Cold as Ice (32 page)

They helped her into her suit. Once dressed and on her feet, she was able to move unaided into the corridor. A gurney was waiting, and the physician standing next to it did not give Camille the option of walking. He had her on it and ready to be wheeled away within seconds.

Dr. Shumi waved aside the others when they tried to follow. He was a tall, elegant man, with a great air of authority.
Be a big hit
, thought Nell,
among the Inner Circle back on Earth.
But she sensed a deep-seated unease behind that professional poise, and she could make a guess at the cause. Any physician who chose to practice on a small research station like Mount Ararat must be
avoiding
medical problems, not seeking them out. Minor ailments were cured on site, major ones shipped at once to Ganymede's superior facilities. Gabriel Shumi had it easy. He must be profoundly uncomfortable with an anomaly like Camille Hamilton suddenly dropped in his lap.

"I promise to return and give you a report as soon as I can," the doctor was saying. "But I cannot allow spectators."

"Will she be all right?" asked David Lammerman.

"Well, it's too soon for me to give you an opinion on that."

His halfhearted tone confirmed Nell's impression. Gabriel Shumi was out of his depth, and he didn't like it. Dead people who came back to life were not in his casebook.

"I've never in my life seen so much edema," he went on. "Fluid retention and swelling. Her body seems to be taking care of that problem in the . . . er, the natural way. As far as I can tell, she's doing well. But I need to do a thorough examination."

He waved off further questions and hustled the gurney away along the corridor. With the removal of Camille's presence, the group spun away into small clusters to talk about what they had seen; and then, when that phenomenon did not yield to analysis, to discuss other things. Tristan and Wilsa locked themselves into an intense personal conversation. David Lammerman listened in silence to Buzz Sandstrom, who was denying that he had forced Camille out onto the ice. But David heard hardly a word. His face glowed with joy, not with accusation. He did not understand how Camille had survived. He did not care.
She was alive!

Nell stood alone. She had not merely
seen
, she had recorded. Every element of the resurrection was on video, even Camille's amazing bladder action, but Nell wasn't sure of what to do with the film. There was surely a place in Earth's junk-sport programs for a clip of the solar system's longest continuous pee, but that was a branch of the business that Nell was happy to avoid. What did it all
mean
? Until she knew that, her footage was a mere curiosity.

She scanned the group. When she came to Hilda Brandt, the research director met her eye and jerked her head for Nell to come over to her. She went reluctantly.

"Isn't it nice to have a happy ending for a change?" Brandt was apparently as pleasant and unassuming as ever. "But I think this particular party is over. I know that you, at least, are wondering what comes next. I'm afraid that it has to be an anticlimax. Jon Perry stays here and does the job for which he came to Europa. But everyone else must leave. This is a protected environment. Although I must say, it hasn't looked anything like that for the past twenty-four hours."

Her eyes, bright and innocent, gazed into Nell's. "I need help. Will you give a hand getting everyone out of here without a fuss? If you do, I give my word that you'll be in the front row when Jon Perry comes back next time from the Europan seabed."

Hilda Brandt was behaving as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Her casual manner reduced Camille's revival from the impossible to the commonplace. Nell nodded, even as she subvocalized:
What does she
really
think of all this? And why
me?
Why has Hilda Brandt singled me out to help her?

She could think of only one answer. Brandt understood, like no one else in the group, the advantage of a friendly press. Comparing that understanding with the adolescent naivete of Outward Bound, Nell again sensed an incongruity. Outward Bound members and sophistication lived in different universes. But somehow Hilda Brandt inhabited both.

Nell tried to shepherd people along the corridor. They would not budge. It would take physical violence to move them until they received another report from Dr. Shumi on Camille's condition. She caught Hilda Brandt's eye and shrugged. The older woman smiled sympathetically, as though she had
expected
Nell to be unsuccessful. She did not seem upset by the failure.

