Jan and Rebecca followed Max into the ICU.
Rebecca’s reservations were quite different from her sister’s: What would she tell Katie and George? Was their grandfather dead or in limbo? They’d want to know what had happened to his soul. She knew damn well he’d never be revived, but he wouldn’t be at rest either—at least not in their minds. They’d never be able to let go of him. How could he have done this to them?
Financial problems had beset Noah and Jan’s law partnership. Their practice now consisted almost exclusively of personal injury cases, which required large capital outlay against uncertain outcome. No meaningful settlements had been forthcoming, while competition in that field had intensified. They both seemed to be working much harder even as they fell further into debt; starving hamsters on a relentless treadmill.
And just four days ago Jan had learned that she was pregnant with their third child, a fact she hadn’t yet revealed to anyone. Noah would not be pleased with the news. What would happen to all of her father’s money? she wondered. Jan felt guilty for thinking it, but the thoughts still came: Was he going to keep it? He couldn’t spend it where he was going, but they sure could use it. He’d never try to take it with him, would he? Damn! Noah had been right, as usual. She should’ve helped her father prepare his will.
“You’re gonna be frozen?” Max was saying to Ben, apparently struggling to keep a sympathetic tone to her voice. “Why didn’t you tell us, Dad?”
“Knew you’d… try to… talk me out of it,” he whispered. “But… I had to… do it… Needed to know… there’s a chance… my death… might not be… permanent. Any chance.”
Jan could feel her own fingernails biting into her palm. “You can’t be serious.”
Rebecca glared at her. Whoops. Jan said nothing more. “I’m sorry,” Ben said.
All three women began to cry again.
“I never wanted to hurt you. Any of you. I’m so sorry. I didn’t… think…”
Suddenly monitor alarms were going off. Then Ben’s right hand lurched toward his chest.
“Oh my God,” Max gasped, running out of the room, calling after Toby. “Another infarction. Come quick!”
Now Ben’s discomfort and anxiety had vanished. He felt himself hovering near the ceiling, as if floating atop a swimming pool filled with a thickly saline emulsion. Below him, with wires and tubes attached, was a comatose body. His body. People strode about it resolutely, but he detected little energy emanating from the body itself. He thought he saw it—me? he wondered dazedly—still breathing, just barely. Now Toby was barking instructions at the nurse, who ran out to fetch something. Then Toby asked Rebecca and Jan to wait outside. “But I might need you, Max, so stay right here, just in case.”
Max nodded.
“In fact,” Toby said moments later, “maybe you’d better go get a crash cart.”
She nodded again, and rushed out to find a nurse.
Now they were alone, just Toby and Ben, and Toby seemed to be at the cusp of decision; Ben could almost feel his friend’s mind at work.
“I hope you really want this,” Toby whispered. His hands were trembling as he carefully removed a syringe from his pocket and covertly injected the contents into the port on the IV pouch. “Goodbye, Ben. You will be missed.”
Even with his mind shutting down, Ben understood. Morphine.
Toby called Harvey Bacon and the rest of the Phoenix team inside. “His heart stopped beating. I’m calling him at one-fourteen P.M. Proceed.”
Approaching footsteps resounded from the hall. Bacon turned toward the door just as Toby was sneaking the empty syringe into his pocket. Bacon’s eyes rested briefly on the motion of Toby’s hand. Then Max returned to the room pushing a crash cart.
“We won’t need that now,” Toby said to her gently. “Ben’s gone.”
Max watched the cryonics team set to its task, as though she’d been expelled as a participant in her own life. Her face appeared shocked, saddened, emotionally repulsed, but professionally fascinated. Her eyes were simply following the activity of the team working over her father, as if her emotions had little meaning and all she could do was watch.
Then suddenly in darkness, Ben heard voices. Gary?
