by Roger Elwood
“Did you vote for the Freezer Law?”
“No, of course not.”
“I must be spoiling for a fight. I’m glad you dropped by, Luke.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“I keep thinking the ten billion voters will eventually work their way down to me. Go ahead, grin. Who’d want your liver?”
Gamer cackled. “Somebody could murder me for my skeleton. Not to put inside him. For a museum.”
We left it at that.
The news broke a couple of days later. Several North American hospitals had been reviving corpsicles.
How they had kept the secret was a mystery. Those corpsicles who had survived the treatment—twenty-two of them, out of thirty-five attempts—had been clinically alive for some ten months, conscious for shorter periods.
For the next week it was all the news there was. Taffy and I watched interviews with the dead men, with the doctors, with members of the Security Council. The move was not illegal. As publicity against the Second Freezer Bill, it may have been a mistake.
All of the revived corpsicles had been insane. Else why risk it?
Some of the casualties had died because their insanity was caused by brain damage. The rest were—cured, but only in a biochemical sense. Each had been insane long enough for their doctors to decide that there was no hope. Now they were stranded in a foreign land, their homes forever lost in the mists of time. Revivification had saved them from an ugly, humiliating death at the hands of most of the human race, a fate that smacked of cannibalism and ghouls. The paranoids were hardly surprised. The rest reacted like paranoids.
In the boob cube, they came across as a bunch of frightened mental patients.
One night we watched a string of interviews on the big screen in Taffy’s bedroom wall. They weren’t well handled. Too much “How do you feel about the wonders of the present?” when the poor boobs hadn’t come out of their shells long enough to know or care. Many wouldn’t believe anything they were told or shown. Others didn’t care about anything but space exploration—a largely Belter activity which Earth’s voting public tended to ignore. Too much of it was at the level of this last one: an interviewer explaining to a woman that a boob cube was not a cube, that the word referred only to the three-dimensional effect. The poor woman was badly rattled and not too bright in the first place.
Taffy was sitting cross-legged on the bed, combing out her long, dark hair so that it flowed over her shoulders in shining curves. “She’s an early one,” she said critically. “There may have been oxygen starvation of the brain during freezing.”
“That’s what you see. All the average citizen sees is the way she acts. She’s obviously not ready to join society.”
“Dammit, Gil, she’s alive. Shouldn’t that be miracle enough for anyone?”
“Maybe. Maybe the average voter liked her better the other way.”
Taffy brushed at her hair with angry vigor. “They’re alive.”
“I wonder if they revived Leviticus Hale.”
“Leviti—Oh. Not at Saint John’s.” Taffy worked there. She’d know.
“I haven’t seen him in the cube. They should have revived him,” I said. “With that patriarchal visage he’d make a great impression. He might even try the Messiah bit. ‘Yea, brethren, I have returned from the dead to lead you—’ None of the others have tried that yet.”
“Good thing, too.” Her strokes slowed. “A lot of them died in the thawing process, and afterward. From cell wall ruptures.”
Ten minutes later I got up and used the phone. Taffy showed her amusement. “Is it that important?”
“Maybe not.” I dialed the Vault of Eternity in New Jersey. I knew I’d be wondering until I did.
Mr. Restarick was on night watch. He seemed glad to see me. He’d have been glad to see anyone who would talk back. His clothes were the same mismatch of ancient styles, but they didn’t look as anachronistic now as they had a year ago. The boob cube had been lousy with corpsicles wearing approximations of their own styles.
Yes, he remembered me. Yes, Leviticus Hale was still in place. The hospitals had taken two of his wards, and both had survived, he told me proudly. The administrators had wanted Hale too; they’d liked his looks and his publicity value, dating as he did from the last century but one. But they hadn’t been able to get permission from the next of kin.
Taffy watched me watching a blank phone screen. “What’s wrong?”
“The Chambers kid. Remember Holden Chambers, the corpsicle heir? He lied to me. He refused permission for the hospitals to revive Leviticus Hale. A year ago.”
