The River of Time
by David Brin
I don’t think anyone knows exactly when it began. It seemed a fatal disease, at first. Dozens, possibly hundreds, were buried or cremated before the ComaSlow epidemic was recognized for what it was.
It was a pseudodeath that struck without warning. There was no precursor, no symptom that gave any clue to its coming.
Its victims were often found in bed, apparently asleep, yet rigid and unrousable. They were discovered on sidewalks, vacant-eyed and poised precariously in mid-stride. At office desks the ComaSlow were found staring blankly at papers, pencils poised above undotted i’s.
These corpses remained warm. Under careful scrutiny, they were found to consume oxygen and give off carbon dioxide. Their stiffness shared only one attribute with rigor mortis… an adamant resistance to motion.
Nobody had ever seen anything like it before. Soon a public investigation was launched.
Several weeks after the epidemic was recognized, the wheels of government reaction creaked far enough to pull me into this mess. By the time the Emergency Management Agency got around to drawing from its “Crackpot Consultant” list, I had seen the new death strike several acquaintances, two close friends, and—before my eyes—my agent.
Larry Carpis was treating me to lunch at Goldfarb’s, a medium-priced restaurant not far from his office, where he traditionally took his clients in the “bright, young, and promising” category.
I had barely touched my steak, so involved was I with my own brilliance. I made grand gestures with my hands, telling Harry about my idea for another “Harold Freebooter” novel.
Carpis ate slowly, as a rule, and spoke little over a meal. He had a tendency to pause and consider beforehand when he did comment. Because of this, it was hard for me to tell exactly when the change occurred. I noticed that he had taken on a particularly bemused expression, a forkful of chef’s salad midway to his mouth. He looked my way attentively, but when I shifted in my seat I saw that his gaze didn’t follow me.
I never did find out what Larry thought of my novel. It was a pretty good idea, if I do say so myself. Naturally, it never got written.
One stricken day later I was awakened early by a pounding on my door. Bleary-eyed, I opened it to face two very large, very starched military policemen.
“Are you Daniel Brand, the sci-fi writer?” the larger of the two asked.
“Um, that’s science fiction. Besides, I write a lot of fact articles… too.”
I was speaking on automatic pilot. Here were two big MPs on my doorstep, and I was giving them one of my standard cocktail party responses. Rise and shine.
“Sorry, sir. Science fiction. I’ll remember that.” He nodded. “Mr. Brand, we have orders to ask you to come with us. Your special commission with the Emergency Management Agency has been activated.”
I must have stared like a dummy. All that was getting through to me was that I was about to be taken somewhere by two Brobdingnagians with guns… and before my morning orange juice!
At this point, one of my characters would have drawn his laser pistol… or spoken up loudly so that the robot doorbell could later tell his best friend what had happened. Or he’d have coolly disarmed his would-be captors and escaped out the bathroom window. I managed to surpass those schemes by grunting, “My what?”
“Your special commission with the Emergency Management Agency, sir. You’ve been receiving a yearly emolument to keep your name and address on a list of unconventional consultants for hypothetical national crises. Surely you remember, sir?”
Never let anyone tell you a giant can’t fit his mouth around twenty-dollar words.
I did recall, at last. My yearly stipend had been a paltry one hundred dollars a year, ten percent going to Larry because it had been his idea to have me sign up in the first place. In exchange I had agreed to advise my country should little green men ever land, or dinosaurs rise up out of the sea, or whatever… and I promised to drop a card to a board corporal in a small office in a Pentagon subbasement, should I ever change my address. The program had been budgeted for twenty years in advance by one of our recent, workaholic Presidents, when he found out the U.S. didn’t have a game plan in the event a giant comet or something was discovered headed for the Earth. I think he used money stolen from the White House janitorial budget.
“They want me,” I said.
“Yessir,” the erudite truncheon-wielder confirmed. “Now, if you’ll please get dressed…?”
I was allowed to take my briefcase and a toothbrush. The rest “would be provided when I joined the crisis team.”
As we left my apartment building, we saw two ambulances pull away, carrying a few more of the night’s catatonics. The bystanders watched with none of the typical detachment of New Yorkers. One could tell they were afraid.
“Am I finally going to meet Carl Sagan?” I asked as the MPs hustled me into a green government Plymouth.
“Nossir,” the one with the vocabulary answered. “I believe he’s already become a victim. The computer chose you as the surviving consultant with the best set of qualifications. We’re now taking you to the main medical team at Johns Hopkins, where they are expecting you.”
That’s how I became a big shot in the investigation of the ComaSlow near-death. A computer picked me. I remember thinking that there must have been a lot of victims, already, for the poor machine to have gotten so hard up.
The hospitals were in chaos. Chronic-care units were filled to overflowing with immobile humanity. Armories and high school gymnasiums were converted to handle the growing number of victims.
The symptoms were frightening.
Physicians listened to heartbeats that dragged on, lonely and deep, for over a minute per. They worried over eyes that refused to blink, yet remained somehow moist. They despaired over encephalograms whose spikes could be counted in single neuron flashes, adding up to a complex pattern that was… normal!
But most disconcerting of all was each patient’s facial expression. In its glacial rigidity, each visage bore none of the calm mindlessness one might expect from a catatonic. There was no balm of sleep. Instead, most of the victims gradually assumed a mask of pitiably frozen, and apparently intelligent, panic.
The appellation “ComaSlow” had been given when it was discovered that the patients retained some vestigial powers of movement. Left unwatched for a night, a victim was often found, later, on his feet near his bed, like a statue of a man or woman trying to walk away. Occasionally two of the stricken would be discovered by the morning light facing each other from neighboring beds, eyes apparently focused, one or both with mouth half-open, in a frozen tableau of mock, furtive conversation.
The epidemic had struck 1 in 200 by the time I joined Unit Prime. The ratio was 1 in 55, a month later. It was becoming nigh impossible to care for and restrain so many patients. Intravenous feeding was stretching the medical establishment to its limit.
That was the situation the day Dr. Hunter and I walked into a Task Force meeting with our results. I opened the door for her, but I didn’t accompany Hunter to the head of the table. After one month I was still a bit of an alien element here… in spite of the powers and confidence granted me by the computers of the FEMA.
Hunter hefted a sheaf of scrawled notes and drawings above the heavy oak table.
“These were all written by our patients!” she announced. She sent the sheaf floating chaotically down the polished surface, leaving a scattered trail of papers along its path. The doctors picked these up and looked at them.
Hunter motioned toward me as she addressed the group.
“You all recall how hard Commissioner Brand and I had to work to persuade you to let some of the victims left alone, with pencils and paper? Well, these are the results of that experiment. Left unbothered, they produced these documents!”