Vectors

by Charles Sheffield

  "I'm afraid this is it, Drake," he said. "I'll be very surprised to see her regain consciousness. If you're still set on this thing, now's the best time for it, while she still has some vestiges of normal body functions. A week from now it would be a waste of time."

  I took a last look at Ana's calm, ravaged face. I fought a battle deep inside, forcing myself to believe that this was not my last farewell to her. Then I nodded to Tom. He injected five c.c.s of Asfanil to assure continued unconsciousness. Then, working together, we lifted her from the bed, removed her clothes and laid her gently in the thermal tank. While Tom filled out the death certificate, I called Second Chance and told them to come to the house. Tom set the tank at three degrees above freezing, inserted the needles and began the temperature drop. The blood was withdrawn through a large hollow needle in the main external iliac artery, cooled a precise amount, and returned to the femoral vein.

  In ten minutes Ana's body temperature had dropped thirty degrees, all life signs had vanished and she was dead. Technically and legally, Tom Lambert and I were now murderers. The death certificate showed that Ana had died of a cardiac arrest induced by her main disease—impossible to dispute. When the Second Chance team arrived, her body lay peacefully in the thermal tank, maintained precisely at three degrees above freezing.

  I had a hard time persuading them to let me go over to the Second Chance preparation building with Ana's body. Tom thought I just couldn't face the idea that it was all over, and he too urged me to accept the fact of her death and stay at the house with him. The preparation team didn't know what to make of it. I must have seemed like a ghoul to them, or some kind of necrophiliac. They told me that the procedures were not pleasant to watch and I would be much better off leaving everything to their experienced hands.

  Of course I couldn't tell them the real reason why I had to see the whole preparation procedure, in detail. But by simply refusing to take no for an answer, I had my way.

  Most Cryo-corpses were stored at liquid nitrogen temperatures—about minus two hundred degrees Celsius. I was not satisfied with that. Minus two hundred is still seventy-three degrees above absolute zero. Although all gross biological processes become imperceptible long before that, there are still plenty of chemical reactions going on and the laws of statistics guarantee that a few atoms will still have enough energy for biological changes. Mind and memory are very delicate functions. I insisted that Ana be prepared and stored as a Heli-corpse, at a couple of degrees absolute. That way the probability of change, physical or mental, went way down. The cost, naturally, went way up.

  I hung around in the preparation room, ignoring all hints that I should wait outside, and I watched closely. The team finally concluded that I must be worried in case they messed up the job, so they humored me and even answered my questions. After the first few minutes it became impossible to see what was happening. As soon as all the air cavities had been filled and all the blood replaced with anti-crystalloids, Ana's body went into the pressure chamber. The temperature was held at three degrees above freezing, while the pressure was slowly raised to five thousand atmospheres. Then the temperature-drop started.

  Back in the 1960's and 70's the freezing process had been done at atmospheric pressure, and the formation of ice crystals ruptured the cells as the temperature dropped. The thawed results were hardly useful, even for tissue transplants. The modern method makes use of the fact that ice can exist in many different solid forms. If you raise the pressure to three thousand atmospheres, then drop the temperature, water will remain liquid to about minus twenty degrees Celsius. And when it finally changes to a solid, it isn't the familiar form of ice—usually called Phase I. Instead, it goes to something called Phase III. Drop the temperature from there, holding the pressure constant, and at about minus twenty-five degrees it goes into another form, Phase II, and stays that way as you drop the temperature still further. If you go to five thousand atmospheres before you drop the temperature, water freezes at about minus five degrees and goes to yet another form, Phase V. The trick to avoid cell-rupture problems at freezing point is to inject anti-crystalloids, which help to inhibit crystal formation. Then by the right combination of pressure and temperature changes, work your way down toward absolute zero, passing into and through Phases V, III and II.

