Alex moved onto the next. He had never heard of anyone putting windows in a cryonics vault. The plaque beneath the next little viewplate read HOWARD ROBARD HUGHES, 1905-1979. An emaciated, worn face that conveyed a hint of granite resolve. And perhaps a gleam of madness.
The next two names and faces he did not recognize, but the third was familiar from the Pink Panther movies. PETER SELLERS, 1925-1980. There was an odd look of pain to the features.
Several more names and faces, two of them women, meant nothing to him. Many of the very wealthiest managed to keep their names and pictures out of the media, then and now.
But the next one aroused pangs of remembrance. Richard Feynman had been a great genius in theoretical physics, Nobel Prize winner, and a madcap prankster of insatiable curiosity. Alex had loved the books that recounted Feynman’s exploits in his own taped conversations. The face seemed about to break into a grin, open to the world. What would a second Feynman lifetime give the world? At a minimum, a lot of deliciously crazy stories.
He heard an indrawn gasp from Ray and walked over to the next aisle. Ray was leaning against a canister that was slightly longer than the others, shaking his head. “Who’d have believed?” he mused.
Alex looked in. Surprise made him momentarily back off. For some reason the eyes had opened, and the famous face seemed to look directly at him, assertive and mellow. The chiseled features had sagged a bit from how Alex remembered them, but they still conveyed the rough and ready spirit. The plaque said MARION MICHAEL MORRISON, 1907-1979, which must have been the real name of John Wayne.
Ray said, “There are a hell of a lot here. All rich, I guess.”
“I saw Getty over that way,” Alex said blankly, trying to digest the implications.
“Yeah, that Onassis guy is two aisles over. Her, too.”
“Really?” There was enough supply of sensationalism here to last the trash media for years.
“Why the windows?” Alex asked.
“I wondered the same,” Ray said. “Looks like they’re triple-paned, with interior lighting so you can see the face. They’re a heat path, so it costs you some in liquid nitrogen.”
“No point in regularly looking in on the patient. They don’t change.”
When Alex had arrived here at the Lomax estate, escorted by Stern, Ray had already been at work with other police specialists, scanning through Lomax’s computer records. Everybody seemed surprised that Lomax’s data-bomb protection programs had failed, until they saw that it was old software, easily outfoxed. As Lomax had aged, he had apparently not kept up with security technology. His large system had proved unable to quickly kill the files Lomax wanted scrubbed in an emergency.
Ray leaned against a vessel, his back bowed by fatigue. “From what I saw in Lomax’s files, I figure it was for advertising.”
“Huh? For who?”
“Big-shots being taken on the tour, into the inner sanctum.” Ray smiled wryly. “Imagine you’re old, plenty of bucks, you see that the big guy, John Wayne himself, has done it. Better than any lecture on the glorious march of technology.”
“I see. And plaques could be fake. But if you can see rich and famous people who’ve already bought in…”
“How many you figure there are in here?”
Stern answered, approaching. “Two hundred and seventeen.”
“Wow.” Alex gazed at the aisles stretching away, still trying to take it all in. “How in the world did he keep such a big operation secret?”
“Tight security,” Stern said. “Dividing up functions, so very few really knew what was going on. After all, Vitality was a registered archival tissue bank. It had permits, did cryopreservation research, then moved into biotech. Plenty of room in there to hide a little quiet freezing on the side. Especially since it was all here, under his estate.”
Alex placed a hand gingerly on John Wayne’s shiny cylinder, still a little unnerved by the man’s unwavering stare. In a real sense, the big movie star was still there, his essential personality intact but inert. Something in Alex wanted to see the old guy tug at the bill of a Stetson and swing heavily up onto a sleek horse again, leather creaking. The world would spin a bit truer on its axis.
Stern said, “One of our technicians found the billing system. Lomax would get the corpse from whatever funeral home was doing the burial. He was supposed to do some special embalming technique. His clients had it all nice and legal, written right into their wills. Lomax would pull a switcheroo, give the funeral home back something that looked like the corpse but wasn’t.”
