Ice and Fire

Chapter Ten

Cryogenics at the level of federal government was still highly classified at the end of the twentieth century. Carried on in a small number of top-secret redoubts, the experimentation was one of the many peripheral projects linked to the Totality Concept.

Richard Ginsberg had been put forward as a suitable candidate for freezing in the last months of the year 2000, late in October and just ninety days before sky-dark blotted out the United States of America and replaced it with the Deathlands.

Richard Ginsberg, of course, knew nothing of that. He had been locked into dreamless sleep, in his chromed coffin, far beneath the mountainside redoubt.

The last things he'd seen as the anesthetic shut down his mind and body had been the cornflower-blue eyes of Sister Magdalena Cohen, winking at him over the top of her surgical mask — eyes as brilliant as the bright circle of lights that had dazzled him from the ceiling of the operating theater at the Air Force base in Nebraska. Then a face mask came, smelling of a sickly mixture of warm rubber and disinfectant. And the angles inside his own skull folded in on his brain, like a Japanese paper sculpture.

The risks had been explained to him in advance, and he'd also undergone extensive counseling therapy to try to prepare him for his eventual reawakening.

His psychiatrist had gray hair, shaved to a fine stubble, with an enormously bushy mustache that overwhelmed his narrow, foxy face.

"We don't know when you might be revived, Rick," he said. "One month. One year. One century. One millenium. Who knows? I don't know. Nobody knows. All we know is that eventually medical science will be able to cure your illness. Until then you will be ceaselessly monitored."

A thousand years!

"I believe, from the best current information, that research into your ailment points to a cure within five years. Tops."

"Five years. Tops," Richard Ginsberg mumbled, cradled in the arms of Ryan Cawdor.

His eyes were still blurred, but now he was able to make out some details. Perhaps if he could be given his spectacles he'd be able to see better. Because what he saw didn't make any sort of sense at all.

There was a tall young woman with very red hair, like molten copper, sitting on the bed by his feet. Ginsberg was recovered enough to know that this woman was called a nurse. She was a future nurse, in an odd dark blue uniform, with a massive, shiny automatic pistol at her hip. She'd been slapping him on the face! What kind of a hospital was this?

"He's starting to come around." Doc leaned forward and stared into the man's white face. "Guess he doesn't know where in tarnation he is. I was like that. It takes time."

An old man, with a lined face, wearing a denim shirt and a weird Victorian frock coat. Pleasant, deep voice and some very expensive orthodontic work. Ginsberg tried to smile in pride at remembering that word. Must be a surgeon. Eccentric genius, perhaps.

"He's tried to grin," Lori said, looking over Doc's shoulder and beaming at the helpless figure on the bed.

"Nurse," Ginsberg said, with an effort. Pretty from what he could make out. Hair like Kansas wheat and eyes like a Montana skyscape. She looked to be very tall. She moved out of his line of sight and he could hear a peculiar tinkling sound like tiny brass cymbals.

"Lay him down and I'll go heat some soup for him," J.B. offered.

Porter? Middle-aged, eyes hidden behind glasses. But why was he wearing a hat in a hospital ward? And he had a gun at his hip, as well. Andanother slung over his shoulder, making him look like a guerrilla.

"What's... I mean, where and when?.." But the connections between brain and speech were temporarily down.

"Just take it quiet," Ryan said, standing up so that he could look properly at the freezie.

Richard Ginsberg freaked out at the sight — a mat of unruly black hair above the hardest, most cruel face that he'd ever seen; one eye that glinted like polished marble, the other lost beneath a leather patch; a fearsome scar that seamed the cheek, tugging at the right-hand corner of the mouth. He struggled to lift his head, checking to see if this man, too, was carrying a gun.

However hard he tried, the disoriented freezie couldn't fit Ryan into his futurist scenario. The one-eyed man looked like a killer. It just wasn't possible to pretend otherwise.

"What soup?" Jak asked, popping into sight at the end of the bed, appearing to Richard Ginsberg like a demented demon from the locked door of a psychotic imagination, a little boy with immensely long hair that was as white as snow and as fine as sea wrack. His eyes blazed like coals in an open hearth.

"Veg soup," Ryan replied, turning away from the freezie for a moment. He missed the fraction of a second when the eyes rolled upward in the skull before the man slipped back into the safe harbor of unconsciousness once more.

