CHILLER

by Gregory Benford

  Jacobs said reflectively, “I’ll have to think about it. A very strange idea.”

  “A wholesale shift in the paradigms of medicine,” Susan agreed. “But that’s not why Blevin and the dean are acting this way.”

  “They think you’re in this for the money.”

  Susan leaned back and with studied calm put her feet up on her desk. It was definitely unladylike, and she saw what men got out of doing it. She hoped her shoes—sensible, heavy-soled for long days of clinical work—would scar the maple desk top.

  She said, “I remember my father saying that Republican scandals were always about money, and Democrats got into trouble over women. I never knew why that was true, until I went to university. Here the scientists and physicians have money misery, and the humanists, they stumble into sex scandals.”

  This brought a flicker of a smile from Marilyn Jacobs. “Why?”

  “Because that’s what they really care about. Or maybe it’s just what they can get.”

  “Well, it’s still unfair. The dean should keep Blevin on a leash.”

  “Can he?”

  Jacobs leaned forward earnestly. “We have had physicians giving experimental drugs to patients without going through the Human Subjects Review protocols. We have had disputes between physicians, in which one published data—remember that idea about warming up HIV patients’ blood to kill the AIDS virus?—even though his co-workers disagreed. Every time, every time, the dean finessed the dispute through committees without raising a ripple in the school large enough to attract outside attention.”

  “Why not this time?”

  Jacobs puffed out her cheeks and sighed with puzzlement. “From corridor gossip, I think it’s something emotional that neither the dean nor Blevin will admit.”

  “About death?”

  “They hate the idea of what you call suspension. I really don’t know why.”

  For a moment Susan felt a certain sympathy for the dean. He was a man of ordinary ability trying to ride a technological tiger. A ripe zoo of possibilities opened up as new crafts flowered. Companies were patenting viruses and bacteria made in the lab. Specially genetically engineered mice were on the market for research use. Most of it dealt with the beginnings of life. Fertilized eggs in a freezer. Gadget-assisted child-making at ten thousand dollars a pop. Hospitals rated by their “take-home baby rate” after artificial fertilization. Champions of fetal rights who wept over fertilized cells so small you could see them only with a microscope—but did full constitutional rights depend on size? Hot-eyed advocates who saw most of the fertility technology as further evidence of a male conspiracy to enslave women, keep ‘em barefoot and pregnant. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, men gotta oppress. And on the other end, women who longed for children and worshiped physicians who might make that possible.

  With birth so uncertain, she thought, it must be comforting to confront death with, well, dead certainty. But science was seldom soothing.

  “We have a funny relationship with death,” Susan said, coming out of her reverie. “At least it tells us when to stop trying.”

  “With Blevin it’s deeper than that.”

  Susan nodded. “Academics always underrate the importance of the irrational in human affairs. Especially their own.”

  “I feel bad about this. I’m sure some of it comes from the fact that you’re a woman, doing something radical.”

  Her colleagues thought she was radical, and to Mrs. Yamada she was conserving… She smiled. Which made Dr. Jacobs look even more troubled. “I’ll see my lawyers tomorrow. My friend Rachel said I shouldn’t have gone into that ad hoc committee without one.”

  “She was right. If you could just publicize your results, a lot of your colleagues would rally around.”

  “I’ll try to hurry up, but I’m not going to rush results and get something wrong.”

  “So it’s up to the lawyers.”

  “Lawyers and worse,” Susan joked. “I’m afraid I have to do this by the house rules now.”

  Jacobs accepted this soberly, sighed, and left. Susan was oddly touched by her visit. She left the hospital lugging a cart of her papers and looked back at the imposing edifice from the parking lot. She thought she could catch a glimmer of what lay behind Blevin and the dean.

  Most people live inside the patterns of their era. They accept current standards and designs as natural phenomena sweeping over them, like massive, oceanic waves. They can’t imagine that their basic assumptions are forces emerging from their own genes and from their times. Yet much of their thought reflects deeply ingrained needs, artful evasions of a simple point: We all have to end.

  Before such an elemental truth, most can only flee. Or hide.

  6

  GEORGE

  The Laguna Beach Library was small but airy, and homeless bums filled most of the seats. There was a rent-a-cop on duty to control the bums, but the librarians looked nervous.