“Oh.” She thought it over, then reacted with a charity typical of her. “It’s a lot of money just for not signing a paper.”
The cube was showing an old flick, a remake of a Shakespeare play. We turned it to landscape and went to sleep.
I back away, back away. The composite ghost comes near, using somebody’s arm and somebody’s eye and Loren’s pleural cavity containing somebody’s heart and somebody’s lung and somebody’s other lung, and I can feel it all inside him with my fingertips. Horrible. I reach deeper. Somebody’s heart wiggles in my hand like a caught fish.
Taffy found me in the kitchen making hot chocolate. For two. I know damn well she can’t sleep when I’m restless. She said, “Why don’t you tell me about it?”
“Because it’s ugly.”
“I think you’d better tell me.” She came into my arms, rubbed her cheek against mine.
I said to her ear, “Get the poison out of my system? Sure, and into yours.”
“All right.” I could take it either way.
The chocolate was ready. I disengaged myself and poured it, added meager splashes of bourbon. She sipped reflectively. She said, “Is it always Loren?”
“Yah. Damn him.”
“Never—this one you’re after now?”
“Anubis? I never dealt with him. He was Bera’s assignment. Anyway, he retired before I was properly trained. Gave his territory to Loren. The market in stuff was so bad that Loren had to double his territory just to keep going.” I was talking too much. I was desperate to talk to someone, to get back my grip on reality. These damn nightmares.
“What did they do, flip a coin?”
“For what? Oh. No, there was never a question about who was going to retire. Loren was a sick man. It must have been why he went into the business. He needed the supply of transplants. And he couldn’t get out because he needed constant shots. His rejection spectrum must have been a bad joke. Anubis was different.”
She sipped at her chocolate. She shouldn’t have to know this, but I couldn’t stop talking. “Anubis changed body parts at whim. We’ll never get him. He probably made himself over completely when he . . . retired.”
Taffy touched my shoulder. “Let’s go back to bed.”
“All right.” But my own voice ran on in my head. His only problem was the money. How could he hide a fortune that size? And the new identity. A new personality with lots of conspicuous money . . . and, if he tried to live somewhere else, a foreign accent too. But there’s less privacy here, and he’s known. . . . I sipped the chocolate, watching the landscape in the boob cube. What could he do to make a new identity convincing? The landscape scene was night on some mountaintop, bare tumbled rock backed by churning clouds. Restful.
I thought of something he could do.
I got out of bed and called Bera.
Taffy watched me in amazement. “It’s three in the morning,” she pointed out.
“I know.”
Lila Bera was sleepy and naked and ready to kill someone. Me. She said, “Gil, it better be good.”
“It’s good. Tell Jackson I can locate Anubis.”
Bera popped up beside her, demanded, “Where?” His hair was miraculously intact, a puffy black dandelion ready to blow. He was squint-eyed and grimacing with sleep, and as naked as . . . as I was, come to that. This thing superseded good manners.
I told him where
Anubis was.
I had his attention then. I talked fast, sketching in the intermediate steps. “Does it sound reasonable? I can’t tell. It’s three in the morning. I may not be thinking right.”
Bera ran both hands through his hair, a swift, violent gesture that left his natural in shreds. “Why didn’t I think of that? Why didn’t anyone think of that?”
“The waste. When the stuff from one condemned ax murderer can save a dozen lives, it just doesn’t occur to you—”
“Right right right. Skip that. What do we do?”
“Alert Headquarters. Then call Holden Chambers. I may be able to tell just by talking to him. Otherwise we’ll have to go over.”
“Yah.” Bera grinned through the pain of interrupted sleep. “He’s not going to like being called at three in the morning.”
The white-haired man informed me that Holden Chambers was not to be disturbed. He was reaching for a (mythical) cutoff switch when I said, “ARM business, life and death,” and displayed my ARM ident. He nodded and put me on HOLD.
Very convincing. But he’d gone through some of the same motions every time I’d called.
