CHILLER

by Gregory Benford

  Alex kept up, but he wasn’t there to shine. It was enough to pour himself into the game.

  Everybody had the moves. Trick dribbles, footwork fakes, the collapsing full-court press. The fine art of the slap steal, the squeeze, the trap. And the one-on-one sparring—blocking, getting in the other guy’s face, hitting the outlet man on the fast break, maxing your free throws.

  He was winded in thirty minutes, staggering at the hour. These guys aren’t that much younger than me, he thought, leaning over to let sweat drip off him, lungs heaving. He bowed out of the next game and cooled off with a walk on the beach. That made him think of Susan, though. The contrast of her icy stasis with the surge and sweat of lunging bodies made him reflective, moody.

  Some called this Silicone Valley, but the meat in this market was real. Deeply tanned athletes parked their jeeps with giant tires in handicapped spots, muttering, “Only be a sec.” Lolitas in string bikinis roller-skated by gawking men and then spun to a stop, glaring and indignant at their audience’s open-mouthed attention. The body reigned here.

  He wondered if he was souring on California. Lately it seemed that personal prosperity depended less on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and more on the Health of Nations. The life sciences commanded the metaphors of innovation. It was an ideology of hope, craving choices. Bionarcissism, the conspicuous consumption of “health” as a commodity: plastic surgery and diet for the skin’s pesky folds and wrinkles; lasers to clear blurred vision; pills galore to erase pain, amplify energy; clever genetic engineering to tailor away chronic ailments and defective children.

  The beach, despite its lazy sun worshipers, was a battleground. Roving eyes compared slim thighs, bunched pecs, ribbed bellies. Stay slim, live right, last forever. Try the fad treatments. And if you couldn’t see eating like a lab rat for 130 years, or smearing yourself with sheep placenta daily, or nipping and tucking each new skin fold—well, just change the definition of old. The sinful Older Woman, Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, back in the 1960s, was thirty-six-year-old Anne Bancroft. But the yuppies and baby boomers had aged, and Bancroft might get away with that kind of role even now.

  Alex yanked himself out of his mood, ducked under the public showers at the beach, and changed clothes in his Volvo. It was running okay again after replacing the starter, and he took a back route to work. There were few remaining orange groves in Orange County. He drove slowly through the biggest, savoring the thick aroma of blossoms that swarmed through the windows and up into his head, lifting the melancholy clouds in his mind.

  How did we lose all this? he wondered. By inches. The developers, the eager immigrants, the boundless plenty of sunlight and sharp air—all conspired to wedge in just one more condo, another street, a minimart to shave seconds of convenience from myriad lives.

  The mood at I2 was no better than the one he brought. Ray Constantine and Bob Skinner were tending to the perpetual small jobs. Alex talked with Skinner about their legal problems for a bit while helping clean up some of the mess left by the sheriff’s deputies. They had taken most of the emergency electrical cart, returning the gear banged-up and messy. In the guise of searching, deputies had opened sterile tubing packs at random, dumping them anywhere they liked among the storage shelves. Perfusate chemicals had been opened and tested for cocaine, then tossed aside, usually so they would drip onto shelves below.

  Skinner had just come up before a UCI Intern Review Board hearing. They wanted to know about his involvement with I2.

  “Guess who brought up the question?” Skinner asked with a wan smile. “Three guesses.”

  “Blevin, Blevin, and Blevin.”

  “Bingo.”

  Alex snorted in exasperation. “The man never rests.”

  “I think I have some chance of charging him with conflict of interest.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s getting some flak from the med school. The dean has distanced himself from Blevin since Susan died.”

  “Good news, but too damned late.”

  Skinner nodded. “His pushing that suicide idea backfired. People figure he drove Susan to it.”

  “Bull. Susan didn’t kill herself. But if the idea hurts Blevin, great.”

