“It wasn’t me, Nemo, it was Sabu. He fell down a little.”
Nemo looked down into the basement. “What is it?”
“A Hairy Mastodon,” I said.
“I don’t see any hair.”
“I shave him every morning,” Scented Song said. She seemed a little miffed and I suspected there was going to be rivalry between Sabu and Laura. There was a scratching on the front door. When I opened it I was confronted by a coiled python ringed about seven feet high.
“No rabbits today,” I said. “Come back tomorrow.”
“He does not swallow rabbits,” a familiar voice said with meticulous diction. “He swallows men.”
Long fingers separated two coils and there was M’bantu surrounded by python, smiling at me.
“My favorite Zulu. Come in, McBee. Bring your friend, unless he’s shy.”
“He is not shy, Guig. He is asleep. He will sleep for ten days and then he will be ready for your Dr. Guess. Good afternoon, princess. Captain Nemo. What a pleasant reunion.”
Both of them sniffed and didn’t bother to conceal it. More rivalry. I was warmed by the way the Group was rallying ‘round, but oh! the competition. M’bantu unwrapped the python, which was like fifteen feet long, and draped it gently around one of the archway pillars. It went right on sleeping.
“What’s that bulge in its middle?” Nemo demanded.
“Breakfast,” McBee said courteously, not going into details.
“Does it like fish?”
“Probably prefers elephants,” Scented Song said. “It’s big enough.”
“The next meal will be Dr. Sequoya Guess. That is, with your permission, Guig,” M’b said pleasantly. “He will die most painfully, but what will be even more painful for me will be the sacrifice of my friend to save the doctor. However, che sara sara.”
The front door burst wide with a blaze of sparks and Edison marched in, carrying his toolbox. “Told you these magnetic locks can’t hold, Guig,” he snapped. “How much electric power does this Sachem have in his house? Princess. Nemo, M’bantu. Well?”
“None,” I said. “He lives in a tepee. Strictly Indian style. Thanks for coming, Ed.”
“Then we’ll have to get him here. You’ve got power?”
“I can deliver ten kilowatts.”
“Plenty. You’ve always been behind the times?”
“Conservative. Yes.”
“Conservative kitchen?”
“Yes.”
“Conservative oven?”
“The old-fashioned walk-in type. Yes.”
“Perfect. That’s how we’ll get him.” Edison opened his toolbox and yanked out a blueprint. “Look at this.”
“Just tell us, Ed.”
“We rewire it, power it, turn it into a magnetic induction furnace.”
“What’s that?”
“It melts metal; nothing else. Only conductive metals. Understand?”
“So far.”
“Put in your hand and you feel nothing. But if you’ve got a ring on your finger, the ring will melt and burn your finger off. Induction.”
“Phew. That sounds grisly.”
“Doesn’t it? Get the Indian into your oven. We start the induction slow and the torture begins.”
“You mean his fingers burn off?”
“No. The brain begins to burn. Bugged, isn’t he?”
“No.”
“Bugs are platinum.” Obviously Ed wasn’t hearing me. “Platinum is conductive. QED.”
At this point the other three, who had been listening utterly fascinated, burst out laughing. They shrieked and rocked helplessly while Edison glared at them. It looked as though this loyal rally was going to turn into a Donnybrook Fair and I’d get nowhere with the murder of Sequoya. I was wondering how to make peace when Fee-5, bless her, called and asked if she could project. I said come ahead and there she was in a starched white lab coat looking every inch the dedicated young scientist.
“He wants you to come to JPL right away,” she burst out in XX. Then she looked around. “Oh, sorry, cats. I didn’t know there was company. Am I intruding?” still in XX.
“All gung, Fee. All friends. As a matter of fact we were just discussing the Chief. Now what’s all this?”
“There’s an elephant in the cellar. Did you know?”
“Yes, we know.”
“And a snake up there.”
“We know. Also an octopus in the drawing room. Why does Dr. Guess want me to come to JPL right away?”
