NightScape

by David Morrell

  "Others, who did wake up, failed to respond to the new treatment," she reluctantly said.

  "Couldn't they be frozen again?" Anthony asked in greater bewilderment.

  "You can't survive being frozen a second time. You get only one chance, and if the treatment doesn't work..." She stared down at the floor. "It's so experimental and risky that insurance companies won't pay for it. The only reason we have it as an option is that the laboratory's agreed to pay for the procedure" - there was that word again-" while the doctors try to figure out how to cure him. But if it's going to happen, it has to happen now." She looked straight into his eyes. "Should we do it?"

  "To save Daddy? We have to."

  "It'll be like he's gone."

  "Dead?"

  Anthony's mother reluctantly nodded.

  "But he won't be dead."

  "That's right," his mother said. "We might never see him alive again, though. They might not ever find a cure. They might not ever wake him up."

  Only much later did Anthony understand the other issues his mother had to deal with. In the worst case, if his father died, at least his life insurance would allow his mother to support the two of them. In the unlikely event that she ever fell in love again, she'd be able to remarry. But if Anthony's father was frozen, in effect dead to them, they'd be in need of money, and the only way for her to remarry would be to get a divorce from the man who, a year after her wedding, might be wakened and cured.

  "But it's the only thing we can do," Anthony said.

  "Yes." His mother wiped her eyes and straightened. "It's the only thing we can do."

  * * *

  Anthony had expected that it would happen the next day or the day after that. But his mother hadn't been exaggerating that, if it was going to happen, it had to happen now. His unconscious father was a gray husk as they rode with him in an ambulance. At a building without windows, they walked next to his father's gurney as it was wheeled along a softly lit corridor and into a room where other doctors waited. There were glinting instruments and humming machines. A man in a suit explained that Anthony and his mother had to step outside while certain preparations were done to Anthony's father to make the freezing process safe. After that, they would be able to accompany him to his cryochamber.

  Again, it wasn't what Anthony expected. In contrast with the humming machines in the preparation room, the chamber was only a niche in a wall in a long corridor that had numerous other niches on each side, metal doors with pressure gauges on them. Anthony watched his father's gaunt naked body being placed on a tray that went into the niche. But his father's back never actually touched the tray. As the man in the suit explained, a force field kept Anthony's father elevated. Otherwise, his back would freeze to the tray and cause infections when he was thawed. For the same reason, no clothes, not even a sheet, could cover him, although Anthony, thinking of how cold his father was going to be, dearly wished that his father had something to keep him warm.

  While the man in the suit and the men who looked like doctors stepped aside, a man dressed in black but with a white collar arrived. He put a purple scarf around his neck. He opened a book and read, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." A little later, he read, "I am the Resurrection."

  Anthony's father was slid into the niche. The door was closed. Something hissed.

  "It's done," the man in the suit said.

  "That quickly ?" Anthony's mother asked.

  "It won't work if it isn't instantaneous."

  "May God grant a cure," the man with the white collar said.

  * * *

  Years earlier, Anthony's father had lost his parents in a fire. Anthony's mother had her parents, but without much money, the only way they could help was by offering to let her and Anthony stay with them. For a time, Anthony's mother fought the notion. After all, she had her job as an administrative assistant at the laboratory, although without her husband's salary she didn't earn enough for the mortgage payments on their house. The house was too big for her and Anthony anyhow, so after six months she was forced to sell it, using the money to move into a cheaper smaller townhouse. By then, the job at the lab had given her too many painful memories about Anthony's father. In fact, she blamed the lab for what had happened to him. Her bitterness intensified until she couldn't make herself go into the lab's offices any longer. She quit, got a lesser paying job as a secretary at a real-estate firm, persuaded a sympathetic broker to sell her townhouse but not charge a commission, and went with Anthony to live with her parents.

  She and Anthony spent all their free time together, even more than before the accident, so he had plenty of opportunity to learn what she was feeling and why she'd made those decisions. The times she revealed herself the most, however, were when they visited his father. She once complained that the corridor of niches reminded her of a mausoleum, a reference that Anthony didn't understand, so she explained it but so vaguely that he still didn't understand, and it was several years before he knew what she'd been talking about.

  Visiting hours for the cryochambers were between eight and six during the day as long as a new patient wasn't being installed. At first, Anthony and his mother went every afternoon after she finished work. Gradually, that lessened to every second day, every third day, and once a week. But they didn't reach that point for at least a year. Sometimes, there were other visitors in the corridor, solitary people or incomplete families, staring mournfully at niches, sometimes leaving small objects of remembrance on narrow tables in the middle of the corridor: notes, photographs, dried maple leaves, and small candles shaped like pumpkins, to mention a few. The company placed no names on any of the niches, so visitors had used stick-on plaques that said who was behind the pressurized door, when he or she had been born, when they had gotten sick, of what, and when they had been frozen. Often there was a bit of a prayer or something as movingly simple as "We love you. We'll see you soon." Here and there, Anthony noticed just a name, but for the most part the plaques had acquired a common form, the same kind of information and in the same order as over the years a tradition had been established.

