They all ducked behind the desks for protection, though the explosion was barely noticeable.
But it did the trick.
A three-sided section of the cover had been lifted off, exposing a single red switch beneath it. On the console, a number of lights flashed furiously.
Doc laughed. "One hundred years ago, a whole peck of telephones would have been ringing all over the shop. This must have been one of the most secret places on the planet."
"Not anymore. You figure this'll start to thaw out the freezies, Doc?"
"Kill or cure," the old man replied.
"Do it, Ryan," Lori said imperiously.
Moving carefully to avoid cutting his hand on the sharp edges of the torn cover, Ryan gripped the red switch and pulled it firmly toward himself, hearing the solid click of the contact being made, somewhere beneath the top of the desk.
"There she blows," J.B. shouted, taking off his fedora and waving it in the air in a most uncharacteristic display of enthusiasm. Lights flashed above each of the nine silver pods that the companions had assumed were occupied. What looked like steam was released in hissing, blinding clouds, concealing everything behind the great glass wall of the control chamber.
"Coolant release," Doc shouted. "Guess it must have been something like liquid nitrogen after all. It's being vented right now. My stars, but this is exciting!"
"Others opening too," Jak called, pointing to the rest of the capsules, whose lids were visibly beginning to lift.
"What are they going to be like?" Krysty asked nobody in particular.
Doc fielded the question. "Those that have already ceased the cryogenic process will obviously be exceedingly defunct. Dead. Gone before. Joined the choir celestial. Sleeping with their Maker. Resting the rest that has no awakening. Dived into the last great darkness. Savoring the enigma of the journey from which no man has yet returned. Plucking at the harp where..."
"Doc," Krysty interrupted irritably, "answer the bastard question, will you? What are they going to be like? The ones that unfreeze?"
"Ah, yes. Bear in mind that the probability is that they will have been frozen either at a point near death or at a point where a disease had them severely in its grip. Perhaps some illness that had not yet run its course, but for which medical science had, then, no hope of cure."
"Fucking sickies, Doc?" Jak said.
"In a word... yes."
"What if it's catching?"
Krysty's question stopped everyone in their tracks. Suppose these illnesses from before sky-dark were hideously contagious? None of them had thought about that.
"Can't be," Ryan denied with a positive degree of false confidence.
She persisted. "Why, lover?"
"Too much risk to anyone here or in the freezing part of the redoubt."
"Ever hear of LIDS?" Doc asked thoughtfully. "Perhaps not. Lethal Immune Deficiency Syndrome. The government suppressed the facts about it, trying to avoid a panic."
"What was?.." asked Jak.
"Your body's resistance to illness vanished overnight. Caught by walking through someone's sneeze. Easy as that. And you reallycould get it from toilet seats. If the nukes hadn't ended civilization, it could have chilled more people than the Black Death."
"What if one of them in those there are got it?" Lori asked, glancing toward the exit.
"As I said. There were many ways you could pick it up. Any sort of contact, no matter how casual, spread the virus, which was always a hundred percent terminal. But it was easily detected, as I recall. So, they'd not have let anyone in here with it. At least I remember from some of the scuttlebutt whispers at the time... Where was I? Oh, yes. When the sons of bitches fired me forward, they were talking about concentration camps and portable crematoria and even IE."
"What was that, Doc?" Krysty asked. The old man's horror tale from the past had caught everyone's attention. Nobody was even bothering to look at the fog-filled cubicles and the ponderously opening streamlined freezing chambers.
"Involuntary Euthanasia. It never got quite that bad, but there was martial law in the air, my friends, and a cold hand around your heart if you tested positive. Bad days."
He shook his head sadly, tapping at the floor with the metal ferrule of his cane. The dismal insight that he'd given into the past of their country held everyone in silence, a silence that was broken by a yelp from Lori.
"Look!"
The inactive or malfunctioned capsules were now completely open. The other nine were still hidden behind the veiling torrents of released coolant.
The blond teenager led the way to peer into the open containers, her spurs jingling merrily as she ran. The others joined her, staring into the padded interiors of the frozen coffins.
Some were quite empty.
Some were not.
"Bones, bones, dried lazy bones," Doc Tanner whispered, turning away with a sigh.
Hermetically sealed for a hundred years, the failures of the cryogenic experiments had become perfectly mummified. The skulls were encased in a tight mask of brown leather, the eyes long vanished into the shadowed sockets. The jaw gaped, held in place only by shreds of gristle, like old whipcord. The bodies had been wrapped in a shroud of thin plasticized cloth that had probably been white but had deteriorated to a patchy yellow. The skeletal hands and feet emerged from under the bindings, hooked and sere.
"Take a look at this double-poor bastard," Ryan suggested. "Seems like he sort of recovered some, when the machine folded up."
Doc was at his side, wiping at the smeared glass. "Lord, Lord," he said quietly. "It puts me in mind of a tale from Mr. Poe, concerning a premature burial of a wretch who... Oh, dear."
It was a dreadful sight.
The person, male by the short strands of straggling hair that clung to the top of the wrinkled skull, had made a fight of it. The winding-cloth was torn and bunched near the feet. The knees were drawn up and the back arched, the arms lifted, hands pressed toward the sky, as he had attempted to lift the massive weight of the locked lid. The head was tilted, jaw yawning in what must have been the last muffled, choking scream for air, the dying calling out to a world that was already dead.
"I'd hate to get chilled in a metal box," Lori said. "When I'm gone I want it with children all around and friends and a hill covering by heather with the sun and a big watery fall. That's how I'm going to be gone."
"How long d'you figure the thawing's going to take, Doc?" Krysty asked, frowning through the glass at the wreathing coils of gas and steam that still encircled the remaining nine cubicles.
"I fear that I have no idea, my dear girl. Time past and time present are both perhaps... What am I saying? No. I can speculate that the full freezing process must have taken many, many hours. Perhaps even days. But we have pressed the emergency button and everything will... I suppose, be much speeded."
"But it'll still take some time?"
Doc shrugged his shoulders. "You are as wise as I in this, my dear. We must all wait for however long it takes."
The room contained nothing of interest to any of them, so the next few hours dragged slowly by.
Doc sat in a corner with his back against a wall, Lori's head in his lap. Jak pared his nails with one of his assortment of throwing knives. J.B. repeatedly stripped and reassembled his new blaster, eventually becoming so familiar with the weapon that he could do it with Ryan's scarf knotted tightly over his eyes.
Krysty and Ryan strolled together around the rows of control consoles, her hand resting lightly on his arm. She sang a childhood song that she said had been taught to her by her mother, in Harmony.
"It's an old ballad, from way, way back before sky-dark. About a baron who catches his young wife making love with another man. He bursts in on them his wife and this Matty Groves and he's got all his sec men with him. And he threatens him. Says they should have a fair fight."