She took fire again. “The event of the century. The experimental cryocapsule will put down in an hour. Three cryonauts have been out in orbit for three months and now they’re coming back. All the celebs from U-Con will be there and the Chief wants you, too.”
“Why me? I’m not celebrated. I don’t even own any stock in United Conglomerate.”
“He likes you. I don’t know why. Nobody else does.”
“Well, ask him if I can bring four friends.”
Fee nodded and retro’d. The others protested that they weren’t faintly interested in the event of the century; they’d witnessed too many in their time and they were always a let down. All of them began bitching simultaneously; about the Boxer rebellion, Franklin and his kite, Captain Bligh and the Bounty, Henry Christophe. I tried to break it up. “You don’t understand,” I told them. “I couldn’t care less about those frozen characters coming in for a landing, but this is a golden opportunity to case the guy we’re going to kill. Don’t you want to size up your victim?”
Fee reappeared. “It’s gung, Guig. He says the more the merrier. You can bring the elephant if you like. I’ll meet you at the front gate and pass you in.” She disappeared.
As we trooped up to the roof (elephant not included) to get into the big chopper, they were all delivering asides.
“Who is she?”
“Sam says he’s had her for three years.”
“One of yours, M’bantu?”
“Alas, I would say not. She is too light. Most probably Maori and Aztec Indian with a strong strain of Honk. It’s the touch of the Waspbrush that accounts for the delicate bones.”
“Guig always likes them exotic.”
“Behind the times all his life.”
“She is pretty.”
“And as nubile as a young dolphin.”
“I wonder how many he’s scored.”
“Sam would know.”
I was delivering a few asides to myself: How the hell did Fee-5 know my guests understood XX? I had the uneasy feeling that there was a lot more I didn’t know about Fee. I also had a sinking that this Cherokee caper was going to turn into the wrong kind of catastrophe. I wanted to go to the university hospital and ask Jacy to move over.
3
We were mugged by some senior citizens on the way from the chopper to the main gate, but no great harm done; they were using vintage revolvers. There was one funny incident. After we chased them I looked around and there was Nemo kneeling on a prostrate maladroit and sincere as hell. He was slamming the Shortie across the face with his own pistol and chanting in rhythm, “This is not … the road to … survival… . You must … transplant … transplant … transplant… .”
We pulled him off the poor old Shortie and were met at the gate by Fee, who seemed rather impressed by Nemo’s performance. Muggings she knew all about, but this was the first time she’d ever seen one used as an excuse for a lecture. Fee conducted us to the landing site and it was my turn to be impressed.
It was an enormous theater-in-the-round with a circular stage. There were seats for a thousand in the amphitheater, all filled with U-Con brass and politicos doing their best to keep JPL happy and paying taxes in the state. Fee seated us in the reserved section and went down to the floor to join Guess, who was standing at a huge control console alongside the stage. I thought she was behaving with poise and assurance. Either the Chief had kept his promise or she’d found her identity. Either way or both, I had to admire her.
Gues
s took stage center, looked around, and spoke. “Senoras, gemmum, soul hermanos, ah gone esplain brief, you know, what this esperiment mean, dig? You got like any preguntas, right, ax da man.”
He motioned to Fee, who did something at the console. Projectors flashed on and there were three bods on the stage alongside Guess, bowing and smiling. They were smallish but looked strong and tough.
“These are the three courageous volunteers,” Guess said (in translation), “who have taken the first cryogenic flight in history. This is in preparation for the Pluto mission and eventually the stars. The constraints are time and payload. It will take the mission many years to reach Pluto, even at maximum acceleration. It will take centuries to reach the stars. It would be impossible to freight enough supplies for these men. There is only one answer, the cryonic technique.”
He motioned to Fee again. The projectors flicked and there were the cryonauts, naked, being helped into transparent coffins by technicians. Quick cuts of them being injected, variously attached to tendrils, given some sort of sterile wash. The coffin lids were bolted.
