CHILLER

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CHILLER Page 36

by Gregory Benford


  Kathryn said, “But all you’ve got is suspicion!”

  “Not all,” Stern said. “Her dog, remember? It hasn’t turned up.”

  Alex gritted his teeth, and Kathryn said quickly, “It ran off. It was frightened. Maybe somebody ran over it on the Coast Highway.”

  “It’s another detail that doesn’t fit,” Stern said.

  “You’re not seriously proposing that someone killed Susan, then stole her dog?” Kathryn asked.

  Stern shrugged. “I don’t propose anything. Not yet.”

  “That step follows after all the evidence is gathered,” Dr. Wellington said, “which I intend to do.”

  “Look,” Alex said rapidly, “I know the cause of death. We took X-rays while we were suspending her, to see how the glycerol was circulating. The embolism was very clear. I’ve got them right here.” He held up a manila folder.

  Wellington accepted them, glancing quickly at the prints, nodding, and for a moment Kathryn felt a spurt of hope. “These will be useful, but we shall determine the cause of death.”

  “She’s not really dead, not in the full sense,” Alex said, his voice thin and desperate. “Her structure is still there. You’re going to destroy that, just to satisfy your curiosity?”

  “What nonsense!” Blevin spat back. “Dead is dead, and surely the coroner knows this better than some jumped-up crank—”

  “Death is a continuum,” Alex said loudly.

  He’s going to lose it completely, she thought. He spat out the words. “Every time a little girl is pulled out of a snowdrift, declared clinically dead, then revives—every time that happens, dead is not dead!”

  Kathryn had a moment of split loyalty as she watched Alex’s face give way to anguish. She understood these officials; after all, they were following the conventional definition of death, and the hallowed traditions of the law. But she saw, too, that Alex was fighting to preserve a last, small possibility for his friend.

  And neither side was going to give ground.

  “We are carrying out the law, Mr. Cowell,” Dr. Wellington said severely. He flicked a glance at his big Rolex imitation, too fast to actually read the dial, to show that he was a man whose time was precious.

  “To warm her up”—Alex’s anger had dissipated, or burrowed inside somewhere, for he now seemed dazed—“without any technical measures, that will rip her cells completely to pieces. Do irreparable damage. You can’t, you just can’t.”

  “We will do our jobs,” Dr. Wellington said. “Just as Dr. Blevin has, bringing his ideas to my attention. And as Detective Stern has. We will have to account for the fractures from the freezing in liquid nitrogen. This will be a technically difficult autopsy, one that will break new ground in forensic pathology.”

  “I don’t suppose that fact has colored your thinking?” Kathryn asked mildly.

  “What?” Wellington said, startled.

  “It’s a nice little career enhancer, isn’t it?”

  “I object to any such insinuation,” Wellington said, standing up briskly. “And I’ll thank you to leave.”

  They got out of there fast. Down the bleached glow and astringent smells of the long corridors, Kathryn holding Alex’s arm protectively. A sheriff’s deputy told them there was a cab stand down the block, and on the way there she said soothing things, meaningless things, any words that might get through to Alex. He stared straight ahead, saying nothing. His face was tight, distant, working with small flickerings in his eyes, his lips twisting—echoes of inner conflicts.

  Then, just as they got into a yellow cab, he looked directly at her. “We’re not going to leave her out in the warm,” he said. “We won’t.”

  7

  ALEX

  He tossed some cash to Kathryn and jumped out of the yellow taxi before it had fully stopped. She paid off the cab while he ran into the Immortality Incorporated facility. The front door was locked, a precaution they always took when they were low on staff. Alex opened the door and went through the front office, then trotted into the main bay. Gary Flint was there with the medical student from UCI, Robert Skinner. Alex shouted, “How’s the nitrogen filling going?”

  Gary looked up from a silvered blue sleeping bag that lay on a gurney. Inside was Susan Hagerty. Gary saw Alex’s wild gaze and answered with deliberate steadiness, “We’re about ready to start.”

  “Good. Change of plans. Big change. We’ve got to use the emergency storage.”

