CHILLER

by Gregory Benford

  “Touché!”

  She frowned prettily and went on, undaunted. “I found out, from reading old microfiche newspaper files, that there was a funny coincidence. The first man ever frozen, a Glendale professor, was put into liquid nitrogen just a few weeks after Disney died.”

  “Glendale—same town.”

  “So people probably made the connection. Glendale, Forest Lawn, Disney, cryonics.”

  “Too bad Disney didn’t do it,” Alex said with a bitter fervor that surprised him. He hitched his thumbs into his belt to keep his hands from displaying the frustration he felt, an old habit hard-learned.

  For a tiny fraction of the wealth the man had created, Disney could have had a shot at walking again in bright sunshine. He had given so much innocent joy to so many, and now he was dust. The immense tragedy of that, of this entire phony place, welled up in Alex.

  Forest Lawn equated death with sleeping, the final loss of loved ones with bees and flowers and peace, as if they had just gone off on a pleasant holiday somewhere. But he knew in his soul that it was probably oblivion, darkness, nothing, the end of love itself. “Till death do you part” was not a promise but a threat. Disney and his immense talent had gone into that, and there was not a scrap of hope that he could ever return.

  “Hey,” she said, taking his hands between hers, obviously sensing his mood and wanting to break it. “Forgive me for this, okay?”

  “For what?”

  “For talking you into a downer date.”

  “This is it?” he asked with mock incredulity. “This is the date? I thought this was just foreplay.”

  She looked askance at him. “In broad daylight? Come on, I’ll treat.”

  He said reluctantly, “I’ve got to do some thinking. Rehearsal.”

  “For what?”

  “TV show. Tomorrow morning this talk show wants me to come on and gab about cryonics.”

  “Great!”

  He grimaced. “Maybe not so great. I’ve done radio shows, sure, just you and a mike. But this—”

  “Listen, the reason talk is cheap is because there’s a lot more supply than demand. But for smart talk—”

  “I don’t know how to handle myself onstage.” Alex recalled reading somewhere that public speaking was the biggie on most people’s list of terrifying prospects. Well, it was reassuring to know that he was an ordinary Joe.

  “I’ll help you,” she said briskly. “Throw questions, stuff like that.”

  “Well…” He knew he should spend the time alone, thinking through a strategy. So why did he want her to talk him out of it?

  “Come on. We can test one of Kathryn’s Universal Laws.”

  He brightened at her impish grin. “Which one?”

  “The one that goes, ‘If you ask the waiter, restaurant fish is always fresh, even in Nebraska.’”

  “This is a dinner invitation, I take it.”

  “My, you’re quick.”

  He sighed. Okay, the day was shot. But he did need some time off, and her sense of humor was infectious. “As Universal Laws go, how about ‘The longer the title, the lousier the movie’?”

  “Another invitation?”

  “We’ll call it a scientific experiment. Testing the Laws.”

  “Gee, and I forgot my lab notebook.”

  “I’ve got one in the car.”

  3

  GEORGE

  He loved the crisp, clean smell of his new apartment—paint barely dry, carpets exhaling their sharp essence.

  The apartment was only the latest in God’s gifts to him, and George set to work right away to repay the Lord in the ways he knew how. First, he had to do his homework. Then there would be the real centerpiece of his day, an evening church service. He had found his proper place here already, a clear and certain Calling. Which was yet another blessing to thank the Lord for.

  He had put the waitress incident behind him with humble prayer and right Scripture. There was always a biblical passage that explained his own actions to him. This time the Old Testament was of more use, with its righteous rage against the world’s harlots. He was sure that the Lord had sealed that waitress Jezebel’s lips in UCI General, just as the Hagerty doctor had said.

  Yes—time to thank Him by getting right to work, George reminded himself. He was seated at a broad plywood work table, hands resting on the keyboard of his new Zenith 2000 computer, all fresh-bought with a Computerland credit card. He reached into his shirt pocket for the crucial element in his life, the 3.5-inch high-density floppy disk he carried with him always. The Feds had gotten all his gear and printouts in Tucson. But George had been careful to leave no vital files in his hard disk there, files that gave the core data for his network. They lay in this one precious disk.