  Over the years indeed. Some of the people in the niches had been frozen at least twenty-five years, he read. It made him fear that his father might never be wakened. His fear worsened each time his mother came back from visiting his father's doctors, who were no closer to finding a cure for his sickness. Eventually his mother took him along to see the doctors, although the visits grew wider apart, every other month, every six months, and then every year. The message was always depressingly the same.

  By then, Anthony was fifteen, in his first year of high school. He decided that he wanted to become a doctor and find a way to cure his father. But the next year his grandfather had a heart attack, leaving a small life insurance policy, enough for his mother and his grandmother to keep the house going but hardly enough for Anthony's dreams of attending medical school.

  Meanwhile, his mother began dating the sympathetic broker at the real-estate firm. Anthony knew that she couldn't be expected to be lonely forever, that after so much time it was almost as if his father was dead and not frozen, and that she had to get on with her life. But "as if his father was dead" wasn't the same as actually being dead, and Anthony had trouble concealing his unhappiness when his mother told him that she was going to marry the broker.

  "But what about Dad? You're still married to him."

  "I'm going to have to divorce him."

  "No."

  "Anthony, we did our best. We couldn't cheat time. It didn't work. Your father's never going to be cured."

  "No!"

  "I'll never stop loving him, Anthony. But I'm not betraying him. He's the same as dead, and I need to live."

  Tears dripped from Anthony's cheeks.

  "He'd have wanted me to," his mother said. "He'd have understood. He'd have done the same thing."

  "I'll ask him when he wakes up."

  * * *

  When Anthony became eighteen, it struck him that his father h
ad been frozen nine years, half of Anthony's life. If it hadn't been for pictures of his father, he feared that he wouldn't have been able to remember what his father had looked like. No, not had looked like, Anthony corrected himself. His father wasn't dead. Once a new treatment was discovered, once he was thawed and cured, he'd look the same as ever.

  Anthony concentrated to remember his father's voice, the gentle tone with which his father had read bedtime stories to him and had taught him how to ride a bicycle. He remembered his father helping him with his math homework and how his father had come to his school every year on Career Day and proudly explained his job at the lab. He remembered how his father had hurried him to the emergency ward after a branch snapped on the backyard tree and Anthony's fall broke his arm.

  His devotion to his father strengthened after his mother remarried and they moved to the broker's house. The broker turned out to be not as sympathetic as when he'd been courting Anthony's mother. He was bossy. He lost his temper if everything wasn't done exactly his way. Anthony's mother looked unhappy, and Anthony hardly ever talked to the man, whom he refused to think of as his stepfather. He stayed away from the house as much as possible, often lying that he'd been playing sports or at the library when actually he'd been visiting his father's chamber, which the broker didn't want him to do because the broker insisted it was disloyal to the new family.

  The broker also said that he wasn't going to pay a fortune so that Anthony could go to medical school. He wanted Anthony to get a degree in business and that was the only education he was going to pay for. So Anthony studied extra hard, got nothing but A's, and applied for every scholarship he could find, eventually being accepted as a science major in a neighboring state. The university there had an excellent medical school, which he hoped to attend after his Bachelor of Science degree, and he was all set to go when he realized how much it would bother him not to visit his father. That almost made him change his plans until he reminded himself that the only way his father might be cured was if he himself became a doctor and found that cure. So, after saying good-bye to his mother, he told the broker to go to hell.

  He went to college, and halfway through his first year, he learned from his mother that the lab had decided that it was futile to hope for a cure. A number of recent deaths after patients were thawed had cast such doubt on cryonics that the lab had decided to stop the monthly payments the cryocompany charged for keeping Anthony's father frozen. For his part, the broker refused to make the payments, saying that it wasn't his responsibility and anyway what was the point since the freezing process had probably killed Anthony's father anyhow.

  Taking a job as a waiter in a restaurant, sometimes working double shifts even as he struggled to maintain his grades, Anthony managed to earn just enough to make the payments. But in his sophomore year, he received a notice that the cryocompany was bankrupt from so many people refusing to make payments for the discredited process. The contract that his mother had signed indemnified the company against certain situations in which it could no longer keep its clients frozen, and bankruptcy was one of those situations.

  Smaller maintenance firms agreed to take the company's patients, but the transfer would be so complicated and hence so expensive that Anthony had to drop his classes and work full-time at the restaurant in order to pay for it. At school, he'd met a girl, who continued to see him even though his exhausting schedule gave him spare time only at inconvenient hours. He couldn't believe that he'd finally found some brightness in his life, and after he returned from making sure that his father was safely installed in a smaller facility, after he resumed his classes, completing his sophomore and junior year, he began to talk to her about marriage.

  "I don't have much to offer, but.

