The Far Arena

by Richard Ben Sapir

McCardle was quiet.

  'Bring it back to life,' said Dr Petrovitch. 'Its systems are much less complex than a human body, and I am sure its freezing conditions were far more exact and favourable than your cargo. You bring this frog back to life.'

  'I'm not an expert in cryogenics,'said McCardle.

  'Cryonics, doctor. Cryogenics is low-temperature physics. I am talking about cryonics, biological low temperature. The effect low temperatures have on living matter. An entirely other thing, which is where you made your mistake.'

  'We found the body eight point two metres down in the ice, Semyon.'

  'After he fell there in an accident, or what ?' 'You saw the body on delivery.' 'I saw external ice.'

  'He was stiff as an iron pipe,' said McCardle.

  Dr Petrovitch nodded while smiling sarcastically. 'In any case, before we make this a criminal affair, would you please be so kind as to bring this little frog back to life.'

  'Well, I don't know too much about your discipline, fella. You're the expert.'

  'Yes, I am. Which was your mistake.'

  'You've achieved a miracle and you're doubting your own success?' said McCardle. He buttoned up the sleeve. A small drop of water remained on his pinky nail.

  A patch of frost at the frozen webbed toes glistened. It was thawing.

  'Make it live, Dr McCardle. Do this little thing for me.' 'Can you do it?'

  'No,' said Dr Petrovitch, 'and neither can anyone else. Take a stool and I will tell you what we can do and cannot do.'

  They could bring the frog's sperm down to inactive levels of temperature, and bring it back to levels of high enough temperatures to make it active. It could then fertilize eggs. They could freeze human sperm and whole blood. This was common practice now at hospitals.

  There had been some notable successes. The small intestines of a dog had been frozen for a week and revived. Not in Oslo, and not by Dr Petrovitch. His area of discipline had been primarily treating frostbite, the revivification of limbs, skin, and other partial elements of the anatomy, which was why an oil company doing exploration in northern climes would know of Dr Petrovitch.

  'I know of you and know you, Semyon.'

  'In a professional relationship,' said Dr Petiovitch.

  Lew McCardle tried to light a cigar, and Dr Petrovitch told him there was no smoking in the laboratory. Among other things accomplished elsewhere was the freezing of a calf embryo and the replacing of it by surgery, after the rapid-thaw process, in the uterus of a cow. It was born alive. This was done in England without giving the Soviet Union the proper credit for the rapid-thaw process. A dog's kidneys had been lowered to 58 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and revived. A cat's brain had been frozen for 182 days, and when brought back to normal temperature, again through Soviet techniques of rapid simultaneous thawing of cells, it resumed electrical activity. That's what had been done.

  'And that body upstairs?' said McCardle. 'We had to dig to get it out of the ice.'

  Petrovitch shook his head. 'Not that body upstairs. That's too healthy for a trusting Russian.'

  'There's no such thing as a trusting Russian. So get off it, Semyon.'

  'There's no such thing as a crystallized body being restored.

  Crystallization destroys cells. They are like little bombs going off in the body,' said Petrovitch, his hands going wide as though pleading for something, his whole manner that of a man exhausted spiritually.

  'If it can't be done, why do people have themselves frozen ?'

  'For the same reason pharaohs were buried with their boats and servants, people light candles and sprinkle incense, while others create societies and art they hope will last forever. We're afraid of death, Dr McCardle. It is a property of the human animal, as reflexive as breathing. It keeps the human race alive. People who have themselves frozen can't accept death. It is hardly anything more than the eternal myth and hope of resurrection. I leave that to the churches. Look around you, no spires, no crucifixes, no candles. Instruments.'

  The frog was wet and shiny. Dr Petrovitch righted it with a finger under its stiff head, like a small statue. It stayed as stiff and as perfect as its last movement in the drawer. Internally, it was still frozen. The little yellow lines had returned and so had the dots. But the eyes were white. McCardle found himself wondering whether it was a baby or a full-grown frog.

  'I know of a scientist who had it done to himself, frozen in a capsule, and, from what I remember, he was a highly rational man,' said McCardle.

