Fiasco Read online

  "For whom, and why?" asked someone in the first row.

  "For me as a psychonicist, for Davis, who is a somaticist, and of course for our superior. Why? We received containers, having no specifications or diagrams of the old vitrifaxes. We did not know that the bells with their frozen occupants had been partly crushed by the glacier, or that at the site they were placed into thermos cylinders with liquid helium and immediately transported by shuttle to our ship. For the four hundred hours after takeoff, while Hercules pushed us, we were under two g's; we could not proceed with the examination of the containers until afterward."

  "That was three months ago, John," said the same voice.

  "Yes. During that time we determined that we could not possibly bring them all back to life. Three were ruled out at once: their brains had been crushed. Of the rest we can reanimate only one, although in principle two of the corpses are candidates for reanimation. The point is that all these people had blood in their circulatory systems."

  "Real blood?" asked someone from another place in the hall.

  "Yes. Erythrocytes, plasma, and so on. We have the data on the blood in our holofiles. We can't do transfusions without additional blood, however, so erythroblasts were taken from the marrow and multiplied. There is blood. But then we have the incompatibility of the tissues. Two brains are candidates for reanimation. But there are only enough vital organs for one person. Only one person can be put together, of these two. Abominable, but true."

  "A brain can be resurrected without a body," said someone.

  "We have no intention of doing that," replied Gerbert. "We are not here to run hideous experiments. At the present level of medicine they would have to be hideous. But the issue is not merely medical. We intrude here on navigational matters as doctors, not as astronauts. No layman can tell us how to proceed. Therefore, I will not go into the details of the operation. It is necessary to decalcify and metallize the skeleton. To remove excess nitrogen from the tissues with helium. To cannibalize bodies for one body. That's our area. I will explain to you only the basis for our request. We must have as little gravitation as possible during the reanimation of the brain. Complete weightlessness would be best of all. We realize, however, that that is impossible without shutting off the engines, which would totally ruin the flight program."

  "Get to the point, John." The Head Physician did not hide his impatience. "The Commander and the people here want to know the reason behind your request."

  He did not say our request but your request. Gerbert, pretending not to notice this slip of the tongue—but convinced that it was not innocent—said calmly:

  "The neurons in the human brain normally do not divide. They do not divide because they constitute the material of personal identity, such as memory, and other qualities that are commonly called character, soul, and so on. In the brains of those vitrifacted in the primitive fashion that we saw on Titan, losses occur. We are now able to cause the neighboring neurons to divide, so that they fill the gaps, but in so doing we destroy the individuality of those neurons. To preserve personal identity, one must limit the number of divided neurons as much as possible, because the daughter cells are like the neurons of an infant—empty, new. Even at zero gravity there is no certainty whether and to what extent the one resurrected will suffer amnesia. A portion of the memory is irreversibly lost in vitrifaction, even in the best cryostats, because the delicate contacts of the synapses sustain damage on the molecular level. Therefore, we cannot claim that the one resurrected will be exactly the man he was some hundred years ago. We can only say that the weaker the gravitation during the reanimation of the brain, the greater the chance will be to save the personality. I'm finished."

  Ter Horab glanced, as if casually, at the Head Physician, who seemed absorbed in the papers before him.

  "There's no need for a vote," Ter Horab said. "By the power vested in me as Commander, I order the drive throttled at the time appointed by the doctors and for the duration they require. Meeting adjourned."

  A subdued murmur went through the auditorium. Ter Horab rose and touched Yusupov's shoulder; both headed for the lower exit. Gerbert and Davis practically ran from the gallery before anyone could approach them. In the corridor they met the Dominican. He did not speak, only nodded, and continued on his way.

  "I didn't expect that of Vahradian," Davis exclaimed, getting into the aft elevator with Gerbert. "The Commander, on the other hand—now, there's a man in the right place. I could feel our colleagues from the humanities, especially our 'psychonauts,' ready to jump us. He nipped that in the bud…"

  The elevator slowed; the passing lights flickered less frequently.

  "Vahradian doesn't matter," muttered Gerbert. "If you must know, Arago spoke with Ter Horab right before the council."

  "Who told you that?"

  "Yusupov. Arago was at Ter Horab's before we met with him."

  "You think he—?"

  "I don't think, I know. The priest helped us."

  "But as a theologian…"

  "I'm no authority on that. But he knows both medicine and theology. How he reconciles the one with the other is his affair. Come, let's change. We have to get everything ready—and to set the hour."

  Before the surgery, Dr. Gerbert read the record from the holofile one more time. In the course of their work the massive planetary machines had halted, because their sensors detected metal and, enclosed in the metal, organic material. One by one, seven old striders were pulled from the Birnam heap, and from those striders, six bodies. Two of the Diglas lay no more than a few hundred meters apart. One was empty; the other contained a man in a bell vitrifax. Compared to the eighth-generation excavators gnawing through the glacier, the Digla was a dwarf. The command center stopped the robot giants and sent out walking drill towers with highly sensitive bioreaders in search of other victims, because the Birnam Depression had claimed nine men. Of the man who left his Digla, no trace was found. The armor of the striders had been crushed beneath accumulating piles of ice, but the vitrifaxes held up amazingly well. The supervisors wanted to ship these immediately to Earth for reanimation, but that meant subjecting the frozen bodies to above-gravity force three times: at the takeoff of the small shuttle from Titan, at the acceleration of the transport rocket on the Titan-Earth line, and during the descent to Earth. X rays of the containers revealed serious injuries in all the bodies, including fractured skulls, so that such an involved move was considered too risky. Someone then hit on the idea of conveying the vitrifaxes to the Eurydice, which had the latest reanimation equipment. Also, the acceleration, when it departed, would have to be inconsequential, considering the ship's tremendous rest mass.

