in Manhattan. C’mon, gal!”

  They emerged into a crisp, sunlit day. Alex noted how the dog took gingerly steps going across the asphalt of the parking lot.

  “She walks kind of funny,” Kathryn said.

  “Just on asphalt. Maybe she’s forgott
en what it is.”

  Once off the warm black surface Sparkle strained at the leash, whimpering eagerly until Alex let her off. She trotted into the arroyo, nose up, eyes bright, millennia of evolution at work. This was a hunting jaunt, wasn’t it?

  Kathryn frowned. “You think something as basic as that could get lost in the freezing?”

  “Sure. We don’t know how memories are stored.”

  “Has she got the rest of her doggy stuff down pat?” She picked up a stick and threw it. Sparkle looked disdainfully at the spot where it landed and ambled on.

  Alex picked up a stick. “You don’t think she’ll fetch for just anybody, do you?”

  She gave him a sidelong glance. “Not an easy first date, ol’ Spark.”

  He ignored the implied opening. “Maybe all her TV exposure has turned her head.”

  “I saw it last night. Pretty accurate.”

  “They like anything with footage, even if it’s just Sparkle giving her patented ferocious scowl.”

  Kathryn shrugged. “So she hates media people—who doesn’t?” She made a surprisingly schoolgirlish kick at a stone and added seriously. “Y’know, if there’s any more media stuff, I’d appreciate, uh…”

  “Keeping your name out of it.”

  “Well, I’m not one of you.”

  “True enough. Look, we follow standard confidentiality. Our membership roster is secret, and so is our employee list.”

  “I remember reading some tabloid about Liz Taylor—”

  “Oh God, that! Sure, her and Ronald Reagan, they had a secret pact to get frozen, see? They’ll run off together when they’re revived.”

  She looked sheepish. “Okay, I confess, I’m another brain-damaged tabloid reader. But only while I’m standing in the supermarket checkout line.”

  “Yeah, everybody says they just glance them over there in line, pick up on the ‘Space Aliens Raped My Lawn Sprinkler’ stories. Makes you wonder how they sell any copies.”