  “So I think I can maintain that he’s just trying to push his own agenda, bringing me up before the board. If I—”

  A hooting alert sounded through the bay. Alex jumped up and ran into the main office. Ray Constantine had already called up the trouble onto the main display board. “It’s Susan,” Ray said.

  “The nitrogen,” Alex said with a sinking feeling.

  “Looks like.”

  “Damn!”

  “It’s running low. Maybe four hours left.”

  “I thought that fill-up was supposed to last through tomorrow night.”

  Ray rolled back in his wheelchair and consulted a smaller screen where numbers wavered in yellow phosphorescent columns. “That feeder system we rigged has got some heat leaks in it.”

  “We wrapped more insulation around it,” Skinner said.

  Ray grunted. “The sucker still boils off way more nitrogen than it should.”

  To minimize damage to Susan’s cells required that she be lowered slowly down the three-hundred-degree slope in temperature. Automatic valves bled liquid nitrogen into her vault. The system had just sent a radio cry for help.

  Alex looked out at the shimmering morning sun. “We can’t wait for dark?”

  “No way.”

  “We could take a big slug of nitrogen out on the truck.”

  Ray frowned, said nothing. Skinner bit his lip, face clouded. Alex sensed in them a natural reluctance to face another risk, another round of the bad luck that had plagued them.

  “Right, the truck’s too conspicuous,” Alex said. “I’ll carry a small dewar on my back.”

  Skinner nodded, relieved. Alex realized that Skinner must have been weighing his options a lot lately. Getting further implicated in the now-infamous Missing Body Caper would not help him.

  It took a while to rig a backpack to carry the cylindrical dewar. When it was filled, Skinner helped Alex swing the dewar up and settle the straps on his shoulders. He felt the bite. “Good thing I don’t have to go far,” he said to Skinner.

  They checked to see if anybody was pulling into the parking lot outside. All clear. He went out the loading dock and trotted into the shelter of the trees.

  He moved with extreme care, erasing signs of his passage. He avoided vegetation where possible and slid through bushes so that stems bent but did not break. This was crucial, for a broken stem cannot be fixed without careful cutting and even so, a sure reader of signs would catch it. Leaving stems or branches pointing the way you came was bad, too. They had to be gently urged back to a random pattern. His adventures in the Boy Scouts, pretending to be Indians, were paying off. Stealth spelled safety.

  The whispering wind calmed him. He caught the soft rustle of the life that underlay all fervent human busyness and felt himself relax into it. Everything in the land fled from his footsteps. Lizards scattered into the nearest cracked rock. Quail hovered in shadow, hoping he would take them for stones—but at the last moment they lost their nerve and burst into frantically flapping birds. Mice evaporated, doves whispered skyward, rabbits crazylegged away in a dead heat. A coyote had melted into legend, leaving only tracks and dung. The heart of the arroyo was pale sand, a field whose emptiness exposed life here for what it was: conjured out of nothingness, and bound for it, too. Desert plants existed as exiles from each other, hoarding their domains of water collection done silently beneath the sand by single-minded roots. For a plant, neighboring vacancy was life.

  He had not seen Susan’s refuge in daylight since they had brought her here a week before. There was no time to let his mood fasten on this place, though. He quickly switched the dewars, checked the fittings, started the trickle of bitter cold into Susan’s cylinder. He permitted himself one moment, while he was waiting for an automatic valve to pop open. His hand reste
d on the cool metal. Rest easy, old friend. We’re still fighting for you.

  He hefted the empty dewar onto his back, then stopped. It was blatant evidence, after all. He rolled it into a corner and then stripped off the backpack carrier and left it, too. Quickly he resealed the entrance.

  He was intent on erasing his footprints, walking backward down the sandy slope and using a whisk broom. He did not hear the helicopter until it came hammering over the ridge line above.

  “Halt!” a cutting, amplified voice barked down. “Do not move!”