  'I know of whom you speak. And his reasoning was that having himself frozen gave himself, what he called, a non-zero chance of recovery. If you are buried in the ground and your body decomposes naturally, there is a zero chance of recovery. When he talked of zero chance of recovery, he really meant death. Zero is death.'

  Dr Petrovitch, by the way, was fully familiar with the cryocapsules that stored people. The freezing concept itself was correct. They drained the body and cooled it to 10 degrees Celsius, then perfused the arteries with glycerol. Blood was not a good freezing agent because it crystallized. Once the body was filled with this cellular antifreeze, it was lowered to minus 79 degrees Celsius at which temperature molecular movement ceases.

  McCardle said he was aware of that.

  'The problem is not freezing a body. That can be done quite well. The problem is in unfreezing. I could freeze you very well now, I just couldn't bring you back to life. Even in single cells, thawing is only seventy per cent effective. Which leaves, under the best conditions, thirty per cent damaged or, if you will, dead. The human body is so complex with so many billions of cells, it is impossible to perfuse it thoroughly with glycerol, assuming glycerol works perfectly which I do not think it does. And with the brain - hah, hah, hah - you get something that looks like a brain, is composed of brain cells, smells like a brain, feels like a brain, and might as well be a cauliflower. People are not frozen dinners, Dr McCardle. Dead is still dead.'

  'And when did you change your mind ?'

  'When it started talking. When it started talking, I would have had to believe that under less than ideal conditions, a brain had been revived intact with more than ninety per cent, if not one hundred per cent, recovery. All this with all the other organs. I couldn't do it with our little frog here, and yet nature is supposed to do it with an incredibly more complex human body with its original blood?'

  'The blood looked brackish.'

  'No. No. No. What happened, my dear Dr McCardle, was you thought you had killed him near the hospital and froze the poor person ineptly so that the brain never froze, the organs never froze, and gullible trusting Semyon Petrovitch provided you with the disposal of a body you had just tried to kill. Or maybe the CIA tried to kill him. I am no murderer. I do not know how your mind works.'

  'So why didn't you phone the police?’

  'I want no trouble here. I am on loan to the university. I told my embassy.'

  'So it's not your problem.'

  ‘It is not a political problem, it is a scientific one.'

  'Well, friend, you have a bigger one right now. You've got a doozy. You'll hear it.'

  McCardle opened his attache case with slightly wet hands slipping on the brass snaps. Careful not to wet one of the tapes, he found an early one and snapped it into a slim aluminium recorder, also taken from the case. In the case was a Latin-English dictionary with a few corners already worn.

  'I have friends who have heard those ramblings from John Carter, and they declare them peculiar.'

  'At your embassy, KGB?' asked Lew, although it was a silly question. Of course they had. They weren't going to be drawn into something blind. They didn't run their country like men ran their lives. Dr Petrovitch had to have their permission.

  Petrovitch pointed to the frog. McCardle rewound the tape. Petrovitch pressed his finger down on the little frog's back. The shiny skin gave way under the finger. It was thawed. But for the once-shiny black eyes, it looked alive. They were white. The crystallization of water had destroyed
them. It had also, McCardle knew, destroyed the brain.

  'Dead,' said Dr Petrovitch, 'is dead.' He clasped a slippery hind foot of the little frog delicately and finally dropped it into a small bucket.

  Only moisture and a small black speck with a small red streak remained on the white sink top. Even if the eyes had returned to their shiny blackness, it still would have been just as dead.

  McCardle played the tape and this time, listening for it, he heard the name 'Publius'.

  'So ?' said Dr Petrovitch.

  'So undoubtedly your friends, who understand the criminal mind, have heard some of the tapes, if not this one already.'

  'I do not know how they operate,' said Dr Petrovitch, using superiority like a fence,

  'They have, have they not ?' said Lew McCardle.

  'I imagine,' said Dr Petrovitch.

  'Let's assume they had copies of the tapes right away, and let's assume they tried translating within, oh, a day. I'd say an hour, but let's say a day, all right ?'