“Why all the secrecy?” Alex asked.
“These were famous people, remember,” Ray said. “Folks like that, they mind to their public image, even after they’re dead. Lots of them have their papers burned before they’ve even cooled off.”
Stern nodded. “Figures. But Lomax didn’t want to be known as a cryonicist, either. Look at all the persecution you guys suffered.”
“Most of it at taxpayers’ expense,” Ray added dryly.
“I figure the big shots liked belonging to a secret, exclusive club, too,” Stern said. “Lomax charged a million bucks a pop.”
“My God, suspension shouldn’t cost nearly that,” Alex said.
“He only had a half dozen or so customers per year,” Stern said. “He funneled the money into his company, used it for research.” A sardonic smile. “Then too, he lived pretty well.”
“Then Lomax was really a cryonicist,” Alex said wonderingly. “He was one of us.”
“Nope, afraid not,” Ray said.
Stern asked, “You mean somebody else was behind this?”
Ray said, “No, just that Lomax never intended these people to come back out of the nitrogen.”
“Come on,” Alex said. “Look at this gear. First class all the way, better than anything from its time. Sure, Immortality Incorporated had better stuff later, but—”
“Lomax didn’t perfuse them.”
“What?”
“The records are plain. He just slipped them in these containers and piped in the liquid nitrogen.”
“But that would cause massive cell rupture!” Alex was shocked.
“It sure must’ve.”
“But why?” Alex looked in at John Wayne and thought of the burst membranes and ravaged chemistries that lay beneath that apparently alert face.
“I’ve been trying to figure it out.” Ray ran his weathered hands along the canister, their backs splotched with brown spots. “Maybe we’ll never know. Lomax was a ruthless egomaniac. He knew how hard the cryosuspension problem was. He was attacking it on his own, spending a lot of money on his research—money from these rich folks. But he didn’t think the technology would get good enough to bring them back out while he was still alive.”
Alex whispered, “So… why bother?”
Ray nodded. “Perfusion, all the cooling stages—that takes time. Care. Money. Personnel. Easier to keep things secret if he did it himself.”
The enormity of it stunned Alex, squeezed his chest. “He just went through the motions?”
“He was running a con game. For decades,” Ray said.
Stern had been subdued, frowning. “I don’t get it, then,” he said. “Why’d Lomax use George to go after Immortality Incorporated?”
“Competition,” Ray said. “Lomax was suckering millionaires. Every time he took one down here to show him the celebs, the scheme snowballed. On the other hand, I2 started suspending people for much less. We even took on charity cases. I2 hurt business.”
Stern said cynically, “Volkswagen hurting the Rolls-Royce guy.”
“Right. He was the luxury end of the market, and we were an upstart cheapo outfit,” Ray said. “Okay, so he sells himself as discreet, private, tasteful. Not a bad marketing strategy. But then Susan started doing first-class research. Lomax must’ve seen his empire threatened. Worse, Susan was successful with reviving dogs—which he knew about, through contacts at UCI, who gave him documents. Imagine his nightmare. We
might even start bringing people back.” Ray smiled without a trace of humor.
Alex grinned. “How terrible.”
“Then where’d he be? Rich people have estates. Watchdog committees. Those would start wondering why grandaddy wasn’t getting thawed out, like the ones over at I2.”
Stern said, “I’ll bet a lot of estates don’t want grandaddy thawed out. Think what that’d do to inheritance law.”
Ray chuckled. “Already is. The lawyers are turning purple already over cryonics. Inventing ‘rights’ of children who got willed stuff and don’t want to give it back to the old man, now that he’s walking around again.”
Stern slapped the John Wayne capsule, the report ringing in the cool silences of the basement. “Me, I’d be happy to be back alive. For a lot of these people, it would be more fun to rebuild your fortune, starting over.”
Alex said, “But Lomax never intended that they’d come back.”