“We lowered the temperature in the cryocoffins one degree Celsius per hour and increased the pressure one atmosphere per hour until we produced the effect of Ice III, which is denser than water and forms above the freezing point. Mid-twentieth-century cryonics failed because it was not known that suspended animation could not be achieved through freezing alone; it requires a combination of low temperature and high pressure. Details are in your fact-tapes.”
Shot of the coffins being tenderly loaded into a capsule. Cut to interior of capsule and techs hooking up complicated plumbing.
“We launched them on a ninety-day orbit, a deep ellipse.” Long shot of the launch; a gentle liftoff and then, at altitude, flames roaring down from the rocket vehicle carrying the capsule, and acceleration to out-of-sight. The usual. Edison looked bored.
“Now they’re returning. We’ll trap the craft in a projected kinorep cone, center it with its lateral gas jets, and let the offset of kinorep and gravity bring it down slowly. For those of you who aren’t tech-oriented, kinotrac and kinorep are our abbreviations for kinetic electromagnetic attraction and repulsion. That’s how the craft you travel on take off and land without shaking you up.
“The cryonauts will arrive in about ten minutes and be brought up to nominal metabolism so slowly that I’m afraid you’ll have to wait quite a few days before interviewing them—not that they’ll have much to tell you. For them, no time has passed at all. Now, are there any questions?”
There were some smart-ass questions from civilians: Where was the orbit of the capsule? (In the plane of the Earth’s orbit. All in your fact-tapes.) Why not a comet orbit around the sun? (Refrigeration constraints plus the fact that it would be thrust into a no-return parabola. All in your fact-tapes.) What are the names and qualifications of the cryonauts? (All in your fact-tapes.) How do you personally feel about this dangerous experiment? (Accountable.) He looked around. “Three more minutes. Any further questions?”
“Yes,” I called. “What’s an Ugly Poppy?”
He gave me a look that made me feel for George Armstrong Custer (West Point, ‘61) and returned to the console. “Iris open,” he ordered. Fee touched something and the entire roof above the stage leafed back. “Kino trap.” She nodded, concentrating so hard that her teeth were fastened on the tip of her tongue.
We waited. We waited. We waited. There was a loud bleep from the console. “In contact,” murmured Guess. He took the controls “Each time the craft contacts the kinorep wall we reverse it with its lateral jets, trying to pin it to the center of the cone.” He thought he was thinking out loud. In the anxious hush it sounded like a shout. His hands flickered over the console controls and the bleeps merged into a sustained discord. “Centered and descending.” It was obvious to me that pokerface was under a tremendous strain even though he showed nothing. He began a droning count: “Diez. Nueve. Ocho. Siete. Seis. Cinco. Cuatro. Tres. Dos. Uno. Minuto.” He was peering up through the iris and down at the console radar screen. He went on counting and it sounded like a Latin mass. What a hell of an accountability.
Then the ass end of the capsule crept silently through the iris and inched down with the speed of a snail. We couldn’t see the kinorep repulsion but it raised a small storm of dust and paper debris on the stage. There was cheering from the audience. Guess paid no attention; he was completely concentrated on the console controls and the capsule.
He nodded to Fee, who ran to the edge of the stage, knelt, and began making hand signals indicating how much farther the capsule had to drop. We knew it had landed when we saw the stage give slightly. Guess switched off the console, drew a deep, shuddering breath, and suddenly electrified us with a Comanche whoop. We all yelled and laughed and applauded; even Edison, who was consumed by professional jealousy.
Three techs, realsies this time, appeared and unsealed the capsule. Guess stepped to the hatch. “As I said, you won’t be able to talk to them but you can look at them. Think of it. They won’t be aware of any time lapse.” He poked his head into the hatch and his voice was muffled. “Frozen ninety days in orbit and—” He stopped abruptly. We waited. Nothing. He didn’t speak; he didn’t move. One of the techs touched his back. No response. The two others joined him, muttering anxiously, and then slowly pulled him back. He moved like a sleepwalker and when they let go he simply stood, frozen. The techs looked into the capsule and when their heads reappeared they were white and dumbfounded.
