Buying Time

by Joe Haldeman

  the

  me into a datanet for a few

  seconds every now & then • on the

  ship I degenerative could stay

  degenerative

  plugged in to the public-access nets

  all the time • phase—early frostbite

  has triggered the phase degenera-

  phase

  tive phase early • it was like walk-

  ing around a party full of eclectic

  interesting people • maybe early.

  early.

  they’ll find a place here where I

  can sit & listen • output state on:

  I’m sorry. How long do you have?

  input state on: • if she has four

  Four

  time to get back to Earth, she can

  be extremely public about it & say

  she escaped from the foul clutches

  of weeks Dallas Barr, man about

  weeks;

  town & part-time murdering

  maniac • might just be able to get

  back to Earth only in 28 days in

  only

  Fireball, but it’s close • even with

  the boost from Mars it took us 35

  days • call it forty days three

  three

  without • fuel mass required goes

  roughly by the square so need 2.04

  times the fuel with maximum until

  until

  acceleration • doubt that there’s

  room for the extra tankage • wait,

  he’s going to say only three weeks

  really it’s so that’s 3.63 times the

  it’s

  fuel • absolutely no way even if

  she had her

  Bugatti • only-three-until-it’s-too-late

  irreversible sometimes your word

  irreversible.

  choice surprises me, Dallas • that

  probably means you actually have

  to trim a few more days off to give

  her time for the song and

  dance • output state on:

  I’m afraid you can’t make Fire-ball get to Earth in that short a time. You’d need to increase the fuel at least fourfold, & you would have to maintain five gees for two long periods.

  input state on: now Maria speaks I

  I

  leaning forward • look at her new

  face, but I always bitmap it and

  reprocess so she looks like she

  really looks like • I don’t really

  blame him for getting all human

  over her though I was always par-

  tial know to blondes, none of

  know.

  whom was to my knowledge much

  of a spaceship pilot • wish they

  wouldn’t turn me is off when they

  Is

  got down to biology but I suppose

  civilization must be served • well

  in some supposedly there civilized

  there

  places supposedly civilized people

  pay to be watched • is there any

  historical precedent any for that,

  any

  rather than the other way around?

  search nothing in my memory wish

  they would other hook me up to a

  other

  generalized relational database • I

  feel deaf dumb & blind • way is-

  there-any-other way way • does she

  way?

  mean alternative transportation or

  another way out of her predica-

  ment? SEARCH output mode on:

  Drones used for document exchange have done Earth/Ceres in as little as seven days. But their rates of acceleration would be intolerable to you, and the fuel/payload ratio would be unrealistic considering the necessity of life support.

  But that’s not what you mean.

  input mode on: is there any other

  no way · some way the degeneration

  No:

  process could be slowed here

  on Ceres · good excuse to be some

  some

  plugged into a database, but first a

  quick tree off my own memory:

  Dallas

  Sometimes the lifelike way that Eric’s image acted made you admire the programming genius that went into creating a TI. He actually looked startled.

  “There’s something here,” he said. “Something that could be of great importance to you.”

  Maria didn’t react. “What is it?”

  “Eric, the flesh-and-blood Eric, had extensive dealings with a Novy scientist or doctor, Baird Ulric, back in ’73. He shipped him more than twenty thousand pages of journal articles, in twelve languages—actual paper copies from his library.”

  “Why in heaven’s name would he do that?” Maria said.

  “So there would be no record of the exchange. They all seem to be about life extension and gerontological research.”

  “Then there would be a record,” I said. “Whether he owned a paper copy or an electronic one. The foundation’s draconian about controlling that kind of information.”

  “But it’s all old stuff. Nothing after late 1998.”

  “What good would that do?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s just of historical interest. But it was important enough for him not to tell me about it.”

  “Or trivial enough.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. Most of my memory space is taken up with trivialities.

  “He spent two weeks on this project but never mentioned it, so I reconstructed it by interrogating his library and copier, which have a rudimentary kind of intelligence, or at least memory.”

  “Why would he keep it secret from you?”

  “We discussed the possibility of the foundation, or some other authority, taking physical possession of me, of the crystal, and analyzing it to see what Eric was up to. I thought I had convinced Eric that I had adequate safeguards, but every now and then something like this came up. I could usually figure it out.”

  You don’t think of TIs as being capable of, “programmed for,” initiative, but of course they are. Eric’s TI had been on its own since November. “You’re sure the foundation couldn’t get it out of you?”

