CHILLER

by Gregory Benford

  Yet it seemed that her life divided into two eras, with After Alex much the better part—a long, warm epoch of discovering him, and finding surprises about herself, too. He had made her see that she kept most people at bay with her crisp, brittle persona. He had put up with it only so far, and then he had joked and kidded and soothed her out of those moods. He was quiet, even shy—except in bed—and really completely ruthless, never letting her get away with a glossy superficiality or offhand bit of easy cynicism. Two months! And they had a whole lifetime left. What could this man do for an encore? It was going to be fun finding out.

  She used her key and walked into the main office of Immortality Incorporated. Ray Constantine was sitting at the central computer crescent, frowning at the big control screen. “How did it go?” she asked.

  Without taking his eyes from the screen, Ray said automatically, “The patient is in guarded but stable condition.”

  “Ah, the cryonicists classic claim. At least things don’t get worse.”

  “Hey, it’s the truth.”

  She dropped with a sigh into a roller chair and fought down the impulse to prop her feet up on the desk. Accumulated mail and paperwork covered half the desk. She retreated into it, disposing of the junk mail and doing blessedly mindless routine.

  “Damn this software,” Ray muttered.

  He and Alex and several other I2 members had been working for weeks with the computer system, battling unseen antagonists who lurked in the byzantine network. Ray sighed. “I found another Trojan horse in the MedAlarm system yesterday. Thought I had it fixed. Now it’s fritzing again.”

  “Trojan horse?”

  “A program somebody plants in your system, looks innocent. It just sits awhile, then bursts open, lets these little damaging programs loose.”

  “Who would do that?”

  “Hackers, maybe. Pranksters. But this stuff looks too sharp, too specific to our system architecture.”

  She knew Alex and Ray had been fighting constant incursions into the computers, and a trickle of suspicion ran through her, a cold apprehension. “What’s wrong now?”

  “Got something funny.” Ray stabbed a finger at the screen. “Alex’s MedAlarm just came on.”

  “Are you guys checking the system?”

  “No, this looks like an honest alarm.”

  “Isn’t Alex here?” She felt a spike of concern.

  “He took nitrogen out to Susan.”

  She was on her feet without thinking about it, staring at the screen. This is an error. A dumb mistake. Please. “Find him.”

  Ray called up the satellite locator program. It filled the screen with a topographical map, curving nests of green lines on a black background. Ray tapped a subprogram and blue dots appeared, the perspective zoomed in, and a bright yellow flashing icon pointed: I2.

  The map exploded a portion of its grid until she could make out the contours of the ridgeline behind I2. Beside a wedge of green lines, indicating a steep slope, a red dot strobed.

  “That’s got him tabbed all right.” Ray pointed. “That’s not far from the emergency storage.”

  “But what could—I mean—there can’t—”

  “Let’s go.” Ray tapped for a printout, but Kathryn beat him to the laser printer. Three copies came out, the color ink gleaming, and when she looked up Ray was gone.

  Bob Skinner shuffled out of the dorm room, blinking. Ray was pushing him along, walking by using a single crutch. “What’s up?” Bob said blearily.

  “Something’s happened to Alex.” Kathryn felt her words burst out, the awful solidness of them giving weight to her tight, rising anxiety.

  “Huh?” Bob blinked. “Damn.” He took only seconds to scan the MedAlarm status report on the big screen. “Ummm. Rise in skin conductance, heart rate erratic.”

  “Oxygen?” Kathryn asked.

  “A little low, and falling.”

  “Couldn’t that be from exercise carried out while he’s tired?”

  “Doubtful, but possible. These diagnostics aren’t perfect.”

  Kathryn felt a jolt of elation and searched Bob’s face for more, but he wore a medical student’s dispassion. “What’s the location?” Bob asked, his mouth twisted with uncertainty. Ray showed him the map.

  Without a word Bob turned to a gray cabinet of open shelves, marked EMERGENCY, and snatched up a medical care backpack. “Take this,” he said, handing both of them a kit.