Ben felt himself rushing through a long tunnel, utterly serene and content. He saw a beautiful white light in the distance, and felt gladdened, eager to join with this loving light. The experience was nothing like his short-lived resignation to death in 1943; this time he welcomed it. The light beckoned him closer; he raced to meet it, no longer missing earthly existence or human flesh. He was not his parents’ child or even his children’s father; he was himself alone. At last.
He couldn’t yet see his wife, but somehow knew she was there, inside the light, waiting to welcome him for all eternity. Soon they would be rejoined. Forever. As the light grew nearer, the voices from earth became faint, disconnected, and ultimately irrelevant.
Out of breath, Gary hobbled into the ICU and saw Toby’s morose expression. “I’m too late, aren’t I?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Damn. Damn it all!”
Three cryonic technicians were coupling Ben to a heart-lung resuscitator and mechanical cardiopulmonary support device. Both functions were activated, and Ben’s circulation resumed. He began to breathe.
Oxygen and other nutrients would soon rekindle part of his brain.
“I order you to stop this immediately,” Max shouted. The three technicians, obviously used to such interference, ignored her.
“Sorry, Max,” Toby said. “Ben made an anatomical donation, willed his body to the Phoenix. I have no legal authority on the disposition of Ben’s remains, even if I disagreed with his wishes. Which I don’t.”
“But we’re his family,” Rebecca said.
“So am I,” Toby answered.
“Gary,” Jan said, “can’t we do something? They’re gonna freeze him, for chrissake!”
“Why are they doing that?” Gary asked, looking at Toby.
“It’s what he wanted. Cryonic suspension. He thought someday we might have the science to cure and revive him. He knew it was a longshot, but it was his life, wasn’t it?”
Gary nodded. He thought about his own years in medical school, his internship and residency and practice: precious time wasted trying to please his father instead of himself; a mistake he would never make again, nor wish on anyone else. That’s right, it was the man’s own life, and even in death, he alone should decide what to do with it.
The cryonic technicians administered various medications: Nimodipine, a slow calcium channel blocker to help reverse ischemia. Heparin, an anticoagulant to aid circulation. And a tonic of free radical inhibitors and other medications to minimize future ischemic brain damage. They began packing the body in ice.
“According to the technicians,” Toby explained to Gary, “every ten-degree drop in Celsius temperature cuts metabolic demand in half, which slows the loss of neurons.”
Gary watched intently, saying nothing. The technicians hovered over Ben, exchanging clipped phrases. Gary felt an unfamiliar emotion surface. He didn’t recognize it until, to his astonishment, he found himself fighting an impulse to raise his arm in salute.
Ben felt something tugging him back through the tunnel, away from the light, down from the ceiling. A powerful force, irresistible.
It made him angry.
He’d seen his darling Marge’s face and was at the verge of melding with the light surrounding her. Yet now he was back inside his body, sentient but unable to move regardless of exertion, aware of his breathing, feeling the pulse of the heart-lung machine through his arteries, and experiencing all other earthly pain, fear, and grief.
Damn! Must be alive again. How long had he been dead? Minutes? Days? Years?
He heard his daughters’ voices clearly, and Toby’s, and Gary’s. He wished he could tell them to send him back.
They argued his fate as if he no longer existed.
They were prepping
him for the freezer, he realized. He must have been gone only moments. But they were right about one thing, he decided: He didn’t exist.
They were talking too fast, or perhaps his mind was operating at a reduced pace. His body felt simultaneously frozen and aflame. He expended no effort; even his breathing was performed by device. Thus the pain was endurable; real yet somehow apart from significance.
But dread overwhelmed him.
As long as he was alive, suicide was still an option. But once he was an ice cube, he couldn’t will himself to die, now could he? Why hadn’t he thought of that before?
The technicians began surgery. Ben was aware of them cutting the femoral vessels in his groin. They attached a blood pump, membrane oxygenator, and some kind of heat exchanger he’d never seen before. As Ben’s brain cooled, everything around him seemed to move with increasing velocity. By the time his body temperature had fallen to 90 degrees Fahrenheit, he was a snail surrounded by hyperactive hummingbirds.