  “What could they do? Force bamboo splinters under my fingernails? Actually, the copy that’s sitting down in New York has all of the forbidden links erased. I could do it to this copy in a millisecond, too, and in the process also destroy the logical structures that allow me to take the action. Leaving no trace.”

  “You’re as devious as the real Eric.”

  “Ah, but I am the real Eric, now.” He raised both eyebrows in a characteristic bug-eyed expression. “Shall we see if we can find Gospodin Ulric?”

  I took the reader into the kitchen and plugged it into the data jack. The directory listed Baird Ulric at the address of the clinic we’d just left.

  It rang for almost a minute before a harried and shaggy man appeared on the screen. “Ulric.” He leaned forward. “Lundley? Eric Lundley? But you’re supposed to be …”

  “Eric is dead. I’m his Turing Image.”

  “Oh.” He pointed. “You’re the Stileman with frostbite who Liz treated this afternoon.”

  “Small world,” Maria said.

  “Biggest one we have.” He looked up, toward the corner where Eric’s image would be superimposed. “I think I know what you want to talk about,” he said slowly. “But let’s not talk about it over the phone. You have dinner plans?”

  “No,” we said in a three-voice chorus, though Eric probably did have plans: electrons du jour.

  He looked at his watch. “Meet me at the entrance to the clinic at nineteen-thirty. We’ll figure out a place to go.” He rang off.

  “The plot thickens,” Eric said. “He thinks the foundation has his phone tapped?”

  “I suppose it’s a reasonable assumpti
on,” I said, “if they have any idea of”—I suddenly had a being-listened-to feeling in the middle of my back—“the hilarious way he does crossword puzzles.”

  “His fiduciary penchant for rudimentary needlepoint,” Eric said.

  Maria nodded. “The random way he parts his beard.” But it was too late for that, actually. If they had been listening earlier, whoever “they” were, they were probably on their way.

  It was more than an hour until 1930, and the clinic was only ten minutes away; but we all had the sudden urge to take a stroll.

  Ulric stepped through the door at exactly 1930, saw us, and motioned to his left. We walked part of a block and turned into a place called Sadie’s Grill (“Ridiculously Expensive Food Prepared the Way We Feel Like Doing It”).

  Very loud classical music; about twenty booths in a late-twentieth chrome/glass/fake plant decor. “This is as safe as any place,” Ulric said. We slid into the first unoccupied booth. My skin rippled and the music dwindled to an almost inaudible whisper. The restaurant outside the booth became a flowing blur.

  “Pressor field,” Maria said. “Are all the booths like this?”

  “All the ones on this side. You pay a security surcharge. Paranoia tax.”

  A waiter was right behind us. He had to lean over the table, and push his head inside the pressor field, to be heard. Ulric ordered for us, a pitcher of wine and four house specials; Liz Eastwood, the doctor who’d examined Maria, would be joining us.

  “First let me tell you what I infer. Then you tell me what you infer.”

  “Okay.”

  “Since you’re carrying Eric Lundley’s TI around with you, one can assume that (A) you’re Dallas Barr, and (B) you didn’t kill Eric.” He looked at me expectantly.

  “That is an inference. A couple of them.”

  He bowed toward Maria. “And you are the infamous lesbian nymphomaniac Maria Marconi, somehow returned from the dead. Possibly neither lesbian nor nymphomaniac.”

  Maria looked at me. “If I were Dallas Barr,” I said to Ulric, “I’d be a fool to admit it. There’s a million-pound price on his head.”

  “I don’t need a million pounds. I’ll prove it by paying for dinner. So what have you inferred?”

  Eric cut in. “Less, and nothing particularly dramatic. Peculiar, rather than dramatic. What I have are citations for twenty thousand eight hundred seventy-four journals, none of them less than eighty-two years old. Eric Lundley acquired paper copies of them and shipped them to you, probably at considerable expense.”

  “Actually, he could only locate three fourths of them. But yes, it cost a couple of million rubles, dollars.”

  “That was nine years ago. For you to have read them all, you would have to go through more than fifteen a day. The ones in Chinese and Arabic probably take longer than the ones in English, too.”

  “I did read eight or ten a day, for several years, but only the ones in my specialty, immune system disorders.”

  “But they’re all so old,” I said. “What good is antique medical knowledge?”

  He looked thoughtful and his brow furrowed. “You must have it half figured out already. But this is something we never talk to … outsiders about. You confirm that you are Dallas Barr. Then I’ll take a chance.”

