His eyes go wide. He’s scared. Scared of rabble, of heathen rabble.
—I’ll… I’ll get somebody to help you, Doc. The fire engines oughtta be here any minute.—
Let him run. We can handle it. The Scotties will be here soon. I can hear their bagpipes now, or is it just the heat singing in my ears?
They’ll be here. Get up on top of the temple dome, Din. Warn them. Sound your trumpet. The colonel’s got to know! These dark incoherent forces of evil can’t be allowed to win. You know that. Snake worshippers, formless, nameless shadows of death. The Forces of Light and Order have to win out in the end. Western organization and military precision always triumph. It will kill you, Din, I know. But that’s the price of admission. We’ll make you an honorary corporal in the regiment, Din. Your name will be written on the rolls of our honored dead.
They’re coming; I know they’re coming. The whole bloomin’ regiment! Climb the golden dome and warn them. Warn them. Warn them!
OUT OF TIME
As my old Armenian boss often told me, «Figures don’t lie, but liars sure can figure.»
The first day of the trial, the courtroom had been as hectic as a television studio, what with four camera crews and all their lights, dozens of reporters, all the extra cops for security, and just plain gawkers. But after eight months, hardly any onlookers were there when Don Carmine Lombardo had his heart attack.
The cappo di tutti cappi for the whole New England region clawed at his chest and made a few gasping, gargling noises in the middle of his brother-in-law’s incredibly perjured testimony, struggled halfway out of his chair, then collapsed across the table in front of him, scattering the notes and depositions neatly laid out by his quartet of lawyers as he slid to the floor like a limp sack of overcooked spaghetti.
The rumor immediately sprang up that his brother-in-law’s testimony, in which he described the Don as a God-fearing family man who had become immensely wealthy merely by hard work and frugality, brought down the vengeance of the Lord upon the old man. This is probably not true. The heart attack was no great surprise. Don Carmine was almost eighty, grossly overweight, and given to smoking horrible little Sicilian rum-soaked cigars by the boxful.
The most gifted and expensive physicians in the Western world were flown to Rhode Island in the valiant attempt to save the Don’s life. Tenaciously, the old man hung on for six days, then, like the God he was said to have feared, he relaxed on the seventh. He was declared dead jointly by the medical team, no single one of them wishing to take the responsibility of making the announcement to the stony-eyed men in their perfectly-tailored silk suits who waited out in the hospital’s corridors, eating pizzas brought in by muscular errand boys and conversing in whispered mixtures of Italian and English.
But Don Carmine did not die before issuing orders that his body be preserved in liquid nitrogen. Perhaps he truly did fear God. If there was any chance that he could survive death, he was willing to spend the money and take the risk.
«What is this cryo… cryology or whatever the hell they call it?» snarled Angelo Marchetti. He was not angry. Snarling was his normal mode of conversation, except when he did get angry. Then he bellowed.
«Cryonics,» said his lawyer, Pat del Vecchio.
«They froze him in that stuff,» Marchetti said. «Like he was a popsickle.»
Del Vecchio was a youngster, one of the new breed of university-trained legal talents that was slowly, patiently turning the Mob away from its brutal old ways and toward the much more profitable pursuits of computer crime and semi-legitimate business. There was far more money to be made, at far less risk, in toxic waste disposal than in narcotics. Let the Latinos cut each other up over the drug trade. Let one state after another legalize gambling. Del Vecchio knew the wave of the future: more money was stolen with a few touches of the fingers on the right computer keyboard than with all the guns the old-timers liked to carry.
Marchetti was one of the last surviving old-timers among the New England families. Bald, built like a squat little fireplug with a glistening, narrow-eyed bullet head stuck atop it, he had been a bully all his life. Once he cowed men with his fists. Now he used the threat of his powerful voice, and the organization behind him, to make men do his will. He had inherited Don Carmine’s empire, but the thought that the Don might come back some day bothered him.
He sat on the patio of his luxurious home in Newport, gazing out at the lovely seascape formed by Narragansett Bay. The blue waters were dotted by dozens of white sails; the blue sky, by puffy white clouds. Marchetti often spent the afternoon out here, relaxing on his lounge chair, ogling the girls in their bathing suits through a powerful pair of binoculars. He was not oblivious to the fact that the great robber barons of the previous century had built their summer retreats nearby. The thought pleased him. But today he was worried about this scientific miracle called cryonics. «I mean, is the old Don dead or ain’t he?»
Del Vecchio, lean and dapper in a sharply-cut doublebreasted ivory blazer and dark blue slacks, assured Marchetti, «He’s legally, medically, and really dead.»
Marchetti scowled suspiciously. «Then why didn’t he wanna be buried?»
With great patience, del Vecchio explained that while the old man was clinically dead, there were some scientists who believed that perhaps in some far-distant future it might be possible to cure the heart problem that caused the death. So Don Carmine had himself frozen, preserved in liquid nitrogen at the temperature of 346 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
«Christ, that’s cold!» Marchetti growled.
At that temperature, del Vecchio said, the old man’s body would be perfectly preserved for eternity. As long as the refrigerator wasn’t turned off.
«And if the scientists ever find a way to fix what killed him, they can thaw him out and bring him back to life,» the young lawyer concluded.
Marchetti squinted in the sunlight, his interest in the sailboats and even the bathing beauties totally gone now.
«Maybe,» he said slowly, «somebody oughtta pull the plug out of that icebox.» He pronounced the word in the old neighborhood dialect: i-sa-bocks.
Del Vecchio smiled, understanding his boss’s reluctance to return the New England empire to a newly-arisen Don Carmine.
«Don’t worry,» he soothed. «There’s one great big loophole in the situation.»
«Yeah? What?»
«Nobody knows how to defrost a corpse, once it’s been frozen. Can’t be done without breaking up the body cells. Try to defrost Don Carmine and you’ll kill him.»
Marchetti laughed, a hearty, loud, blood-chilling roar. «Then he’ll be twice as dead!» He laughed until tears streamed down his cheeks.
The years passed swiftly, too swiftly and too few for Angelo Marchetti. Despite del Vecchio’s often-repeated advice that he get into the profits that can be skimmed from legalized casino gambling and banking, Marchetti could not change his ways. But the law enforcement agencies of the federal government were constantly improving their techniques and inevitably they caught up with him. Marchetti (he never thought to have himself styled «Don Angelo») was brought to trial to face charges of loansharking, tax evasion, and—most embarrassing of all—endangering the public health by improperly disposing of toxic wastes. One of the companies that del Vecchio had urged him to buy through a dummy corporation had gotten caught dumping chemical sludge into a public storm sewer.
Thirty pounds heavier than he had been the year that Don Carmine died, Marchetti sat once again on the patio behind his mansion. The binoculars rested on the flagstones beside his lounge chair; they had not been used all summer. Marchetti’s eyesight was not what it once was, nor was his interest in scantily-clad young women. He lay on the lounge chair like a beached white whale in size 52 plaid bathing trunks.