Oh God, tell them to stop!
The cryonic technicians were now preparing Ben for the plane trip to the storage facility in Phoenix, Arizona, where he knew he would receive cryoprotective perfusion to minimize freezing injury to cells, and eventually be cooled to minus 196 degrees Celsius. First they would have to replace his blood with an organ preservation solution. Then they would place his body, packed in ice, into a shipping container for perhaps its final flight.
A sense of panic overtook him. Was he trapped here for generations with no possible escape? Had he made the ultimate mistake? Would he become like a Kafka character, paralyzed until the end of time?
Ben felt a scream surging from the core of himself; all the worse because he knew he could never give it voice. Perhaps it would quiver on the edge of his throat forever.
Then, like a rheostat diminishing the flow of current, his brain activity decelerated to below the critical level, the optic nerve concurrently deprived of blood flow. He experienced what seemed a brilliant, transcendent moment of astonishing lucidity, a moment isotropic with respect to time; an instant or an eternity.
For reasons unknown and unimportant to him, he recalled the words of Jean-Paul Sartre: “And I opened my heart to the benign indifference of the universe.” All at once Ben understood the wisdom of those words as no living man ever could.
The rheostat slipped into the range just a kiss above darkness.
Ben felt himself rising once again; to the ceiling, into the tunnel, and on into the light. The light. The Light! The promising, the beckoning, the all-encompassing, beautiful Light.
2
THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE
June 16,1988
It was almost twelve-thirty P.M. Gary Franklin Smith knew he should get a move on, but he continued to sit at his father’s desk in the office of the Chestnut Street brownstone poring over documents he’d found in a file folder marked “Cryonics.” He’d started at 6:45 that morning and still didn’t know what to feel or think. That was when a photograph of Benjamin Franklin, his own family’s namesake, caught his eye, so he began to read:
The nineteenth century Russian philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov once proposed that the powers of science could solve every problem of humankind, including death. In fact he dreamed that technology would eventually restore life to every person who had ever died. Since all things are composed of atoms, he believed the motions of those atoms must be predictable, if not by the science of his day then certainly by the science of the future. History would become known, and thus could be perfectly reconstructed.
Fyodorov’s assertion seems naive today. His vision of limitless technology nurtured his hope for eternal life. Or was it the other way around? Certainly human desire for resurrection transcends science; religion is itself a testament to our quest to live forever. Like a devoutly religious adherent, Fyodorov, who died in 1903, must have found comfort in the prospect of someday being raised from the dead.
But nature’s laws grant no exceptions. In 1927, Werner Heisenberg illustrated that the effect of observation on the trajectories of subatomic particles can never simultaneously be measured for position and velocity. To all appearances Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” forever put Fyodorov’s fanciful thesis to rest.
Now compare Fyodorov to Benjamin Franklin, an eighteenth century man of science whose view of the world was acquired through detached observation.
“I wish (physical resurrection) were possible…” he wrote in April 1773, “for having a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence, I should prefer to an ordinary death, being immersed with a few friends in a cask of Madeira until that time, then to be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country. But… in all probability, we live in a century too little advanced, and too near the infancy of science, to see such an art brought in our time to its perfection.”
Franklin also wrote: “The rapid progress true science now makes occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born too soon. It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter. We may perhaps learn to deprive large masses of their gravity, for the sake of easy transport. Agriculture may diminish its labor and double its produce; all diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured, not excepting even that of old age, and our lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the antediluvian standard.”
Benjamin Franklin was a realist; he embraced the tenets of immortalism, yet knew he would never live to see its realization. He took his final breath in 1790.
Had Father taken his? Gary wondered. The hands of his watch kept moving, but at that moment he didn’t care.