  "You're the gentlest, most determined, most hardworking person I've ever met. I'd be proud to be your wife."

  "At the start, we won't have much money because I have to pay for my father's maintenance, but..."

  "We'll live on what I earn. After you're a doctor, you can take care of me. There'll be plenty enough for us and our children and your father."

  "How many children would you like?"

  "Three."

  Anthony laughed. "You're so sure of the number."

  "It's good to hear you laugh."

  "You make me laugh."

  "By the time you're a doctor, maybe there'll be a cure for your father and you won't have to worry about him anymore."

  "Isn't it nice to think so."

  * * *

  Anthony's mother died in a car accident the year he entered medical school. Her remarriage had been so unsatisfying that she'd taken to drinking heavily and had been intoxicated when she veered from the road and crashed into a ravine. At the funeral, the broker hardly acknowledged Anthony and his fiancee. That night, Anthony cried in her arms as he remembered the wonderful family he had once been a part of and how badly everything had changed when his father had gotten sick.

  He took his fiancee to the firm that now maintained his father. Since the transfer, Anthony had been able to afford returning to his hometown to visit his father only sporadically. The distance made him anxious because the new firm didn't inspire the confidence that the previous one had. It looked on the edge of disrepair, floors not dirty but not clean, walls not exactly faded and yet somehow in need of painting. Rooms seemed vaguely underlit. The units in which patients were kept frozen looked cheap. The temperature gauges were primitive compared to the elaborate technology at the previous facility. But as long as they kept his father safe...

  That thought left Anthony when he took another look at the gauge and realized that the temperature inside his father's chamber had risen one degree from when he'd last checked it.

  "What's wrong?" his fiancee asked.

  Words caught in his throat. All he could do was point.

  The temperature had gone up yet another degree.

  He raced along corridor after corridor, desperate to find a maintenance worker. He burst into the company's office and found only a secretary.

  "My father..."

  Startled, the secretary took a moment to react when he finished explaining. She phoned the control room. No one answered.

  "It's almost noon. The technicians must have gone to lunch."

  "For God's sake, where's the control room?"

  At the end of the corridor where his father was. As Anthony raced past the niche, he saw that the temperature gauge had gone up fifteen degrees. He charged into the control room, saw flashing red lights on a panel, and hurried to them, trying to figure out what was wrong. Among numerous gauges, eight temperature needles were rising, and Anthony was certain that one of them was for his father.

  He flicked a switch beneath each of them, hoping to reset the controls.

  The lights kept flashing.

  He flicked a switch at the end of their row.

  Nothing changed.

  He pulled a lever. Every light on the panel went out. "Jesus."

  Pushing the lever back to where it had been, he held his breath, exhaling only when all the lights came back on. The eight that had been flashing were now constant.

  Sweating, he eased onto a chair. Gradually, he became aware of people behind him and turned to where his fiancee and the secretary watched in dismay from the open door. Then he stared at the panel, watching the temperature needles gradually descend to where they had been. Terrified that the lights would start flashing again, he was still concentrating on the gauges an hour later when a bored technician returned from lunch.

  It turned out that a faulty valve had restricted the flow of freezant around eight of the niches. When Anthony had turned the power off and on, the valve had reset itself, although it could fail again at any time and would have to be replaced, the technician explained.

  "Then do it!"

  * * *

  He would never again be comfortable away from his father. It made him nervous to return to medical school. He contacted the cryofirm every day, making sure th
ere weren't any problems. He married, became a parent of a lovely daughter, graduated, and was lucky enough to be able to do his internship in the city where he'd been raised and where he could keep a close watch on his father's safety. If only his father had been awake to see him graduate, he thought. If only his father had been cured and could have seen his granddaughter being brought home from the hospital...

  One night, while Anthony was on duty in the emergency ward, a comatose patient turned out to be the broker who'd married his mother. The broker had shot himself in the head. Anthony tried everything possible to save him. His voice tightened when he pronounced the time of death.

  He joined a medical practice in his hometown after he finished his internship. He started earning enough to make good on his promise and take care of his wife after she'd spent so many years taking care of him. She had said that she wanted three children, and she got them sooner than she expected, for the next time she gave birth, it was to twins, a boy and a girl. Nonetheless, Anthony's work prevented him from spending as much time with his family as he wanted, for his specialty was blood diseases, and when he wasn't seeing patients, he was doing research, trying to find a way to cure his father.

  He needed to know the experiments that the lab had conducted and the types of rays that his father might have been exposed to. But the lab was obsessed with security and refused to tell him. He fought to get a court order to force the lab to cooperate. Judge after judge refused. Meanwhile, he was sadly conscious of all the family celebrations that his father continued to miss: the day Anthony's first daughter started grade school, the afternoon the twins began swimming lessons, the evening Anthony's second daughter played "Chopsticks" at her first piano recital. Anthony was thirty-five before he knew it. Then forty. All of a sudden, his children were in high school. His wife went to law school. He kept doing research.