  He slipped it into the disk-drive slit with a nearly sensual joy and booted up the system, savoring the thin little whine that told him 200 megabytes awaited his beck and call. Within twenty seconds he had his spreadsheet running, a lovely multicolored display on the flat screen monitor. A fairyland of wealth and promise, George liked to think of it.

  He had arranged the interlocking names into a gaudy technicolor pyramid. The big bank cards—Visa, AmEx, Discover, Optima, Fuji—appeared as solid granite-gray blocks at the base, the firm underpinning of his “Bruce Prior” universe.

  Above them were stacked blue and red cubes, representing the money-market accounts where he had a minimum of five hundred dollars on deposit: Dreyfus, Chase Manhattan, First National, Fidelity, a half-dozen others scattered evenly across the country, revealing no pattern.

  Soaring above these in the pyramid were the bright red icons of his department store cards—Neiman Marcus, Robinson’s, Bullock’s, I. Magnin, a dozen lesser names.

  George liked the store cards especially. He knew from experience that he could pile up debt there for months without a peep from them. He’d gotten in good with them years before by simply overpaying his bills.

  He’d learned that when he overpaid his $1,500 credit line with Neiman Marcus on a combined MasterCard account. He had deliberately sent Neiman $3,500 extra one month, using a momentary cash surplus. They had raised his credit level to $5,000 right away and sent him the usual glad-handing letter about what a choice customer he was.

  That was where his computer-hacker skills came into play. With the ID numbers on his balance statement, he had worked his way into their accounting system, using pretty simple search patterns to wiggle in. By modem, you could voyage just about anywhere in the cyber-labyrinths of finance.

  He had found that they had flagged him as an especially good risk. The accounting programs at Neiman never forgot what a swell fellow he was, and they let him pile up bills for three months before even beginning to hint delicately about repayment.

  Quick like a bunny, he overpaid his others. They had even started inviting him to special closed-door bargain sales and sending him little gifts at Christmas. Yes, he loved the store cards.

  George had stumbled upon his profession almost by accident. When he had started out as a mathematics teacher in high school, he had been deluged with charge cards. They had come in the mail, sometimes two or three a day, within a few months after he started work.

  He hadn’t applied for them, of course. Some diligent computer program had decided a solid citizen teaching school was just too good a risk to pass up.

  At first he had thrown away the official, embossed letters on creamy bond, welcoming him to their array of services, flattering him with a lot of gush about how he had already been approved for thousands of dollars in credit. Still, the flattery worked, in a way. He held on to some cards, used a few now and then. He had not mastered the knack of keeping friends, and his new job in Albuquerque had put him in a strange city where he knew no one. In a way, he supposed, the cards were a friendly gesture, a welcome he had not gotten from his co-workers.

  Then the trouble had started at the school. He got angry with the kids when they did not do their homework, when they made dumb mistakes
in class, when they sassed him. They joked about his praying during the lunch hour and made faces and even imitated the passing of gas when his back was turned.

  The principal had taken their side, of course; the sallow-faced man was a jellyfish. When parents started complaining that George had made some mistakes in dealing with them, understandable errors, the principal put him on probation. Then the father of one of the worst boys had come in for a conference, and they’d started arguing, the father shouting and calling George a fool. Somehow George’s quite justified rage had turned into a slugging match, and the parent had gone down with a broken jaw, and that was what put George on the street with $235 in the bank and no prospects of ever teaching again.

  He had prayed a lot then, sought the solace of his Church. The minister had not been very sympathetic. Walking home from Sunday service, George had passed a Bank of America. He knew the landlord was waiting back at his apartment, hand out for that month’s rent.

  The letters say these cards are good for cash advances, he had thought. As quick as a greased pig, the teller machine had rewarded him with $800 in less than five minutes, honoring four of his cards without a single question or pause. He had walked away with forty twenty-dollar bills and a new profession.

