The Far Arena

by Richard Ben Sapir

  Morally, however, he felt he was being justly punished for not even liking the woman, but rather taking her because he was there, she was there, and both were willing. Somehow, it went better with roses and soft words. And perhaps that was why he had drunk too much and eaten too much, to make up for the lack of romance. He was not eighteen any more. He should have had higher standards, he felt.

  Unfortunately, this late afternoon at the university hospital complex, he was paying for it, and he could not return to the apartment his embassy had provided him here in Oslo because he had promised to meet an American scientist today who was bringing a specimen.

  It might be a good one.

  A whole body ? Dr Petrovitch had asked. What sort of decomposition was there? None that the American could see? In glacial ice ? What sort of ice ? Where ?

  'Do you want this, Dr Petrovitch?'

  'Possibly. And you are ?’

  'Dr Lewellyn McCardle. We met at the conference in Stockholm last year.'

  'There are many conferences, doctor. I am part of a Scandinavian-Soviet Friendship Pact, so I do make many appearances.'

  'Sort of a mundane thing. It was on cryogenic applications to medical problems. Frostbite, if you will. You were gearing it somewhat for a lay audience. We were more interested only in how we could immediately save lives.'

  'Saving lives is never only, doctor. I don't seem to place your name.'

  'I'm sort of tall. Geologist.'

  The Texan!'

  'Uh,yeah.'

  And then Dr Petrovitch remembered; he remembered the Texan, because that was what the big American had seemed to be reluctant to divulge last year. When asked where he came from in America, the American had said, 'All over.' He had studied in Chicago and California; 'all over', he said. But where was he born?

  'Oh, just a little place in Texas,' he had said, and Dr Petrovitch until that time had never known there were any negative feelings about people coming from certain parts of America, least of all Texas. The Texans he had met always seemed rather proud of it. Cowboys and all that.

  So, feeling somewhat embarrassed by accidentally stressing the one point he had assumed the American had felt somewhat uneasy about, Dr Petrovitch had said he would certainly be happy to take the specimen. But he had not mentioned what part of the university complex he would meet him at.

  There was his office on the third floor of one building, and the laboratory he shared in the basement of that building, and the hospital itself, which was another building. Now, which entrance in which building ? Where did one deliver a frozen cadaver ?

  When confronted by this dilemma, Dr Petrovitch tried to remember which air base the American had phoned from, so that he could send more specific directions, instead of the University at Oslo hospital complex. Failing to remember, Dr Petrovitch prepared to receive a cadaver somewhere.

  There were many ways it could be received. A good specimen whose sustained low temperatures had retarded body action could go directly into one of the cryogenic cylinders in the lab to be examined later.

  A decomposing corpse, however, was just that, a corpse. That was not his area. The normal body process at normal temperature was to take apart the body and put it back into the life cycle of the earth. A decomposing cadaver would have to be taken to the emergency room of the hospital. There it would be pronounced dead, and proper papers filled out.Dr Petrovitch expected it would not be a decomposing corpse. The American was a scientist, and he should understand the limitations of cryogenics.

  Therefore, thought Dr Petrovitch, the body would have to be a specimen.

  Probably.

  He decided, after pushing three different buttons in an elevator between the ground floor that led to the emergency room of the hospital and the basement which led to the laboratory that he shared, to wait in neither place, but in his office, justly suffering the physical pangs of a too late evening the night before.

  One of the more attractive nurses suggested that he should not smoke in the elevator, and he apologized, saying that he had not thought about it. For three floors they politely discussed smoking while he was trying not to stare at the delicate and lightly freckled breast cleavage appearing between the white lapels of her uniform. He wanted to be gallant, but he found himself turning his gaze forcibly, time and time again, from her chest. He imagined her breasts bare. They were perfect. Breasts always were, in his imagination. He noticed the glimmering of opportunity, when somehow and not too smoothly she let him know she would be alone that evening.

  He tried to decline the evening without declining the person. It came out that he preferred a frozen corpse to her.

  When he reached his small office, the phone was ringing. It was the emergency room. An American was there with a specimen. Did Dr Petrovitch want it brought to the laboratory ?

  'I don't know. No. Tell him to wait there. What does it look like?' he asked in Norwegian. He was fluent in four foreign languages: Norwegian, Swedish, German, and English. He preferred to work in two, however - Norwegian and English. Norwegian because he had worked here for the last four years and English because of American scientific journals.

  'What does the specimen look like ?' he asked again.

  'I don't know, Dr Petrovitch. It's outside in a truck, and the man who brought it said you wanted it. He didn't say where.'

  Tell him... tell him...'

  'Yes?'

  'Stay there. I will be down to look at it,’ said Dr Petrovitch, deciding on the sure course. Not only was he nauseated from the night before, but now the annoying little tension of trying to make sure he met someone at the right place in the sprawling university hospital complex made his stomach contract in little pains.

  He ignored this and rapidly straightened up in front of a small mirror he whisked from a desk drawer. He was in his early forties, and his fleshy face hovered dangerously close to fat. His dark lips and dark eyes created a sense of unhappiness that if not dispelled by a definite smile gave the impression he was constantly dissatisfied with his surroundings. But when he smiled it was a leap into total joy.