  The process is very tricky and there is absolutely nothing to see except dial readings. The pressure chamber is made without seams or observation ports for obvious reasons. You don't get pressures of five thousand atmospheres, even in the deepest oceans. Fortunately, once you have the temperature down to a hundred degrees absolute, you can let the pressure back down to one atmosphere—otherwise Heli- and Nitro-corpse storage would be impracticable. As it is, there are three-quarters of a million of them stacked away in the Second Chance wombs, all neatly labeled and waiting the resurrection. As soon as someone figures out how.

  In my opinion, it will be as hard to re-vivify most of the early Cryo-corpses as it would be to get Tutankhamen's mummy up and about again. They weren't frozen using the correct procedure and they were stored at too high a temperature. But they paid their deposits and they have the right to sit there until the rental runs out. I had started Ana with a forty-year rental but I thought of that as just a beginning.

  I had a copy of Ana's medical records with me at the Second Chance preparation building. I added to them a full description of what I had observed in the Heli-corpse preparation, copied the whole thing, and made sure that a complete set was included with the file records on Ana that would be stored in the wombs. After Ana's body was taken away there, I went back to the house, fell into bed and slept like a Cryo-corpse myself for thirty hours.

  When I was fully awake again, fed and bathed, I called Tom Lambert. It was time to drop the other shoe. I went over to his office, accepted a hefty drink that Tom prepared, after one look at me, for "medicinal purposes," and told him my plans.

  After I had finished, he came over to my chair, poked the muscles in my shoulders and the back of my neck, pulled down my lower eyelid and looked at the exposed skin, then went and sat opposite me.

  "You've been under a monstrous strain the past few months," he began. "It would be quite unnatural for your behavior or feelings to have been completely normal. In fact, you only seem normal even now because you've walled in your emotions. You don't really understand the implications of what you're suggesting."

  I shook my head. "I've been thinking about this since the first day we had your terminal diagnosis."

  "Then that was the day you put the lid on your real feelings. Look, Drake, Ana was a wonderful woman, and I think I have some faint idea of what you've been through. But you must try and look at this thing objectively. You can't let it become a complete obsession with you. You have a life of your own, you must live it."

  While Tom was talking, I found it hard to listen to him. The room felt hot and airless and I had trouble breathing. His words seemed to come to me from a long distance and they didn't penetrate fully.

  "You're still a young man, Drake, with forty or fifty good years to look forward to. You are one of the world's leading composers and your best works lie ahead. Ana performed your work better than anyone else—but there will be others who can learn. With your talent, you owe it to the rest of us not to cut yourself off in your prime.

  "Drake, take my advice as your doctor and your friend. Get out of that house and take a vacation. You feel one way now, but give it a year and then see how you feel. I guarantee you things will seem quite different. You'll want to live again."

  The breathless feeling was fading and I again had control of myself. Tom's reaction was just what I should have expected. I nodded agreement.

  "I'll do as you say, Tom, and get away from here for a while. But if you're wrong—if, say, I come back to you in eight or ten years and ask you again, will you do it? Will you help me? I want you to give me an honest answer—and your word on it."

  I saw the tension leave him. "Ten years from now? Drake,
if you come back to me in eight or ten years, I'll admit I was wrong—and I'll help you to do what you want. That's a promise. But I'll bet you everything I own that you don't call me on that promise. Come on, Drake, let's drink to your future and to your next composition."

  I shook my head. "Not tonight, Tom. I really have things to do. For one thing, I'm getting ready to go out of town for a while. I'll be in touch."

  A half-truth. I wouldn't leave town until my plans were more firmly fixed. But I certainly expected to be in touch with Tom Lambert when the time came.

  * * *

  I had two problems. One was well-defined: money. I needed enough to make sure that Ana's Cryo-corpse would be kept safe into the indefinite future, until she could be thawed, her disease cured and her life begin again. There were some things I obviously couldn't guard against, such as a total collapse of the world back to barbarism, or the rejection of all present forms of currencies and commodities. Those were risks I had to accept.