  There remained the question of the identification of the bodies, which could not be done until the vitrifaxes were opened. Vahradian, the Head Physician of the Eurydice, made an agreement with SETI headquarters that specific data and the names of those taken from the ice of Titan would be transmitted to the ship by radio from Earth—because all disks of computer memory, for computers long since dismantled, lay in the archives of the Swiss center of SETI. Up until the moment of takeoff, the communication channels were overcrowded; someone or something—man or computer—assigned the incoming data a low degree of importance; and the Eurydice left the circumlunar orbit before the doctors became aware of the lack of this information. Gerbert went to the Commander, but nothing could be done; the ship was on its way, picking up speed, pushed by the Herculean lasers like a missile.

  In this initial phase, Titan took the full brunt of the recoil, and some planetologists believed that it might split apart. Their fears did not materialize, but the acceleration did not proceed as smoothly as the planners expected. Hercules pressed the moon's crust deep into the lithosphere, violent seismic waves set in motion the mountings of the laser throwers, and although they withstood these earthquakes (Titan quakes, rather) the solar column wavered and shook. It was necessary to lower the power, wait out the diminishing tremors, and re-aim the collimated lase
rs at the mirror-stern of the ship.

  This created interference; unsent messages piled up. What was worse, Titan, pushed two years earlier from the vicinity of Saturn and stopped in its rotation so that Hercules, while relatively stationary, could drive the Eurydice outward with its light, began to undergo libration. Many hundreds of thousands of old thermonuclear warheads, embedded as an emergency reserve in the heavy moon, finally extinguished this movement as well. It was not easy. As a result, the physicians could not commence with the reanimation. The Eurydice, hit-and-missed over a series of weeks, received each return of the solar column to her stern as a blow that spread throughout the ship.

  The difficulties with the collimation of the beam, the seismic shocks of Titan, the few boosters that failed to fire, all postponed the operation. To many on board, the postponement was justified also by the fact that the odds of returning the victims to life did not seem good. With each day of now steady acceleration, communication with Earth worsened, and, on top of that, priority was given to radiograms that concerned the success of the expedition. At last the ship got from Earth the names of the six frozen castaways, and their photographs and bios, but that was insufficient to determine identity. With vitrification, which took place explosively, the facial parts of the skull were crushed. Secondary implosions inside the cryo-containers tore off the clothing worn under the spacesuits, and its shreds were forced by the oxygen from the bursting suits into the nitrogen coffins, where they turned to ash.

  There was talk, then, of acquiring fingerprints from Earth, and dental records. But when these arrived, they only added to the confusion. Because of the ancient rivalry between Grail and Roembden, the computer logs there were in disorder, and no one knew whether a portion of the memory disks had been destroyed or had ended up, perhaps, in some archive outside Switzerland. The man who would be revived on the Eurydice bore one of six names: Ansel, Nawada, Pirx, Koehler, Parvis, Illmensee. All that the doctors could hope for was that the survivor, recovering from postreanimation amnesia, would recognize his own name on the list—if he was unable to remember it himself. Vahradian and Davis counted on that. But Gerbert, the psychonicist, had doubts. After setting the time of the operation, therefore, he went to the Commander to explain the problem. Ter Horab, always clearheaded and practical, agreed that it would be worth reexamining the contents of the vitrifaxes that had been emptied of their bodies.

  "What you need are criminologists, forensic experts," he said. "Since I don't have any on board, I can give you"—he hesitated—"Field and LoBianco. Physicists," he added with a grin, "are also sleuths, in a way."

  So a blackened—as if charred—cryocontainer resembling a curved sarcophagus was brought to the level of the main laboratory. Held by massive pincers while wrenches were applied to the outer catches, it opened slowly, lengthwise, with an awful grating sound. A black interior showed beneath the half-open coffin lid. The spacesuit in the center was sunken, unoccupied; its owner was floating in liquid helium, for week now, along with the nitrogen block in which he had originally been frozen. Field and LoBianco took out the spacesuit and carried it to a low metal table. It had been examined before, at the time the body was removed, but nothing was found then except frozen scraps of fabric and some air-conditioning lines interwoven in a cable. Now they cut open the frost-covered suit, from the ring onto which the helmet fastened and down the torso and pneumatic legs to the large boots. They unhooked winding, spiraling tubes from the scarecrow figure, along with the broken oxygen hoses, and did a meticulous dissection: every shred went under the microscope. Finally, LoBianco crawled into the cylindrical cryocontainer with a hand-held light. To make his job easier, he had the manipulator slice through the metal plate and spread the halves wide. He searched here because the spacesuit had burst at the welds joining the arm sleeves to the trunk—either when the Digla was subjected to the growing weight of the collapsed Birnam glacier, or else from the internal pressure during the explosive vitrifaction. If the man had had with him any personal belongings, they could have been blown out through the rent in the suit and fallen, with the streams of solidifying nitrogen and human blood, into the container—at the instant its open mouth was clamped shut by the helmet shot from above, a hood of special steel that cut off the corpse in the spacesuit from the outside world.