  He dressed well, he knew - today, in British tweed jacket and grey flannel slacks, with a white Italian shirt and a severe British regimental tie. He was not one who believed in denying himself the pleasures of life, and in no way did this detract from his commitment to his work.

  He thought about this as he left his office on his way to the other side of the university complex. He had sought work as part of this exchange programme just because of his commitment. Not that Moscow would deny him any equipment or space. Indeed, the space was better back home. But back home the cold war was still being fought, this competition with the West.

  It had led to dramatizing those scientific achievements which most captured the imagination - creating a two-headed dog through grafting techniques; parapsychology; and of course the freezing of the cat's brain for two months and returning it to certain functions, that is, getting it to transmit waves which could be recorded.

  The important work here was not so much with the brain but with the blood, which at normal temperature provided life and which at low temperatures became crystallized, causing massive destruction of cells. It was not that the brain had been revived but that extensive work had been .done with blood elements. Unfortunately, red blood cell counts and white blood cell counts, osmotic fragility and hemolysis hardly trumpeted the triumph of socialism among the masses.

  Therefore, significant work was subordinated to the imagination of some propagandist. It was natural, humanly natural, to drift into what would gain the most fame.

  But Semyon Fyodor wanted more. He wanted more for his country and for the people whose labours had paid for his education. He wanted more for all those scientists who had preceded him and on whose work he built. What Dr Semyon Petrovitch wanted was to add another solid brick to the body of knowledge for others to build on. He was not in competition with the West. He was partners with them, from the ancient Egyptians to the latest brain
surgeons in New York City.

  This made him no less a Russian, no less a believer in his form of government. It made him want to work outside of Russia and escape the competitive nature of Soviet science.

  These things he thought about, going down in the elevator toward the main floor. He suddenly noticed the nurse with the cleavage had taken the elevator down with him and he had ignored her. He was also aware that his headache was gone and his stomach contractions had ceased.

  He left the elevator stepping briskly. The big problem with cryonics, low-temperature medicine, was that too many people around the world had treated it as some form of medical miracle, like resurrection.

  Even today, especially in America, rich people with good bank accounts and a fear of death were arranging for their dead bodies to be incarcerated in capsules, temperatures rapidly lowered with liquid nitrogen and sustained in that state by technology supported by the interest of those good bank accounts.

  They froze the dead. And then expected some future scientist to resurrect the dead body. As Dr Petrovitch had told one person at one of those awful embassy parties, 'You don't need a scientist, you need a Christian minister. They believe in resurrection, I don't. It is possible as an article of faith, sir, not as a fact of science.'

  The embassy had also prevailed upon him to speak at one of those cryonics societies that had sprung up around the world, many of whose members entertained some fancy of having a double life, one natural and the other through freezing.

  'Yes, we might have a chance of suspending animation through cryonics. First, we need a volunteer. He, or she, has to have a good heart, be in perfect physical condition, and ideally be in the late twenties. Then we drain his blood, rapidly replacing it with a substance, probably glycerol, which also has a very good chance of killing him at normal temperatures, and we lower his temperature fast enough during this process - a very chancy combination of blood transfer and temperature reduction. Do I have any volunteers?'

  There was a hush in the hotel room, rented for that meeting.

  'That may work if we had a volunteer,' Dr Petrovitch went on. 'Let me tell you what will not work: terminal cancer patients, already weak from the ravages of the disease; old people whose bodies have given out and have little chance of surviving now, let alone against the massive assault upon the body a freezing process entails; and, most of all, those people who have just died. If their bodies are not capable of sustaining life at ninety-eight point six degrees Fahrenheit, how are they going to do it at below zero degrees Celsius?'

  And then came that persistent rationale for the most unscientific of expectations. A hand had been raised and that old statement made. Dr Petrovitch kept reminding himself not to be cruel as hi heard it.

  'Sir, I am not a scientist or a doctor. But I do know this. If we bury someone, put them into the ground to decompose, there is a zero chance of recovery. There is no chance. But if we freeze someone, on the chance that a later age will have cures for the disease, that person has a better than zero chance of recovery. Isn't that so?'

  And Semyon, stifling his rage, his voice lower than normal, each word precise, had answered:

  'Yes, better than zero. You are correct. It is as good as this lucky krone I have in my pocket, which I will sell you for everything you own. Put this krone in your mouth and you will never die. It is magic. Now, the odds are certain you will die. We have precedent for that assumption.

  'So, you are certain of dying. But perhaps the psychic belief that holding this krone in your mouth will give you eternal life, will keep you from dying. That, too, is a better than zero possibility. And just as good. If you want resurrection, may I recommend some excellent Lutheran churches in this country.'

  The meeting had broken up. There had been a protest to the embassy that if Dr Petrovitch was an example of the Soviet-Scandinavian Friendship Pact, he was certainly not doing the Soviet Union any good, and that the writer had been previously well disposed toward communism before Dr Petrovitch's appearance at their meeting and now felt otherwise.

