“My, my, I wonder which of my friends that could be.” There was only one possibility, of course, but it made no sense to admit this to the young man delivering the mail.
She signed for the package and examined it a moment before opening it.
It did not feel cold, despite its origins. This surprised her, despite the absurdity of the expectation.
It did not feel heavy; she could have believed that the package was empty.
Frustrated by the lack of tangible clues, she grasped the package at one end and tried to pull it apart. When that failed, a friendly hospital attendant assisted her, and soon she held the contents in her hand.
She read the note first. In his stark script, it said simply, After we settled into camp at 16,500feet, I wentfor a walk. I found this. I couldn’t believe it—it was growing in a shallow crack in barren rock, surrounded by snow. I knew that it wouldn’t last long, so I preserved it as best / could and sent it to you. Perhaps the winter flower will yet live, against all odds, R.H.
She opened the box and held the flower in her hand. She had spent a couple of decades gardening, and recognized the pink petals at a glance: a fairy rhododendron. These flowers were known for their ability to survive at high altitudes, but still, this was incredible. What astonishing travails the bright blossom had survived to get here!
Kath sighed. Such a romantic, this Mr. Herrick. You’d think he’d be more practical, with death as close at hand as it was in his present circumstances.
“Miss Tepper, we’re ready,” another bright young attendant announced. He wheeled her away to her doom, despite her protests.
She lay floating on the sea. It was quite comfortable there, though there was something odd about it. She drifted back to sleep, but something still bothered her about her comfortableness. Eventually she figured it out: her neck muscles were too relaxed. She had been tensing her neck muscles ever since the pain behind her eyes had begun, months ago; now her muscles were relaxed, because… because the pain was gone! She blessed the surgeon and drifted off to sleep again.
The next time she awoke, there was a stale, dry taste in her mouth. Her body was not floating; rather, it was a lead brick, designed to keep her trapped in bed. There could be little doubt about her condition: she was a zombie now.
Either that, or she was getting better. She considered the advantages of being a zombie, and rather preferred them.
Finally she woke up, in that terribly definitive way that told her that she wouldn’t drift off to sleep again soon. She complained about the coffee; she demanded, and received, a daily paper.
Reading the paper was a relatively new habit for her, only a few decades old. She hadn’t started until the ’90s. Before that, the headlines had always been the same: either someone was starting a war, or someone was trying to end one, or the Americans were talking to the Russians. But when the Soviet Union collapsed and the guardian B-52’s descended from the skies, a void appeared in the daily headlines. Oh, of a certainty, there were still wars—probably more than before—but without the global overtones of Communism versus Democracy, they rarely rated headlines.
So newspapers had gone back to covering news. They created headlines out of all kinds of oddities, from the nutritional value of theater popcorn to the sexual peccadillos of the current President years before he got elected. What news had lost in grand planetary sweep, it had gained in… humanity. One never knew what ridiculous concoction would become tomorrow’s news.
Today, however, the headline wasn’t at all amusing. No, not in the least.
She threw the paper aside, and blinked repeatedly; there were tears in her eyes! Damn him!
Well, Mr. Herrick was no doubt already receiving damnation from experts. There was little she could do to punish him any more. A massive avalanche had crashed down the side of Everest, burying half of the American climbing team. The team leader, Ross Herrick, was among those lost.
Contrary to her desires, Kath continued to recover. But as her body’s automatic physical process marched towards healing, her will to live faded.
Everyone and everything was gone. I have long outlived my usefulness, she thought, with only a trace of bitterness. Not even Mr. Herrick was left to argue with.
Dolly’s family held a memorial service for the late Mr. Ross Herrick; Kath did not attend. This was traditional for Kath: she had not even attended Spence’s funeral. No, her last memory of Spence was of the love in his eyes. Her last memory of Ross Herrick would be of his arrogant, challenging glare.
After the operation, the surgeon had confirmed for her what they had done: for almost an hour, she had been clinically dead. Dead, dead, totally dead.
She had half expected to see heaven—or more likely, hell—during that hour. But there was nothing. Death was flatly, simply, absurdly… boring. Kath, who had spent a lifetime of fierce activity, could think of little more distasteful. But she was tired now, too tired to pound back at Death again.
And everyone else was gone.
She recovered from her operation, but not from her sense of loss. She started to lose strength and weight once again. Her darned fool doctors could find nothing wrong, as usual.
Then the magazines started to arrive at her house—magazines about cryonics. Clearly, Mr. Herrick had alerted his compatriots that he had a fish wriggling on the hook. But that was before his oh-so-permanent demise.
Kath threw the magazines away. But they kept coming. And then came one issue that tried to answer the question that Mr. Herrick had evaded with considerable vigor: How cold was cold enough? She smiled as she remembered him, almost squirming, so she went ahead and read the article.
But in the end the essay disappointed her. The author spent a great many words saying that nobody really knew. He didn’t even dance around the question as skillfully as Mr. Herrick had. Disgusted, Kath tossed that magazine into the trash.
But as the paper hit the receptacle, she realized that the uncertainty held hope. She realized that, just possibly, not all of her friends were dead. Not quite yet.
But she also realized that the one friend who might yet survive would need her to save him. And she realized that, in order to save him, she would first have to save herself.
And to save herself, she would have to travel with Death once again. She found it hard to believe that she could let Death clutch at her yet again and still slip away from him. Nevertheless, it now made sense for her to try.
Besides, as a worst case, she would finally have the chance to give the Powers That Be a piece of her mind. That, at least, was something worth smiling about.
His memory of death was quite clear, quite certain. He remembered the terrible thunder, the shaking of the ground beneath him as uncounted tons of snow and ice poured down. He remembered clinging to his ice ax, jammed in a crack, and the giant fist of snow that flung him away. He remembered falling, sinking into his own private mountain of snow. He never really hit the ground: the snow simply became ever more dense, and his progress ever more sluggish, till at the last he was no longer moving.
It had been pitch black there in the middle of a hundred tons of snow. But what his eyes could no longer see, his other senses described for him with terrible surety. He had felt the snow and its bitter coldness. A burning, tingling sensation ran quickly down the tips of his fingers. He had realized he was going to die of hypothermia. He cursed under his breath.
But his attempt to curse had failed. Only then had he realized that he wasn’t breathing. The initial fall had knocked the breath out of him, and the densely packed snow had crushed his lungs. He had realized that the freezing cold would not be quick enough to kill him. He had tried to shout; but that hadn’t worked, either. He had fought for consciousness, for one last gasp of air…