"You used the word 'team,'" I reminded her.
Maggie nodded. "Ever heard of a fellow by the name of Byron Huntington?"
It was my turn to shake my head. "Nope."
"Or Hannah Holbrook?"
So far I was zero for three. "They're not exactly household names," I muttered. Of the three, Hannah Holbrook's name was ringing a little bell, but I didn't have the slightest idea why.
"Byron is from the California Academy of Cryonics, and if you tend to believe in that sort of thing, probably the most knowledgeable man Bearing could hire on the subject. As for Hannah, she's a pure brain, a thermo-engineering talent from M.I.T. Bearing had enough clout to have someone at NASA send her down from the Cape for this little drill."
There must be something about the way I look, something that's permanently etched into my face, that announces to the world that they are dealing with a born skeptic. Either that or my body language gives me away. For whatever reason, Maggie suddenly looked a little disappointed. "I'm not exactly dazzling you with all of this, am I?"
"It's not your fault," I said. I had all I could do to appear passingly modest while I crawled out of bed, wrapped a sheet around me and slipped into the bathroom. "Let me think about it," I said, "while I grab a quick shower."
The water was needling down on me as I sifted through the pieces. From what little I had been able to gather in the way of irrefutable facts, I had underpriced myself. Bearing's announced escapade was far more extensive than I had first pictured. Locating the wreck of the Garl and coming up with the cylinders was far more important to the old man than I had estimated. For that matter, I had the feeling that even Cosmo hadn't grasped the full magnitude of Bearing's endeavor. I played around in the water until I was sure I was thinking straight, and tried to line up my questions for Ms. Chrysler. After thinking about it, I decided to just peel them off one by one and see if the good-looking lady had the right answers.
I crawled out, toweled off, pulled on a pair of khaki pants and a navy blue golf shirt with the words "Harbor Springs" artfully stitched over the pocket. Then I went back in to confront Maggie. She was standing on the balcony squinting out at the sun-drenched gulf.
"First question," I said, without further preamble. "Does this project have anything to do with all those people who died at Deechapal a couple of weeks ago?"
"I doubt it," she said confidently. "Bearing had already hired Hannah and me. Byron was already in route to talk to Bearing when you were just a twinkle in Cosmo's eye. Cosmo told the boss man that he wasn't even sure he could get you to come down here to talk to him. All that was a few days before we heard about the Deechapal incident."
"Second question. What about Bearing's son, Marshal?"
"The one you didn't get along with back in your undergrad days?"
"You know everything, don't you?" I said.
"In addition to having very long legs, I have very good ears," Maggie said, grinning.
While she studied the azure blue horizon, I studied her. Bearing Schuster was one smart son-of-a-bitch, I thought. Dispatching this lovely package to sway me into taking on this little assignment was taking unfair advantage of the situation. "You didn't answer my question… what about Marshal Schuster? Do you know anything about him?"
Maggie shrugged. The gesture was noncommittal. "All I know is that he owns his own company down in Boca."
"And?"
"Well, nobody told me this, but I think we're in a race."
"A race?" I repeated.
Maggie nodded her pretty head. "You have to understand that Bearing Schuster didn't come right out and admit it, but I get the distinct impression that your old college chum knows about his daddy's diary, and that it's a race to see who gets to those cylinders first."
I leaned my frame up against the wrought-iron railing of the third-floor balcony and folded my arms across my chest. "Bear with me," I said, "but you're going to have to explain to me why those damn cylinders are so important."
"Just suppose for a minute that Bachmann's process works," she said. "Think what that knowledge could do for somebody like Bearing Schuster who is sitting there watching his body rot off from under him. There he sits, having amassed one of the world's greatest fortunes, and no way to take it with him."
"If I carry your little hypothesis further, Marshal doesn't want his old man to find Bachmann's process because if he does, and if it should just happen to work, it keeps him from one hell of an inheritance."
"That's the way I figure it," Maggie admitted. "Kinda intriguing, huh?"
I quit lusting after Maggie long enough to turn my attention to the magnificence of the gulf. The next question was going to go a long way toward determining just how much credence I was willing to put in what sweet Maggie was telling me. "You don't really think you can quick freeze some poor slob then bring him back to life, do you?"
The lady didn't come back at me with the kind of answer I expected. "Let me put it this way, Elliott. Given the fact that we are all going to die, you've got a helluva lot better chance of pulling off the reincarnation thing if you've been quick frozen for twenty years than if you've been buried in a hole in the ground."
I studied Maggie's calmly logical face. This time she wasn't smiling — she looked very, very serious.
By noon, a lot had happened. First of all, I had given Maggie the answer Bearing sent her after. She left all smiles. Then I called Cosmo and asked him what he knew about the Doobacque Cluster. It took him less than 30 minutes to hustle over with a portfolio full of facts and figures about the obscure island chain and a raft of newspaper clippings about the recent disaster. All of which didn't shed much more light on the matter than the one clipping I had read earlier.
In addition, I left word on my modem back in the wintery midwest for ever faithful Lucy to figure out a way to access the library's files; I wanted everything she could dig up on the Garl, Manfred Kohler, Rudolph Bachmann, and the final hours in the Fuhrerbunker. Then I called Queet.
Lucy got back to me by midmorning with tidbits at best. Bachmann and the available data on his work was sketchy. It appears Hitler's one and only cryonics specialist spent the latter years of his life tucked away in some obscure mountain retreat in Argentina. According to Lucy's findings, he never resurfaced after the end of the war, and based on what I had been able to learn so far, it was easy to figure out why. His Fuhrer gave him an assignment, and when crunch time came, Bachmann couldn't deliver — at least that was the assessment of modern day cryonics experts evaluating his somewhat primitive procedures. Of course, proponents were quick to point out that since no one actually had tried his procedure, no one knew for certain.
There was another angle to all of this. If Bachmann led Hitler and Bormann to believe that his process was perfected in the final hours but in reality he knew that it wasn't, Bachmann could have figured loyalists to the Third Reich would have come looking for him. Rudolph Bachmann, it appears, was damned if it worked and damned if it didn't.
So far, the only piece of evidence Bearing and his so-called Prometheus Project team had to go on was an equally obscure diary from a German officer written just hours before the inevitable end. As a student of human behavior, I figured it was unlikely that Manfred Kohler would have spent his final minutes concocting a cock and bull story for his wife. That's not the sort of twist the Teutonic mind takes.
Ultimately, the only real test of the validity of Bachmann's reanimation process was to find the cylinder containing Hitler's body and see if modern cyronic science could breathe life into the old boy again.