  Kathryn opened hers and checked the flashlight and radio phones inside. Their verifying lights went on reassuringly. By then, Bob had his shoes on and a red windbreaker. They went out through the loading dock, each clutching a copy of the topo map. Bob grabbed a fold-up cloth stretcher from the I2 ambulance.

  Ray kept pace, his face lined. “Shall I call paramedics?”

  They stopped in the rear parking lot, the same thought striking simultaneously. “Damn,” Bob said, startled. “We’d lead them to the emergency storage. To Susan.”

  Ray said, “The locator says he’s near the facility, but not in it.”

  Kathryn said, “Maybe if we’re careful—”

  Bob shook his head. “If we get a team stumbling around out here, maybe a helicopter, too—they could see it. For sure.”

  Kathryn said, “But if we don’t, and something’s really wrong—”

  “Look, take the truck,” Ray said quickly. “You can work your way partway around the ridge. You know that dirt path. Faster than on foot, for sure.”

  “You mean you won’t call the paramedics?” Kathryn demanded.

  Ray looked at her steadily for a moment that seemed unendurable, but passed in a heartbeat. “Not yet. Let’s see what’s going on first.”

  “But if Alex—”

  “We’ll reach him long before paramedics could,” Bob said.

  “They’re trained. They—”

  “I’m almost a doctor. And I’m here.”

  Ray said flatly, “Enough talk—let’s move it.”

  Kathryn drove. She had used the truck several times now and knew most of the route. Bob knew the rest. He checked through the medical backpack, rearranging things. They jounced into sandy ruts, catching the tailgate in dips, the engine grinding. She slewed too hard on a left turn and the tires spun madly, nearly getting stuck. Branches whipped the windshield. Her nose wrinkled with a sour smell, and she realized it was herself, a sharp bite of sweat and fear.

  She concentrated on weaving along the barely marked track but could not keep out of her mind the images of driving with Alex in this same truck through a night like this, racing toward doomed, crumpled Susan. So long ago. Yet only two weeks. A time crowded with legalese and grinding anxiety. But looming larger now were the quiet yet grand moments with Alex. They had watched the late-night news together, greeting the sensationalized coverage of I2 and Alex with catcalls. She had never realized how TV news teams were a pseudofamily, with jokester weathermen and solemn daddy-figures and concerned, earnest moms. The lightweight team member always handled the I2 items, playing them for macabre laughs. Kathryn guessed that many forlorn viewers tuned in not for news but for an echo of family warmth. It was all rather sad, revealing a vast, unspoken loneliness.

  The path ended. She slammed to a stop. Bob checked the topo map and pointed to the left. “Instead of going up by the facility, let’s follow along the base of the hill. It looks like the signal’s from over there.”

  “How far?”

  “Couple hundred yards, looks like.”

  She rummaged in the truck seat. “Damn it, where’s that hand-held locator?”

  “I’ve got it.”

  She jumped down from the truck and ran through the scrub bushes. Beyond the headlights the night swarmed in on them in dry embrace. Bob fell behind. She held her flashlight tightly and barreled ahead, not feeling the twigs that snapped off, the thorns that plucked at her skirt and scratched her arms. She plunged through the slightest opening in the brush if it would shorten her route, crashing through and making a lot of noise
and not caring. Like a jittering small sun the flashlight beam threw giant shadows from inconsequential mounds, brought ropy tangles into stark relief, and bored forward through a pervasive gloom. She ran without thinking, navigating by keeping the rock face as a looming presence on her right. A huge stand of prickly pear cactus towered ahead, and she cut around it, trotting slightly downhill. She saw an opening in the broad pads, a narrow gap between sharp needles, and turned sideways to slip through without slowing. She ran smack into a man.

  He had been hiding from view, crouched down, and she spilled over him, arms flying. Thumped onto the sand. Sprang up.

  He was big and even in a sweat-stained jogging suit she could see he was heavily muscled. But he scrambled away with agility, got to his feet quickly. He was white-faced, his mouth a pale slit. His legs trembled. He reached convulsively for his belly, where the jogging suit was blood-stained.

  I’ve seen him before.