Nell's mind continued to spin with puzzling questions.
So why did she ask me, if she knew it wouldn't work?
And an answer, a flash of inspiration:
She wanted to give me a job that would isolate me from talking to the others. But why?
And finally, a warning to herself:
Be careful. Pawns never get to see much of the board. There is more to the Outer System, Nell Cotter, than is dreamed of in your philosophy. If you want to get to the bottom of all this, you'd better not forget it. And if you want to stay out of trouble, you'd better not confuse Hilda Brandt's statements with her motives.

18
Deep Discovery

Jon Perry was thoroughly miserable. He had never been good at understanding emotions, his own or anybody else's. He had watched Nell Cotter as she wandered through the group urging everyone back toward Hilda Brandt's quarters, and he had tried without success to read her facial expression. Finally he went over to her. She greeted him with a small, distant nod. She accepted his offer of assistance, and she even talked to him freely enough; but it was the bright, impersonal chatter of a stranger in an elevator.

Until, without warning, she turned and whispered in a low, savage voice: "
Why did you do it?
And
don't
say, 'Do what?' "

Jon had wondered the same thing himself. He liked Wilsa, and he felt totally at ease with her. But that was not the reason he had headed for Europa with her after as good as promising that he would take Nell with him. And he had
wanted
to go with Nell.

He shook his head. "I don't know. I'm sorry, but I really don't. I don't know why I did it."

She stared at him for two seconds, standing motionless in her characteristic cocked-head stance. "You just saved your face, Jon Perry. Not to mention some other bits. You gave me the only answer I can believe. All right, then."

He followed her eyes as she surveyed the others. They were moving, slowly but steadily, toward Hilda Brandt's suite of rooms.

"They can go the rest of the way without us." Nell linked her arm in his. "We'll stay outside. I have to talk to you."

"I've been wanting to talk to you for days."

"So you get your chance. But first, you listen. Hilda Brandt wants me and the rest of us off Europa within the next few hours. Everybody except you. But Wilsa says that she's been invited to come back after her next set of concerts. Did you arrange that?"

"No. Honest. Nell, I didn't even know about it. I don't feel that way about Wilsa."

"Then how
do
you feel about her? Oh, hell, I'm not going to start that again. But I'm damned if I'll go back to Ganymede to stew over you without knowing where I stand. Make up your mind, Jon Perry. Are you and I going to be an item, or aren't we?"

"Well . . ."

"No stalling." She reached up to grab him by the ears, hard enough to hurt. "Yes or no?"

"Yes.
Definitely
yes. I wasn't stalling. I want you, want to be with you. It's what I've thought about ever since we got to Arenas. You're so-m-mm—"

The rest of his sentence was smothered by an urgent kiss on the lips from Nell. "Tell me the good stuff some other time," she said as she released him. "We'll have to postpone everything else, because they're coming. Don't think I'm a patient woman, though."

Jon glanced toward Hilda Brandt's suite, then realized that Nell was not looking in that direction. He turned to scan the main corridor. Dr. Gabriel Shumi approached—and with him, barely recognizable, was a plump, fair-haired woman. The corpse from the ice tomb. Her face was patchy with broken veins and blotches of pink, and the doctor had his hand ready at her arm; but as they entered Brandt's suite, she was walking steadily and without assistance.

"Camille Hamilton," said Nell. "Come on. I have to cover this."

She and Jon hurried into the room just as Shumi was beginning to talk. Camille, a little bewildered-looking to Jon now that he could see her eyes, sat on a broad, cloth-covered armchair in the middle of the chamber.

"I promised a report for Dr. Brandt as soon as possible, otherwise I'd not be here now." The physician's fine-featured face wore an unhappy expression. His own words were repugnant to him. "And if I hadn't been assured by everyone in this room that Camille Hamilton was frozen solid and apparently dead an hour ago, I'd ask you to stop playing games and wasting the time of overworked doctors. Miss Hamilton, please stand up. And turn around."

Camille did so, wobble-legged and bowing her head in embarrassment. "I feel like the prize exhibit in an old-fashioned animal show. A turkey, maybe." She glanced at everyone in turn. "Where are Jon Perry and Wilsa Sheer? I want to thank them for saving my life."