  The other problem was more subtle. According to Tom, it would probably be a long time—a hundred years maybe—before Ana's unusual and highly malignant disease could be cured. Suppose it were two hundred years, or even more. What knowledge of present-day society would interest people in the year 2200, or the year 2300? What should a person be, for the people of that future time to think it worthwhile to revive him? If we had a foolproof way of resuscitating the Cryo-corpses, most of the unfortunates in the Cryo-wombs would remain just where they were. Why add another to a crowded world, unless he had something special to offer?

  I imagined myself back in the early nineteenth century. What could I have put in my brain, then, that would be considered valuable two hundred years later? Not politics, not art—our knowledge of them was quite adequate. Not science, or any technology—we had gone far beyond their level.

  I had plenty of time to tackle the question—time, which had been denied to Ana. I could plan and calculate at my leisure. I had set a goal of ten years—that would still give us forty of the fifty we had looked for and expected. But I was willing to stretch that a couple of years, to twelve or so, if I had to. My only recreation while I planned was to estimate the probabilities that it would all work out as I hoped. Always, the chances came out depressingly low.

  While I pondered my second problem, I was hard at work on my first one—making money. I turned my back on compositions that broke new ground. Instead, I took commissions, wrote commemorative pieces, gave concerts and made recordings—anything was accepted if it was lucrative. It was continuous, grinding toil. If anyone thought I was debasing my art, they were too polite to comment on it.

  After four years I had my biggest stroke of luck and my money worries disappeared. I had written a set of short pieces a few years after Ana and I were married, as a kind of musical joke. Baroque forms, with baroque period harmonies, except for occasional modern harmonic twists, spice inserted where it would be most surprising and most appealing. They had been quite successful, among a limited audience. Then I gave permission for them to be used as the incidental music for a series of holovision dramas on life in eighteenth-century France, from Louis Quinze to the French Revolution. The dramas turned out to be the surprise hit of the decade. Suddenly my minuets, bourrees, gavottes, sarabandes and rondeaux were flooding out of every audio outlet, and my royalties were flooding in from every country of the globe. I established a trust fund that would guarantee continued care for Ana's Cryo-corpse for many centuries.

  While all this was going on, I was feverishly busy soaking up all that I could of the personal lives of my musical contemporaries. I interviewed, entertained, courted and analyzed them—and I wrote, in summary form, of my actions. What would the people of the future want to know of the present? I was betting that it would not be the formal works, the text-book knowledge, the official biographies—they would have more than enough of those. The historians would want to hear the personal details, the chat, the gossip. They would want the equivalent of Boswell's journals and Sam Pepys' private diary. I was careful in my own writings to tantalize my reader, hinting that I knew far more than I was putting into print.

  It took time, but after nine long years I felt that I was as ready as I would ever be. I hadn't given as much attention as I would have liked to the question of earning a living in two hundred years' time—but it might be fifty, two hundred, or a thousand. Could Beethoven, suddenly transported to the year 2000, have earned a living as a musician? Let me be less presumptuous—make that Spohr, or Hummel, or some other of Ludwig's less famous contemporaries. I was betting that they could, with ease, as soon as they had picked up the tricks of the time. If I were wrong, I'd do the twenty-third-century equivalent of washing dishes for a living.

  I put my affairs in reasonable order, then went over to see Tom Lambert. We hadn't kept up such close contact since Ana had gone. I'd had other things on my mind, and Tom had married and was busy raising a family. He was genuinely glad to see me and fussed over me like the returning Prodigal Son. We settled in the same familiar study while Tom beamed at me and his wife went to the kitchen and killed the fatted calf.

  "I hear your music everywhere, Drake," he said. "It's great to know that your career is going so well."

  It wasn't, in the strictest musical sense. I had done no really first-rate composition for many years. But Tom had no ear at all for music. Perhaps that was the reason that we had always got along so well—there was no chance of any professional jealousy.

