CHILLER

by Gregory Benford

  Wright said, “Still, her personal pyramid—for I must admit, Ms. Sheffield, that is all I feel it to be, a big, pointless gesture—her pyramid involves letting you invade our ICU, disrupt it, use our resources.”

  Kathryn could see Alex pause for an instant and knew he was tempted to launch into a spirited defense of Susan’s own research, of the results in reviving Sparkle, and how they would vindicate her in UCI’s coming inquiry. But this was certainly not the place or time, and after a breath he said, “We will be quiet. We will use nothing of yours.”

  “Nothing of ours?” Blevin finally erupted. “You’re taking our reputation!”

  “If your patients die, it’s not our fault. We just try to hang on to the structure remaining in them and save it for the future.”

  “You empty their bank accounts, you mean, in return for snake oil. Dr. Wright, you simply cannot allow these misfits to use our hospital for their fraudulent—”

  “Careful of your words,” Wright said mildly, holding up a single finger. “They are actionable.”

  Blevin shook his head and snorted in exasperation. “By condoning this, you—”

  “Don’t worry,” Kathryn said. “We’re not here to cook up a lawsuit. We’re here to save Susan, if that’s necessary.”

  Blevin said sharply, “Irwin, I appeal to you on behalf of the medical faculty. We are united against this kind of thing. I had hoped that Susan Hagerty’s being brought forward to the Academic Senate on charges would alert you to that. Apparently it hasn’t. I suggest you consider our wishes in this matter, particularly in view of the way the media will view this entire incident. You know how we dislike such outside perceptions.”

  This struck Kathryn as a well-reasoned threat, couched in high-minded tones but just obvious enough to remind Wright that he was, in the end, elected by the physicians who worked here. Blevin was biased but not dumb.

  Wright registered all this with a flick of an eyebrow. His sallow face hardened. “I wish you hadn’t said that, Sidney. To take your position would then make it seem like giving in to in-house pressures.” A thin smile. “You know how I dislike such outside perceptions.”

  3

  ALEX

  It was a relief to release his pent-up energies in a flurry of activity. As soon as he reached the ICU with Dr. Anderson, Alex began to pepper the man with questions.

  “Can we move Susan into that area down at the end?” he gestured down the long, machine-thronged room, which was partitioned into ample spaces around each bed.

  Anderson looked at the head nurse, the muscular woman named Dowell. “That’s farther from the nurses’ station,” she said.

  “I appreciate that, but then our work won’t bother your other patients as much, either.” He studied Dowell’s stony face for an instant and added, “I’m thinking of them. We’ll do as much as we can to minimize the disruption.”

  “I should hope so,” Dowell said, rolling her eyes skyward, apparently because Anderson was going to be of no use whatever in warding off these crank invaders.

  Alex ran through the checklist in his mind, with Gary standing next to him, eyes on the loose-leaf manual. Doing things by the numbers saved time and, long afterward, could be the touch that kept lawyers off your tail. “Dr. Anderson, will you or another physician be available all tonight, to pronounce legal death?”

  Anderson frowned. “Normally, no. I have other duties, other patients.”

  “Could you let us know when you’re in the hospital?”

  Anderson’s mouth worked, annoyed. “I suppose so. You can reach me on my beeper, through my office. I go off duty at two o’clock. You’ll have to talk to my replacement physician then.”

  “We’ll be happy to, sir,” Alex said briskly.

  The ICU outside the nurses’ station murmured with the whispers and gurgles of machines, the music of medicine. There were five patients in the ICU at the moment, each the nucleus for a web of tubes, wires, catheters, lines, and other unsubtle invasions. The price of survival is inevitably an utter exposure, a nakedness before the brute fact of the physical self that reduces a person to a machine. That is the philosophy of modern medicine, and it works.

  But the whole person has properties beyond the underlying machine, facets like passion and gossamer-thin intuition and a certain instinctive resonance with other life. Usually our minds work on, party to airy dreams, while our bodies labor in ancient silence. Here the roles reversed. Susan lay inert and her body held the stage. Modern medicine could pull her body back from the abyss, yet lose her self to the oblivion of coma.