Chambers appeared, wearing a different minimum kilt. He backed up a few feet (wary of ghostly intrusions?) and sat down on the uneasy edge of a water bed. He rubbed his eyes and said, “Censor it, I was up past midnight studying. What now?”
“You’re in danger. Immediate danger. Don’t panic, but don’t go back to bed either. We’re coming over.”
“You’re kidding.” He studied my face in the phone screen. “You’re not, are you? Aaall right, I’ll put some clothes on. What kind of danger?”
“I can’t tell you that. Don’t go anywhere.”
I called Bera back.
He met me in the lobby. We used his taxi. An ARM ident in the credit slot turns any cab into a police car. Bera said, “Couldn’t you tell?”
“No, he was too far back. I had to say something, so I warned him not to go anywhere.”
“I wonder if that was a good idea.”
“It doesn’t matter. Anubis only has about fifteen minutes to act, and even then we could follow him.”
There was no immediate answer to our ring. Maybe he was surprised to see us outside his door. Ordinarily you can’t get into the parking-roof elevator unless a tenant lets you in; but an ARM ident unlocks most doors.
Bera’s patience snapped. “I think he’s gone. We’d better call—”
Chambers opened the door. “All right, what’s it all about? Come—” He saw our guns.
Bera hit the door hard and branched right; I branched left. Those tiny apartments don’t have many places to hide. The water bed was gone, replaced by an L-shaped couch and coffee table. There was nothing behind the couch. I covered the bathroom while Bera kicked the door open.
Nobody here but us. Chambers lost his astonished look, smiled and clapped for us. I bowed.
“You must have been serious,” he said. “What kind of danger? Couldn’t it have waited for morning?”
“Yah, but I couldn’t have slept,” I said, coming toward him. “I’m going to owe you a big fat apology if this doesn’t work out.”
He backed away.
“Hold still. This will only take a second.” I advanced on him. Bera was behind him now. He hadn’t hurried. His long legs give him deceptive speed.
Chambers backed away, backed away, backed into Bera and squeaked in surprise. He dithered, then made a break for the bathroom.
Bera reached out, wrapped one arm around Chambers’ waist and pinned his arms with the other. Chambers struggled like a madman. I stepped wide around them, moved in sideways to avoid Chambers’ thrashing legs, reached out to touch his face with my imaginary hand.
He froze. Then he screamed.
And if I was wrong, it was going to be embarrassing. But it all fitted: the very noticeable frozen body of Leviticus Hale, Anubis’ very noticeable fortune and plethora of unsaleable transplant stocks, the cigarette trick, the man with the hunting laser, and Chambers’ terror. “That’s what you were afraid of,” I told him. “You never dreamed I could reach through a phone screen and do this.”
I reached into his head. I felt smooth muscle and grainy bone and sinus cavities like bubbles. He tossed his head, but my hand went with it. I ran imaginary fingertips along the smooth inner surface of his skull.
It was there. A ridge of scar, barely raised above the rest of the bone, too fine for X-rays. It ran in a closed curve from the base of his skull up through the temples to intersect his eye sockets.
“It’s him,” I said.
Bera screamed in his ear. “You pig!”
Anubis went limp.
“I can’t find a joining at the brain stem. They must have transplanted the spinal cord too: the whole central nervous system.” I found scars along the vertebrae. “That’s what they did, all right.”
Anubis spoke almost casually, as if he’d lost a chess game. “All right, that’s a gotcha. I concede. Let’s sit down.”
“Sure.” Bera threw him at the couch. He hit it, more or less. He adjusted himself, looking astonished at Bern’s bad behavior. What was the man so excited about?
Bera told him. “You pig. Coring him like that, making a vehicle out of the poor bastard. We never thought of a brain transplant.”
“It’s a wonder I thought of it myself. The stuff from one donor is worth over a million marks in surgery charges. Why should anyone use a whole prospect for one transplant? But once I thought of it, it made all kinds of sense. The stuff wasn’t selling anyway.”