While Ginsberg slept on, Doc called the other five together to make a short speech to them.

"My dear friends. Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I declare this laboratory to be well and truly... What am I saying? Goodness, but my mind seems to have slipped a gear or two."

"Or three or four," Lori added in a less than kindly tone.

"Our newfound and defrosted companion will require much help."

"If he stays awake long enough for us to help him."

"Indeed. It seems clear that the sight of us, perfectly normal though we might appear to one another, was not quite what the poor man had expected. I would imagine he had thought to recover in a hospital amidst the best of medical care."

"Will he not know he isn't... he is in Deathlands, then?" Lori asked, and was rewarded with a broad smile from Doc.

"Excellently deduced, my little bitty pretty one. A positive Hercules of the intellect. A veritable Napoleon of... No, that's not it. But, Lori is right. This is what we must take care with. Richard Ginsberg will think he has been thawed out to be cured of whatever it is that ails him. In a future world of peace and wonder."

"What's sickness?" Jak asked. The heating of the can of soup had been put on the back burner until Ginsberg recovered again.

"It was obvious — painfully so in both cases — what was wrong with the other freezies. Here, it is less so. Perhaps leukemia, or some associated blood disease. Looking at him, I can see no evidence of any particular illness. Since he has been frozen for a hundred years, his muscle tone is, understandably, not good. Or, might there have been some progressive sickness there? I have no doubt that he will be able to tell us himself, when he finally recovers. But, I say again, be cautious about how we break the news of the long winters. It could topple his frail hold on sanity forever."

The next time that Richard Ginsberg opened his eyes, he waited a long time before risking speech, trying to formulate a concept that would explain what he was seeing.

He recognized from the layout of the room that he appeared to be somewhere in one of the large underground fortresses known as redoubts. Reaching that deduction was the easy part. The six people that he saw around him were much more difficult.

It seemed possible that some kind of bizarre bunch of terrorists had infiltrated the complex and were taking him hostage. That fitted the facts as he saw them. He decided that the best opening gambit was simply to tell them his name. Ginsberg opened his mouth, ready to speak.

"Richard Ginsberg."

Shit. Things were even worse than in his worst imaginings. Though he'd opened his mouth, the voice had come from somewhere else, from the sinister fellow with only one eye. He'd said his name for him.

"Your name is Richard Ginsberg, isn't it?"

No response.

"I asked if your name was Richard Ginsberg? Can you hear me?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah, you can hear or yeah your name's Richard Ginsberg?"

"Both."

"Good. We're getting some soup for you and some water. Guess you must be hungry after... after so long."

The tall blond nurse spoke. "I'll be hungry after a..."

"Lori!" the one-eyed man snapped. "Can the talk! Remember?"

"Sorry, Ryan," she said, pouting and grinning like a child caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

Ginsberg cleared his throat and tried again. "You unfroze me?"

"Yeah."

"How do you know my name?"

Krysty answered him. "It's on the comp-console screen. Date of birth. Everything else was classified, and we couldn't access it."

He nodded. "Figures. Did you find any clothes? And my glasses?"

J.B. handed over the spectacles and Ginsberg slipped them on. "Clothes are in the locker."

The freezie blinked owlishly around. The six fuzzy figures now sharpened and became distinct. But none of the bewilderment eased.

"You know who I am. Who on the green earth are you?"

Ryan made the introductions. "This is Krysty Wroth, Doc Tanner, J.B. Dix, Lori Quint. Jak Lauren's getting the soup. I'm Ryan Cawdor."

Ginsberg coughed, struggled for breath for a moment. "Oh, that's... Must be all the stuff I've been full of for... Hell! I guess I have to ask you now. Why push it across the tracks? You aren't doctors and... But you said he was a doctor?"

"Science, son. Not medicine."

The man in the bed nodded. "Right. Got that clear. Now, if you aren't doctors and you all... look the way you do, then I figure something's gone very, very wrong with things."

"Things?" Krysty said.

"Things," he repeated, waving his hands in a vague gesture. "This isn't what I kind of expected, you know. Not guys with guns. I'm supposed to be brought out of it so I can be cured."

"What ails you?" Doc asked, moving out of the way as Jak brought in a bowl of steaming soup.

"Thanks." Ginsberg sat up and took a sip. "Wow! That's hot. And... I can't really taste it. Guess that could take some time to return."