  Alex was no poet, as some cryonicists were, rhapsodizing about immortality. He was here to save whatever he could. This head nurse was not his enemy, though she undoubtedly thought herself one. Compared with the touchy-feely brigade, the health faddists and cult figures and gurus, he and Nurse Dowell were soldiers in the same small army.

  “Nurse Dowell, you’ve got IV lines, bladder catheter, some other diagnostics in the patient now. Could you please leave them in for our use, if Susan dies?”

  Nurse Dowell frowned, looked exasperated for a moment at this intrusion into routine, and then turned to Anderson without saying anything. A savvy nurse deferred to the physician, if possible. Anderson nodded.

  Alex asked, “Before we look at her, I wonder if the hospital has any ice on hand?”

  The nurse’s mouth twitched with irritation. “We have a perfectly good morgue cooler.”

  “Of course, but we’ll need a lot of ice. We want a steady temperature held a few degrees above freezing.”

  Nurse Dowell said sharply, “I thought you people wanted to freeze her.”

  “We do it under controlled conditions. Look, I’m hoping we won’t need to use the morgue at all. Gary, could you and Kathryn go down and check with the morgue people?”

  This was actually a good way to hand off the problem, keeping relations smooth with the ICU. A big hospital resembled Eastern Europe, with balkanized fiefdoms presided over by lordly, capricious technicians. Gary nodded and left to get Kathryn from the waiting room outside. Director Wright’s guidelines allowed only two I2 staff in the ICU unless Susan died.

  Gary was following a protocol in the manual. Morgue attendants were the lowly of hospitals, essentially charged with disposing of its failures. Brought into the loop, they could speed movement of a patient when time was most crucial.

  Alex asked for permission to view Susan. Anderson and Dowell shepherded him cautiously through the sliding curtain partitions. Despite his training, he was shocked. Susan’s face was chalk-white, glassy, grossly swollen. She breathed shallowly through a tube, and the video monitors showed a steady, slow heartbeat. He remembered her as determined, always in motion. Here she was inert, seemingly less alive than the humming devices surrounding her.

  Alex put a hand on her arm, an instinctive act that he found reassuring. He was here to help her, but he ached with the hope that he would prove unnecessary, that he would see her sunny energy again.

  “Anything more, then?” Nurse Dowell demanded briskly.

  Jerked out of his mood, Alex clicked into automatic again. “Uh, yes. We’ve got two E cylinders of oxygen on our cart, but we’d like to save them for transport. Could we tap into your oxygen line?”

  “Well…” Another glance at Anderson, who was playing a cagy, quiet game. He nodded again. “I suppose so.”

  “Thanks very much. I brought a DISS fitting for the adaptor. I’ll just check it out, and—”

  “Mr. Cowell?” One of the other nurses had stuck her head through the curtains.

  “Yes?”

  “There’s a Detective Stern outside to see you. He says it’s important.”

  Alex glanced at the clock as he left: 9:14 P.M. Three hours ago he had been in Kathryn’s arms. Life was a cabaret, right.

  Stern’s face seemed furrowed with fatigue beneath the unforgiving bleached light of the corridor. He was talking to two other men, both in rumpled gray suits. They had the sam
e steady hardness about them and Alex instantly knew they were cops, too. Stern finished talking and nodded to Alex. “Come on, let’s go in here,” Stern said without preliminaries and led him into a small conference room down the carpeted hall. One of the other plainclothesmen came back, bringing Kathryn from the office where she had been discussing Susan’s legal papers with the staff.

  “How is she?” Stern asked when all three were seated around a plain table.

  “Stable, but not good.”

  “Too bad. I came by to ask you a few more questions.”

  “I don’t really know much more about her.”

  Stern looked sour. “Come on. She worked out there with you guys for years.”

  Kathryn said, “We knew her well enough to know she didn’t have any enemies.”

  “How about right here?”

  Kathryn blinked. “What?”

  “At UCI. Seems she was up for some kind of trial. Accusations of illegal operations, that sort of thing.”

