Ramis knew the face would burn in his memory for a long time. This man was still alive. Ramis had no right to steal that from him.
He could not try it. He was not sure of his own abilities. He could not be so arrogant as to play with this man’s life.
Then Ramis felt his stomach knot. He would have to go back to Brahms and tell him he refused, that he didn’t feel competent.
Instructions written in Cyrillic characters covered the control panels. The walls had preprinted posters with lines of text, but he could not be sure which were inane signs about maintaining one’s health and exercising in orbit, and which contained more crucial information for reviving the hibernating people.
He kneeled next to the controls once more. With the translucent touchpad controls, Ramis was not even sure which of the dimmed squares were activation buttons and which were blank readouts.
He could go back, get the portable video imager, and record every block of text for Karen to translate and interpret.
The START touchpad was in the upper left, according to the instructions. He wondered what the other controls were for—the ones not mentioned on the list. He could activate the chamber and hope everything proceeded automatically. Everything on the Kibalchich had been straightforward so far—the emergency hatch, the lift platform, the transceiver.
Ramis trusted technology. The Soviets wouldn’t try to make things difficult—they would make it obvious. Perhaps Curtis Brahms was right: if they had put themselves into their sleepfreeze to wait for someone else to come, they could not know who would be first to arrive at their station. They could not be sure it would be one of their Soviet compatriots.
Before his arm muscles could lock with hesitation, Ramis reached forward and pressed his finger against the upper left touchpad.
The three readouts suddenly came to life under indecipherable labels, displaying numbers that meant nothing to him. All the numbers remained close to zero and then began to rise. One changed rapidly, while the others crept up a digit at a time. Low numbers. That all made sense—body temperature, heartbeat, respiration.
Yellow lights came on, embedded along the corners of the coffin. The frost on the inside of the glass vanished with little wisps of steam. Warming up the chamber, Ramis decided. He nodded. The first readout still rose rapidly. He watched the digits tick off faster than his heartbeat.
A thick red fluid—blood?—pushed up through the transparent tube from the reservoir below the chamber. The new blood entered the vein in the man’s left arm. After a few moments the tube in the other arm began to carry a pinkish tinge, away from the body and draining down below. Ramis thought he understood that the nutrient solution was being replaced by stored blood.
Then the background light on that readout turned red. Ramis jumped and looked around, staring at the other dead squares on the panel. Keypads, or readouts? If he pushed them, what would happen? He stared at the instructions, but they gave no assistance for anything out of the norm.
The red light began to blink. The process was going wrong—he had to do something. He couldn’t figure out what it meant. He felt sweat prickle down his back. A second blank touchpad flashed red. He stared up at the instructions again, as if something might have magically appeared there. He had to do something.
Acting instinctively, holding his breath, Ramis pushed the flashing red light. It must be some sort of signal. The control panel had sensed an emergency situation and indicated the button he would have to push.
“Please, please, please!” he muttered to himself.
The numbers on the readout continued to rise. The red alarm lights kept flashing. Another red light blinked. Ramis pushed that one, too, then pushed the other one again.
He was panicking. He tried to fight it down, but everything was slipping out of control, falling through his fingers. He didn’t know what was going on. He couldn’t react to it; he couldn’t think fast enough and find a solution because he didn’t know what he had done.
“What am I supposed to do!” he shouted.
A tiny curl of smoke spiraled up from the electrode on the man’s sternum, then a minuscule blue arc popped the electrode off the skin, leaving a burned mark in the center of his chest.
Suddenly, inside the chamber, the Soviet man shivered and vibrated, bucking with his spine and banging his elbows against the sides of the coffin. His lips drew back and his teeth clenched in a seizure.
Ramis could not decide what to do. He couldn’t get inside the coffin. He tugged at the control panel end, hoping he could yank it off and pull the man free, though he had no idea what he would do then.
“Help me!” Ramis called.
The Kibalchich had no one to hear him.
He banged on the glass, trying to break it and force his way in. “Help!”
The Soviet man lay still, rigid with a contorted expression on his face. His eyelids had popped wide open. He stared through the glass at the ceiling, but saw nothing. Tiny blood vessels had hemorrhaged, smearing his eye whites with red blots.
All the lights on the control panel had turned red. Two of the numerals fell back to zero; one remained at twenty-four.
With a hiss of pressurized air, the control panel end slid down, opening the chamber. The man did not move.
Ramis slumped to the floor and sat with his legs crossed, pressing his knees against the cold metal. He began to shiver uncontrollably.
Chapter 36
ORBITECH 1—Day 41
Karen Langelier put her head down and closed her eyes. She could imagine Ramis’s fear, sitting in an abandoned space station with hundreds of frozen bodies—it must be like a giant haunted house in orbit. There was one dead man in the airlock, and now another in the infirmary with wide eyes, staring at the person who had killed him by not understanding the sleepfreeze process.
Or was the process itself flawed? Maybe Ramis wasn’t to blame after all. But what would happen when the other Soviets did awake, only to find Ramis with their dead comrades? He wouldn’t stand a chance.
If the Soviets could indeed be revived. Biological researchers had pursued suspended animation for decades, and it seemed an odd topic to be pursuing in an orbital research station. That work could have been done as well on Earth, where laboratory space was not so precious.
But Karen knew what it was like to dig into an idea, spend months or even years on a false trail, perhaps give an entire life over to a single problem, only to learn that someone else had made the same discovery weeks before. Then you had to suffer the frustration of throwing yourself back into the whole crazy cycle again with a new idea.…
As competent and quick to learn as Ramis was, Karen didn’t believe he could intuitively guess all the necessary steps to revive the Soviets, and she was furious at Brahms for forcing him to try. More detailed revival information probably resided in the Kibalchich’s main computer, but she was certain it would all be in Russian.
Ramis had to have help.
Karen opened her eyes. The past few months weighed her down—her separation from Ray, her mourning for those on Earth, and now Brahms’s incessant pressure to produce.
She could get out, too, just as Ramis had.
And who better than she to go to the Soviet station? She was proficient in Russian, as were other people on the scientific staff, but that was only icing on the cake. She would be the first person to test out her weavewire ferry system. And the kicker was that she knew Ramis better than anyone else on Orbitech 1.