  It took several minutes to explain to Gary and Skinner what had happened at the coroner’s. They listened in stark, open-mouthed disbelief. Kathryn came in, her face flushed, hands clamped around the envelope holding their forlorn, rejected paperwork.

  Gary nodded decisively. “Blevin, he’s the one. Stern’s case is all guesswork, but Blevin and his suicide theory—”

  “That’s what’s so awful,” Kathryn said. “They have two incompatible theories—suicide and murder—and we got sandbagged by Stern while we were defending against Blevin.”

  “Never mind that,” Alex said. “We’ve got to get Susan into emergency storage.”

  Gary nodded again. “We’re ready for nitrogen staging.”

  “Move her first,” Alex said, “then nitrogen.”

  The human body has considerable mass. For the last three days Susan had been immersed in a silicone oil bath, cooling to a temperature of –77 degrees Centigrade. Alex checked the seals on the shiny silver-blue, precooled sleeping bag into which the team had recently slipped Susan. For a moment he wanted to peel the bag back, gaze once more down into Susan’s composed, resolute features. She would have known what to do in this crisis. He missed her steady judgment, her sense of the many vectors society brought to bear. Was he going off half-cocked here? Should they all talk it over a little? Or was speed essential?

  “We could let the lawyers hassle this out,” Gary said uncertainly.

  Skinner blinked owlishly. His face was drawn and pale from the long, tedious hours of cooldown. “Yeah, get an injunction against the coroner to show cause, or something like that.”

  “That will take days,” Kathryn said.

  Alex glanced at her. Her mouth was set firmly, all her lipstick licked away by her fretting tongue. He said, “Right. And the coroner won’t carefully warm Susan up. He’ll probably put her under heat lamps or something. She’ll be gone by the time our lawyer gets in front of a judge.”

  Skinner bit his lower lip. Alex could see the implications dawning on him. Skinner was in the most trying, crucial years of medical school. In a while he would apply for a license to practice medicine. A gaudy, public association with cryonics—particularly amid a case of “body-snatching”—could wreck his life.

  “Look, Bob,” Alex said, “you can bow out of this.”

  Skinner worried his lower lip some more, eyes seeing nothing.

  Gary said, “Yeah, go home. This is going to get messy.”

  Skinner nodded, not at Gary’s remark, but to some inner voice. “No. No. I’ll stay.”

  Gary gently patted Skinner on his shoulder. “Okay. We get her to safety, then.”

  “So you figure to do something right now,” Skinner said. “Make her be missing.”

  “Damn right,” Alex said.

  “How?” Kathryn asked.

  “Come on.” Alex waved them toward the back of the bay. “Let’s get Susan lashed on here.” He drew the straps from under the gurney.

  “What are you going to do?” Kathryn asked.

  Alex had said nothing specific to her in the taxi. He loved her, sure, but she was not really a cryonicist. She might not fathom all this, and anybody could get rattled if they had to handle too much at once. Let her stay ignorant a little longer, then. “Could you stand guard? Stay in the front office. Start the telephone tree, call in some members. We’re going to need them.”

  “What if the sheriff shows up?”

  “Stall them. Ask to see papers, warrants.”

  Kathryn waved her hands, exasperated. “But I’m not an of
ficer of the corporation. How can I—”

  “You’re all we’ve got. Move!”

  Alex turned and ran through the towering ranks of steel cylinders and out onto the polished concrete loading dock. The new I2 truck—a used Ford with an extended flatbed—stood nearby. He unlocked the wall-mounted security box and grabbed the truck keys off their hook.

  As he trotted over to the truck, he noticed that they hadn’t had time to stencil the company logo on it yet. Just as well; less conspicuous. He had never really liked the company name, anyway. They didn’t promise immortality. At best, cryonics was a second chance at life. Right now those chances didn’t look very good, either.

  He backed the truck to the dock. Gary Flint and Robert Skinner brought Susan out, rolling her carefully on rubber wheels. They carefully slid the stretcher onto the truck bed and lashed it to the securing hooks. Alex got in the truck cab—an act that still called up memories of the crash, the flames, no matter how he tried to suppress them—and slammed the door. The two men behind rolled a dewar of liquid nitrogen across the dock and directly onto the bed. Alex was putting the Ford in gear when Kathryn appeared in his window, standing on the running board. Her hair was touseled, her mouth awry with excitement.