  To pull the hood from the container, hydraulic grippers had to be employed, since the pincers of the manipulator proved too weak. The two physicists and the doctor stepped back several paces from the platform, because the operation was quite violent. Before the hood—looking like the head of a giant artillery shell—jerked and began to move from the upper part of the container, large splinters of metal went flying from under the vanadium teeth. They waited. It was only when the coal-black fragments stopped dribbling and the bell, torn from the cryocontainer, opened emptily toward them, that Field lifted it high with the four-levered manipulator and LoBianco again began to examine the cylinder. Then everyone stopped. Coming apart completely along the seams, the metal plates trembled and fell slowly to the platform, as if in reenactment of an ancient death agony. The robot jaws carried the heavy hood through the air to the other end of the room and set it down, like half of an empty bomb, with such care that the thing came to rest on the aluminum table without a sound.

  LoBianco approached the split container. In the center were the dark remnants of inside padding: shriveled layers, like burned dead leaves.

  Field looked over LoBianco's shoulder. He was acquainted with the history of vitrifaction. In the days of Grail and Roembden, explosive charges had been used to drive the headpiece onto the container with the man, in order that the freezing process take place as rapidly as possible. The man first had to remove his helmet, though remaining in his suit. To keep the blow from crushing his skull, the hood was padded with pneumatically inflated cushions. Expanding, these shielded him. An injection cone was rammed into his mouth; it forced in liquid nitrogen, usually breaking the teeth and even the bones of the jaw. The idea was to congeal the brain from all sides at once, and therefore from the base as well, located just above the palate. The technology of the time was unable to avoid such injuries.

  Bit by bit, the physicists pulled away layers of the crumbling shielding, and placed one beside the other until the instruments bared the metal bottom of the cryocontainer. Among the crushed ashes they found an object, also crushed, but preserving the form of a small booklet, the corners burned as in a fire. The half-carbonized thing was so fragile that it fell into dust wherever touched, so they placed it under a glass cover; even a breath could damage it.

  "Looks like a small carrying case. Possibly leather. A portfolio. People kept them on their person. But the documents, as a rule, were cellulose, paper."

  "Or made of plastic polymers," Gerbert added to what LoBianco said.

  "Not encouraging," replied the physicist. "Under such conditions, cellulose holds up no better than the old plastics. How did it find its way into the hood?"

  "That's not hard to guess." Field crossed his arms. "When he closed the circuits, the lower bell thrust up over the legs to the chest, and the upper half, shot out at the same time, clapped onto the lower. The charges were implosive, but obviously not the kind that would crush a man. Nitrogen filled the spacesuit, so that it split under the arms, and the air forced out stripped him naked. The blast of a shell has more than once torn the clothes off a soldier near the target…"

  "What do we do with this?"

  Gerbert watched the physicists fill the space under the glass with a liquid stiffener; then they took the resultant mold, in which the dark, flat, tattered object was embedded like a bug in amber, and set about analyzing it. They found chemicals that used to be employed to print paper currency, and organic compounds common in animal skins tanned and dyed, and small traces of silver. These were undoubtedly remnants of photographs, because silver salts were used to make photographs. Adjusting the scan beam, the physicists fixed the scrap taken from the mold and finally acquired a
kind of palimpsest: a scramble of letters and small circles, possibly from an official document seal.

  Chromatography separated the colors from the ink of the print, because fortunately it possessed a mineral ingredient. The rest was done by the filters of a microtomograph. The result was modest. If in fact they had discovered a proof of identity, which seemed likely, the first name was illegible and of the last name they could be certain only of the first letter: "P." The word had from four to seven letters. By coincidence, the names of the two people who were revivable began with "P."

  They put on the screen the resograms of those at rest in the liquid helium. This layered imaging technique, far more precise than old-fashioned X-raying, allowed one to determine the age of the victim to the decade, judging by the hardening in the articular cartilage and in the blood vessels, since medicine, at the time these people lived, had not yet learned how to halt the changes termed sclerosis.

  The two candidates for reanimation were of similar build. They had the same blood type. The calcification of the ribs and, minutely, in the aorta indicated that they were both from thirty to forty years of age. According to their biographies, which included medical histories, neither had had an operation that left a scar on the body. The doctors knew this but wanted to see what the physicists could tell them from the nuclear magnetic resonance imaging. The physicists shook their heads: the nuclei of the stable elements in the organism were as good as eternal, but it was another story if there were isotopes in these people's bodies. Which was in fact the case—producing another dead end. Both men had at one time been irradiated with a dose on the order of one to two hundred rems. Probably in the final hours of their lives.