"Doesn't sound very fair."
"It's not. But he says 'In England it shall not be said I slew a sleeping man.' But Matty Groves doesn't have a chance. He gets chilled, but the wife turns on her husband and says they're all through."
"Sing it, lover."
She did, her sweet voice flooding the room, rising over the mechanical hissing and throbbing of the thawing cryo capsules. The age-old song of passion, betrayal and death caught everyone's interest.
When it was over Doc led a round of applause. "Beautiful, my dear silver-throated Miss Wroth. I had heard the song before, sung by a maiden in the Ozarks, when I was a callow youth. But not so finely as you have sung it. Bravo, my dear, bravo!"
"Anything happening, Jak?" J.B. asked later, watching the teenager as the youth catfooted along the row of containers.
"No. Can't see. Wait..." He pushed his face against the glass, trying the sec-locked handle. "Still shut tight. But looks like clearing."
"It's about time," Ryan said, levering himself up off the floor, where he'd been resting. He joined the young albino. "Yeah, I can see the lids up. Can't make anything inside 'em, yet. Too much of that mist."
"They going to be skeletons like the others, Doc?" Krysty asked.
"Frankly, ma'am, should any of them actually be returned to some sort of life, I think we might be more concerned about their brains than their bodies."
Doc continued to try to monitor the dials, seeking some kind of pattern that might tell him how the thawing was going.
"Looks to me like a basic draining of coolant, combined with some sort of bodily fluid replacement and reassessment. Blood coming in and the artificially frozen preservatives thawing and seeping out of the system. All sorts of artificial stimulants and nourishments pumping in, as well."
"Any signs of actual monitoring of the vital functions, Doc?" Ryan asked. "Those there?" He pointed at a number of display panels, each showing an unbroken line of pale green electrical light, accompanied by a thin, toneless bleeping.
"Could be. If they are, then we're not going to strike too much gold. I've seen more signs of life in a petrified dinosaur's dropping."
Another hour passed. The nine capsules were all open, but there was still too much mist in the cubicles to see what was happening. And the monitors remained stubbornly unchanged.
"Triple zero," J.B. muttered to Ryan. "Laid the ace on the line, best we could. Still got us a lot of nothing. Time we moved?"
"One more hour. Then we go. Krysty says she can still 'see' something. Like she's never seen before. They gotta come around, don't they?"
The Armorer pushed back the brim of his hat and shrugged his shoulders. "Mebbe, Ryan. Mebbe."
The big digital clock on the far wall of the control room clicked over another forty-two minutes, then things began to happen.
"The line's broke," Lori said, pointing at one of the monitors marked Vital Function 17. A blip had appeared, running slowly along, followed by another. And another. The tone changed to a more insistent cheeping, drawing attention to itself.
"Number seventeen. That one, in the corner." Doc pointed to the booth with that number stenciled above it.
Another monitor came to life, on one of the capsules nearest the main entrance. And a third one.
Moments later the first appalling screams began.
Chapter Eight
Krysty spotted a new display that had clicked into life on one of the many desks. It was labeled Time to Manual Override Unit Sec Lock.
Most of the twenty-five numbers were blank, but nine glowed. Of the nine, six were showing a hesitant orange light. Three, including number seventeen, were showing a glittering emerald green, bright as the eye of the dragon.
But everyone's attention had been torn away by the sound of the screaming.
Faint at first, like the first stirring of a summer breeze in the top branches of a mighty pine forest, then louder and more insistent, drawing them to capsule 17.
"Alive." Jak's eyes were wide in amazement. "Moving and 'live."
The silver top had now folded all the way open, and the coolant mists had finally vanished, allowing the companions to see into the lined box.
"We can open it in about ninety seconds," Krysty told them, checking the repeater chron over the armored glass door.
"Dark night!" J.B. said. "It's a woman and she looks like she's already been chilled."
Flat on her back, with a number of thin plastic tubes connected to her arms, was a woman, aged in her sixties. The hair was silver gray, tied in a neat coil. The hands jerked and twitched at the binding shroud in uncontrollable movements. Her brown eyes were open, staring sightlessly upward, and her mouth gaped, revealing pink gums. The screams rose and fell in a steady, racking rhythm, seeming beyond any conscious control of the freezie.
What the Armorer had said was deadly accurate. The woman looked on the brink of the grave. Ryan recalled at that moment Doc's warning that many of the cryogenic experiments had been carried out either on the newly dead or on the imminently dying.
"Forty seconds," Krysty said, raising her voice above the muffled cries.
The freezie's arms were painfully thin, her narrow body showing every sign of extreme emaciation. Her hands were like a bunch of twigs, covered in opaque skin, and her cheeks were completely sunken in, stretched over sharp planes of bone. The eyes were almost hidden in the scraped caverns of the sockets.
"What can we do, Doc?" Lori asked, tugging on his sleeve.
"Precious little, I fear. If only we knew what ailed her we could..."
"Fifteen seconds and we can open up the door and get her out."
"Then what?" Lori was almost crying at the sight of the old woman's obvious suffering.
The screaming stretched on, flat, barely rising and falling. Just a succession of mindless notes. The eyes of the freezie showed no sign whatsoever of any kind of consciousness.
"There's 'nother one coming out!" Jak called from near the entrance. "Man. Doesn't look so close to chill."
"Lock's open," Krysty said, reaching and turning the handle. As the door swung, the volume of the screaming became much louder, like the edge of a diamond saw drawn across a sheet of plate glass.
Ryan sniffed, catching a unique smell that was both sharp and flat at the same time, with a bitter overlay to it. Chemical and unpleasant.
"The wretched woman had recently undergone some drastic surgery to her brain," Doc observed. "See? The sutures look almost fresh."
"What's that mean?" Ryan asked. "What's making her scream?"
"I would hazard that pure speculation you understand but I would guess it may have been a terminal brain tumor."
The woman was trying to tear at the material of the winding-sheet, and her head was tossing to and fro. Her breath was fast and ragged, making a pulse at the angle of jaw and neck flutter and dance.
Krysty had gone back to the console that recorded motor functions, gazing at the buttons and punching at one or two.
She shouted to the group gathered around the open door. "What'd you say was wrong?"
"I would guess a tumor, but..."
"Intrinsic carcinoma near parieto-occipital sulcus? If I spoke it right."
"It says that?" Ryan asked.
"Her name's Joan Thoroldson. It also says she's sixty-four. There's been exploratory surgery. Then it says IIT."
"Inoperable, imminent termination," Doc muttered. "She is near death, Ryan, and in the most dreadful agony."
"Can't we..." Lori began, stopping as Doc solemnly shook his head.
"Nothing. Unless we can..." He turned his questioning gaze to Ryan.
"What, Doc? What can we do?"
"We can ease her passing. The swifter the better for her."
"Fireblast! Are all freezies gonna be like this? What's the point of?.."
"If civilization had not plunged a knife into its own belly, then possibly there might have been advances in laser or even in cryo surgery that could have restored her and then immediately excised the cancer that rips at her brain."