CHILLER Read online

  Auto mechanics can fix cars easily because they don’t have to work on them while the engine is still running. The delicacy of surgery comes from the fact that patients have to remain alive while hands and instruments thrust deep into them. Surgery is itself a major, life-threatening trauma.

  Matters are far simpler if the patient has already died.

  Sparkle had gone on a voyage no other being had ever attempted. Held in stiff, chilled stasis, she suffered none of the slow erosion that living beings endure. Susan and Alex had used new drugs Susan was developing, “transglycerols” that allowed a body to avoid freezing even though it was colder than the freezing point of water. This gave Susan time to study the results of Sparkle’s surgery. She had used the days to carefully trace the path of the tumor threads, dark strings like coiled snakes that had wriggled deep within her. It had been long labor, consulting the inner maps of X-rays, of PET and CAT scans, and of tissue samples. Susan had rooted out every fibrous remnant, taking biopsy specimens, cutting away with a laser scalpel, stitching up the widespread damage. She was an adequate surgeon and had worked on dogs and cats. The luxury of time at low temperatures, free of the need to keep the patient’s body functioning, let her take meticulous care.

  Ironically, it was only through killing Sparkle that she had any scrap of hope. She was now free of the insidious growths that had riddled her. Heart stilled, brain waves stopped, her purple eyelids lying so flattened it seemed that she had lost her corneas, Sparkle had glided through days of changeless time, dead by all the standards of medical science.

  They had prepared her rewarming by injecting membrane stabilizers, to hold cell structure together. Then they had brought her up from the icy domain that claimed her by using carefully controlled radio frequency rewarming. The glycerols that gave antifreeze protection to her cells were hard to coax back out. Susan had developed new, simpler procedures and taught them to Alex. He knew biochemistry, but better, he knew how to listen, which usually is more valuable than bookish lore. Hand-eye coordination proved to be especially important in the bleached-light intricacies of the operating theater.

  “Dura mater seems fine,” Susan said. “No big surprise, though. It’s just the sort of tissue the cryoprotectants should work best on.”

  Alex nodded, adjusting the ventilator settings. The dura mater was the tough membrane covering Sparkle’s brain. Before Susan had developed her new methods, they had seen previous frozen animals develop fatal damage there as they cooled down. Ice expanded between cells, caving them in. This was a more insidious problem than “freezer burn,” which was simply the loss of water from tissue in ordinary refrigerators. The major enemy of cooling as a method of saving patients came with rewarming, when cell walls could not re-expand naturally because they had been damaged. Susan’s research had perhaps offset that. Perhaps.

  Alex found himself petting Sparkle, stroking her fine pelt, hands seeking some sign of life from her familiar body. The coat was tangled and matted, and her shanks were chilly beneath her gray warming blanket. The respirator kept forcing the worn old body to go through its mechanical motions, but Alex wanted to feel some tremor of that mysterious other, the essence that changed a laboring mechanism to a living spirit, a mind capable of knowing joy.

  Susan leaned over, fatigue lining her oval face. She had given more this day than he had, yet her hands remained steady, her voice calm and free of the skittering tension he felt, as she said, “She’s in there somewhere, Alex.”

  “I hope.”

  “The memories that made her all that you loved—they’re preserved.”

  Down in the cells of Sparkle’s brain, hard-wired by chemical processes science was only beginning to fathom, she was waiting for him. The ravages of warmth and pressing time had not gotten to her yet. Or so their theories went.

  He sighed. “Yeah. I know.”

  “And it’s looking good.” Susan tapped the liquid crystal display of Sparkle’s internal temperature: 27.7 centigrade.

  Alex worked in centigrade constantly, but somehow for matters close to the throb of living things, his mind reverted to the scale he had learned as a boy, just as he dutifully swallowed drugs for a cold but took his true, deep solace in chicken soup. “Let’s see—that’s eighty-two degrees Fahrenheit. She’s almost there!”