  I hated to spoil Tom's pleasure, but the sooner it was done, the better. I took out the application and handed it to him without speaking.

  He looked at it and all the happiness faded from his face. He shook his head in disbelief, then looked at me closely.

  "Drake, when did you last take a vacation?"

  I did not understand his question.

  "When did you last take any sort of break from work, Drake? How long since you relaxed for an evening, or even for an hour?" he went on. "I hear that you've been working incessantly, year after year. Face it, Drake. Ana is dead. You can't live forever with your own emotions chained and harnessed."

  The study seemed to be much too warm, and I was having trouble in catching my breath. I swallowed several times and finally pointed at the application that Tom was still holding in his hand. I could not speak. Tom's words washed over me but I could not understand them.

  "You've done all you can do for Anastasia," he said. "She's in the best womb, she had the best preparation that you could get. You can't go on with your obsession. You're famous, you're productive—what more do you want? You want me to help you to give up all this and take the long chance that someday, God knows when, they'll find a way to revive you. Drake, you're physically healthy and in the prime of life. Don't you see? I can't help you." He looked again at the application form. "It's against my oath as a physician. I'd be taking you from health to a high odds of final death. Drake, you need real emotional help, more than I can give."

  I was at last able to force myself to speak. "You gave me your word, Tom."

  "My word, damn my word. You can't ask this of me." I said nothing and finally he spoke again. "Why, Drake? Why would you do this?"

  "I have to, Tom." I spoke gently. "You know why, if you think about it. Unless I go on ahead, they may never wake Ana. She may be one of the last on the list. You and I know her as she really is, but what will her records show? A singer, not too famous, killed by a devastating disease. You know they'll wake the ones they need first. I have to be there. I must make sure that they wake Ana as soon as they have a certain cure. I've had the time to prepare, she didn't. I feel pretty sure that they'll wake me."

  Tom looked blind with misery. "Drake, you can't see reason. You're set on this, aren't you? If I say no, you'll just go to someone else?"

  I nodded, again without speaking, and he put his hands over his face. At that moment I knew that I would be able to gain his cooperation.

  Five days later Tom Lambert had made all the pr
eparations and we went together to Second Chance. I took a last look out of the window at the trees and the sunshine, then climbed slowly into the thermal tank. Tom injected the Asfanil and after a few seconds I began the long fall, dropping forever down the longest descent a man can ever make. All the way down to two degrees absolute, colder than the coldest Hell ever conceived by Dante.

  * * *

  Did I dream my superconducting dreams, lying there twelve degrees colder than a block of solid hydrogen? Or did I only dream that I had dreamed them, as I came slowly, slowly back through the long thaw? It makes little difference. There was an eternity of twisted images, of a procession of pale lights moving forever on a black background, long before I had any form of consciousness.

  I was one of the lucky ones. The freezing process must have gone very smoothly, and all that I lost during the thaw was a few square centimeters of skin. But the pain of waking—ah, that was something else. The slow final stages, up from three degrees Celsius to normal body temperature, took thirty-six hours. For most of that time I was pierced with the agony of waking tissues and returning circulation, unable to move or even to cry out. In the last stages, before full consciousness, hearing came back before sight. I could hear speech around me, but not in any tongue that I could recognize. How far had I traveled? As the pain slowly faded, that was my first thought.

  I had to wait for the answer. While I was still half-conscious, I felt the sting of an injector spray, and I went out again. Next time, though, I came up all the way, opening my eyes to a quiet sunlit room, not too different from the one in the Second Chance building where I had started the freeze.

  A man and a woman were watching me, talking together softly. As soon as they saw that I was fully awake, they pressed a point on a segmented wall panel and went on with their work, lining up two complex pieces of equipment.

  The man who came in presently through the smooth white sliding door was dark-haired and clean-shaven, with a smooth, almost womanly face. He came to the side of the bed and looked at me with a pleased and proprietary air.