Fiasco (12 page)

There was talk, then, of acquiring fingerprints from Earth, and dental records. But when these arrived, they only added to the confusion. Because of the ancient rivalry between Grail and Roembden, the computer logs there were in disorder, and no one knew whether a portion of the memory disks had been destroyed or had ended up, perhaps, in some archive outside Switzerland. The man who would be revived on the
Eurydice
bore one of six names: Ansel, Nawada, Pirx, Koehler, Parvis, Illmensee. All that the doctors could hope for was that the survivor, recovering from postreanimation amnesia, would recognize his own name on the list—if he was unable to remember it himself. Vahradian and Davis counted on that. But Gerbert, the psychonicist, had doubts. After setting the time of the operation, therefore, he went to the Commander to explain the problem. Ter Horab, always clearheaded and practical, agreed that it would be worth reexamining the contents of the vitrifaxes that had been emptied of their bodies.

"What you need are criminologists, forensic experts," he said. "Since I don't have any on board, I can give you"—he hesitated—"Field and LoBianco. Physicists," he added with a grin, "are also sleuths, in a way."

So a blackened—as if charred—cryocontainer resembling a curved sarcophagus was brought to the level of the main laboratory. Held by massive pincers while wrenches were applied to the outer catches, it opened slowly, lengthwise, with an awful grating sound. A black interior showed beneath the half-open coffin lid. The spacesuit in the center was sunken, unoccupied; its owner was floating in liquid helium, for week now, along with the nitrogen block in which he had originally been frozen. Field and LoBianco took out the spacesuit and carried it to a low metal table. It had been examined before, at the time the body was removed, but nothing was found then except frozen scraps of fabric and some air-conditioning lines interwoven in a cable. Now they cut open the frost-covered suit, from the ring onto which the helmet fastened and down the torso and pneumatic legs to the large boots. They unhooked winding, spiraling tubes from the scarecrow figure, along with the broken oxygen hoses, and did a meticulous dissection: every shred went under the microscope. Finally, LoBianco crawled into the cylindrical cryocontainer with a hand-held light. To make his job easier, he had the manipulator slice through the metal plate and spread the halves wide. He searched here because the spacesuit had burst at the welds joining the arm sleeves to the trunk—either when the Digla was subjected to the growing weight of the collapsed Birnam glacier, or else from the internal pressure during the explosive vitrifaction. If the man had had with him any personal belongings, they could have been blown out through the rent in the suit and fallen, with the streams of solidifying nitrogen and human blood, into the container—at the instant its open mouth was clamped shut by the helmet shot from above, a hood of special steel that cut off the corpse in the spacesuit from the outside world.

To pull the hood from the container, hydraulic grippers had to be employed, since the pincers of the manipulator proved too weak. The two physicists and the doctor stepped back several paces from the platform, because the operation was quite violent. Before the hood—looking like the head of a giant artillery shell—jerked and began to move from the upper part of the container, large splinters of metal went flying from under the vanadium teeth. They waited. It was only when the coal-black fragments stopped dribbling and the bell, torn from the cryocontainer, opened emptily toward them, that Field lifted it high with the four-levered manipulator and LoBianco again began to examine the cylinder. Then everyone stopped. Coming apart completely along the seams, the metal plates trembled and fell slowly to the platform, as if in reenactment of an ancient death agony. The robot jaws carried the heavy hood through the air to the other end of the room and set it down, like half of an empty bomb, with such care that the thing came to rest on the aluminum table without a sound.

LoBianco approached the split container. In the center were the dark remnants of inside padding: shriveled layers, like burned dead leaves.

Field looked over LoBianco's shoulder. He was acquainted with the history of vitrifaction. In the days of Grail and Roembden, explosive charges had been used to drive the headpiece onto the container with the man, in order that the freezing process take place as rapidly as possible. The man first had to remove his helmet, though remaining in his suit. To keep the blow from crushing his skull, the hood was padded with pneumatically inflated cushions. Expanding, these shielded him. An injection cone was rammed into his mouth; it forced in liquid nitrogen, usually breaking the teeth and even the bones of the jaw. The idea was to congeal the brain from all sides at once, and therefore from the base as well, located just above the palate. The technology of the time was unable to avoid such injuries.

