He had come to a place where the fence turned through a right angle. Along the new side the snow had been flattened to make a path three feet wide. The snow base showed footprints, so many and overlapping that they could not be counted. They ran in both directions, and a heavy object had been dragged one way to smooth and partially erase them.
“That settles one thing,” Dana said softly. “We’re not the only ones with the idea. What sort of people were sentenced to this facility?”
“Murderers, mostly.” Seth was bending low, examining the footprints. “Rapists, sadists, torturers. Terrorists. Enemies of the state, whatever that means. Hey, I see different sizes here. Men and women both, by the look of it. Question isn’t, who’d they put here? It’s who’d try to bring somebody out at a time like this? Most people have trouble fending for themselves.”
“Anyone afraid that the Q-5 judicial sleep maintenance system has broken down, like everything else. Anyone with a relative or friend they’re desperate to save.” Art was moving on ahead of Seth. He didn’t have time for philosophical questions, only for whether Oliver Guest was alive or dead. Did that make him worse than Seth, more obsessive about his personal future?
“There’s a gate ahead,” Dana said. “A big one. And it looks open.” She was hurrying along behind Art. She caught his arm, slowing him down. “Art, be careful. We have no idea who has been here. They may be here still.”
“She’s right.” Seth was coming up behind. “Some-thin’ weird about this. There’s a regular driveway from the main road to the gate. You can follow its line from the shrubs on each side of it. The snow on the drive hasn’t been disturbed, all it shows is birds’ feet and animal tracks. Then there’s the cleared path we came in on, runnin’ along the fence and back toward the river. Why didn’t they use the real road?”
“Whoever came here, it wasn’t an official maintenance group.” Art had reached the gate, twelve feet across and nine feet high. The trampled path through the snow turned in, leading toward the double doors of the facility itself. “See, they hacked right through the locks. That takes a heavy bolt-cutter and plenty of strength. I don’t think I could do it.”
“You’d be surprised. You could if you had to.” Seth moved to Art’s side. “I agree with Dana, we gotta be careful an’ ready for anything. But there’s no way we stop. Let’s go.”
They were approaching the building from the north. As they moved from bright sunlight into its squat shadow, the drop in temperature hit Art hard. He saw Dana shiver. Physical, or psychological? Within that two-hundred-foot faceless cube, more than eleven thousand living humans had been placed in judicial sleep.
And what lay there now? Eleven thousand prisoners, or eleven thousand corpses?
“Main door locks are broken, too.” Art found himself speaking in a whisper. “More proof we’re not seeing official action.”
“But the doors are closed.” Seth’s voice was as soft as Art’s. “If the lights don’t work inside — I’ll take bets on that — it’s a good sign. They already left, whoever they were. What’s wrong?”
The last words were to Dana, who had stopped and placed her hand on her throat.
“The smell.” She stepped back a pace. “Don’t you smell it, too?”
Art didn’t. That was no surprise. He was a family joke for his inability to identify — or even to detect — odors. ("The milk is a bit spoiled, you think? Give it to Uncle Arthur; he’ll never know the difference.")
But Seth was nodding. “I do now, after you point it out.”
“What is it?” Art asked.
“Same as in the city, only not so strong.” Seth pulled the double doors open wide and grunted in disgust. “Except now it is.”
Dana gagged and put her hand to her mouth. Even Art couldn’t miss it. A ripe, sweet smell of rotting flesh surged out from the opened door and hit him in the face like a hand from the grave.
“Put somethin’ round your nose.” Seth was tying a scarf around his head. “We have to find out. Is it all of ’em dead or just some?”
Dana shook her head and stepped back again. “I can’t. I’m sorry, but I just can’t.”
“You stay here.” Art squeezed her hand. “Watch the doors. Shout if anyone comes.”
He tied a cloth around his own face, though he was not sure he would need it. He and Seth went forward. Shouts from Dana would do no good, because if they were caught inside there was no other door. It was just a way to make her feel better.