  The shock paralyzed her. Questions reverberated through her, but she knew she had no time to think. Who is he?

  His eyes jerked feverishly from her to the menacing wall of cactus. Gasps shuddered from heaving lungs. Thin lips worked, but no words came forth, only strangled shards of sound. This man was teetering on the verge of some abyss she could not glimpse.

  Later there would be time to understand. Now only Alex mattered. Whoever this was, he was slowing her down. She had to push this massive obstruction out of the way.

  The strained bulk of his shoulders, bunched neck muscles, flexing fingers—all spoke of panic. But his eyes now became more rapt, fixed on her face with blazing intensity. Emotions fought across his face. She sensed that he was balanced between fight and flight, and in another heartbeat would decide.

  She consciously willed herself to take a step forward. What could she say? She remembered her emergency kit. It was clipped to her belt on the left side. She turned so that he could not see it, then reached with her left hand for it, as though for a weapon. She held the flashlight forward, throwing her left side further into shadow.

  She put as much authority as she could muster into her voice. “Freeze. Right now.”

  He gaped, the big mouth open so wide she could see his tongue. “N-no, no.”

  “Freeze, I said!”

  He bolted. Swiveling, lurching among the soaring cactus. A barb snagged him, and he gave a startled cry. He yanked his torn sleeve free and plunged into the brush beyond.

  She let him go. It would be impossible to catch up to him. Darkness swallowed the running shape. A crackling of snapped branches faded until she heard only the hammering of her own pulse. The confrontation had taken perhaps five seconds.

  She took a deep breath and sprinted along the curve of the rock slope, angling upward. In a few moments she saw another beam bobbing to her left. “Bob!”

  “Locator says it’s this way.” She scrambled after his voice. In the inky shadows Bob moved more slowly, encumbered by the medical backpack and fold-up stretcher. He carried the hand-held transmitter that gave a homing vector on an active MedAlarm within a range of a hundred yards.

  She struggled up a rough slope, slipping on gravel and banging her knee. Branches and cactus seemed to reach out of the blackness and pluck at her. She caught up to Bob in a narrow gully. A dark mass filled half the sky to her right, the steep slant of the ridgeline.

  “Here!”

  She reached him as Bob shone the flashlight into Alex’s white face. Bob began checking all over Alex for trauma. Alex lay motionless. The eyes were closed. The chest fluttered. The right arm was caught under him at a wrong angle.

  “Is he…?”

  “Pretty bad,” Bob said, slinging his medical backpack to the ground and fishing for equipment. “Here, hold the light where I’m working.”

  She watched helplessly. Bob carefully inspected Alex’s neck and spine with deft fingers, moving the body as little as possible. Only when he took his hands away and wiped them did she register the sullen red and notice that blood stained the sand around Alex’s head.

  “What’s—what’s—”

  Bob ignored her and worked with an elastic bandage, fixing a tourniquet. “We’ve got to get him to help. I’ve stopped the bleeding, but there’s plenty of other trauma.”

  “His arm—”

  “Yeah, but that’s secondary. He’s in deep shock. That’s the big problem.”

  Alex seemed shrunken. The small cone of the flashlights held him within a precarious zone of weak light, while all around them an immense dark wrapped its sullen cloak. “Do you think—”

  “Lay the stretcher down here.”

  “We can carry him out?”

  “It’s not the best, but I think it’ll be okay.”

  “We can carry him back to the ambulance, then—”

  “Faster to carry him in the truck. We’ll immobilize him in the back.”

  “We’ve got short-range radio. If we call Ray, he can get a helicopter.”

  “Too slow. If we’d called when we started, maybe so.”

  “We can have paramedics waiting—”

  Bob looked up at her for the first time since they had reached Alex. His face was deeply lined, ash-gray in the flashlight glow. A stark desperation narrowed his mouth. “Remember Susan. She’s not far away.”

  “But she’s dead, and Alex—”

  “I’m the physician here. Help me.”

  Kathryn opened her mouth, felt a sudden rush of piercing fear. Everything was coming at her with screaming, headlong velocity. She had to think, see a way through this, understand—

  “Kathryn! Get the stretcher.”

