"Yeah."
"How do you know my name?"
Krysty answered him. "It's on the comp-console screen. Date of birth. Everything else was classified, and we couldn't access it."
He nodded. "Figures. Did you find any clothes? And my glasses?"
J.B. handed over the spectacles and Ginsberg slipped them on. "Clothes are in the locker."
The freezie blinked owlishly around. The six fuzzy figures now sharpened and became distinct. But none of the bewilderment eased.
"You know who I am. Who on the green earth are you?"
Ryan made the introductions. "This is Krysty Wroth, Doc Tanner, J.B. Dix, Lori Quint. Jak Lauren's getting the soup. I'm Ryan Cawdor."
Ginsberg coughed, struggled for breath for a moment. "Oh, that's... Must be all the stuff I've been full of for... Hell! I guess I have to ask you now. Why push it across the tracks? You aren't doctors and... But you said he was a doctor?"
"Science, son. Not medicine."
The man in the bed nodded. "Right. Got that clear. Now, if you aren't doctors and you all... look the way you do, then I figure something's gone very, very wrong with things."
"Things?" Krysty said.
"Things," he repeated, waving his hands in a vague gesture. "This isn't what I kind of expected, you know. Not guys with guns. I'm supposed to be brought out of it so I can be cured."
"What ails you?" Doc asked, moving out of the way as Jak brought in a bowl of steaming soup.
"Thanks." Ginsberg sat up and took a sip. "Wow! That's hot. And... I can't really taste it. Guess that could take some time to return."
"It's tomatoes," Jak said helpfully.
"Could be watermelon for all I can tell, kid."
"Don't call me 'kid,'" the albino boy warned, angrily.
"Sorry. You asked about what my illness was, didn't you? Mind's still fogged. Like a Frisco evening. Funny. I can remember watching the mist come rolling in over the hills into the bay when I was only about nine years old. Now, I can't remember things about what I was doing before they..." The words tailed off and he sat, sipping at the soup.
Ryan prompted him gently. "What was wrong with you?"
"Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis," Ginsberg replied, stumbling over the long syllables. "Something like that."
"Sounds real bad," Krysty said. "What is it?"
"It's Lou Gehrig's disease," Doc told her. "That's what it was known as."
"Right!" Ginsberg exclaimed. "You're kidding me, aren't you, Doc? You really are a doctor, and this is some kind of hospital. Right?"
"Wrong," Ryan corrected. "Who's this Lou Gehrig guy, Doc? Some kind of scientist?"
"Ball player. First baseman for the Yankees way back in the... way back when. It's a kind of progressive muscular weakness."
Ginsberg gave the half-empty bowl back to Jak. "Thanks. Guess I wasn't as hungry as I thought I was. Yeah, Doc, you're right. Lou Gehrig. When they diagnosed what I'd got, I kept hearing the name. Read up about him, some."
"What's it do, this sickness?" Jak asked.
Ginsberg sighed. "I always thought, when they started to talk about cryogenics, that I'd wake up and some guy in a white coat would pat me on the shoulder and tell me I was cured. Not have some... not get asked what my illness was."
"No," Ryan said. "I'm real double-sorry, but you have to know this clear from the start. None of us knows nothing... anything... about your sickness. We can do nothing for you."
Ginsberg took off his spectacles and polished them on the sheet, not saying anything for several moments. He peered at the light through the glasses, wiping away a small smear. Finally he nodded.
"I appreciate your honesty, Mr. Cawdor. Truly I do. When they confirmed the diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS they called it, I'd known something was wrong. My coordination had been off for some weeks. I'd stumble, or I'd drop something. Spill food. I'd played baseball, like Gehrig, and suddenly I started to miss the pitches. Fumble it when I was out in right field. Lots of silly things. I felt tired. Weak. Wanted to lie down and rest a lot. They did all the tests on me."
He stopped and put his glasses back on. The others still stood around him, listening to his story, crowding the small cubicle.
He carried on. "They tried everything. Digitalis. Didn't help. Androstenolone. Same. I was getting steadily weaker."
"Did they know what caused this sickness," Krysty asked.
"Nerve cells in my brain and in my spine were just sort of giving up the ghost. Degeneration is the name. No cure. No hope. Fetch the coolant and pop the boy in the freezer. Thaw him out in a thousand years when we can save him."
The bitterness reached the front of his voice, and he buried his face in his hands. "That string of operations and tests and then the actual freezing. Having to say goodbye to all my friends. My parents. All of them. Like I was an astronaut going boldly off to brave the new frontiers. Now I come around and I'm in some military base with a half-dozen people who I don't know."
Lori sat on the bed and patted Ginsberg on the arm. "Could be badder," she said. "You can be dead and it's badder."
"You think so? You get what I got, young lady, and you sometimes think death is going to come in with a blessing."
"Disease like that goes into remission, doesn't it?" Doc asked.
"Sure. That's the irony. When I got frozen I was feeling better than I had for months."
The freezie still hadn't asked the question that Ryan and the others were dreading. But all of them were waiting for it.
Ginsberg sighed. "Mind if I snatch some sleep, folks? I feel kind of drained with all this waking up."
"Sure. We want to think about moving outside this redoubt sometime today," Ryan said.
"Yeah." Jak grinned. "Find out where fuck we are."
Ginsberg smiled. "Sure. I understand that you..." He looked suddenly puzzled. "How d'you mean? Did I hear you right? So you can find out whereyou are? How come you don't... don't know?"
Nobody spoke and everyone tried to avoid catching the eye of the bemused freezie, looking everywhere except at him.
"Hey, come on, Mr. Cawdor! What's going down here? What? And..."
Here it comes, Ryan thought.
"I want to know where we are. What's going on? What year is this? And..." his voice broke like a lost child's "...what in the name of God Almighty is happening?"
Chapter Eleven
The six companions stood by the subsidiary exits from the redoubt, on its northern flank. Richard Ginsberg leaned against the wall, breathing hard.
Walking was difficult for him, and the others had taken turns helping to support him. His muscles were painfully weak and wasted. Ryan noticed that the freezie's way of walking was slightly peculiar, each foot lifted rigidly then set down with an unusual firmness. Ginsberg also kept clenching and unclenching his fingers, as though they were stiff and sore.
Ryan had, as gently as he could, given him a spotty version of history from the October morning when Richard Neal Ginsberg had last seen the light of day, up to the present morning, one hundred eternal years later. The freezie had taken the news fairly well in spite of Doc's concern for his sanity.
Ryan sketched in what he knew of the end of civilization, the long winters, the barren wastes and frothing hot spots; the changes in the land and in the climate and the changes in the people.
Ginsberg had asked surprisingly few questions.
"When I saw you all, sporting guns, I guessed something was... bad. Had to be. Course, when I went under, the war talk was louder. Same old faces and voices. Hatred. I was born and raised on growing hatred in... once that... can't remember his name, the Russian leader who talked peace. Once he was toppled word was the CIA brought him down it all went downhill."
He'd cautiously asked how many had died in the first waves of missiles. Ryan told him that nobody knew the answer to that. All records were gone, and the months immediately following the devastation were known as "the lost days."