  “Try her brain waves.”

  He checked the electrodes attached to Sparkle’s head, then scanned the screen. Soft hash, green lines jittering against a black field. No clear result, but the complexity of the traces alone tightened his throat. The last time he had looked there had been nothing, an ominous flat line.

  This is all a research project, remember. An experiment. Chances are slim. Susan laid out the odds. I knew that going in.

  He caught his breath. The green hash, which showed activity levels in portions of Sparkle’s brain, now showed complex waves. They spiked up out of the spaghetti jumble, vanished, then returned.

  “Hey. Alpha rhythm, good and strong.” Waves snaked steadily across the ‘scope face.

  While I was outside, day-dreaming, he thought, the old girl was fighting her way up from the cold. Coming back to me.

  He massaged Sparkle vigorously, as if life could ooze like a fluid from him into her. C’mon, girl. Up from the dark depths… Her flesh was torpid and sluggish. Beneath his kneading fingers his old pet felt like chilly meat in a supermarket. But he knew that in medicine appearances can lie. That was especially true here, in a surgical procedure never tried before.

  C’mon… just give us a flutter of life, anything, the most feeble stirring. We’ll hold a party for you, throw a barrel full of fresh bright yellow tennis balls, take you rabbit hunting up the arroyo. A rebirthday party, Sparkle. His hands began to ache from the massaging. Did Sparkle’s muscles seem a fraction more supple?

  Susan said compassionately, “Don’t expect a lot. This is the first time, Alex.”

  “I know, I know, but—”

  “Totally new technology, and I’m doing it all by the seat of my pants. Don’t expect—”

  “She moved.” He said it in a flat, factual voice, as though excitement might scare the tremor away.

  Susan smiled sympathetically. “You’re sure? The respirator sometimes induces an autonomic response in the rest of the body, and—”

  “There! There it is again.” He bit his lip. Eagerly he massaged Sparkle’s legs with fingers that were beginning to ache. Her legs had twitched the way she did when she dreamed, chasing tasty rabbits over green summer fields.

  Susan’s eyes darted over the complicated displays that crowded around the operating table. They stood for long moments watching the shifting liquid-crystal numbers and graphs. Sparkle’s brain waves showed fresh ripples, growing complexity.

  “Blood chemistry is coming around. Her pH looks better,” Susan said. “The perfusate is completely exchanged out.”

  “She’s trembling.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Look.” Alex let go of Sparkle’s legs. They began to jerk visibly.

  “My lord,” Susan whispered.

  “See? She’s—”

  “That could be a simple discharging of—” Susan stopped, gazing at rippling digital indicators. Her look of rigorous scientific skepticism fell away like a mask slipping from a warmer, more vulnerable face. Susan was a handsome woman with chestnut hair and a square face that gave the impression of solidity. Even now this came through, despite the red bags under her eyes and a network of fine lines that webbed out from the corners of her mouth. Lipstick and powder and eye shadow might have hidden much of this, but not the leaden notes in her voice. Yet these, too, were banished in the next moment. “Heartbeat. Look.”

  A monitor now showed a steady pulse.

  Alex glanced at the brain-wave spectrum. It was alive with shifting structure.

  “Let’s get her breathing on her own,” Susan said.

  Alex’s eyes widened. “You’re sure?”

  “Come on. I’ll show you.” />
  It took a while to attach a plastic bag in place of the heart-lung machine. Alex rhythmically forced air in and out of Sparkle, following Susan’s directions in concert with her own quick, expert work. He stopped regularly to see if Sparkle would start breathing on her own.

  “Think it’s safe?” Alex felt a lump in his throat. The dangers of taking her off the machine suddenly loomed before him. But then, he reminded himself, he wasn’t the surgeon. Here his lofty Ph.D. in biochemistry qualified him to be a simple medical assistant, little more than a handyman with the equipment. The doctorate had been fun to earn, but even before he finished it, he knew he didn’t want to do research in conventional areas. This was his calling. He liked working with his callused hands, fixing balky machines, doing the grunt labor around Immortality Incorporated, where something needed patching up all the time. He enjoyed understanding circuits, putting up drywall, framing in wooden supports for the suspension vessels, anything that transformed lines on paper into something solid that worked. And at this moment he was heartily glad that he did not have to make the decisions here.