  Alex kept his voice flat, noncommittal. “She had a dispute with another faculty member. We just saw him here, in fact. It was a scientific matter.”

  Stern sniffed, rubbed his nose with his hand. “Not the kind of stuff people kill each other about, you’d say?”

  “Of course not,” Kathryn said.

  “So she was a workaholic with few friends? Who liked to run on the beach with her dog?”

  “Well, yes,” Alex said guardedly.

  “We checked out her home. Nothing unusual there, near as we can tell.”

  “Oh,” Alex said.

  Stern made a thin, mirthless smile. “But no dog.” He gazed steadily at Alex. “You were the last person to see her, near as we can determine.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “She say anything about the dog?”

  “I think so. About taking it for a run.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Not really. A lot has happened in the last few hours.”

  “Sure has. We spent an hour trying to find that dog down on that cold, foggy beach.”

  Kathryn said firmly, “So probably it ran off.”

  “Could be,” Stern said. “Seems unusual for a pet, though.”

  “Did any witnesses see her on the beach?” Alex asked.

  “We haven’t found any. Weather kept them away, I expect.”

  A sharp knock at the door startled Alex. He was intent on not giving away his own suspicions. Acting concerned, but not too much, was the hardest part. And how could he bring up Susan’s earlier incident with the vagrant, without arousing Stern’s suspicions? He had to play a cagy game here, in case the worst happened.

  Alex opened the door and there was Dr. Blevin, hands tucked into his loose-fitting red cardigan. Alex had a sudden impulse to slam the door in the man’s face, a hot urge so strong, his arm twitched. But that would earn him nothing, and he made himself say, “This is a private conversation, doctor.”

  “I know precisely what it is. I want to see the detective.”

  Alex stepped aside, thinking furiously. He couldn’t imagine how Blevin could mess this up, but he could see from the hard, flat line of the man’s mouth that Blevin was there to try. He watched as Blevin went through introductions with a sudden air of warm sincerity—a bedside manner on a switch, he supposed. “Do you know Frank Olenberg in the DA’s office? Old buddy of mine,” Blevin said, ignoring Kathryn completely.

  Stern said, “Yeah, we have lunch now and then.”

  “Great guy. I heard you were in the building and thought I’d stop by.”

  “Why so, doctor?”

  “Well, I’m sure these two”—a contemptuous wave—“have been filling your ear about the dispute between Dr. Hagerty and myself.”

  Stern said politely in a just-making-conversation voice, “Oh, that was you?”

  “Regrettably, yes. It was over her research, some violations of university standards.”

  “Involving what?”

  Blevin seemed truly surprised, his mouth hanging slightly open. “They didn’t tell you? Over this cryonics stuff. Susan was using university facilities, university funds—all to carry out crackpot research for these people. I was pretty sure she was getting some money under the table for it.”

  “That’s a lie!” Alex erupted. “We didn’t pay her a dime for research.”

  Stern turned his gaze lazily to Alex. “You said just a while back, as I remember, that she did some consulting for your company.”

  Kathryn said, “That was for other services.”

  Blevin shook his head with thoroughly believable sadness. “I understand that you cryonics people refuse to accept death. I see it every day, and I guess I know how you feel. But surely you can see that conservative medical practice cannot go along with your claims. Somehow you enlisted poor Dr. Hagerty in your beliefs. She was under a lot of strain, and I suppose I feel responsible. I had public and private disagreements with her—maybe I should have simply taken her aside, tried to get her therapy, maybe even apologized. The last time I saw her she looked so depressed.”

  “Tired, not depressed,” Alex said. “She’s been working hard to get her research written up.”

  “The mysterious revived dog?” Blevin raised an eyebrow. “That’s somehow dead again?”

  “The dog, Sparkle, is well documented.” Alex knew that Blevin had the weight of authority on his side here, and Stern was the audience for both of them. They weren’t really talking to each other at all. “She has earlier work with mice, too. A fair hearing will clear her of your attacks.”