He was more than pleased when a few seconds later she caught up with him.
“You’re a gutsy lady,” he said. “Will you be all right?”
She nodded. She was veiled up to her eyes. Even he could smell her. “Drenched my head scarf in the only perfume I have.” Her speech was muffled. “I was saving it for some big seduction scene, but I guess I’ve blown that chance.”
“Perfume’s wasted on me. I can’t smell worth a damn, you know that.” He nodded forward, to where Seth had taken out his flashlight and was shining it around. “Save it for him.”
Her eyes rolled. “Don’t make me laugh, or I’ll have to breathe.”
Cheerful small talk. The surest sign that you were edgy.
The inside of the syncope facility matched the outside: gray, drab, and utilitarian. One long corridor led to the left, a matching one to the right. From each, all the way to the back of the building, side aisles ran off at sixteen-foot intervals. They held the body drawers, two feet by two feet by eight, packed side by side and one on top of the other like a library stack of stored humans.’
The elevators for higher floors were on either side of the main doors. They were not working now, but iron stairs for use in emergencies stood next to them, rising up and up in dizzying turns until they vanished in the upper gloom. Seth’s flashlight was not strong enough to carry its beam the full twenty floors to the dark ceiling.
“We still got the same problems.” Seth stopped cranking the light. They stood together in the faint light coming in through the open double doors and waited for their eyes to adjust. “We didn’t solve ’em comin’ here, and I don’t see we’re nearer to solvin’ ’em now. How do we find Oliver Guest? How can we be sure we got the right man? I’m not even askin’ how we revive him when we find him.”
“There has to be a filing system.” It seemed gruesome to apply that term to stored people, but Art couldn’t think of a better one. “And I bet it’s simple, because the only people you can get to work in a place like this have to be morons.”
“Or necrophiliacs,” added Seth. “I doubt if most of them are any too bright, though.”
They walked slowly to the first tier of body drawers and picked the third one from the bottom. Its aluminum end contained a grille for the circulation of air and was held shut by a cheap catch at the top. Seth shone his flashlight on the square panel.
“Not wasting the public’s money on extras, are we?” he said. “Here’s one question answered. This is an ID plate. 1-0128-394, that has to be a prisoner number. And Desmond Lota must be his name. And here’s a date, 27/04/11. That has to be when he gets out. He’s a JS short-timer, can’t have been in for much. A year from now he’ll be up and moving.”
He placed his light flat on the grille and bent beside it. He shook his head. “Can’t see a thing. Oh, well.”
He reached up and turned the catch. The end panel dropped vertically until the drawer was fully open. Seth leaned forward, but at once jerked back and took two steps away. “Shit.” He was coughing and choking behind his scarf. “It’s putrid. I think I’m gonna puke.”
“Let me.” Art grabbed the light, worked the crank, and stepped to peer into the open drawer. The judicial sleep criminals were stored feetfirst and he was staring at the top of Desmond Lota’s head, hairless and purple-blotched in the pale beam of the flashlight.
The drawers sat on lubricated runners that must have been designed for ease of maintenance and were useful now. An easy pull brought the drawer out until Art
could see the whole body. It lay naked, with IVs and sprays still in position. Desmond Lota’s skin sagged on his arms and legs, but bulged tight on his grossly swollen belly. The pneumatic system that rotated the criminals to prevent sores was still functioning at some level, because as the drawer reached the end of its travel the body was rolled through thirty degrees on its air pad. That led to a loud belch of escaping gases and a smell that made even Art blench and step back.
“This one won’t be coming out — not next year or in a hundred years.” Art pushed the drawer hard and closed the end panel as soon as he could work the catch.
“Do you think they’re all like that?” Dana stood half a dozen steps away and had avoided the worst of the stench. Seth was apparently still speechless, hands covering his nose and mouth.
“I might, except for one thing.” Art was walking along the aisle, shining the light on each end panel’s ID plate. “The people who were here before us took something or somebody away with them. We saw the marks in the snow. I can’t see anybody stealing a rotting corpse.”