  George had built his system from scratch. The banks very nearly taught him how. He had learned a lot about the “float”—the number of days it took each bank to process and approve a check.

  Each box in his multicolored pyramid gave float time, precaution codes, other tips. George moved his mouse to the Chase Manhattan icon and tapped it, calling forth in an instant all his transactions.

  He had written a $3,000 check on his Chase Manhattan money-market account in Delaware and mailed it to Colorado for deposit at Rocky Mountain First National. Below this transaction appeared the parallel check he’d written on Rocky Mountain, mailed to the Delaware account. For four days, his program showed, he would run $3,000 in both accounts, earning top grade interest. In the last week he had set $76,000 floating among his dozens of accounts.

  The bookkeeping took about ten hours a week to keep straight. Not bad for a decent income, earned simply by passing money around.

  But the system worked only so long as the banks kept increasing his credit limits. That let him cover his mounting interest costs with fatter loans.

  It had taken him a while to figure out how to make the banks do this. Politely applying didn’t work. You got a form letter back saying nosiree! and pussy-footing around about why.

  Simple, really. He had never gone over his limit and he paid promptly, so to them he obviously didn’t need more credit. So he had started playing deadbeat.

  He charged more than he was allowed, all in a single day, to sidestep their pathetic phone-in precautions. Sometimes they’d call him and he’d say Uh-huh, gee, sorry ‘bout that, guess I’m a little strapped. I’ll make good though, you betcha. And thanks for calling.

  Then he made only minimum payments for a few months, to make their brows furrow. Every time, some assistant account manager had made the same decision: Give the guy more credit. After all, schoolteachers are the salt of the earth, right? They never checked on his employment again.

  George worked steadily, filling out deposit orders and letting his laser printer spit out the deposit slips and address the envelopes. He had to watch the float, be sure no account got in serious debt. That would make his name spike up on some account clerk’s monitor. He liked to work his system so that no human eye ever saw his busy transactions, ever caught on to the transfer of funds that kept him on the street with cash in hand while a shadow debt hovered in the computer banks.

  George finished up, licked the envelopes, and got ready for church. His fresh gray suit, just back from the tailor’s, fit snugly. He liked the crisp, sharp feel of the best clothes, Oxford broadcloth shirts, silk ties, shoes polished until he could look down and see his broad smile in their mirror shine. Exactness, clean details—that was what had led him to a life of prosperity, simply by following the rules the banks themselves laid down.

  On the way he stopped at the Main Street Mall in Orange and mailed two dozen letters to his unwitting benefactors. Most of the big money-markets even gave you stamped, self-addressed envelopes. He stopped at a big bank done in pure Monetary Modern—welded steel sculptures, hangarlike expanses of glass, cantilevered ceiling illuminated by indirect lighting to draw the eye upward.

  Like a cathedral, mosaic murals faintly echoing the gospel. A marriage of art and commerce. One of the pleasures of living off these people lay in rebuking such subtle insolence.

  He used one of the new extrasmart tellers in a tastefully lit carrel beside the immense steel-and-glass-slab building. A silky female voice welcomed him as he slid in his first card, a First National with an $8,000 limit. Plenty of room on it, his printout said. He hit the card for $400. The woman’s voice even gave him directions on how to connect into the different networks for which his different cards were valid, using his electronic fund transfer card.

  It was almost like being guided around a bank vault, having the batches of twenties politely pointed out and stuffing fistfuls of them into his pockets. The soft breezes of Orange County ruffled his hair as he worked, like the soft caresses of his mother when he was a boy. He walked away with $1,600 in less than ten minutes.

  4

  SUSAN

  The patient had no hair. Margaret Yamada had lost it three times now from her chemotherapy. Her most recent course had been more severe, leaving her drawn and lined, but her eyes gleamed like black marbles in the pale face, defiant, quick, and glittering. She was a second-generation Japanese-American, sixty-two, with three quiet children who visited every day. Her husband had died two years before of complications following on kidney disease.

