His pocket phone rang at about eleven A.M. He set down his tools, pulled it out, and switched it on.
“Chao speaking,” he said.
“Larry?”
That was all it took for Larry to recognize the voice, and his stomach turned to a block of ice. Marcia MacDougal. Not someone who would call just to chat. “Yes, this is Larry Chao. Hello, Marcia.”
“Hello. Good to hear your voice. Listen, Larry, I’m calling from the North Pole.” The North Pole. To anyone else on the Moon, she would have said Dreyfuss Station. But not to Larry. She couldn’t say that to Larry. “Something has come up and, well, you might say we want your opinion on it. Is there any chance that you could get up here in a hurry?”
“It’s important?” he asked, but it wasn’t really a question. Marcia MacDougal wasn’t the type to ask big favors without explaining why. Unless it was important.
“Yes, it is. Very.”
Larry found he could do nothing but stare at the splitter housing on the resonance chamber. It needed realignment. He’d have to log that in.
He shut his eyes and let out a sigh. Maybe Marcia could hear it, maybe she couldn’t. He didn’t care. He felt angry, frustrated, hounded. He wanted to shout at the phone, throw it against the wall, tell her to go to hell. But he knew he would not, and that was part of what was making him angry. He would agree to go, would do his duty, would do whatever they asked, because he knew they would not ask for what they did not need. Because they would not ask him if anyone else would do.
“I can catch the 1600 hopper,” he said. “No problem.”
“Thank you, Larry. Thank you very much. I’ll be there to meet you.”
“Good,” Larry said. “See you then.”
“Until then,” Marcia said, and the line went dead.
She hadn’t said a damned thing about whatever it was. And that only made Larry more certain of one thing.
He wasn’t going to like it.
Eight hours after she called Larry Chao, Marcia MacDougal was wondering if calling him had been such a good idea. He had taken the sight of the un-corpse very well. A little too well. He had yet to show the slightest outward reaction, unless an impassive expression was his way to register shock. Now they were back in the improvised office Selby’s team had set up in a chamber just down the Wheelway from where Lucian was.
She watched impassively as Selby poured Larry Chao a stiff three fingers of scotch and handed him the glass. Larry took a long hard gulp and winced at the taste. The distilleries here just hadn’t gotten the hang of it yet. Scotland was sorely missed on the Moon, if any part of Earth was.
“Lucian Dreyfuss,” Larry said, sitting in the operations bubble a hundred meters from where the undead man lay. “Lucian Dreyfuss. You brought me up here because you solved the Dreyfuss mystery.”
“Yes, love, we did,” Selby Bogsworth-Stapleton replied, her cheerful tones utterly unconvincing. Neither Selby nor Larry seemed to have much else to say, and Marcia couldn’t think of anything herself.
Marcia stood, leaning one-shouldered against the wall of the field office, watching Larry closely. She knew Larry slightly, nowhere near well enough to guess how he would deal with this nightmare. Marcia was an expert in analyzing Charonian data and imagery, but she never had understood people that well.
And right now she wished, devoutly wished, that she were anyplace but here, down here in the Wheel, watching a neurotic Brit pour cheap bar scotch down a man who had earned his nervous breakdown. But maybe, just maybe, this was the first step on the long road that would get Earth—and her husband Gerald—home.
Selby poured herself a drink and then gestured with the bottle, but Marcia just shook her head no. Larry took the bottle from Selby, though he hadn’t finished his first drink yet. He held the bottle close to his body, as if it were some sort of shield. None of them seemed quite ready to speak.
Larry sat there, still in his suit, his helmet off, as Selby bustled about, getting her own suit off, trying to pretend everything was fine. Larry emptied his glass and then poured himself another. It was hard for Marcia to watch him. She found herself staring at a brownish splotch on the wall just over Selby’s desk.
At last, Larry seemed to decide they were going to have to talk this thing through. “Is there any way to get him out of that thing?” he asked.
Selby sat down, stared at him for a minute, drummed her fingers on her desk, then knocked back the rest of her own scotch in one gulp. She stood again and started pacing the office. At last she spoke. “We don’t know. But there’s more to it than just getting him out.”
“What do you mean?” Chao demanded. “He’s in there. Can’t you open that thing up?”
“Certainly,” Marcia replied. “We’ve run tests on small samples of the material he’s in. We can chip it away, or melt it off, or dissolve it. But then what?”
“We give him a decent burial, of course!” Larry replied.
“Except he’s not dead, love,” Selby said. “Not so far as we can tell.” She reached across the desk, took the bottle back from Chao and poured herself another drink. She stared at her glass as she held it in both hands. “Not bloody much we do know for sure, really. But it could be us opening that thing up that kills him.”
“Wait a second,” Larry said, looking from one woman to the other. “I’m not clear. Is he dead, or isn’t he?”
“We don’t know,” Marcia said. She pulled a chair up and sat down, close to Larry. “To be honest, I don’t even know if that’s a meaningful question. I’ve been studying Charonian symbol systems for five years, and I haven’t spotted anything that suggests they make any distinction between living, unliving, and dead. The closest they come is ‘on’ and ‘off.’ ”
“What are you saying?” Larry asked, fighting to stay calm.
Marcia shook her head and held her upturned palms in the air, a gesture of helplessness. “I can’t answer your question. He could be either living or dead. Or it could be that he has been… been taken by the Charonians to such a degree that there is no such thing as Lucian Dreyfuss anymore, and asking if that object out there is his living or dead body would make as much sense as asking how deep is sunshine. That body is in as close to a state of perfect stasis as I have ever seen. I’d be willing to bet his last meal is still half-digested in his stomach, that his beard and fingernails haven’t grown a millimeter. I bet that if we went down to the cell structure, we’d find there has been no decay, no change in energy state at all.
“I’m sure the Charonians could wake that body up, revive him, very easily. In that sense, yes, he is alive—but that’s meaningless, because we don’t know what that wakened body would contain. Lucian Dreyfuss? A mindwiped vegetable? A Charonian? Besides, even if that still is Lucian, and we did get him out alive, I doubt we could do it without inflicting severe damage. Even if he is still himself, but in stasis, would he be sane and functional, or a vegetable, after he was awakened?”
Marcia shook her head, and got to her feet again. She stood uncertainly over Larry, kneading her hands together nervously. “My best guess right now is that he isn’t alive or dead. He’s off, and we don’t know how to turn him on. He has no heartbeat, no respiration, and we don’t know how to give them to him. He has no spark of life.”
“So what does he have?” Larry demanded. “Why have you got all those sensors hooked up to him if there’s nothing there for them to sense?”
Marcia MacDougal hesitated a moment before she spoke. “There’s not much you miss, is there?” she asked. “What he has are brainwaves and neural activity. Very slight, very faint, very slow. His brain is showing what looks like an REM dream state, greatly slowed down.”