“Why would some people have survived, when others died?”
“I can only guess. But the nutrients and somnol and ion balancers probably go to the IVs in each drawer through a gravity-assist delivery. Without a working heating system, you’ll also find temperature differences from top to bottom of the building. If that’s the case, different levels would be treated differently when the chips died in the monitoring system.”
“Higher levels would do better than ground-floor ones?”
“Or worse.”
“Let’s go find out.” Seth had recovered enough to grab his flashlight back from Art. “If Oliver Guest is dead meat, the sooner we’re out of here the better.”
“One other thing.” Art followed as Seth headed for the metal staircase. “Do you remember how long his sentence was?”
“Hell, I don’t know. A gazillion years. He didn’t just kill a whole bunch, he picked teenagers. Pretty ones. He’d be iced down to the max. Why you want to know?”
“We might get lucky. I noticed every ID in the first aisle had a wake-up time in the next year or two. It would make sense to stow short-timers on the lowest level, and a five-hundred-year sentence up where you don’t need to check it so often. And the longer terms use different drugs to maintain judicial sleep.”
They were climbing the open lattice of the metal staircase as they spoke. Art, last behind Dana, found it hard work. Serb, was well ahead but paused at the fifth level, not to let the others catch up but to inspect one of the aisles and its body drawers.
“Fourteen years to go on this one. Comin’ along.” He was shining the flashlight on a plate. “Like to take a look?”
Art nodded. The rest for his lungs was welcome. He started to open the drawer, and at once knew he did not need to go any farther.
Seth was backing away. “Don’t tell me, I can smell it. Another maggoty one. Let’s go.”
This time they plodded up another eighty feet before Seth halted and shone his flashlight along an aisle. “We got problems. No ID plates.”
“Then we must have gone too far.” Dana was a full level below, on one of the staircase landings. “They wouldn’t use the highest levels until the facility was filled all the way up. Shine the light back here, let me take a look.” And, a moment later, “This shows a 2735 revival date. Fat chance he’s got. He’s going to die.”
“But is he alive now?” asked Art. He hurried to join her. He felt sure that Dana was not going to risk opening the drawer.
He was right. “You tell me,” she said, and stood warily by as he opened the catch. “I don’t smell anything bad.”
“Because he’s not dead!” Art watched the slow rise and fall of a naked chest, then looked down the long aisle as Seth approached to give them more light. “The trickle supply system must still be working. What now?”
“Put him back. Tough for him, but we’re not here on a prisoner humanitarian release program. He’ll have to take his chances.”
“I didn’t mean that.” Art closed the drawer and tagged the latch. “My question was, how do we find Oliver Guest? He should be somewhere on this level with the other maximum sentences.”
“Unless he’s already been taken,” Seth said.
“Why would anyone except us do that?” But Art was following the beam of Seth’s flashlight, and now he saw it, too. A drawer, all the way along, was open and empty.
“We knew somebody was here before us,” Dana said. “We shouldn’t be surprised.”
“And they weren’t after Guest. That’s good news.” Seth had moved along to examine the ID on the other drawer. “The name’s sort of familiar but I can’t place it. Who the devil is Pearl Lazenby?”
“I don’t know. Whoever she is, she should have been iced down for a long time.” Art pointed to the date. “2670. Somebody didn’t want her around for a while. She’s out of here way ahead of time.”
“She was the leader of that big religious group,” Dana said. “The Legion of Argos. Her people didn’t use her real name much, that’s why you didn’t recognize it. They called her ’The Eye of God’ and they said she could foresee the future.”
“That woman!” Seth closed the drawer. “Then she oughta be in here forever. Her group killed a ton of people. It wasn’t a religion, it was a cult.”
“Your cult, my religion. The Legion of Argos certainly got one thing right. They prophesied a coming disaster.” Art unwrapped the cloth from his face. “I think we can manage without these — even you, Dana.