  Slowly he shaded his eyes with one hand and read OC SHERIFF on the helicopter. With the other hand he slipped the whisk broom under his shirt. Then he stood and watched the excited, scowling faces above. Wind and noise buffeted him. A deputy came trotting up the arroyo. Only then would the chopper depart to land in the I2 parking lot. Its whump-whump-whump had deafened Alex, and it took a while to understand the deputy.

  “We’ll just stay right here, mister,” the deputy insisted.

  “I didn’t know taking a walk was illegal.”

  “No smart mouth. You wait.”

  Alex sat down and tried to look bored. Depression settled over him. Had the cops positioned someone out here to track him, send up an alert? He should have thought of that. He felt hollow.

  Detectives Stern and Detweiler came slogging up the arroyo with a corps of sweating deputies behind them.

  “You trying to run?” Detweiler grinned slyly.

  “I didn’t know you were coming. I would have put on some coffee. In case you wanted to ask me any more questions.”

  Detweiler frowned. “We’re going to throw a lot more at you this time, creep.”

  “Are you guys just out for a hike, like me?”

  “The hell you’re hiking. You heard we were coming.”

  Alex was startled and tried not to show it. He turned to Stern. “What’s the story?”

  Stern said evenly, “The grand jury returned an indictment against you for obstruction of justice and a few other charges. They authorized another search for the body.”

  “I want to be there when you ransack my home again.”

  “You will be.”

  “Are Skinner and Flint included?”

  “Sure,” Detweiler said. “A regular li’l creep roundup.”

  “Okay, let’s go inside. I’ve got to go down to the jail, right?”

  Stern said, “Later. We’ll search here first.”

  “I hope you don’t think you’re going to open the suspension cylinders.”

  Stern shook his head. Detweiler said, “You give us any lip, I’ll pop the seals on those corpsicles of yours.”

  Alex gritted his teeth and said nothing. Stern looked around. “What were you doing out here?”

  “Taking a walk before my shift starts.”

  “Uh-huh.” Stern’s eyes narrowed, and Alex felt his heart lurch.

  “There are a lot of deer up in these hills,” Alex said. “Over that way there’s coyote tracks right behind the deer, and what looks like a cougar.”

  “Yeah?” Stern was interested. “Show me.”

  Detweiler stayed behind with the others, talking loudly into a walkie-talkie. Alex spent some time going on about the tracks and Stern nodded, crouching to look at the sandy soil. Alex had led him off to the side so that the strokes of his brush were not visible.

  Stern straightened up and looked at Alex for a long moment. Then he turned and called to the other men, “Spread out. Search this area. Report anything that looks funny.”

  Alex let nothing show in his face. After a long moment he managed a shrug. “I know you’ve got to go through the motions, but do I have to stand out here? I’m late for work.”

  “You’re going downtown again.”

  “My hourly will get docked. Can’t you—”

  “Move it.”

  The worst of it was the waiting. He managed to delay awhile at I2, expecting at every moment to hear hoarse shouts of discovery. None came. Then they loaded him into a sheriff’s cruiser, complete with the wire cage back seat, and took him into Santa Ana.

  Paperwork. Waiting. The I2 lawyer. More bail. More money to juggle. His checkbook was getting riddled. Already he had taken out a short-term loan, paying surrealistic interest, and now he saw he would have to go back for more to get through the month.

  If anybody would give him, infamous body snatcher, a dime.

  More waiting. More paperwork. More legalese.

  But the worst was the battery of reporters, videocams, and snapping cameras as he emerged into the street with Skinner and Flint. The indictment had created a bloodlust in the media. Microphones thrust into his face.

  You’ve got her, haven’t you? What would make you give up the corpse? Do you deny that you’re a member of a Satanic cult? What have you chiller people really used the body for, anyway?

  He got back to I2 as fast as possible, brushing aside the media feeding frenzy. Flint and Skinner went off to tend their own gardens, the three shaking hands solemnly, comrades in a cause they could scarcely speak of directly, for fear of being overheard. But there was a quiet steadiness between them, a peace almost like the slow silences he had felt when he had walked, in better days, back in the arroyo.