  Petrovitch shrugged as if it were of no matter to him.

  'And let's say,' said McCardle, 'they still don't know what language it is, because if they did, you wouldn't be here calling me some sort of murderer. I'm telling you your secret police still haven't translated this tape because they're so suspicious. Their own mentality has protected them from the truth.

  'They say it is a form of Italian.

  'No, Semyon. Italian is a form of this language and so is Spanish and French. It is Latin. Classical Latin. The tape stopped and the forward button clicked up.

  'So it is a dead language, said Dr Petrovitch. 'So your victim speaks a dead language. 'To whom is he speaking, Semyon ?

  'Someone else in a Latin class. You have those things. You study Greek, too.

  ‘In a semi-comatose state, Semyon ?

  'He is reciting a childhood lesson. It happens.'

  'Seven days in a row with no other language present ?' asked McCardle.

  He was not sure the person had not lapsed into some other language until he saw Semyon's face, which did not flinch. McCardle was correct. The body spoke only Latin, and Semyon's embassy staff had yet to identify the language, because Dr Petrovitch himself had assured them the patient could not have been more than twenty minutes in ice. The Russian embassy apparently had examined every tape.

  'How old is he?' asked Dr Petrovitch.

  'At least sixteen hundred years, probably older,' said McCardle.

  'Are you lying, Lew ?'

  'No. That is too big a lie.'

  it is too big a truth,' said Petrovitch. He rubbed his balding scalp and sat down on a high stool. He peered down into the waste bucket where the dead glistening little experiment was and shook his head.

  'How ?' asked Petrovitch finally. 'How ?'

  'That's what you've got to find out. Now you yourself have admitted that one of the problems with Soviet science is its taste for the spectacular. What's breathing upstairs is pretty spectacular. Do you think if this becomes public knowledge too soon, you're going to have the slightest chance of working scientifically?'

  Petrovitch gulped for air. He shook his head. He wouldn't, he knew.

  'Not at all. Now I need the same thing. I need to be free of the kind of intense, wild publicity that will surround this guy when they find out what you've done.'

  ‘If he lives,' said Petrovitch.

  ‘Is there a doubt?'

  'I do not know. I do not know,' said Petrovitch. He stared vaguely at the ceiling. 'The blood. Of course. The blood.' 'What?'

  'The blood,' said Petrovitch, as though Lew had been part of the scientist's innermost thoughts. 'The blood. At the wound, It did not feel crystallized, although it might have been melting. I didn't know.'

  'What ?' asked Lew. 'Is that possible below freezing ?'

  'Yes. But not for blood. But this blood was different.'

  'How?'

  'We are finding out. The final tests are not in yet. But somehow the bloodstream at one point did not carry completely normal blood. We saved the blood. We'll find out what it was.'

  'It was whitish, yellowish, sort of, when I saw it first. But wouldn't that be natural for its state of existence ?'

  'Of course. The red cells were driven out by the temperature.' said Petrovitch. 'That wouldn't explain it. There was that odour. That blood was not normal blood. Not at all. There was another element in that bloodstream. And we'll find it.'

  'When the core sample came up with that piece of thigh...'

  'The gracilis muscle.'

  'Whatever. When I felt it, it felt sort of rubbery. There was no crunch under my fingers.'

  'Yes,' exulted Petrovitch. He clapped his hands with a loud crack, blew a kiss to the trash barrel with the remains of the frog, and danced three light steps around the table. 'Yes. Yes. Yes. There was no crystallization. None. None. None. None.'

  'We must be cautious with this,' said Lew.

  'Absolutely. Absolutely,' said Petrovitch, his mind still grappling with medical facts, while Lew was emphasizing political ones. 'But why is it so important to you ?'

  'With the kind of miracle you've done, there will be armies of people and journalists and kook hunters running around looking into where I've been and double-checking where I claim to have found him, which won't be the place I really found him, but they'll find that.'

  'That you would lie about ?'