Ray pursed his mouth with grim disbelief. “Hard to get your mind around that, isn’t it?”
Alex felt the same, but the logic seemed inescapable. He had never truly believed that evil lurked in the world in a pure form, but Lomax—a man he had only glimpsed in the final skirmish on the lawn—embodied pure malevolence.
A strange thought struck him. That man he saw for just a few moments had shaped Alex’s entire life—no, lives—from offstage.
“All for money. Just money. No concern for people at all,” Alex said disbelievingly.
“Cryonics is always about money as well as life,” Ray said. “Same as medicine generally. You stop to wonder why I’m an old codger, showing every year?”
Taken aback at this shift, Alex said defensively, “Hell, you don’t look so old.”
Ray poked at his arm. “Skin’s looking like saddle leather, knees creak, eyes don’t want to read—but sure, I’m doing great for an old fart. Point is, the biotech that brought you back can also fix me up. Only I can’t afford it yet.”
Alex had in fact wondered why anybody aged in this brave new whirl, but he hadn’t brought it up. While he searched for a reply, Stern said, “Yeah, me, too. I’ve saved up, withdrew most of my retirement account. I’m going in for a refab soon as I can get a slot.”
“Refab?” Alex asked to cover his confusion.
“Refabrication of tissues—the really important organs, anyway,” Stern said. “Molecular agents that clean out the cholesterol deposits, rebuild kidneys, stand guard against cancers. Costs a fortune, but adds years, decades.”
Alex had to admit that both men looked a good deal younger than their years—which numbered in the seventies. Ray had an unreadable expression. Alex wondered if Ray envied him, fresh and young and rebuilt with microscopic agents Ray could not afford. Medicine and money and the movements of time.
Embarrassed, Alex decided to step around the issue. “Lomax looked pretty good for a man his age, too. He must have spent his money on the best biotech treatments.”
“I imagine we’ll find out in the records,” Stern said. “They go back deep into the twencen.”
“Funny, y’know—back when he got started, Lomax never really believed in cryonics enough to bother treating his clients right,” Ray said.
“Until Susan started getting her results at UCI,” Alex said. “That’s when he sent George after us.”
“I wonder how he knew about her results that early?” Ray asked. “Somebody at UCI leak it to him?”
A small, tingling suspicion wriggled through Alex’s memories. He would have to look up the records on that guy—what was his name? Blevin.
Ray grimaced. “That kind of thinking led him to this—suspending people without treatment. Great technical guy, but he had no faith.”
Alex remembered Sheila from long ago, smiling at a party conversation and saying that cryonics was just another kind of faith. He wondered if even then she had understood how right she was. Technology without a dash of faith was stale, barren.
“Plus he was psycho,” Stern said vehemently. “At least with George, we have an assignable cause. Those resuscitation drugs that Lomax used on him, they went straight to certain focal spots in the brain. Overdose, as he did, and you burn away capabilities, balances. Made George a barely controlled sociopath. A human Rottweiler. But what was Lomax’s excuse?”
Evil needed no explanation, Alex thought. It just was.
Faith, evil, immortality—deep stuff, aswarm in mystery. And he had always thought of himself as a technical type, clear and precise and objective. He had used to say on radio talk shows that one way of viewing cryonics was to imagine that any medical treatment that could ever be developed could, in principle, be available to the patient of the present—if you saved the structure of them, suspended it, then just waited for the future to arrive.
But that was too intellectual a way to go at it. This reached into the deep swamp of the human psyche. “I hope the religious people don’t try to read too much into all this,” he said distantly.
Ray smiled, this time with amused warmth. “Too late. You’re the modern Lazarus yourself, buddy. This is a weird world we’ve got here, but it still needs icons, and you’re going to be one.”
“Huh? Wait a minute.”
“You’re a founding cryonicist, one of the reborn. People will want you to help them, heal them. Tell ‘em what you heard from God while you were in there. Pester you to death, I’ll bet.”