  He walked into I2 with tingling apprehension. Stern was in the main bay watching two deputies methodically cataloging gear on the shelves.

  “Are you finished in the arroyo?” Alex asked casually.

  “Maybe,” Stern said, eyeing him closely.

  He let into his face no hint of the sinking feeling that washed over him. Small triumphs went unheralded in this game. “What happens next?”

  “We toss your apartment.”

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  Crime wasn’t exciting at all, he thought wearily. He would have to remember that when he thought of future career moves.

  Kathryn came over and helped him put the place back together after the deputies left. They had been thorough, polite for a change, and seldom put anything back right.

  He took her out to dinner at Rumari’s, an Italian joint in Laguna. They walked on the beach and came back to his place and made love, all without speaking very much. There seemed no need.

  Late that night, after Kathryn had left, he took out the garbage for the early-morning trash pickup. He didn’t mind sorting plastics, aluminum, glass, and newspapers into their proper recycling bins; at the end of a day that hadn’t yielded much accomplishment, a touch of civic virtue was a welcome afternote.

  As he rattled the lid on the last can he heard the rush and whoosh of rumbling menace. An inky figure hurtled toward him. He leaped back to the curb as a teenager shot past on a skateboard, rasping into his turn, steel wheels swooping with casual ease across and down the street. The boy passed beneath a yellow streetlight, and Alex could see in the smooth, turned face a glaze of oblivious pleasure, eyes fixed upon an infinite perspective. He felt a peculiar pang. When was the last time he had done anything so blissful, so unthinking, so much fun? The boy sped away on the street’s steepening slope, rrrrrrr in the sharp air, blithe freedom passing him by without a wave.

  13

  GEORGE

  There are many tricks in the computer world, and George knew most of them.

  He had started as a cracker, one of the legion who infiltrate systems to filch credit card numbers or other data. Typical teenage bozo stuff, he saw now. Making calls out of pay phones, with an acoustic coupler clamped on the mouthpiece like a plastic parasite. Tapping in with a cheap Taiwan laptop computer, so that if he was discovered, he could dump the gear and run. A can of Jolt cola, “all the sugar and twice the caffeine.”

  He had quickly graduated from such easily caught invasions and began planting worms. These were illicit accounts in bank systems that gently transferred funds out, into a labyrinth of dummy accounts, and finally into one that George could tap with one of his many credit cards. Tricky, risky, but profitable.

  When he went to work on the exte
nsive I2 files, he had at first considered installing a logic bomb. This could be a mere few lines of insinuating orders, nothing obvious. But the shrewdly stated commands could go berserk later and destroy vast realms of existing computer software. He had gleaned several crafty logic bombs from his thousands of hours at the keyboard. He enjoyed exchanging secrets with other hackers through the message boards available by merely dialing a number.

  But today he decided against that. Too obvious. He needed a Trojan horse, some malign software disguised as an interesting, friendly program. Slip it into I2 files, let it lie in wait.

  That took him most of the day. The procedures were subtle, and someone at I2 had erected fresh defenses. But he got through.

  While he skated joyfully through the I2 networks, he stopped to check the positions of his quarry. That premed guy, Skinner, was at UCI. Alex Cowell was at I2 itself.

  He thought about Kathryn Sheffield and her tight rounded ass and wished he could track her. But she wasn’t a signed-up member of I2, for some reason. She had seen him once, got to be careful about that. She liked me, appreciated the way I dress, the suit and all, sharp woman. But she works for the chillers, and God has ordained her fate, there’s nothing I can do about that.

  They deserved it, they all did.

  He was just doing what was necessary, acting out God’s will. They had brought all this on themselves by not reading the Lord’s word and knowing about the bleached bones, or how important the vision of rising skeletons was. The divinely risen dead would dance merrily at the end of time, animated by sweet celestial music, skeletal grins wide beneath the waning red sun, their bony feet stirring the dust of uncounted generations long passed.

  The grand vision swept whistling through him.