"It's tomatoes," Jak said helpfully.

"Could be watermelon for all I can tell, kid."

"Don't call me 'kid,'" the albino boy warned, angrily.

"Sorry. You asked about what my illness was, didn't you? Mind's still fogged. Like a Frisco evening. Funny. I can remember watching the mist come rolling in over the hills into the bay when I was only about nine years old. Now, I can't remember things about what I was doing before they..." The words tailed off and he sat, sipping at the soup.

Ryan prompted him gently. "What was wrong with you?"

"Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis," Ginsberg replied, stumbling over the long syllables. "Something like that."

"Sounds real bad," Krysty said. "What is it?"

"It's Lou Gehrig's disease," Doc told her. "That's what it was known as."

"Right!" Ginsberg exclaimed. "You're kidding me, aren't you, Doc? You really are a doctor, and this is some kind of hospital. Right?"

"Wrong," Ryan corrected. "Who's this Lou Gehrig guy, Doc? Some kind of scientist?"

"Ball player. First baseman for the Yankees way back in the... way back when. It's a kind of progressive muscular weakness."

Ginsberg gave the half-empty bowl back to Jak. "Thanks. Guess I wasn't as hungry as I thought I was. Yeah, Doc, you're right. Lou Gehrig. When they diagnosed what I'd got, I kept hearing the name. Read up about him, some."

"What's it do, this sickness?" Jak asked.

Ginsberg sighed. "I always thought, when they started to talk about cryogenics, that I'd wake up and some guy in a white coat would pat me on the shoulder and tell me I was cured. Not have some... not get asked what my illness was."

"No," Ryan said. "I'm real double-sorry, but you have to know this clear from the start. None of us knows nothing... anything... about your sickness. We can do nothing for you."

Ginsberg took off his spectacles and polished them on the sheet, not saying anything for several moments. He peered at the light through the glasses, wiping away a small smear. Finally he nodded.

"I appreciate your honesty, Mr. Cawdor. Truly I do. When they confirmed the diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS they called it, I'd known something was wrong. My coordination had been off for some weeks. I'd stumble, or I'd drop something. Spill food. I'd played baseball, like Gehrig, and suddenly I started to miss the pitches. Fumble it when I was out in right field. Lots of silly things. I felt tired. Weak. Wanted to lie down and rest a lot. They did all the tests on me."

He stopped and put his glasses back on. The others still stood around him, listening to his story, crowding the small cubicle.

He carried on. "They tried everything. Digitalis. Didn't help. Androstenolone. Same. I was getting steadily weaker."

"Did they know what caused this sickness," Krysty asked.

"Nerve cells in my brain and in my spine were just sort of giving up the ghost. Degeneration is the name. No cure. No hope. Fetch the coolant and pop the boy in the freezer. Thaw him out in a thousand years when we can save him."

The bitterness reached the front of his voice, and he buried his face in his hands. "That string of operations and tests and then the actual freezing. Having to say goodbye to all my friends. My parents. All of them. Like I was an astronaut going boldly off to brave the new frontiers. Now I come around and I'm in some military base with a half-dozen people who I don't know."

Lori sat on the bed and patted Ginsberg on the arm. "Could be badder," she said. "You can be dead and it's badder."

"You think so? You get what I got, young lady, and you sometimes think death is going to come in with a blessing."

"Disease like that goes into remission, doesn't it?" Doc asked.

"Sure. That's the irony. When I got frozen I was feeling better than I had for months."

The freezie still hadn't asked the question that Ryan and the others were dreading. But all of them were waiting for it.

Ginsberg sighed. "Mind if I snatch some sleep, folks? I feel kind of drained with all this waking up."

"Sure. We want to think about moving outside this redoubt sometime today," Ryan said.

"Yeah." Jak grinned. "Find out where fuck we are."

Ginsberg smiled. "Sure. I understand that you..." He looked suddenly puzzled. "How d'you mean? Did I hear you right? So you can find out whereyou are? How come you don't... don't know?"

Nobody spoke and everyone tried to avoid catching the eye of the bemused freezie, looking everywhere except at him.

"Hey, come on, Mr. Cawdor! What's going down here? What? And..."

Here it comes, Ryan thought.

"I want to know where we are. What's going on? What year is this? And..." his voice broke like a lost child's "...what in the name of God Almighty is happening?"