"We can leave him to die and get out of this place for a look-see," J.B. suggested.
"Just like that?" Doc retorted, the anger riding at the front of his voice.
"Yeah. He'll be worm fodder in a day. Mebbe less than that. Why wait and watch?"
"Sometimes, John Barrymore Dix, I have serious doubts about the code by which you live. By which we all live. I fear that I cannot — and will not — simply pass by this poor refuge from the past. Walk on the farther side and avert my eyes? No, thank you, my friends. That is not the way of Theophilus Algernon Tanner."
The Armorer took the reproach with a reasonable grace. "You got a point, Doc. Grant that. But if there was close danger here, you still wouldn't see me for dust. And the freezie could go get frozen again. But what can we do for him, Doc? You tell me that, will you?"
"Wish I knew, J.B., I wish I knew. He seems to be gently slipping through our fingers. After all those years..."
A short while later Richard Ginsberg appeared to stabilize. His heart and breathing steadied and even rallied a little. And, beneath the blankets, his flesh no longer felt so bitterly cold.
By noon there was a rekindling of a real hope for him.
"Looks better, Doc," Ryan said.
"I feel now we should try to restore him to consciousness. And try to make him take nourishment."
"How?" Lori queried.
Doc scratched his head. "Excellent question, my sweet passion flower of youth. How indeed?"
"Slap his face a few times, sit him up and pour some hot soup down his throat," Krysty suggested.
"Might kill him," J.B. said. "Then again... might cure him."
"What do you think, Doc?" Ryan asked.
"I do wish that you would all make a little more effort to recall that I may be called 'Doc' but that I know precious little about medicine. I am a doctor of science, and none of my science is of any avail here and now. I don't know, Ryan Cawdor. Why not try it? I doubt it will actually contribute to his death."
Ryan supported the dark-haired man, sitting him up on the bed. Krysty sat at his side, licking her lips nervously, looking at Ginsberg. "He's starting to show a beard. Look. All that stubble frozen for ten decades."
"Get on with it," Ryan urged her.
"Gaia help me," she whispered. "May the force of the Earth Mother act through me to save this stranger from the past."
Ryan noticed how the sensory curls of her crimson hair had retreated in tight bunches, as if seeking to protect her. Krysty swung her arm back, and then whipped it forward, hitting Ginsberg a solid slap across the left cheek. Though Ryan was braced against it, he was still rocked.
"Fireblast! You don't have to force his skull off his spine, lover."
"No point unless I do it hard. Keep him still there."
This time she used her left hand, leaving the vivid imprint of palm and fingers on the pale skin. Ginsberg's eyes jerked open, unfocused, then closed once more. Ryan could feel that the man's breathing had quickened.
"Again," he ordered.
Krysty slapped the helpless freezie's face twice more — a sharp back-and-forth motion, making the head roll from side to side.
This time the eyes flicked open, and stayed that way.
"Again?" Krysty asked, hand lifted ready.
"No," Richard Ginsberg gasped in a weak but clearly audible voice. "Thank you, but no. Not again."
"Welcome to the future," Doc said.
Chapter Ten
Cryogenics at the level of federal government was still highly classified at the end of the twentieth century. Carried on in a small number of top-secret redoubts, the experimentation was one of the many peripheral projects linked to the Totality Concept.
Richard Ginsberg had been put forward as a suitable candidate for freezing in the last months of the year 2000, late in October and just ninety days before sky-dark blotted out the United States of America and replaced it with the Deathlands.
Richard Ginsberg, of course, knew nothing of that. He had been locked into dreamless sleep, in his chromed coffin, far beneath the mountainside redoubt.
The last things he'd seen as the anesthetic shut down his mind and body had been the cornflower-blue eyes of Sister Magdalena Cohen, winking at him over the top of her surgical mask — eyes as brilliant as the bright circle of lights that had dazzled him from the ceiling of the operating theater at the Air Force base in Nebraska. Then a face mask came, smelling of a sickly mixture of warm rubber and disinfectant. And the angles inside his own skull folded in on his brain, like a Japanese paper sculpture.
The risks had been explained to him in advance, and he'd also undergone extensive counseling therapy to try to prepare him for his eventual reawakening.
His psychiatrist had gray hair, shaved to a fine stubble, with an enormously bushy mustache that overwhelmed his narrow, foxy face.
"We don't know when you might be revived, Rick," he said. "One month. One year. One century. One millenium. Who knows? I don't know. Nobody knows. All we know is that eventually medical science will be able to cure your illness. Until then you will be ceaselessly monitored."
A thousand years!
"I believe, from the best current information, that research into your ailment points to a cure within five years. Tops."
"Five years. Tops," Richard Ginsberg mumbled, cradled in the arms of Ryan Cawdor.
His eyes were still blurred, but now he was able to make out some details. Perhaps if he could be given his spectacles he'd be able to see better. Because what he saw didn't make any sort of sense at all.
There was a tall young woman with very red hair, like molten copper, sitting on the bed by his feet. Ginsberg was recovered enough to know that this woman was called a nurse. She was a future nurse, in an odd dark blue uniform, with a massive, shiny automatic pistol at her hip. She'd been slapping him on the face! What kind of a hospital was this?
"He's starting to come around." Doc leaned forward and stared into the man's white face. "Guess he doesn't know where in tarnation he is. I was like that. It takes time."
An old man, with a lined face, wearing a denim shirt and a weird Victorian frock coat. Pleasant, deep voice and some very expensive orthodontic work. Ginsberg tried to smile in pride at remembering that word. Must be a surgeon. Eccentric genius, perhaps.
"He's tried to grin," Lori said, looking over Doc's shoulder and beaming at the helpless figure on the bed.
"Nurse," Ginsberg said, with an effort. Pretty from what he could make out. Hair like Kansas wheat and eyes like a Montana skyscape. She looked to be very tall. She moved out of his line of sight and he could hear a peculiar tinkling sound like tiny brass cymbals.
"Lay him down and I'll go heat some soup for him," J.B. offered.
Porter? Middle-aged, eyes hidden behind glasses. But why was he wearing a hat in a hospital ward? And he had a gun at his hip, as well. Andanother slung over his shoulder, making him look like a guerrilla.
"What's... I mean, where and when?.." But the connections between brain and speech were temporarily down.
"Just take it quiet," Ryan said, standing up so that he could look properly at the freezie.
Richard Ginsberg freaked out at the sight — a mat of unruly black hair above the hardest, most cruel face that he'd ever seen; one eye that glinted like polished marble, the other lost beneath a leather patch; a fearsome scar that seamed the cheek, tugging at the right-hand corner of the mouth. He struggled to lift his head, checking to see if this man, too, was carrying a gun.
However hard he tried, the disoriented freezie couldn't fit Ryan into his futurist scenario. The one-eyed man looked like a killer. It just wasn't possible to pretend otherwise.