  She closed her mouth and got the stretcher. Helping Bob carefully slide Alex onto the stretcher consumed all her attention. “We’ve got to move him right or risk more trauma to the spine. I don’t think that’s the big problem, though, feels not so bad. But that’s just a prelim inspection. It’s the shock we’ve got to get a grip on.”

  It was comforting to listen to Bob as he put an IV into Alex and began administering a solution. It helped still her inner confusion, and she realized that was why Bob was talking like this, telling her exactly what to do, how Alex was.

  She had time to think again while they carried Alex back along the contour of the hillside. Bob found a narrow path that made progress along a gentle slope. This time they knew where they were going, beckoned by the truck’s headlights. She was intent upon keeping Alex level and steady, watching her footing. The truck’s brilliance seemed to shoot out of the cloaking night like a stabbing bright beacon, surprising her. She concentrated on Bob’s voice, on following each step. They got Alex fixed onto the flatbed of the truck, using the guy ropes and stays.

  She rode beside him on the slow drive back. Alex showed no movement, no eyelid flickering, nothing. She felt his face, his swollen arm, more to seek reassurance than for any medical purpose. She had no clear idea of how to interpret his cold hands, the strange inert quality of his slack face.

  Are you there? she thought. Alex? Fight it, darling. I’m here. She whispered into the dry night, “Don’t leave me. Don’t.”

  They parked beside the ramp of the loading dock. Ray had the tailgate of the truck down before she could get out. He got around amazingly well on one crutch, and she filled him in briefly on what had happened.

  “A man? What man?” Bob asked as they slid Alex out of the truck bed and onto a mobile gurney.

  She described her encounter by the cactus, and the men peppered her with more questions, but then they were in the operating room and talk ceased as they transferred Alex to the central operating table. Bob began treatment, calling out orders in a flat, methodical voice that heartened her with its matter-of-fact professionalism. She fetched supplies, instruments, helped Ray, all in a blur. Minutes stretched into half an hour, then more, and she had begun to breathe normally again when suddenly Bob said, “Heart’s stopped. Give me epinephrine.”

  Time then compressed into wafer-thin instants. Procedures. Instruments. Di
agnostics. Jagged emotions. Shouted orders. Her fingers fumbled as she tried to follow Bob’s barked commands.

  Her hands slipped and wavered, and then she understood that she was not seeing properly. The bleak light of the operating theater diffused and melted around her. She had been crying for some time without knowing it, the world gauzy and glowing.

  She and Ray ran to get the “thumper” from the ambulance, her feet hitting the floor like wooden pegs. They slid it into place over Alex’s chest. It came on, pock-pock-pock-pock-wheeze, maddening in its remorseless energy.

  Alex’s chest labored beneath it, a puppet driven to a parody of life. Moments slid by. Astringent medical smells bit the air. Words flew by, technical, quick, pressing.

  She finally saw there was nothing to do. Bob said no more, just watched the monitors, and finally shook his head.

  “No,” she whispered.

  “I’m afraid so,” Bob said.

  Ray smacked his palm on the operating table. “Damn. Damn.”

  “Look, there’s nothing more to do. If I was at UCI, I could try a few things, but frankly—”

  “Then let’s take him there!” she cried.

  “It’s too late. UCI is half an hour away.”

  “But he—he can’t go just like that, so fast, so—”

  “He can.” Bob’s lined face seemed to collapse, crinkling into despair. “He has.”

  Kathryn stared in disbelief. “What happened, what—”

  “Circulatory failure, major trauma, massive hemorrhage.”

  The three of them gazed across Alex’s body, the overhead lamps etching their drawn expressions.

  Ray said, “Look, this is terrible, but we can’t rest. We’ve got to start his suspension. Now.”

  “Suspension?” Kathryn simply could not comprehend the word. The room itself swam, watery and remote. Their voices came to her through a thick, cottony distance.

  “That’s all we can do,” Bob said, his eyes fixed, as though he listened to an interior voice.

  Ray said tentatively, “You have to pronounce death, sign a certificate.”