  “Hey, what—”

  “Ray Constantine showed up. On crutches, no less. His shift is just starting. And he is an I2 officer.”

  “Damn.”

  She grinned impishly, enjoying this. “Now you’ve got to cut me in on the secret.”

  He said grimly, “Climb in.” She laughed, which startled him further.

  He pulled carefully around the edge of the I2 building, halfway expecting patrol cars to come slamming into the front parking lot. But there was nothing there except their own cars. Nor was there any traffic visible at midday on Santiago Canyon Road. He waved for the two men riding in the bed to lie down. The truck surged powerfully onto the highway, went a hundred yards, and then turned off onto a weathered dry track. Alex clunked the shift into low, and they roared up a barely visible trail. It petered out in another hundred yards and they ground to a halt.

  “You’re going to hide her out here?”

  “Help them with the brush. Gloves are in the glove compartment.”

  “I always wondered why they called it that.” She climbed out and helped tug big tumbleweed bushes out of the way. The surface root systems of the plants made it possible to pull them away from their natural growth patterns and hold them back while Alex drove through the temporary opening. Then the three dragged the towering dusty-tan bushes back into place.

  Kathryn climbed back in, puffing. “So you had this all planned.”

  “Not for Susan specifically. It’s our emergency backup.” He took them forward at a slow crawl over rough ground.

  “You’ve been here a fair amount.”

  He blinked. “How do you know that?”

  “Look at the tire tracks. It hasn’t rained in weeks, and I can see four separate sets.”

  He stopped the truck and leaned out the window. “Bob, can you run back and cover our tracks beyond the bushes?”

  They snarled forward. Alex was conscious of the truck’s noise. They were angling back into the arroyo. What if a sheriff’s deputy heard them?

  The possibility of pursuit, of deputies yapping at their heels, brought the old horrors welling up.

  He knew what the coroner would do. It would all transpire on tiled surfaces gleaming under bright fluorescents, with strong suction hoods to spirit away unwanted odors. The sterilized, stainless-steel glaze would flood the space with merciless glare, the precision, promise and hope of modern medicine. But he had seen the analytical, careful way an electric vibrating saw cuts a thin line around the head, just above the earline. Then they lifted the top of the skull away, like taking off a beanie cap. They cut away the membranes and arteries holding the brain in place. It took some work with the fingers to free the brain until it lifted out. About fourteen hundred grams of wrinkled jelly, the essence of Susan Hagerty. Memories, personality, hopes, and dreams—a lump of matter that with a few applied volts could laugh or cry, ponder and plan, could know inexpressible joys. They would then cleanly slice it into sections, inspect it for hemorrhaging or lesions. There would probably be some blood clots, some explanation for her coma. And then they would toss the now-useless, decaying mass onto a sideboard, where it would await the trash collector’s red plastic bag.

  The truck lumbered and dipped through a narrow path in the chaparral. Alex wrestled with the wheel and forced his mind back into the present.

  “Boy, we really need the four-wheel drive,” Kathryn said. He was somewhat surprised that she didn’t pepper him with questions. Instead, she studied him with disconcerting interest.

  “We didn’t smooth out the track any. The fewer signs, the better. Hold on, here’s the gully.”

  They lurched into the dry wash at the bottom of the arroyo. The Ford slid in the sand, wheels whirred angrily, and then rolled up the incline.

  “That’s the footpath over there, right?” Kathryn pointed.

  “Right. We cover it with the same tumbleweed trick, at five different spots.”

  Kathryn nodded. He liked the way she figured things out for herself. It was a risk, he supposed, letting her in on this most closely guarded I2 secret. But he was sure of her, with a solidity that he knew sprang from his love rather than from his sober judgment. Well, he thought, all that judgment had done him no good in his marriage, so how much real use was it?

  They worked up through several twists of the dry streambed. “The mystery spot is somewhere near here.”

  “Right. Bet you can’t see it even now,” he said as the truck stopped.

  Kathryn searched the worn sandstone slopes on each side. “I can’t even see any footprints.”

