“All gung, Fee. All friends. As a matter of fact we were just discussing the Chief. Now what’s all this?”
“There’s an elephant in the cellar. Did you know?”
“Yes, we know.”
“And a snake up there.”
“We know. Also an octopus in the drawing room. Why does Dr. Guess want me to come to JPL right away?”
She took fire again. “The event of the century. The experimental cryocapsule will put down in an hour. Three cryonauts have been out in orbit for three months and now they’re coming back. All the celebs from U-Con will be there and the Chief wants you, too.”
“Why me? I’m not celebrated. I don’t even own any stock in United Conglomerate.”
“He likes you. I don’t know why. Nobody else does.”
“Well, ask him if I can bring four friends.”
Fee nodded and retro’d. The others protested that they weren’t faintly interested in the event of the century; they’d witnessed too many in their time and they were always a let down. All of them began bitching simultaneously; about the Boxer rebellion, Franklin and his kite, Captain Bligh and the Bounty, Henry Christophe. I tried to break it up. “You don’t understand,” I told them. “I couldn’t care less about those frozen characters coming in for a landing, but this is a golden opportunity to case the guy we’re going to kill. Don’t you want to size up your victim?”
Fee reappeared. “It’s gung, Guig. He says the more the merrier. You can bring the elephant if you like. I’ll meet you at the front gate and pass you in.” She disappeared.
As we trooped up to the roof (elephant not included) to get into the big chopper, they were all delivering asides.
“Who is she?”
“Sam says he’s had her for three years.”
“One of yours, M’bantu?”
“Alas, I would say not. She is too light. Most probably Maori and Aztec Indian with a strong strain of Honk. It’s the touch of the Waspbrush that accounts for the delicate bones.”
“Guig always likes them exotic.”
“Behind the times all his life.”
“She is pretty.”
“And as nubile as a young dolphin.”
“I wonder how many he’s scored.”
“Sam would know.”
I was delivering a few asides to myself: How the hell did Fee-5 know my guests understood XX? I had the uneasy feeling that there was a lot more I didn’t know about Fee. I also had a sinking that this Cherokee caper was going to turn into the wrong kind of catastrophe. I wanted to go to the university hospital and ask Jacy to move over.
3
We were mugged by some senior citizens on the way from the chopper to the main gate, but no great harm done; they were using vintage revolvers. There was one funny incident. After we chased them I looked around and there was Nemo kneeling on a prostrate maladroit and sincere as hell. He was slamming the Shortie across the face with his own pistol and chanting in rhythm, “This is not… the road to… survival… You must… transplant… transplant… transplant…”
We pulled him off the poor old Shortie and were met at the gate by Fee, who seemed rather impressed by Nemo’s performance. Muggings she knew all about, but this was the first time she’d ever seen one used as an excuse for a lecture. Fee conducted us to the landing site and it was my turn to be impressed.
It was an enormous theater-in-the-round with a circular stage. There were seats for a thousand in the amphitheater, all filled with U-Con brass and politicos doing their best to keep JPL happy and paying taxes in the state. Fee seated us in the reserved section and went down to the floor to join Guess, who was standing at a huge control console alongside the stage. I thought she was behaving with poise and assurance. Either the Chief had kept his promise or she’d found her identity. Either way or both, I had to admire her.
Guess took stage center, looked around, and spoke. “Senoras, gemmum, soul hermanos, ah gone esplain brief, you know, what this esperiment mean, dig? You got like any preguntas, right, ax da man.”
He motioned to Fee, who did something at the console. Projectors flashed on and there were three bods on the stage alongside Guess, bowing and smiling. They were smallish but looked strong and tough.
“These are the three courageous volunteers,” Guess said (in translation), “who have taken the first cryogenic flight in history. This is in preparation for the Pluto mission and eventually the stars. The constraints are time and payload. It will take the mission many years to reach Pluto, even at maximum acceleration. It will take centuries to reach the stars. It would be impossible to freight enough supplies for these men. There is only one answer, the cryonic technique.”
He motioned to Fee again. The projectors flicked and there were the cryonauts, naked, being helped into transparent coffins by technicians. Quick cuts of them being injected, variously attached to tendrils, given some sort of sterile wash. The coffin lids were bolted.
“We lowered the temperature in the cryocoffins one degree Celsius per hour and increased the pressure one atmosphere per hour until we produced the effect of Ice III, which is denser than water and forms above the freezing point. Mid-twentieth-century cryonics failed because it was not known that suspended animation could not be achieved through freezing alone; it requires a combination of low temperature and high pressure. Details are in your fact-tapes.”
Shot of the coffins being tenderly loaded into a capsule. Cut to interior of capsule and techs hooking up complicated plumbing.
“We launched them on a ninety-day orbit, a deep ellipse.” Long shot of the launch; a gentle liftoff and then, at altitude, flames roaring down from the rocket vehicle carrying the capsule, and acceleration to out-of-sight. The usual. Edison looked bored.
“Now they’re returning. We’ll trap the craft in a projected kinorep cone, center it with its lateral gas jets, and let the offset of kinorep and gravity bring it down slowly. For those of you who aren’t tech-oriented, kinotrac and kinorep are our abbreviations for kinetic electromagnetic attraction and repulsion. That’s how the craft you travel on take off and land without shaking you up.
“The cryonauts will arrive in about ten minutes and be brought up to nominal metabolism so slowly that I’m afraid you’ll have to wait quite a few days before interviewing them — not that they’ll have much to tell you. For them, no time has passed at all. Now, are there any questions?”
There were some smart-ass questions from civilians: Where was the orbit of the capsule? (In the plane of the Earth’s orbit. All in your fact-tapes.) Why not a comet orbit around the sun? (Refrigeration constraints plus the fact that it would be thrust into a no-return parabola. All in your fact-tapes.) What are the names and qualifications of the cryonauts? (All in your fact-tapes.) How do you personally feel about this dangerous experiment? (Accountable.) He looked around. “Three more minutes. Any further questions?”
“Yes,” I called. “What’s an Ugly Poppy?”
He gave me a look that made me feel for George Armstrong Custer (West Point, ‘61) and returned to the console. “Iris open,” he ordered. Fee touched something and the entire roof above the stage leafed back. “Kino trap.” She nodded, concentrating so hard that her teeth were fastened on the tip of her tongue.
We waited. We waited. We waited. There was a loud bleep from the console. “In contact,” murmured Guess. He took the controls. “Each time the craft contacts the kinorep wall we reverse it with its lateral jets, trying to pin it to the center of the cone.” He thought he was thinking out loud. In the anxious hush it sounded like a shout. His hands flickered over the console controls and the bleeps merged into a sustained discord. “Centered and descending.” It was obvious to me that pokerface was under a tremendous strain even though he showed nothing. He began a droning count: “Diez. Nueve. Ocho. Siete. Seis. Cinco. Cuatro. Tres. Dos. Uno. Minuto.” He was peering up through the iris and down at the console radar screen. He went on counting and it sounded like a Latin mass. What a hell of an accountability.