Bit by bit, the physicists pulled away layers of the crumbling shielding, and placed one beside the other until the instruments bared the metal bottom of the cryocontainer. Among the crushed ashes they found an object, also crushed, but preserving the form of a small booklet, the corners burned as in a fire. The half-carbonized thing was so fragile that it fell into dust wherever touched, so they placed it under a glass cover; even a breath could damage it.

"Looks like a small carrying case. Possibly leather. A portfolio. People kept them on their person. But the documents, as a rule, were cellulose, paper."

"Or made of plastic polymers," Gerbert added to what LoBianco said.

"Not encouraging," replied the physicist. "Under such conditions, cellulose holds up no better than the old plastics. How did it find its way into the hood?"

"That's not hard to guess." Field crossed his arms. "When he closed the circuits, the lower bell thrust up over the legs to the chest, and the upper half, shot out at the same time, clapped onto the lower. The charges were implosive, but obviously not the kind that would crush a man. Nitrogen filled the spacesuit, so that it split under the arms, and the air forced out stripped him naked. The blast of a shell has more than once torn the clothes off a soldier near the target…"

"What do we do with this?"

Gerbert watched the physicists fill the space under the glass with a liquid stiffener; then they took the resultant mold, in which the dark, flat, tattered object was embedded like a bug in amber, and set about analyzing it. They found chemicals that used to be employed to print paper currency, and organic compounds common in animal skins tanned and dyed, and small traces of silver. These were undoubtedly remnants of photographs, because silver salts were used to make photographs. Adjusting the scan beam, the physicists fixed the scrap taken from the mold and finally acquired a kind of palimpsest: a scramble of letters and small circles, possibly from an official document seal.

Chromatography separated the colors from the ink of the print, because fortunately it possessed a mineral ingredient. The rest was done by the filters of a microtomograph. The result was modest. If in fact they had discovered a proof of identity, which seemed likely, the first name was illegible and of the last name they could be certain only of the first letter: "P." The word had from four to seven letters. By coincidence, the names of the two people who were revivable began with "P."

They put on the screen the resograms of those at rest in the liquid helium. This layered imaging technique, far more precise than old-fashioned X-raying, allowed one to determine the age of the victim to the decade, judging by the hardening in the articular cartilage and in the blood vessels, since medicine, at the time these people lived, had not yet learned how to halt the changes termed sclerosis.

The two candidates for reanimation were of similar build. They had the same blood type. The calcification of the ribs and, minutely, in the aorta indicated that they were both from thirty to forty years of age. According to their biographies, which included medical histories, neither had had an operation that left a scar on the body. The doctors knew this but wanted to see what the physicists could tell them from the nuclear magnetic resonance imaging. The physicists shook their heads: the nuclei of the stable elements in the organism were as good as eternal, but it was another story if there were isotopes in these people's bodies. Which was in fact the case—producing another dead end. Both men had at one time been irradiated with a dose on the order of one to two hundred rems. Probably in the final hours of their lives.

To examine the internal organs of a man in various planes and sections was an anonymous, abstract activity. The sight of naked corpses encased in nitrogen ice under helium, however, especially with their faces crushed, was such that Gerbert preferred to spare the physicists the experience. (The eyeballs of both bodies were intact—a secret grief for the doctors, this, because unquestionably the blindness of one would have made the decision for them: namely, to revive the man whose vision was unimpaired.) When the physicists left, Davis sat down on the platform with the split-open cryocontainer and said nothing. Finally Gerbert could stand the tension no longer.

"Well then?" he asked. "Which one?"

"We could get Vahradian's opinion…" Davis muttered uncertainly.