  “We brush them away when we leave. Come on.”

  Alex held up his hand for silence after they all got out. On the whispering breeze the hum of a car on Santiago Canyon Road rose and ebbed. No slamming doors, no squealing tires. Just the lazy warm wind. They nodded to each other, and Alex fetched forth a new set of keys. He watched Kathryn, feeling a small measure of pride, as they walked up a slope crowded with manzanita bushes, rounded a split sandstone boulder—and stopped at a jutting wall of conglomerate rock. Or so it looked.

  “Concrete.” Alex rapped it. “We copied the technique from Laguna Beach.”

  “I remember.” Kathryn ran a hand over the pebbled surface. “They blend it in with the bluff rock.”

  Alex fitted keys into two small crevices in the rock. “Right here, for the door, the concrete’s only half an inch thick. Ray did the work.”

  The heavy door swung out on thick steel bolts. Alex flicked on battery lamps and stepped inside. The single room ran twelve feet into the soft stone and housed a single glistening steel cylinder. It smelled dry and cool.

  “Let’s move her,” Alex said.

  He was uncomfortably aware that even in her insulated bag, Susan would slowly climb up the steep gradient of temperature. Each warming degree might bring further cell damage. Organisms suffered wreckage of membranes, enzymes, and untold chemical subtleties when they rewarmed. Nobody quite knew why. The riddle awaited a future generation of biological research. One with fewer Blevins around, Alex thought bitterly.

  The four of them carried Susan up and into the narrow facility. She slid into the cylinder, inside the shiny sheets of aluminized Mylar layered to cut heat transfer. Stainless steel withstood deep cold without becoming brittle. There was a vacuum gap between inner and outer skins and thick insulation. Wire leads at both ends were ready to send an alert to Alex’s beeper, if the liquid nitrogen level got low.

  “You did all this and kept it secret,” Kathryn said.

  “And hoped we’d never need it,” Gary said somberly. “Finished it just a few months back. Sure didn’t think it would get filled so quick.”

  Alex secured Susan in the cylinder. He started to swing the end cap shut and pa
used, peering in. When all this madness was over they would—he hoped—be able to move Susan to one of the big cylinders in the main bay. But for now, this was good-bye. He noticed that the others stood quietly, heads lowered. He reminded himself that he wasn’t religious. But that did not erase the deep, human need for some ceremony to mark Susan’s passage.

  “God rest you, Susan. I promise you, I—we won’t let you down.”

  He wanted to say something more, but the words would not come through his tight, agonized throat. He remembered Sheila at the party: You guys and us Baptists, we’re alike. The memory sent blurred, troubling thoughts skating through his mind.

  He coughed to cover his unease. “Okay, now let’s lug that nitrogen in here,” he said gruffly.

  8

  KATHRYN

  She slipped from behind a stately stand of eucalyptus and walked with what she hoped was nonchalance toward the loading dock of Immortality Incorporated. The roundabout route of the truck had been deceptive; the emergency storage site was only five hundred yards from I2. Now she knew why Alex had taken Sparkle for walks down the long, rugged arroyo; he had been finishing the outfitting of the hideaway and needed a cover. Few in I2 knew about the site, and certainly Kathryn, as a noncryonicist, had to be kept in the dark. She had to give him credit; the guy could keep his mouth shut and lie while looking like a blue-eyed saint—a vivid contrast with the man she was discovering in bed.

  She had already circled far enough around to see the sheriff’s patrol cars parked at odd angles in the front lot. She told herself to be calm, not to betray anything, and most of all to cover any evidence of their hasty departure. But that did not make her stomach stop fluttering. It felt as if it wanted to take wing on its own.

  There was nobody in the loading area or the cool recesses of the main bay. She heard loud voices from the front office and steeled herself. Head held high, she walked in briskly. She faked mild surprise at the four sheriff’s deputies grouped around Ray Constantine.

  They wore irked expressions, but at least they were not the thick-necked glowerers she had expected. Ray was sitting with his arms crossed, face set, saying nothing beyond the obvious, as she had told him. Detective Stern was talking on a telephone. When he saw her, he spoke rapidly into the receiver and hung up.

 

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