  'Semyon. I want oil. I look for oil. We want to find it by ourselves, so that we can get the rights cheaper. Your own people must have told you that. That's why I don't want the great publicity for a while. That is my area of interest.'

  'Why would your people tell my people ?'

  'Because, Semyon, in this business, on the project I was working on, the gieat enemy is not the Soviet Union but Royal Dutch Shell, Phillips Petroleum, Standard Oil. Those are our enemies in this, not you.'

  'Capitalism,' said Petrovitch, as though that explained all sorts of peculiarities and that to delve further would be a waste of time for one would find only more peculiarities.

  'So, we share the same interest. You will work with discretion and a shield that I help provide, and when you are ready, and we are ready, we will announce what a great thing you have done. We laud Soviet science and you laud the commitment of an American oil company. We get the oil. You get the prestige.'

  'It has to be the blood. It's got to be the blood,' said Petrovitch. 'A maximum of sixteen hundred years, Lew ?'

  'No. Minimum, Semyon. It could be two thousand, three thousand. Sixteen hundred is the youngest it could be.'

  Petrovitch shrugged, his dark eyebrows rising with an acceptable thought. 'Sixteen hundred. Actually, at certain temperatures sixteen hundred, a minute and a half, ten thousand years. At certain temperatures they become the same. Organic functions like decomposition need heat. Did you know that ?'

  'I guess you're right, yes.'

  'We have another problem, small this time, Lew. Who talks to it, if it recovers enough to talk to people instead of itself.'

  'The woman suggested by the Romance professor, Semyon, She's a nun. I saw her. She identified the language.'

  Petrovitch shook his head. "They will try to prove some religious thing. They will.'

  'I think we could use her and she wouldn't have ambitions.'

  'Then we must exact a promise, she would not try to prove some religious thing with it.'

  'She has gone to Oxford.'

  'I don't trust religious things.'

  'Meet her.'

  'Religious people make me uncomfortable. I don't like them.’ 'Meet her first, and then decide. She is quite taken with the language. I just know she is not the sort who would let religious convictions interfere with academic facts.'

  'Nuns are lesbians,' said Petrovitch.'

  'Do you know any ?'

  'If they were not lesbians, why would they become nuns ?' 'Is it possible,' said Lew smiling, 'that you are being a bit irrational ?' 'A bit,' conceded Petrovitch.


  'We have benefits if we use a nun. She is not going to hold press conferences or sell her memoirs or go running off with someone who might sell information.'

  'What about the nurses ?'

  'They don't know what we have, and only one is with us who remembers its condition when it arrived. Everyone else thinks it's some dirty-minded executive.'

  'Let me think about it. If recovery continues, then we will interview her. I have sent her a package without getting a reply. One advantage to having a lesbian is that she will not play around with the subject.'

  'Maybe she is hoarding a passion and will sexually attack John Carter,'said Lew.

  'Not John Carter. It should have another name. A Roman name.'

  'Not yet.'

  'Yes. You're right. You don't think she would rape a patient, do you?'

  'I thought she was a lesbian, Semyon.'

  'You are right. I am being irrational. Let us see her tomorrow . in case we need her. I will talk to her. Although I think it is a waste of time. I cannot imagine anyone so religious being scientific, but who knows? I really don't know if she is a lesbian or what or anything. But I do know there has to be some reason why she would live without men.'

  'You can ask her tomorrow.'

  'I might,' said Semyon.

  But the trip to Ringerike the next day had to be put off. What Petrovitch had feared, happened. Screaming 'no', the patient went into shock.

  The little figure with the dark skin coughed and was quiet. The tormented mumbling calmed to an occasional whisper. The twitching stopped, like a storm leaving a lake calm. John Carter was dying

  Twelve

  Eighth Day - Petrovitch Report

  Condition poor. Blood pressure down. Heartbeat unsteady. Temperature down. Body producing abnormally high white-cell count without sufficient infections or any other normal stimulus for this action. Apparent, now, that despite its semi-comatose state, mental process, as with conscious people, effects physical reaction. Heartbeat rose to 180 when recordings picked up the scream of 'no'.