  Susan watched the displays closely, then nodded. “So far.”

  “Whoosh, this is hard work.”

  “You’re tensing up, that’s all.” Above her surgical mask she gave him a wink. “Don’t force it.”

  “Right. Right.” Alex eased off, watching Susan for guidance at every step of the procedure. She carefully adjusted a dozen other settings. The body had to be restarted smoothly, letting the heart and lungs strike up their own rhythms. For long minutes he watched the regular rise and fall of Sparkle’s chest, driven by his hands, and it was only when Susan touched his arm softly, much later, that he realized that his hands were no longer breathing for Sparkle. He let them drop to his side, aching. The gentle rush of air through her now seemed subtly different, almost like a repeated sighing, effortless, a natural flowing.

  “She’s back.” Alex felt stunned, dumb.

  “Back from the other side,” Susan smiled, and Alex saw how pale and wan she was. He glanced at the clock and automatically made an entry in their operation log. Every detail of the procedure had to be exact, recorded.

  Susan puffed out her cheeks, popped her eyes, and let out a great “Whoosh!” Then she sagged, leaning against the operating table. He realized that she had been on her feet, taking no more than five minutes away to gulp down some tacos, for ten hours.

  “She’ll need rest, therapy, constant monitoring.” Susan had relaxed physically but was still plainly holding her emotions encased in a professional reserve.

  “Sure, sure…” He stared down in wonder at Sparkle. Her chest rose and fell smoothly, and he knew in the silent, sliding moment that he was watching a quiet, profound miracle.

  “Back from freezing,” Susan said. “A whole, intact, higher mammal. Never been done before. Never.”

  Alex swallowed hard. “Never. Goddamn.”

  “All the dreams, the stunts, the half-baked ideas…”

  “And here it is.”

  “Got anything to drink?” Susan grinned, and as if on a signal, the tension broke. They embraced each other, whirling away from the operating table in a lurching dance, whooping and laughing and crying. The rebirthday party had begun.

  2

  GEORGE

  An illegal panhandled him on the corner of Bristol and McFadden and he shot back, “Go with God, brother.”

  But his tone might as well have said, “Go to hell.” He wanted to say, “You got more than me, Mexo,” because that was the plain truth.

  The illegal didn’t speak enough English to understand him so he shoved the guy and spat on the sidewalk and walked on, knowing that it was dumb to draw even that much attention to himself.

  Cops might see a chance to roust the illegal and check him out, too. Word could be out on him, even this far from Arizona. He doubted it. Hitchhiking didn’t leave leads. Still, he couldn’t get into police files until he got set up in a secure place again, with all his gear and interfacing software.

  He walked down the broad street that was empty and asphalt-anonymous beneath the ceaseless, piercing morning sunlight, the way only California streets were, bland and strangely, quietly beautiful, and promising to become a slum the next time you looked.

  His fingers curled back to touch his palms as he strode heavily along, arms swinging easily like beams carved out of hardwood by a sculptor who thought big and liked muscles. The veins in his neck bulged as he ground his teeth, thinking for the thousandth time about the mistakes he’d made, the ones that had put him here on the street, watching his back to see if a squad car was pulling alongside the curb nice and easy, just to take a look at him.

  He was the kind of man who got that sort of attention. It was useful sometimes, kept people from getting in your way. It was a God-given gift, and he just had to suffer the side effects. The Lord gave no boon without some trial coming along with it, his saintly mother had said.