"As you can see," went on Shumi, "she appears to be recovering, and she's functioning almost normally. But please don't ask me, or anyone else in the medical facility,
how.
There are two or three ways of taking a human being's body temperature all the way down below freezing point and back up, safely, and we do it often enough in tricky operations. But it doesn't just
happen
because someone is exposed to extreme cold."

"People who fall through ice," volunteered Tristan, "into freezing water . . ."

"All of their systems switch off and their body temperature drops in a few seconds. The brain's oxygen requirement drops, too. That's how they can survive." Gabriel Shumi gestured to Camille to sit down again. "But that's not what happened here, according to everything that was told to me. The temperature in her car would have gone down slowly, over a period of time. That's a killer. And stranger than that, you have the retained water . . . and the ice."

"Ice?"
Hilda Brandt had been smiling at Camille with a proprietary air.

"Solid ice, Dr. Brandt. When we got Miss Hamilton to the X-ray department, there were lumps of water-ice scattered over her body, close to the skin. Anything from a few grams to a couple of kilos. As they melted she got rid of the excess water in the natural way—sixty kilograms from the time she stepped into my lab to the time she stepped out of it. A wonderful flushing job for the kidneys, you might say. I estimate that there are still about fifteen to twenty kilos to go before she reaches her usual body weight. But it's all liquid."

"No hurry
now
," said Camille. She smiled. "You're all quite safe, I won't disgrace myself."

"Wouldn't the formation of ice
help
?" asked David Lammerman. He wore a nonstop grin. "I mean, when water turns to ice, it gives up its latent heat. That heat would keep the temperature up in the rest of the body."

"Indeed it would. And it did." Shumi nodded at David in a patronizing way. "But I challenge you to tell me
how
it could help in this case. If I drank ten or twenty gallons of water—assuming I could swallow that much, which I'm sure I couldn't—and you started to freeze me, I might begin to form lumps of ice all through my body . . . but they certainly wouldn't show up in just the places to keep the rest of me from freezing."

"
Did
you do that?" David Lammerman had been edging closer to Camille. He wanted to grab her. "Drink twenty gallons of water?"

"David, I don't know
what
I did." Camille moved forward and slipped her arm through his. "As far as I'm concerned, it all happened just the way I told it to Dr. Shumi. I was sitting in the car, knowing that I didn't have enough heat and convinced that I'd freeze to death before anyone noticed my beacon or realized that I was missing. Then I started analyzing new data I'd received from DOS—I guess that was my form of mental escape. The last thing I remember, I was in the middle of doing calculations and they were getting really interesting. And then I woke up. Woke up
here.
I don't recall drinking water, or becoming unconscious, or
anything.
Maybe something about being frozen affected my brain, though I feel normal enough now."

"It didn't affect you," said Shumi. "Not in any of the usual, ways. I pulled in your brain-scan profile from Ganymede. Your performance is exactly the same as always."

"So what
did
happen to me?"

"That's the point where we came in." Gabriel Shumi glanced across at Hilda Brandt. "I can't answer that question. Although I admit that Miss Hamilton has every reason to ask it. Maybe in a few days . . ."

"Do you have a recommendation for me, Dr. Shumi?"

"Well, she certainly shouldn't leave Europa until she is physically back to normal. That might be as soon as three days from now if she keeps up this rate of progress. But of course I'd like to make a closer examination—"

"If she consents. She is a
patient
with us, you know, not a test animal."

"Of course." Shumi was taken aback at the unexpected edge in Hilda Brandt's voice.

"Very well." The director moved to stand in front of Camille and gazed into her eyes. She seemed pleased by what she saw. "So that's the deal, my dear. Even if Dr. Shumi hadn't insisted on it, I was going to refuse to let you go for at least a couple of days."

She straightened up. "And for the rest of you, I'm afraid the party's over. This is a research facility, though you might find that hard to believe from present operations. We'll find someone to make arrangements to take all of you over to Ganymede."

There was a casual certainty to her manner that discouraged argument. Nell, seeing her now, was doubly convinced that Hilda Brandt's earlier request for assistance had been made for other reasons. The director could have cleared the other room
alone
, and in just a couple of minutes, had she chosen to do so.