I had to see what had happened. I scrambled with the crowd to the capsule. When I finally got a chance to look in I saw the three coffins. There were no cryonauts inside. There was nothing inside the coffins except three pasty, naked rats. The mob pushed me aside. Through the bedlam I heard Fee-5 shrilling, “Guig! Here! Guig! Please! Guig!” She was alongside the console. I fought my way to her. She was standing over Guess, who was on the floor behind the console in the throes of a classic epileptic seizure.
“All right, Fee, I’ve got him.” I did what had to be done. The tongue. The foam. Loosening the clothes. Easing the thrashing arms and legs. She was appalled; a seizure is always terrifying. Then I stood up and shouted, “Group! Here!” All four materialized. “Guard of honor,” I said. “Don’t let anyone see him. Are you in control, Fee?”
“No.”
“Sorry. You’ll have to be. Does the Chief have an office? Any private sanctum?” She nodded. “Good. Instructions: My friends will carry him. Show them where to take him. Then come right back. At once, understand? You’ll have to front for Guess when the mob gets around to asking questions. I’ll stand by you. My friends will stand by the Chief. Go!”
She was back in five minutes, out of breath, carrying a lab coat. “Put this on, Guig. You be one of his assistants.”
“No. You’ll have to do this on your own.”
“But you’ll stand by me?”
“I’m here.”
“What do I do? What do I say? I’m not so smart.”
“Yes you are, and I haven’t trained you for three years for nothing. Now—with great assurance and great style—are you ready?”
“Not yet. Tell me what threw the Chief.”
“The cryonauts aren’t in their coffins. They’ve disappeared. There’s nothing in each coffin but something that looks like a naked rat.”
She began to shake. “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!” I waited. This was no time to cosset her; she had to make it on her own. She made it. “Gung, Guig. I’m ready. What now?”
“Call for attention. Assurance and style. I’ll cue you in.”
By God, she had the style to climb up on the console and stand like stout Cortez having his first look at the Pacific. (While his men looked at each other with a wild surmise.) “Ladies and gentlemen!” she called in Spang. “Ladies and gentlemen! Your attention, please.” (What now, Guig? in XX.)
“Identify yourself.”
“I am Fee-5 Grauman’s Chinese, the confidential assistant of Dr. Gu
ess. I’m sure you saw me at the control console.” (And now?)
“Upbeat. Elegant. This isn’t a disaster, it’s a challenge.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, something unusual has taken place in the course of our cryogenic probe, and you’ve been privileged to witness it. I congratulate you. It was unexpected but, as Dr. Guess says, that’s the essence of discovery, to find what you’re not looking for.” She cocked her head. “Ah, some of you are saying serendipity. Yes, science is serendipity.” (Guig!)
“The Chief is analyzing this surprise with his staff. Very technical here.”
“Dr. Guess is with his staff now in a mode analysis of the phenomenon which you’ve all seen.” She cocked an ear again. “Yes, I know what you’re wondering: Will we go ahead with nominal procedure with the cryocoffins? Dr. Guess is evaluating that now, which is why he must not be disturbed. You’re wondering what happened to the cryonauts. So are we.” (Guig!)
“That s all.”
“Thank you very much. I must return to the staff conference now. Dr. Guess will issue a full status review as quickly as possible. Thank you.”
I helped her down. She was trembling.
“You’re not finished yet, Fee. Tell the techs to put a hold on the capsule just as it is. Seal it and maintain all systems as if it were still in orbit.”
She nodded and fought her way through the crowd to the technical men, who still looked dazed. She spoke to them urgently and then returned to me. “Now what?”
“First, I’m proud of you.”
“F.”
“Now take me to Sitting Bull. I’ve got to—”
“Don’t call him that!” she screamed. “Don’t call him any of those names. He’s a great man. He’s a—he’s—”
“—brief him on the situation. He must be recovered from the attack by now.”
“I think I love him,” she said helplessly.
“And it hurts.”
“It’s awful.”
“It always is, first time around. Let’s go.”
“Only twelve hours, Guig, and I feel twelve years older.”
“I can see it. You’ve made a quantum jump. Let’s go.”