But our problem isn’t solved. How do we find Oliver Guest?”
“The hard way. We look at every drawer.” Seth started walking. “Come on.”
Art did the arithmetic as he followed. Eleven thousand prisoners in judicial sleep at this facility. Twelve levels occupied. They might have to examine close to a thousand IDs if the prisoners were spread evenly.
But what better way to spend your time? Art walked behind the other two in silence, up and down each aisle, checking to make sure nothing was missed.
Five aisles covered, out of a total of ten. They crossed to the other side. A sixth, and Art began to wonder what they would do next. Without Oliver Guest the last hope of telomod therapy was gone.
“Jackpot,” Seth said. He was leading, and he spoke so softly and casually that Art, ten yards behind, had no strong reaction. It was Dana’s gasp and cry of excitement that brought him hurrying to join them.
“How about that.” Seth was cranking furiously, and his light pointed straight at the ID plate.
Art read the inscription. 12-0456-97. Dr. Oliver Samuel Guest. 2621. Below it were handwritten words. You are a monster. May all your dreams be nightmares, your final hours agony, and may you rot in hell forever.
“Not too popular with somebody,” Seth said. “And now the real question. Dana, want to do the honors?”
The body drawer was six feet off the ground. Dana stood on tiptoe, opened the front panel, and peered in. “He’s alive!”
“And we have to make sure he stays that way. Seth and I will have to loan him clothes, otherwise he’ll freeze.” Art stared around in the gloom. “There must be special equipment to lower the drawer to the ground. But I don’t see it, and chances are it’s not working.”
“We’ll have to do it ourselves.” Seth began to reach up, then paused. “I was gonna say, we bring the drawer out all the way an’ lower it between us. But that’s too risky. Suppose the drawer weighs five hundred pounds? We’d drop it an’ kill him.”
“Dana will have to stand on our backs and unplug him. Then — if the publicity about somnol and judicial sleep isn’t one big pack of lies — he ought to wake up without any action on our part. And then we can roll him off and lift him down.”
“Yeah. And then it gets really interesting.” Seth leaned over, placing the top of his head against the bank of closed drawers. “I’m ready. Your move, Dr. Frankenstein. Wake the monster.”
Dana hesit
ated. “Do I just unhook everything?”
“We don’t know. I guess so. He shouldn’t need any life-support system once he’s awake.” Art was also bent and waiting. “Use your good judgment.”
“Right.” She placed one foot into Seth’s cupped hands and scrambled onto their backs. “Though I’m not sure ’good judgment’ applies at all if you wake up a man who killed eighteen people.”
Dana inspected Oliver Guest with the aid of Seth’s little flashlight. His nude body was festooned with monitor cables and sensors and tubes, but after the horror of Desmond Lota’s bloated corpse he looked reassuringly normal. He might have been simply sleeping. True, his skull was hairless, and his skin cool to her touch, but the muscles beneath had atrophied little during his five-year coma. The electronic stimulator apparently worked as advertised.
The spray delivery system worked through skin osmosis, and those attachments were easily removed. So were the twin tubes at the corner of Guest’s closed mouth and the sensor at his left eyeball. The harness that held and rotated Guest’s body ought to be easy, too; she could just undo the straps. The urethral catheter would be straightforward, and the anal peristaltic activator was already uncoupled from the body. Guest was lucky. Had the gamma pulse arrived during the once-a-month period when that device was in the rectum and operating, he would now undoubtedly be dead.
The six IVs were another matter. They entered veins at both elbows, at the hips, above the navel, and on one side of the neck. The skin around the six slender tubes was red and slightly puffy. She wasn’t sure how to remove them to do the least damage.
One of the two backs she was standing on moved a little under her foot. “How’s it goin’ up there?” Seth said from his head-down position below her. “You makin’ progress?”
“I’m going as fast as I can. I don’t want to kill him.”
“That’s all very well.” It was Art, wheezy and muffled. “But you’re damn near killing us. You should have taken your boots off.”
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