“Oh, how terrible.”
“It’s not her fault, really. She should never have been given that responsibility. If anyone’s to blame, it’s my wife and I.”
“Oh no,” said Dr. Ogilvy. “No, don’t think that way! These things, you know, they just happen sometimes.”
“Anyway, Phil’s in the hospital now, in intensive care, and we’re praying that he’ll pull through, but if he doesn’t…We want to be ready.”
“Of course. Of course.”
“So what we’d like,” Wise concluded, “is to have a look around your facility, here, and maybe meet some of your people…”
“Of course! I’d be happy to give you a tour right now! Let’s—” The phone rang, and Dr. Ogilvy started. “Oh dear! I’m sorry…” Peering closer at the blinking light that accompanied the ringing: “Hmm, line three, I’m sorry, you know I really should take this…Would you mind if—”
“It’s fine,” I said, getting up. “We’ll wait for you outside.”
I practically dragged Wise from the room. As soon as we were out the door, I lit into him: “What the hell was that about?”
“What was what about?”
“Our son Phil? Who had an accident? While his sister was watching him?”
Wise was blank-faced. “I have no idea what’s eating you. Everything I said in there was part of a script. I’m just following it.”
“What script?”
“The one Cost-Benefits gave me for this op. You think I make this stuff up as I go along?”
“Who in Cost-Benefits—”
“All right then!” said Dr. Ogilvy. “Are we ready for the tour?”
We headed down the hall towards our first stop, with me still staring daggers at Wise. Meanwhile Ogilvy, either because he’d picked up on the tension or because it was part of his standard sales pitch, launched into a rambling explanation of the company name: “It’s from the poem by Percy Shelley.”
“Ozymandias, King of Kings,” said Wise. “‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.’”
“Yes! That’s the one. And of course, ‘my works,’ that’s meant to be ironic, since as the poem goes on to say, there’s actually nothing left of those works, other than the inscription that brags about them. Which, given what we do here, may seem like a strange allusion to be making. But you see, there’s actually a double irony, because it turns out Shelley picked on the wrong king. At the time he was writing, 1817, I believe, Egyptology hadn’t gotten off the ground yet, so one pharaoh was as obscure as any other. Today, though, thanks to science, things are very different. Ozymandias—aka Ramses the Great—is not only one of the most famous rulers in history, but we know, contrary to what Shelley wrote, that a lot of his works did survive.”
“So what’s the point?” I interrupted, not wanting to fall asleep before I had a chance to finish grilling Wise. “Don’t speak too soon?”
“Exactly!” said Dr. Ogilvy. “Exactly. Don’t speak too soon! And we believe a similar caution applies to what we’re doing here. Our industry, Mrs. Doe, perhaps I don’t have to tell you this, but it has its share of skeptics. Some people, I won’t call them ignorant, but some…uninformed people, think cryogenics is, well—”
“A load of crap?”
“—a fantasy. An optimist’s pipe dream…But the same thing has been said about a lot of scientific advances.”
“Like organ transplants,” I said. “Or cloning.”
“Yes! Yes! You do understand. What one generation mocks, the next takes for granted. And I promise you,
Mrs. Doe—we’ll pray for your son, of course we will, and we’ll hope for the best—but even if the worst happens, he won’t be lost forever. I guarantee, we will bring Phil back…And here we are!”
We’d come to a security door marked CRYOSTASIS A. Ogilvy swiped a keycard through a reader on the wall and the door slid open, hitting us with another blast of cold air.
I stepped inside, expecting a morgue-type setup, bodies filed away in lockers along the wall. Instead, Ozymandias’ clients were arranged on freestanding racks, encased in tall metal cylinders like giant thermoses—what Dr. Ogilvy called “cryopods.” There were six pods to a rack. They hung upright, but could swivel to a horizontal position for loading and unloading. At the far end of the room, a team of moon-suit guys—probably the same ones we’d seen on the helicopter pad—had just cranked a pod into the loading position; white vapor boiled out of it as they removed the end cap.
One series of racks held smaller containers, each about a third the size of a normal cryopod. I said: “Please tell me those aren’t babies.”
“Oh no,” said Dr. Ogilvy. “Children are kept in Cryostasis B. This is an adults-only chamber. Those are heads. The, uh, budget option,” he explained, wincing a little. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that, you understand—once we have the means to reanimate a dead body, growing an entirely new one shouldn’t be much harder. Personally, though, I’d rather not present a revival team with any unnecessary challenges.”
Cryostasis B was almost identical to Cryostasis A, except that the racks were spaced farther apart to make room for padded benches. “For visitors,” Dr. Ogilvy explained. “Friends and loved ones of our adult clients are welcome to visit at any time as well, but for reasons I’m sure you can appreciate, visits here in the nursery are much more common. Incidentally, purchase of a Platinum Lazarus or higher-premium plan entitles you to unlimited shuttle service to and from McCarran Airport…”
Figuring it might blow our cover if I slugged him, I stepped away while Ogilvy continued his pitch. I went over to the nearest rack and pretended to examine one of the pods.
A clanging noise caught my attention. I leaned sideways and looked around the rack to where a maintenance hatch had just opened in the floor. Another moon-suit guy climbed up out of it. As he turned to drop the hatch cover back in place, I saw his face.
Jacob Carlton.
“Mrs. Doe?” Dr. Ogilvy said. “I was just telling your husband something that I think you—”
“Be with you in a minute!” I drew my NC gun and stepped quickly around the rack, but Carlton had vanished.
“Jane?” said Wise. “What is it?”
A loud boom! from beneath the floor shook the pods in their racks. The lights flickered, and the steady hum of air-conditioning and refrigeration units gave way to a sick stutter.
“It’s you-know-who!” I called to Wise. “I think he just sabotaged the electricity!”
“What?” said Dr. Ogilvy. “Oh no, sabotage is impossible here, we have excellent security! And the power system has two backup generators.”
On cue, a second explosion rocked the building. An alarm sounded.
“Oh dear,” said Dr. Ogilvy. “Perhaps we’d better—urk!”
“Wise?” Gun at the ready, I stepped back around the rack and saw the doctor lying facedown on the floor. Wise, who’d dived for cover behind a batch of frozen heads, mouthed the words Over there and pointed.
I made my way from rack to rack towards Carlton’s hiding place. I was nearly there when a third explosion knocked out the last of the power. In the seconds of pitch-blackness that followed, I heard running footsteps.
Battery-operated safety lights came on. I ducked past the last rack in time to see an emergency-exit door swinging closed. I shouted to Wise, “I’m going after him,” but when I reached the door I paused to look back. The room was already noticeably warmer, and wisps of vapor were curling off the cryopods.
I went through the door. A twisting corridor led me back out to the main hallway, where I found two more bodies on the ground, another doctor and a security guard. The guard had gone down swinging, a nightstick still clutched tightly in his fist. Right next to him on the floor, nearly invisible in the amber glow of the safety lights, was an orange pistol.
I tucked Carlton’s NC gun in my waistband and followed the signs to the nearest exit. Carlton was stuck there, his final escape from the building blocked by a set of automatic doors that were no longer automatic. You’re supposed to be able to slide those things open manually, but it helps to have both hands, and Carlton’s right arm hung limp, a casualty of the guard’s nightstick. Now he’d pulled out a club of his own—a monkey wrench—and was using it to bash out the door glass. I snuck up behind him and waited until he’d removed enough of the glass to give me a clear field of fire. Then I put him to sleep.