Funny: they both talked as if they’d known each other a long time. There aren’t many people an organlegger will regard as people, but an ARM is one of them. We’re organleggers too, in a sense.
Bera was holding a sonic on him. Anubis ignored it. He said, “The only problem was the money.”
“Then you thought of the corpsicle heirs,” I said.
“Yah. I went looking for a rich corpsicle with a young, healthy, direct-line heir. Leviticus Hale seemed made for the part. He was the first one I noticed.”
“He’s pretty noticeable, isn’t he? A healthy middle-aged man sleeping there among all those battered accident cases. Only two heirs, both orphans, one kind of introverted, the other . . . What did you do to Charlotte?”
“Charlotte Chambers? We drove her mad. We had to. She was the only one who’d notice if Holden Chambers suddenly got too different.”
“What did you do to her?”
“We made a wirehead out of her.”
“The hell. Someone would have noticed the contact in her scalp.”
“No, no, no. We used one of those helmets you find in the ecstasy shops. It stimulates a current in the pleasure center of the brain, by induction, so a customer can try it out before the peddler, actually drops the wire into his brain. We kept her in the helmet for nine days, on full. When we stopped the current, she just wasn’t interested in anything anymore.”
“How did you know it would work?”
“Oh, we tried it out on a few prospects. It worked fine. It didn’t hurt them after they were broken up.”
“Okay.” I went to the phone and dialed ARM Headquarters.
“It solved the money problem beautifully,” he ran on. “I plowed most of it into advertising charges. And there’s nothing suspicious about Leviticus Hale’s money. When the Second Freezer Bill goes through—well, I guess not. Not now. Unless—”
“No,” Bera said for both of us.
I told the man on duty where we were, and to stop monitoring the tracers, and to call in the operatives watching corpsicle heirs. Then I hung up.
“I spent six months studying Chambers’ college courses. I didn’t want to blow his career. Six months! Answer me one,” said Anubis, curiously anxious. “Where did I go wrong? What gave me away?”
“You were beautiful,” I told him wearily. “You never went out of character. You should have been an actor. Would have been safer, too. We didn’t sus
pect anything until—” I looked at my watch. “Forty-five minutes ago.”
“Censored dammit! You would say that. When I saw you looking at me in Midgard I thought that was it. That floating cigarette. You’d got Loren, now you were after me.”
I couldn’t help it. I roared. Anubis sat there, taking it. He was beginning to blush.
They were shouting something, something I couldn’t make out. Something with a beat. DAdadadaDAdadada . . .
There was just room for me and Jackson Bera and Luke Gamer’s travel chair on the tiny balcony outside Gamer’s office. Far below, the marchers flowed past the ARM building in half-orderly procession. Teams of them carried huge banners. LET THEM STAY DEAD, one suggested; and another in small print: why not revive them a bit at a time? FOR YOUR FATHER’S SAKE, a third said with deadly logic.
They were roped off from the spectators, roped off into a column down the middle of Wilshire. The spectators were even thicker. It looked like all of Los Angeles had tamed out to watch. Some of them carried placards too. THEY WANT TO LIVE TOO, and ARE YOU A FREEZER VAULT HEIR?
“What is it they’re shouting?” Bera wondered. “It’s not the marchers, it’s the spectators. They’re drowning out the marchers.”
DA dadadaDA dadadaDA dadada, it rippled up to us on stray wind currents.
“We could see it better inside, in the boob cube,” Gamer said without moving. What held us was a metaphysical force, the knowledge that one is there, a witness. Abruptly Gamer asked, “How’s Charlotte Chambers?”
“I don’t know.” I didn’t want to talk about it.
“Didn’t you call Menninger Institute this morning?”
“I mean I don’t know how to take it. They’ve done a wirehead operation on her. They’re giving her just enough current to keep her interested. It’s working, I mean she’s talking to people, but . . .”
“It’s got to be better than being catatonic,” Bera said.