The rest of the siblings having arrived early for their one P.M. appointment, each had been escorted to a windowless conference room and assured that Mr. Webster would be right in.
Only Gary was a little late. “Anyone ever heard of this guy?” he asked.
All three sisters shook their heads. “Dad never mentioned him,” Rebecca said.
“According to the directory, he specializes in trusts,” Gary said.
Jan nodded. “Dad’s finances were complicated.”
Then Toby entered the room.
“What are you doing here?” Jan asked.
“Got a notice in the mail. Ben musta left me his stethoscope or something.”
Gary smiled. The three women didn’t. But before their ill-humor could spread, Webster popped through the door.
“I see everyone found the place okay,” he said. “I’m Pat Webster.”
“Toby Fiske.”
Webster shook the cardiologist’s hand and looked around at the others. “That means you must be Gary,” he said, smiling. “Then which one is Jan? Maxine? And that leaves Rebecca, our designated executrix. Terribly sorry about your father. Seemed like a great guy.”
“He was,” Max answered.
“So,” Webster said abruptly, “down to business.”
The six quickly chose chairs around the conference table, as if speed might help dispel the awkwardness they felt.
“Did our father ever talk to you about wanting to be frozen?” Jan asked.
“You’re the lawyer, right?”
Jan nodded.
“Then you know I can’t answer questions about private discussions.”
“We’re his family,” Jan argued, “not his adversaries.”
“Sometimes family members wind up choosing sides,” Webster explained. “Seen it happen a lot. Blood can’t always guarantee commitments. But when I read the will—”
“Okay. Go ahead, then.”
Webster began, “‘I, Benjamin Franklin Smith, a resident of Massachusetts, being of sound and disposing mind and memory, make, publish, and declare this to be my Last Will and Testament, and I hereby revoke any and all other wills and codicils I have made.
“‘As of the date of this Will, I am no longer married, my beloved wife Margaret Callahan Smith having passed away on September fourteenth, 1979. I have four child
ren: Gary Franklin Smith, Rebecca Carol Smith-Crane, Maxine Lee Smith Swenson, and Janette Lois Smith. I also have five grandchildren: George Jacob Crane Jr., Sarah Smith Banks, Katherine Franklin Crane, Justin Robert Swenson, and Michael Smith Banks. Under this Will, I am providing for any of these nine children and grandchildren who survive me and any additional grandchildren born prior to my death.’”
I should’ve told him about you, Jan thought, gently touching her pregnant belly.
Webster looked around the table. “Anybody mind if I skip the boilerplate and technicals vis-à-vis payment of legal obligations and expenses, et cetera, blah blah?”
“As long as we can read it later,” Jan said.
“Of course. ‘Gifts of personal effects: I bequeath six oil paintings by Gary Franklin Smith to the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University under the terms of an agreement attached as exhibit A.’”
“He bought six of my paintings? And never told me. Damn.”
“Back when you were struggling,” Toby said. “He didn’t want you to know. And he didn’t do it because you needed it. He figured your art would draw the notice it deserved, eventually. He just wanted to speed it along. Besides, he loved your paintings.”
Gary smiled. “Son of a gun.”
Webster continued, “‘I hereby appoint Rebecca Carol Smith-Crane as independent executrix of my estate. If for any reason Rebecca is unable to perform these duties, I appoint Maxine Lee Smith Swenson, and if Maxine is unable, I appoint Janette Lois Smith.’”
Guess he still didn’t trust Gary, Jan thought, feeling a rush of pity for her brother.
“‘The executrix shall distribute the following items of property: my intimate personal items such as jewelry, clothing, books, china and silverware, furniture and furnishings, objects of art, and automobiles and all policies of insurance on such tangible property, club memberships, and all other personal and household chattels and personal property pertinent to my residence. These items shall be distributed among my children in a manner determined by the executrix, in her absolute discretion, to be fair and equitable. Any division and distribution made by the executrix shall be binding on all.
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