Alex grinned and wandered down the aisle. “Geez, and here I thought I’d woken up into utopia.”
Ray said, “No such thing if it has real people in it.”
Alex stopped beside a canister that was a bit different from the others. Older, less outfitted. He bent to peer inside, straightened up, and asked meditatively, “Do you think we can bring these people back after all?”
Ray frowned. “Wow, that’s one hell of a job. Have to repair all the wreckage in every cell. Where structure was completely scrambled, you’d be forced to make a shrewd guess about what information was lost. It would take a whole mess of special microbugs, new techniques.”
“I’d like to work on that,” Alex said distantly. “There’s a hell of a lot of talent down here.”
He looked around, not seeing the stretching stillness of the vault at all. Here was a legacy Lomax never truly meant to leave. But it could be made real and vibrant. Something splendid could come out of malignant blackness.
“Well, a man’s got to have something to do,” Ray allowed.
Alex slapped the old canister. “There’s a fellow here I’d sure like to shake hands with, if we can recover him. Kathryn would, too. She and I visited his grave once, a long, long time ago.”
3
GEORGE
It was simple, really.
Ezekiel had said it long before in fiery words that cascaded down through millennia. About the dancing bones. Bleached white and yet dancing, holy gambols in the risen sun. The shining valley. The fertile fields where happy holy women in long dresses worked unceasingly.
It had been that way in his family. Warmth, order, certainty. Parents who loved and cherished. They had been wonderful, and he had spent his life trying to get back to them, to someone like them. Lomax had prevented that. Had blocked off a part of him with gray walls of drugged forgetfulness.
Those granite slabs had come crashing down inside him, at last—there in the pond, where the waxy plants had beckoned to him like the bloated limbs of corpses. He had remembered it all.
The maggot-covered bodies of his parents, dead in a crashed car and found by the sheriff a week later.
The yearning, the pain that the boy could not quell.
The black lake. So serene.
Then coming back to the raw world again. Into shrieking hard lights, twisted doctor-faces, a loveless antiseptic hell. He had tried to flee that Godless place, and Lomax had worked the medical madness on him, taking away the memories. Stealing from George what he was.
So that when shards of memory had come to him in unguarded mom
ents, he thought they were the Master’s Messages. Signs from the Lord. Images of what the chillers would go through.
When all along it was what he had already done.
Now Lomax had joined his parents in the valley of seared bones, as was only right, and the grand day would come when he too would rise in the valley of Ezekiel, Lomax and his parents, together.
George would be there, somehow, and he would speak to the Lord of all this, tell the story of twisted years, and the Lord would send Lomax farther into the bowels of the great earth.
Forever. Eternal fire awaited Lomax, not the chill.
The chiller people—his people, now—could not save Lomax’s carcass, devoured by corrosion. So Lomax would not rise from the sinful cold to greet George some future day, and of that George was most thankful.
He fell to his knees in his little room with no windows. Kneeled and prayed and wrestled with the memories. So many.
The pain had been so great, so lancing for a boy. Both parents gone. A world hollow and aching. His feet had led him to the lake. He had marched right in, never stopping, never doubting that another, better world lay on the far side of the black lake, the side he could not see because it lay in the dark waters. He had known that he would find Mommy and Daddy there and laugh with them again in God’s sunny embrace. So he had started to swim and the wise weight of water in his shoes and socks had known his intention, had drawn him downward even as he stroked for the far shore.
The healing waters had betrayed him in the end, he saw that now. The strength had drained from him, the chill had made him sluggish and fearful. In his waterlogged clothes he had not been able to swim to the deepest part of the lake, where the kindly darkness would have hidden him. The man who saw him from the distance had called others and though they were slow in coming, they had known where to look. They had dragged him away from his reward, snatched the holy promise from him, cut the last cord to his mommy and daddy. In the long moments of sinking, down through silvery schools of fish, he had felt his daddy reaching out toward him, calling, smiling the broad grin, big hands ready to help. Then gone.
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