  Flowers perfumed the air of her sunlit bed as she turned the pages of a magazine, not noticing Susan. Mrs. Yamada’s children had gotten her a private minisuite, which she deplored as a needless extravagance. Her children did not want their mother having to bother with the teaching routines of UCI Hospital, but she had adamantly kept her name on the list of patients open to a visit. She seemed to like the idea.

  Susan Hagerty finished her furtive glance into Mrs. Yamada’s room and slipped back into the corridor. Her memory was often visual, so that just looking at a patient called up associations, previous diagnoses, details. It also reminded her that beneath the thicket of documentation there was a human being, a complex personality, warts and all.

  Susan walked energetically into the ward conference room two doors down. The band of interns and subinterns awaited her, clutching Styrofoam cups of coffee like magic talismans that would get them through another morning of “rounds.”

  “Good morning, gang.” She nodded to Robert Skinner. “Mrs. Yamada is first. Go ahead.”

  Skinner was a slightly overweight medical student with an air of edgy uncertainty. His brown eyes kept glancing down at his notes, which seemed to be in an unreadable scrawl. Susan smiled to encourage him. Skinner was the only person she knew at UCI Hospital who was interested in cryonics, as she had discovered when she met him at an Immortality Incorporated open house a year before. She had seen him around the hospital occasionally, before finding herself acting as his team attending physician. They rarely talked about cryonics at work. The cool antiseptic air of the hospital, with odors of rubber tubing and freshly waxed linoleum, made professional distance easy. Skinner was now a fourth-year student acting as an intern, which meant that Susan usually glimpsed him heading somewhere at a brisk pace, frayed and preoccupied.

  The medical students shifted around Skinner as he glanced at his notes, coughed, and fingered the lapel of his white lab coat. As senior staff, Susan accompanied the students twice a week. Clinical teaching took time and had some status attached, but it cut into research work. In the academic pyramid, one rose through the airy promise of original research, not by dogged service to the profession. Susan knew she should probably worm her way out of
doing rounds so often, but she actually liked them, the rub of reality.

  Skinner stumbled a bit at first and referred anxiously back to his clipboard. Gradually a coherent picture emerged. Mrs. Yamada was an oncology patient of Dr. Blevin, admitted to house staff after a fracture of the right humerus, suffered in a fall. X-rays showed a clean break. The radiologist noted signs of tumor infiltration at the fracture site.

  Skinner matter-of-factly dropped the other shoe. “She has a two-year history of breast cancer, with known metastatic disease to bone.”

  And now she’s got a fracture because of it, Susan thought. A reasonable conclusion. But the essence of method lay in testing your quick intuitions.

  Skinner ran through her history: a standard mastectomy, lymph node dissection results, early chemotherapy. Tumors recurred as lung metastases six months ago. “Patient reported considerable pain. Positive bone marrow biopsy. No family history of breast cancer. Family close and attentive.”

  He likes her, Susan guessed. Maybe he hates seeing a patient waste away on the same chemo that didn’t even work well for her before.

  Review of organ systems. “Positive for shortness of breath, skin nodules, constant rib and arm pain, weight loss, and depression. Not hard to understand that last,” he added wryly.

  “Physical exam revealed a mastectomy scar and multiple indurated areas on the skin of chest and back. Lab data includes abnormal X-rays, a macrocytic anemia, hypoalbuminemia, and some liver enzyme abnormalities.” Other than these, there was nothing unusual, only the erosions and oddities of the human species.

  Skinner got through it well. He scrambled the details a bit but didn’t stall. He threw in some “pertinent negatives,” too, particularly some normal vitamin levels that excluded a few specific diagnoses. In Mrs. Yamada’s case there were some interesting sidelights, but the central truth was clear.

  The mastectomy and lymph node removal of two years before, plus chemotherapy, hadn’t caught all the malignant cells. Nobody really knew why chemo worked sometimes and not others; it was a crapshoot. The cancer had spread and now was eating up her lungs, penetrating her bones, even her skin.