  George found that they also had a good hookup to the main Orange County library facilities, and within half an hour he was reading the reference material he wanted.

  The librarian he asked for help took him on a tour of the whole reference system, her ample breasts touching the keyboard of the computer as she showed him access codes. She had full lips free of lipstick, which pursed with attentive, dewy interest as he described how he was doing a term paper for a night class in criminal justice at Saddleback College. She seemed oblivious to her breasts beneath the plain blue blouse and to her hips that bulged hourglass-fashion below her broad shiny black belt.

  There were a lot of women like her here, showing off themselves. They pushed their breasts at you with those special bras and wore skirts that either clung or shaped but certainly didn’t just leave their bodies alone. He would see them on the streets and they would usually look right through him, eyes only for the window displays in the splashy fashion places, the ones with the e in shoppes. Plenty attention for the clothes but not for what they were doing to the men on the street who had to live with the everlasting enticement but do nothing about it until one of the rouged harlots gave the nod. Or more likely, smiled coolly and flicked the fake eyelashes and brushed him off. That was the game they were all playing, the newspapers and TV screamed it at you, never giving a minute’s peace. But none of them would admit it.

  His jimmy-john spoke with its heathen voice, and he willed it to subside. His chest itched, too, with the fresh tattoo he had dedicated to his mission, words in inch-high lettering across his chest: GOD IS.

  George watched the librarian call up the directory of U.S. government publications and track down background titles. He gave her his aw-shucks routine, and pretty soon she was getting the stuff faxed down from the main county library. He could have done this at home with the modem. It gave him a laugh to get the system to oblige him, though, to cater to a cause they would find horrifying if they could understand it but that in the end was the Lord’s.

  As usual, government was anxious to spill its beans. The FBI Behavioral Science Unit stuff was funny and useful. The way they sliced and diced the world, so sure that by defining everything they could understand it. So murder wasn’t just bloody death, no. There were types: single, double, triple, mass, spree, and serial. Like a Baskin Robbins, take your choice, flavors for all. With a topping of experts on each, like candy sprinkles.

  So was he a spree killer? No, because though he had killed at two or more locations, he also had an “emotional cooling-off period” between them. That made him a serial killer. The FBI had a whole subunit assigned to computer analysis and psychological team studies of “a new phenomenon that has baffled law enforcement officials and mental health professionals.”

  But all these smart guys in three-piece suits—there was a group photo in one of the background pieces, and a piece in Psychology Today—hadn’t figured that one of their subjects would read up on them.

  He speed-read through pages of clotted, official prose. Then some words made him stop breathing: “He thi
nks he will never be caught—”

  His skin rippled with a prickly, itchy wave. He glanced around, for an instant convinced that people at nearby tables could sense his reaction, knew what he was reading, saw him clearly for what he was. But the drowsy air of the library carried no such electricity. His eyes dropped back to the page: “—and sometimes he is right.”

  Yes. “A serial murderer controls the events. Spree killers may barely control what will happen next.” Right. Spree killers were just loonies. It was an insult to be associated with them.

  The scientific papers had titles like “Criminal Profiling from Crime Scene Analysis,” written by a half-dozen experts apiece. A whole platoon of beady-eyed nerds, blind men grasping at the elusive elephant. Their “profiling inputs” and “offender risk analyses” and breakdowns of killers into organized versus “lust murder” were earnest, remorseless, comic. Plenty of attention lavished on details, none on the real issue.

  Spree types kill just about anybody they run into. Serial killers stalk victims because they are red-haired women or look like their mother. Demented, obvious patterns.

  “Serial killers display powerful inner direction.” That was a small piece of it, but they missed the essential. They could never understand him.

  He wasn’t a serial killer, he was a serious killer. He worked not out of blind passion but from scrupulous service to the Lord, as revealed by the dancing many-colored auras around his victims, and as the Reverend Montana had ordained him.

  This was war, the Reverend had said. Holy war. George had sensed it all along without being able to find the right way to say it. The Bible had made it all clear. You just had to know how to read it. King David had killed many, even his girlfriend’s husband, and was still beloved by the Almighty.

  He had always wanted to fight for the Godly against the unholy. Now he would, freely. Even the waitress in that dirty alley, she had been part of the struggle. If she had succeeded in her obvious plot to draw the police to him, he would never have been able to do this good work now.