  The real tragedy of the meeting came with a beautiful, pale blonde woman in her early twenties. There was an offer of seduction, and Semyon had taken it. In the second week of the affair, Semyon, glowing from every active corpuscle in his forty-two-year-old body, was asked to look at the girl's father. Perhaps Semyon could do something with low-level temperatures to help the father. What diseases did the father have, Semyon had asked; heart failure had been the answer.

  'I would suggest a heart specialist.'

  'But they failed, Semyon darling. That's what killed him.'

  The woman had wanted him to get her father dug up after eleven months of burial.

  After that, Semyon Petrovitch refused even to consider any prospect concerning his field that did not come from a reputable scientist.

  Early spring was coming to Norway, and Dr Petrovitch breathed gusts of moisture as he trotted through the courtyard between building and hospital. He tried to remember what the American scientist looked like, but all he could remember was Texas and that the man was somewhat tall.

  At the emergency room, he saw someone who had to be Dr McCardle, but he didn't remember him that tall. The man was dressed like an Eskimo. A giant in fur.

  'Dr McCardle?'

  'Yes. Dr Petrovitch ?'

  'Yes. Where is the specimen you have for me? A whole body, yes?'

  'Yes,' said the American.

  He stuffed a big glove in his parka. He explained he had been travelling since the day before and had just flown in and had kept the body wrapped in a tarpaulin. He was tired. He was sweating. And he was glad to be here.

  Dr Petrovitch reached for a piece of paper that the American was taking out from his shirt, but the American yanked it back and apologized. It was company business, and the body was outside.

  'Fine,' said Dr Petrovitch. 'How did it die?'

  'I don't know. I'm a geologist. We found it. Like the mastodon found in permafrost in your country.'

  'It is a human body, isn't it?' asked Dr Petrovitch. Suddenly he was experiencing severe doubts about what this man had brought him. A small rented van was parked, blocking access for ambulances.

  'Yes, it's in there.'

  'How bad is the decomposition ?’

  ‘I didn't look at it long. I didn't see any.'

  'Uhhum,' said Dr Petrovitch, registering this fact and waiting for the rear door of the van to open. The big American swung the door open easily, and water broke out of the van. Dr Petrovitch saw a brownish tarpaulin. The lights from the hospital glistened off the dark water at the bed of the truck, as though the water had broken out of the tarpaulin itself.

  The big American reached inside and, with an effort to get the closed tarpaulin off, ripped a strand of cord with his massive hands. He pulled back an edge to the wall of the truck, and Dr Petrovitch saw dark hair through a smooth covering of ice.

  Obviously, the melting process had begun in the truck itself but had not reached the body. With grunts, the American climbed into the back of the truck, and both he and Dr Petrovitch eased the tarpaulin away. The American had amazing strength, and Dr Petrovitch cautioned him not to drop the water-slick ice with the specimen inside.

  A small light in the back of the van showed flashes of skin, with very little discolouration.

  It was a muscular young man. There was a wound, Dr Petrovitch found, in the right thigh. It should not have been the cause of death.

  That was from a core tube. Went through it,' said the American.

  Dr Petrovitch pressed his forefinger into the cylindrical wound. He tried to feel the crack of crystals between thumb and forefinger. It was rubbery. He tried to find a vein, but there was not room enough to do this by eyesight since he was wedged against the side of the van, and the frozen specimen was right against him. If there was a vein at his fingers, it too had yet to be crystallized.

  'My God,' gasped Dr Petrovitch, who did not believe in God. 'He's beautiful. Thank you. Thank you
. Thank you.’

  Three

  In the back of the truck, his knees wet from incredibly cold water that had seeped down his open jacket underneath his pants, and trying desperately to protect the piece of paper authorizing him to leave the drill site far up north.Lew McCardle heard massively confusing comments from the Russian doctor.

  'Why not ?' said the Russian. His dark eyes were wide, his face just across the slick ice mound between them, and he was grinning as though Lew was supposed to understand 'why not ?'.

  'Can I let it down?'

  'Certainly. Do you have sinus trouble?' 'No.'

  'Then why not?'

  'What, why not ?' asked McCardle.

  'Let it down carefully. Carefully. Carefully.'

  Lew eased the block down to the cold, wet floor. His fingers were numb. He blew on them. Petrovitch yelled out for a nurse. He yelled out for orderlies. He wanted an assistant. He wanted the hyperbaric chamber. A nurse came with a light sweater over her starched uniform. She wanted to see the patient. Petrovitch said it was none of her business.

  Petrovitch said it was an emergency because he said it was an emergency. McCardle squeezed out of the truck. Petrovitch grabbed McCardle. The nurse grabbed McCardle. Lew McCardle asked what was going on.

  'Don't ask nurses questions. Give them orders,' said Petrovitch.

  'You're accepting the body ?'

  'We have. It's mine. Come. We'll get a reasonable nurse. Don't worry, you're part of it.'

  'I'm not worried,' said McCardle. He said it to Petrovitch. But Petrovitch was out of the truck and back inside the hospital. McCardle said it to the nurse.