  I considered it. “Okay. I’m Dallas Barr. But you’ll never get a million pounds for the knowledge. I have a crowd-pleaser under the table, aimed at your abdomen.”

  “You’d fit in real well here,” he said without changing expression. “There’s no formal record anywhere in the solar system of my interest in immunology. I’m supposedly a general practitioner.”

  “Okay.”

  “Liz Eastwood, similarly, has spent a quarter of a century immersed in gerontological oncology. There’s no record of her ever even having requested a journal article on the subject.”

  “Clever,” Eric said.

  “What?” I said.

  “There are more than a hundred doctors and medical technicians on this asteroid,” Ulric said. “We essentially give health care in our spare time; some of us make a living in something other than medicine. Every one of us has a ghost specialty.” He leaned forward. “What we are doing is rediscovering the Stileman Process. Secretly.”

  I could feel the sudden electricity from Maria. Neither of us dared ask.

  “The foundation owns every particle of research on anything related to life extension that’s been done over the past ninety years. It’s all proprietary. You want to work in one of those fields, you have to work for them. You work for them and they have your ass in a vise. If you make anything public, they can deny you life extension. They can murder you, plain and simple. And legally.”

  “But they haven’t bothered to nail down the old work,” Eric said. “The work that actually led up to the original Stileman Process.”

  “We don’t know. That’s why we had, um, you try to find paper copies of everything.” He turned to me. “Eric Lundley had the largest private collection of bound journals—actual physical books of magazines—in the world. He was always extending his collection. So he could search out volumes of things like the Journal of the American Medical Association without arousing suspicion.”

  “So what you did was go back in time,” I said. “Put yourself in the shoes of the original researchers, and reconstruct what they did.”

  “It was easier than that,” he said. “No false modesty; medicine hasn’t stood still in the past hundred years. There are a lot of ancillary things we all learned in medical school, that evolved from the original Stileman research. But that is essentially what we’ve done. Are doing.”

  “Does it work?” Maria said, in a voice more calm than mine would have been. The waiter came with the wine and we both jumped as he leaned into the field.

  “It’s startling the first time,” he said. “Thank you for not knocking anything over.” He poured three glasses, expertly shaking globs of wine out of the carafe (cutting off the right amount with a knife blade), and disappeared back into the blur.

  “Not yet.” Maria had been holding my hand; I felt the pressure slacken. The aroma of the wine was strong inside the enclosure. We all reached for our glasses. “But.” He sipped. “But maybe.” He glanced outside, moved over, and Liz Eastwood slipped into the shell.

  She looked at us intently. “You’ve told them?”

  “Some. Maria, we have two chimpanzees we’re watching very closely. The plan was that if they were still okay three years after going through the process, two years from now, then we would try a human volunteer. Probably a Stileman who wasn’t able to raise his million—partly for clinical reasons and partly because, well, he wouldn’t be risking that much.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Eastwood said. “Did you talk about her chances?”

  “No,” Ulric said.

  Eastwood carefully poured herself some wine. “Fifty-fifty would be optimistic. Especially since you’re already dying.”

  “So I have nothing to lose.”

  “Only your mind.” She took a sip and continued in a quiet voice. “You are fed and emptied by tubes. You’re on constant dialysis. You have a major operation every few days for at least eight weeks. Your bones are cracked and the marrow replaced. We pull out your intestines and check every inch. Remove and replace your breasts. Open your skull and fool with the brain. We do awful things to your throat and sinuses while you stay alive on oxygen piped into your lungs through tubes. Every organ gets looked at, fixed up, and put back. Then we skin you alive, one area at a time, and grow new skin. We have to do everything slowly and carefully. It’s probably as bad as any torture ever devised by man.”

  “They do all that in the Stileman Clinics,” I said.

  “But they know how to make you forget,” Ulric said. “We don’t. It’s as simple as that.”

  “We’ll use palliatives, anesthetics, tranquilizers. Up to a point, chemistry can help you deal with the pain and the unrelenting
awfulness of it. But only up to a point.”

  “Even if we could guarantee your life,” Ulric said, “we can’t guarantee your sanity.”

  “All right,” Maria said in a small voice. “You’ve done your job. I’m terrified. But I still want to go ahead with it.”

  “We could start tomorrow morning,” Eastwood said. “As long as the cancer hasn’t set in. I didn’t find gross abnormalities today; inspection palpation, samples. Have you ever had cancer?”

  “In 2015. Ovarian.”

  Eastwood had started to take a drink. She set it down. “Did it metastasize?”