  Blevin remained collected, his voice reasonable as he turned to Stern, conspicuously ignoring Alex. “She admitted at her hearing—you can check this from the transcript—that she did some of her experiments at this corpse-freezing firm. Under a fictitious corporate screen, of course, a phony name. She was clever. No one ever accused Susan Hagerty of being dumb, not at all. My dispute with her was over—well, ethics.”

  “You’re misrepresenting her work,” Alex said sharply. But even to himself it sounded weak.

  “I wanted to come by and clear up any suspicions you might have, Detective,” Blevin said evenly, ignoring Alex.

  “Suspicions?” Stern asked.

  “Well, Susan is hurt, I’ve had a feud with her, I suppose you could say—the line of logic is clear.”

  “But wrong.”

  “Of course. I was home with my wife all evening. But I bring up our past associations and differences because I do believe them to be germane. I believe Susan may have tried to commit suicide.”

  “Suicide!” Alex blurted.

  “No. No no no,” Kathryn said.

  Stern raised his eyebrows. “Why?”

  “Susan faced expulsion from the university—a near certainty, to my mind, once the full facts were known. She would find difficulty in obtaining another post. Certainly no major research institution would touch her.”

  Alex shot back, “You’re exaggerating—”

  “And frankly, she was something of a depressive sort already, in my estimation.”

  Alex made himself say stiffly, “I wasn’t aware that you were a psychiatrist, Dr. Blevin.”

  Blevin gave a self-deprecating smile. “Well, of course I’m not. However, any physician receives some training in that area, enough to recognize obvious symptoms.”

  Alex had been struggling to hold his temper. He recognized his own symptoms—the room seemed too warm, his breathing was fast and shallow. But he judged that Stern liked hard evidence, coolly stated opinions, so he kept his voice flat and factual. “I don’t think your opinion of her mental state has any validity. You’re her enemy. You’re biased as hell. I knew her, and I saw no depressive behavior. She kept herself in good physical condition. As I recall, that’s seldom the case with suicides.”

  Blevin narrowed his already hooded eyes. “I don’t believe any credence whatever can be given to the medical opinions of laymen.”

  Stern held up a hand, a world-weary
signal for them to stop. “It’s an interesting idea, anyway. An unusual method, though. Women usually choose sedatives. You’d think a doctor would go that way. Men like guns. Jumpers are rare for either sex.”

  Blevin said, “She may have acted on impulse. And remember that suicides often occur at night.”

  Alex sputtered in exasperation. “Look, anybody who knew Susan—really knew her—knows she wouldn’t kill herself.”

  Blevin said adamantly, “In my opinion she never recovered from her husband’s sudden death.”

  Kathryn said, “She spent years trying to do something about that death. She didn’t mope around, she worked.”

  Blevin pointedly turned away from Alex and Kathryn and addressed Stern. “I believe you will agree that suicide is a plausible hypothesis.”

  Alex’s caution blew away in a sudden spike of anger. “You’re bringing this up out of spite!”

  “I have information relevant to Detective Stern’s business.”

  “You’re personally involved.”

  Blevin gave a long-suffering glance to Stern. “And you are not? I am being objective—something you wouldn’t understand.”

  “You know damned well that a suspicion of suicide demands an autopsy.”

  Blevin shrugged. “I don’t make the law.”

  “If Susan dies and the coroner believes your claim, he’ll section her brain, maybe keep some of it. That will erase the memories lodged there. It’ll destroy any hope of reviving her.”

  Blevin spread both hands in a we’re-professionals gesture to Stern. “You can see that they’re fixated on this preposterous corpse-freezing idea, to the exclusion of any other considerations.”

  “Gentlemen”—Stern sighed—“I am trying to find out the truth here. I haven’t got time to referee between you two.”

  “My point is that Dr. Blevin is trying to use your investigation to get at us.”

  Stern smiled. “And you? You were trying hard to convince me it’s an accident, so I won’t turn the case over to the coroner if she dies.”

  Alex hoped his face gave nothing away. He had hoped that Stern wouldn’t think of that, but he should have realized that was a futile wish, once Stern had some knowledge of cryonics. “I do think it’s an accident. Nobody had anything to gain from—”