Adam starts to let out a scream of dismay, and Friga silences him by covering his mouth with her enormous hand.
Jowe takes one quick glance at the holographic map.
“A century and a half…” he sighs. “Poor Moy… Maybe things will have improved some by the time we arrive. There’s nothing else to discuss; let’s head to the freezers. It’ll be anabiosis, then.”
A first-rate hypership carries suspended animation freezers only as a last resort.
Same way the ships sailing the oceans in olden times used to carry lifeboats or life-rafts.
Their freezers are high-tech: comfortable, safe, individual.
So that, if something unfortunately goes wrong and a traveler dies, the others won’t suffer the same fate.
The Hope has three freezers that are actually one divided into three compartments.
Instead of three independent biological monitoring systems, it only has three interconnected subroutines.
There wasn’t enough money or space or time for more.
On the other hand, since the ship would only be used for one voyage, Adam was able to adapt each compartment to the physical parameters of its potential occupant.
One is long and wide, for Friga.
Another, long and narrow, for himself.
The third, the smallest, is for Jowe.
Their leader is the first to take her clothes off, climb into her nook, and put on her biosensors.
But she waits until the others follow her lead before injecting herself with the mixture of antifreeze and metabolism-inhibitor drugs.
Adam programs the automatic controls of the Hope to bring them out of their frozen sleep as soon as the shining lights of Tau Ceti are close enough.
And to steer them prudently away from any dangerous asteroids.
As soon as all three are in their “coffins,” cautious Friga watches to see that both men have stuck in their syringes before she does the same.
When Adam feels the drowsiness and the cold running through his veins, he activates the second phase.
The cryogel comes bubbling into their coffins.
The drowsiness of cold is overtaking them…
The conjunction of the low-temperature colloid, the antifreeze, and the metabolic inhibitors will reduce them to unconsciousness and keep their vital functions virtually suspended while the Hope slowly consumes light-minutes, light-days, and finally whole light-years.
Theoretically…
Friga is the first to realize that something’s gone wrong.
In spite of the drug in her veins, the cold stabs at her with icy needles that will not let her lapse into unconsciousness.
A few seconds later, the discomfort is turning into pain.
Pain, pain…
Her entire body is cold, but it burns.
And her still-active lungs need air.
Air that they can’t get, with her whole body submerged in cryogel.
Air, air…
Friga gasps desperately, and a huge gulp of the frozen substance enters her mouth, her stomach, and her lungs.
It’s as bitter as death…
The drug is jumbling her thoughts: death?
She’s drowning!
And she has to live!
Panic overcomes her: she twists, struggles, swallows more gulps of the repulsive, frozen mixture that envelops her in place of the life-saving air she needs.
Her lungs ache and terror commands her to flee.
Flee, out, into the air, whatever the cost.
Calm down, there’s a way out…
Her fingers feel around for the latch to open the lid.
The latch won’t open.
Adam outdid himself on the security system: cryogel is very expensive, and the coffins are designed so that they can’t be opened until the pumps have extracted the last drop of frozen colloid from them.
Not even from the inside…
And there’s no command for activating the pumps before the deadline set on the computer expires.
Friga, overwhelmed by claustrophobia, beats furiously against the coffin’s transparent steel-glass housing.
As if through a veil of terror, she feels the banging of the two dying men who are also struggling to escape.
The steel-glass in the lid is a very resistant material.
A coffin.
Buried alive, dead, dead…
No!
The huge muscles of the woman with a man’s strength strain until their fibers are at the breaking point.
And they produce a miracle.
The steel-glass in the lid is a very resistant material… much more resistant than the synplast joints around the rim of the freezer.
The entire lid comes off, cryogel goes flying, and Friga, half-suffocated, rolls onto the floor, her whole body aching and half-frozen.
But alive!
She coughs, expelling the bitter colloid from her lungs.
She breathes… and runs to help the others.
Swaying from the shock of her near asphyxiation, the drug-induced drowsiness clouding her mental processes, she only manages to pick up a hydraulic wrench… and break the two men’s freezer lids.
Adam is already still, his mouth and eyes open.
The expression of surprise on his face is like the look of a fish out of water.
Jowe is struggling, with the cold obstinacy of instinct, but with less and less strength.
When he gets out, he and Friga, half-fainting, try clumsily and desperately to revive their “super-handyman.”
They know that their lives depend on his skill…
Cardiac massage, electric defibrillator, the same neurostimulant that they both injected into themselves with trembling fingers to erase the stupefaction brought on by the metabolic inhibitors.
Nothing works.
Adam has drowned, and he stays dead.
Worn out by their futile struggle, naked, sticky with cryogel, covered with bruises, the surviving man and woman fall asleep, weeping and splashing over the lanky cadaver.
They have no strength for more.
Much less to face the crisis.
Six hours later, encased in his improvised shroud, what had been Adam goes tumbling off through the hatch.
Friga and Jowe watch it go, silently.
There’s nothing to be said…
Their provisions will last two weeks.
They scrape off the cryogel, already half solidified, clean the grubby deck, check the instruments.
For three days they try to repair the suspended animation system.
The broken lids on the freezer are the easy part…
But meticulous Jowe discovers, and shows to Friga, the real problem.
The patrol ship’s attack damaged the Freon tubing, and some of the refrigerant leaked.
The cryogel never cooled down to the temperature (near absolute zero) necessary for bringing about anabiosis.
They could fix the tubing, but they have no stores of Freon.
Or of cryogel.
Maybe Adam could have rigged something up…
Adam is dead.
Friga blasts her bad luck, curses God and the Virgin and all the saints, asks Satan and Moloch and Zeus, anybody, for help, breaks things.
Jowe, quiet, watches her with dead eyes.
When the woman lets her fury abate from sheer weariness, Jowe touches her on the shoulder and points to the controls of the one remaining hyperengine.
Friga looks at him furiously, as if she’d like to squash him, but gives an almost imperceptible nod.