"Why?
Tres faciunt collegium
?"

Davis got up, stabbed the keyboard, and the screen obediently displayed, side by side, two rows of green numbers, and one number in red, on the right, which blinked in warning. He switched off the unit, unable to endure it, but again reached out to press a key. Gerbert put his arms around him, restraining him.

"Stop. That's useless."

They looked at each other.

"We might consult…" Davis began, but did not finish.

"No. No one can help us. Vahradian—"

"I wasn't thinking of Vahradian."

"I know. I was going to say that, officially, Vahradian will make the decision if we turn to him. He has to, as the Head Physician—but that's a cowardly way out. Anyway, look how the man has made himself scarce. Let's not prolong this. In an hour—in less than an hour, now—Yusupov will throttle the drive."

He released Davis and threw the switches on the console to prepare the reanimating room, saying:

"The dead do not exist. It is as if they had never been born. We are not killing anyone. We are re-creating a single life. Look at it that way."

"Fine," replied Davis, his eyes glittering. "You're right. It's a good deed. And you can have the honor of performing it. You choose."

The two white snakes that were coiled around the winged staff on the wall above the control panel lit up: the room was ready.

"Very well," said Gerbert. "On one condition. That this remains between us and no one ever learns about it. Especially
he.
You understand?"

"Yes."

"Think about it. After the operation, all the remains go overboard. And I will erase all the data in the holofile. But you and I will know; we will know because we cannot erase our own memory. Will you be able to forget?"

"No."

"To be silent?"

"Yes."

"To everyone?"

"Yes."

"To the end?"

Davis hesitated.

"But … they all know, after all. You said yourself at the council that we would choose either—"

"I had to. Vahradian knew the score. But after the data are destroyed we will lie and tell everyone that this man was objectively preferable in a way discovered by us only here and now."

Davis nodded.

"I agree."

"We'll write the protocol, sign it together, falsify two of the items. You'll sign?"

"Yes, with you."

Gerbert opened the wall compartment. In it hung silvery suits with white boots and face masks of glass. He took out his and began to put it on. Davis did likewise. In the central rotunda of the room a door parted, revealing the bright interior of an elevator. The door closed, the elevator went down, and the empty room grew darker, but above the point lights of the control panel glowed the snakes of Aesculapius.

He returned to consciousness blind and without a body. His first thoughts were not formed of words; his feelings were confused, inexpressible. He receded, disappeared somewhere, and returned. It was only when he found his internal speech that he could put questions to himself: What was I afraid of? What kind of darkness is this? What does this mean? And when he made this step, he was able to think: What am I? What is happening to me?

He tried to move, to locate his arms, legs, torso, knowing now that he had a body, or at least that he should have one. But nothing responded, nothing moved. He could not tell if his eyes were open. He felt no lids, no blinking. He exerted all his strength to lift the lids, and perhaps succeeded. But he saw nothing except the same darkness as before. These attempts, requiring tremendous effort, again led him to the question: What am I? I am a man.

This obvious answer was a revelation to him. Then, immediately, he knew its obviousness and smiled at himself, because what kind of brilliant discovery was that?

Words returned slowly, from where he did not know, and at first were scattered and without pattern, as if he were pulling them up like fish out of unknown depths. Am.
I
am. Where, I do not know. I cannot feel my body. Why is that? Now he began to feel his face, the cheeks, possibly the nose. He was even able to move the nostrils, though that took an enormous exertion of will. He stared, moving the eyeballs, in all directions, and concluded, because his ability to reason had returned: Either I am blind or it is completely dark. The darkness brought to mind night, and night a great space full of pure, cold air, and air suggested breath. Am I breathing? he asked himself, and listened carefully to his darkness, which was so like nothingness and yet so unlike it.

It seemed to him that he was breathing, but not in the usual way. The belly, the ribs were motionless, held in incomprehensible suspension; the air entered by itself and gently left. There was no other way he could breathe.