  The early morning traffic growled and muttered beside him on McFadden. Except for keeping an eye out for cops, he gave it no notice. The men on their way to work noticed him, though. His suit was a light gray wool showing the wrinkles and wear of two days on the run. It held off the morning chill but hadn’t been enough last night. His black hair was cropped close, neat and under control. His two days of beard bothered him, made him feel like trash, a grimy yellow newspaper in the gutter, but he would have to deal with it when he had toilet articles again. He wore the fifties-style white nylon shirts that you could launder and hang up in the shower of your hotel room. He liked them because they had a clean, functional feel. The white of them did nothing to lighten his face, which was like chipped concrete. His gray eyes absorbed the slanting spring sunlight and gave nothing back.

  He knew what the men in the passing cars thought. They were mostly Chicano, a lot of them driving pickups and wearing baseball caps. To them he was an Anglo without a car, obviously a bum. Maybe he had stolen the suit somewhere, along with the black shoes that needed a polish but looked expensive. Any Anglo walking here had no money. They would remember the time when they had nothing, took buses to work, were still dodging la migra, angling for a green card or straight papers, and holding down two sweatshop jobs at a time—in places where the first thing you learned was the exits.

  It had been okay for them to walk, back then, but they had been on their way up and knew it. This Anglo was on the way down. Had to be.

  George watched their quick glances and read in their expressions all of that. With the women it was different. He crossed with the light at McFadden and Main, and a mousy woman waiting at the crosswalk in a Honda watched him stride solidly along, her eyes veiled by false eyelashes that made her look ridiculous. About one woman in twenty would take notice of him, and he knew just from their looks what they were wanting. They usually watched his hands, which were big and veined. His power often came through his hands and women knew that, sensed it, felt a stirring. He had used those hands on women before, to caress them and sometimes to slap them when they wanted too much.

  He ignored the mousy woman, even though she turned to watch him march past. He had learned to pass them by when he had important tasks, and always when he was about God’s work.

  Today had to be devoted to himself. God helped those who helped themselves. He had spent the night sleeping under the Santa Ana River passover at Edinger and needed something to pick himself up, take the bitter chill from his bones. A good breakfast, like the ones on the farm when he was a boy, thick pancakes and plenty of molasses and big warm biscuits, maybe. But that would take money.

  He found the Bank of America on Flower Street, just where the telephone book had said. He walked up to the twenty-four-hour teller and pulled out his first-line credit card holder. This was one of the old tellers, its keys worn, because this was a poor neighborhood. The banks never kept up the maintenance on these, even though from his reading he knew they made a big profit off the accounts serviced in places like thi
s.

  He took out his top-of-the-line set of cards, a full constellation for all major banks, in the name of Gary Pinkerton. He had been in a playful mood when he’d set them up, and now he ruefully saw that maybe that little joke, using the name of the first detective agency, had tripped him up. Some beady-eyed security hacker might have caught on.

  He slipped the card into the slot, and the slit-mouth ate it eagerly. ENTER USER CODE, the video display commanded. He punched in his call letters and drummed his fingers on the spotted metal counter. PLEASE WAIT.

  The words held there while he counted to ten. He figured maybe the phone lines were full, this was an old machine, and plenty of people all over Southern California were stopping off on the way to work, hitting the machines for shopping or lunch money. That would slow down the whole system.

  But then he reached twenty, and finally at thirty he knew it was sour. He was turning away when the video screen flickered to blank. The slot did not spit his card back out.

  He walked away fast. The banks were getting sharper all the time. Even this crummy old teller might be able to call the police. In a neighborhood like this they could be pretty hardnosed with customers and get away with it.

  He went five short blocks down Chestnut and around a beat-up high school, turning regularly to see if any cop cars showed up behind him. He passed by a Denny’s and felt in his pockets for change. Three quarters. He went inside and sat at the counter.

  A woman at the end in a pink uniform one size too small noticed him and came over, even though he was sitting in another waitress’s area. Swaying, lots of hip action. He ordered coffee and noticed a pack of Marlboros in her skirt pocket. He bummed one from her, making himself smile.