Tomorrow and Tomorrow Paperback - 1998

Excerpt

Three days later Drake called Tom Lambert again to the house. The doctor went  to the bedroom, felt Ana's pulse, and took blood pressure and brain-wave  readings.

He emerged stone-faced. "I'm afraid this is it, Drake. I'll be very surprised  if she regains consciousness. If you are still set on this thing, it has to be  done while she has some normal body functions. Another three  days...it will be a waste of time."

The two men went together into the bedroom. Drake took a last look at Ana's  calm, ravaged face. He told himself that this was not a last farewell. At last  he nodded to Tom.

"Go ahead." He could not tear his gaze away from her face. "Any  time."

Time, time. A waste of time. To the end of time. Time heals all wounds. O!  call back yesterday, bid time return.

"Drake? Drake? Are you all right?"

"Sorry. I'm all right." Again he nodded. "Go on, Tom. There's no point in  waiting."

The physician made the injection. Working together, they lifted Ana from  the bed and removed her clothes. Drake wheeled in the prepared thermal tank. He  laid her gently into it. She was so light, it was as though part of her was  already lost to him.

While Tom filled out the death certificate, Drake placed the call to Second  Chance. He told them to come at once to the house. He set the tank at three  degrees above freezing, as instructed. Tom inserted the catheters and the IVs.  The next stages were automatic, controlled by the tank's own programs. Blood  was withdrawn through a large hollow needle in the main external iliac artery,  cooled a precise amount, and returned to the femoral vein.

In ten minutes Ana's body temperature had dropped thirty degrees. All life  signs had vanished. Ana was now legally dead. To an earlier generation, Drake  Merlin and Tom Lambert would have been judged murderers. It was hard not to  feel that way as they sat in the silence of the bedroom, awaiting the arrival  of the Second Chance team. Tom was filled with pity--for Drake. Ana was  now beyond pity.

Drake's thoughts and plans were fortunately beyond his friend's  imaginings. He had a hard time with Tom Lambert and the three women who arrived from Second  Chance. Not one of them could see a reason for Drake to go over to the Second  Chance preparation facility with Ana's body.

Tom thought that Drake couldn't face the idea that it was all over. He  urged his friend to come home with him and have a drink. Drake refused. The  preparation team didn't know what to make of it as he hovered close by them. He  seemed like a ghoul or some sort of necrophiliac, yet the look on his face showed  he was clearly suffering. They carefully explained that the procedures were  very unpleasant to watch, especially for someone so personally involved. They  agreed with Dr. Lambert. Drake would be much better off leaving everything in  their experienced hands and going home with his friend. They would make sure  that everything was all right. If he was worried, they would be sure to call  him as soon as the work was finished.

Drake couldn't tell them the real reason he wanted to see the whole preparation  procedure, down to the last grisly detail. But by simply refusing to take no  for an answer, he at last had his way.

The head of the team then decided that Drake wanted to come along because he  was afraid that some element of the job would be botched. She explained the  whole procedure to him, kindly and carefully, on the one-hour drive to the  facility. They were sitting together in the rear of the van, next to the  temperature-controlled casket.

"Most of the revivables--we much prefer that term to  cryocorpses--are stored at liquid nitrogen temperatures. That's about  minus two hundred degrees Celsius. It's almost certainly cold enough. But it's  still about seventy-five degrees above absolute zero. All measurable biological processes become imperceptible long  before that. However, there are still some chemical reactions going on. The  laws of statistics guarantee that a few atoms will have enough energy to induce  biological changes. And mind and memory are very delicate things. So for people  who are worried about that, we make available a deluxe version. That's what you  bought. Your wife will be stored at liquid helium temperatures, just a few  degrees above absolute zero. That's supersafe. When it's so cold, the chance of  change--physical or mental--goes way down."

And the cost, although she did not mention the fact, went way up. But cost was  not even a variable to be considered from Drake's perspective. When they  arrived at the Second Chance facility he hung around the preparation room,  ignoring all hints that he should wait outside; and he watched  closely.

The team members became more sympathetic. They were now convinced that he was  simply terrified that a mistake would be made. They allowed him to see  everything and answered all his questions. He was careful not to ask anything  that sounded too clinical and dispassionate. The main thing he wanted was to  see, to know at absolute firsthand what had been done, and in what  sequence.

After the first few minutes there was in any case not much to see. He knew that  all the air cavities within Ana's body had been filled with neutral solution,  and her blood replaced with anticrystalloids. But then she went into the  seamless pressure chamber. The body was held there at three degrees above freezing, while the  pressure was raised slowly to five thousand atmospheres. After that was done,  the temperature drop started.

"Back in the eighties and nineties, they had no idea of this technique." The  team leader was still talking to Drake, perhaps with the idea that she might  make him feel more relaxed. "They used to do the freezing at atmospheric  pressure. There was a formation of ice crystals within the cells as the  temperature dropped, and it was a mess when the thaw was done. No return to  consciousness was possible."

She smiled reassuringly at Drake, who was not reassured at all. So they didn't  know what they were doing in the eighties and nineties. Would they claim in  twenty more years that people didn't know what they were doing now? But he had no alternative. He couldn't wait for twenty years, or even twenty  hours.

"The modern method is quite different," she went on. "We make use of the  fact that ice can exist in many different solid forms. Ice is complicated  stuff, much more than most people realize. If you raise the pressure to three  thousand atmospheres, then drop the temperature, water will remain liquid to  about minus twenty degrees Celsius. And when it finally changes to a solid, it  isn't the familiar form of ice--what is usually called phase 1. Instead  it turns to something called phase 3. Drop the temperature from there, holding  the pressure constant, and at about minus twenty-five degrees it changes to  another form, phase 2. And it stays that way as you drop the temperature still farther. If you go to five thousand atmospheres pressure--that's  what we are doing here--before you drop the temperature, water freezes at  about minus five degrees and adopts still another form, phase 5. The trick to  avoiding cell rupture problems at freezing point is to inject anticrystalloids,  which help to inhibit crystal formation, then by the right combination of  temperatures and pressures work all the way down toward absolute zero, passing  into and through phases 5, 3, and 2.

"That's what we are doing now. But don't expect to see much except dial  readings. For obvious reasons, the pressure chamber is made without seams and  without observation ports. You don't get pressures of five thousand  atmospheres, not even in the deepest ocean gulfs. Fortunately, once you have  the temperature down below a hundred absolute, you can reduce the pressure to  one atmosphere, otherwise the storage of revivables would be quite  impracticable. As it is, we have many thousands stacked away in the Second  Chance wombs. Every one of them is neatly labeled and waiting for the  resurrection. That will come as soon as someone figures out a way to do the  thaw."

She glanced at Drake, aware that her last comment might have been the wrong  thing to say. The official position at Second Chance was that  everyone was revivable, and that the organization had full control of  all the necessary technology. In due course everyone would be  revived.

Drake nodded without expression. He had researched the whole subject in detail,  and nothing that she had said so far was news.  In his opinion it would be as hard to revive the early cryocorpses as it would  be to get Tutankhamen's mummy up and moving again. They had been frozen with  the wrong procedure, and they were being stored at too high a  temperature.

But who was he to make that decision? They had paid their deposits, and they  had the right to sit there in the wombs until their rentals ran out. He had  started Ana with a forty-year contract, but he thought of that as just the  beginning.

He had brought with him a copy of Ana's medical records. He added to it a full  description of everything he had seen in the past hour or two, copied the whole  document, and made sure that a complete set was included with the file records  on Ana. When Ana's body was finally taken away for storage he went back to the  house, fell into bed, and slept like a cryocorpse himself for sixteen hours.