  He spent the afternoon carefully reading the inert prose of the papers, then checked out the major work on the subject, Joel Norris’s Serial Killers. The case studies and grisly lab reports did not move him. They were like newspaper accounts of distant wars, tales of moral confusion far over the curve of the sleeping earth.

  And through all this they never spoke of the obvious point: the experts could study cases only if they knew the crimes were murders.

  George could avoid all this relentless analysis and attention if he did what these “experts” said was impossible—change his pattern. The high school principal, the waitress—those had been obvious. His beginner’s mistakes, really. Cops were looking for separate, single killers for those.

  Time to change. He should operate the way he had as a boy, with the trusting dogs and cats in the safe cloak of night.

  Accidents. They must look like accidents. No witnesses. Do it at night, far from prying eyes. Not easy in Orange County’s urban sprawl.

  No killing in one place and moving to another; the forensics labs could build a story from a single slender carpet fiber, a dime’s weight of mud, an invisible thread of DNA like a chemical fingerprint.

  No autopsy. That was crucial, too. George knew little chemistry, but he had respect for the intricacies of the human body. It was the work of God and could tell many tales, to the unbeliever and the saved alike. At all costs he should avoid any suspicion, for that would bring the autopsy, the experts with their test tubes and microscopes and calipers. And the FBI Special Unit on Serial Killers.

  No, he would be a serious killer. A stinging retribution that would go as unnoticed here as the salty ocean breeze.

  He left the library and walked the streets. It was a lazy day beneath a pale sun that brushed his face with rewarding warmth.

  He stopped before a pet shop and recalled the Reverend’s rage about the cockroaches. Two women had twisted their ankles and a man had cut his hand in the scramble. They had found one of the insects dead with some ice caught around its legs, and so they knew it was the chiller fanatics who had sent them. They had left a clever sort of calling card.

  The county health inspector had harbored a grudge against the Reverend for some past matters, something about serving so many from the cathedral kitchen. The inspector was the kind of man who would have applied rules and regulations to Jesus’s multiplying of the bread and fishes. Once he had the cockroach setup, he used it to cost the cathedral fines and trouble.

  The Reverend had summoned George and showed him the hideous insects, grotesque things like a biblical scourge. But the Reverend could not speak out publicly and blame them or seek any legal action. That would link the Reverend too strongly with the chillers, in case George’s activities became known. The Reverend was strong on this point, and George readily agreed. He was to be a secret soldier for the Lord. So retribution was up to him.

  Just reflecting on it brought a slow burn into George. Standing at the pet-shop window he watched a rainbow parrot in its cage and suddenly recalled how as a kid he had thrown a parakeet into a fan and laughed at all the feathers twirling around the room.

  As he would laugh today.

  Three times now he had approached Dr. Susan Hagerty’s house and made friends with the peppery gray keeshond. She followed a predictable pattern of work and exercise, seldom straying.

  It was late afternoon as he walked up Pacific Coast Highway and stopped to watch the sun send tongues of yellow-gold through the decks of cumulus. How could people witness such splendor every day and yet remain unmoved by the wonder of God’s works? Did they not know that some greater force had created all this for mankind?

  The beauty of the natural world contrasted so profoundly with the ugliness of the men he saw here, the primped and coiffured queers who flounced in the sand. At a nearby coffee house, Zinc’s, the moneyed sluts advertised their insulation from the moral world. He felt like bursting into a torrential sermon right on the boardwalk of Main Beach, like the great prophets of old. Instead, George shoved his hands in the pockets of his double-weave gray slacks and brushed past the sauntering male couples. A Hare Krishna group chanted by the lifeguard tower, a grotesque parody of what these doomed souls truly needed: not eastern fog, but the stern hand of biblical justice.

  George would never understand these people, perched on the edge of the continent. The palms nodded with a malarial indolence in this attempted Eden. Laxity suffused the balmy air. He walked past a bookstore named for a temperature and sporting a huge mural on its side depicting whales. THE WHALING WALL, it said, another scornful toss-off of a great biblical site. Arrogant irreverence was just a joke here.

  His car was squeezed into a slot on Coast Highway. He reached it with a sense of relief. The view of the ocean troubled him. Its infinite perspective stretched away toward Asia, flat and ominous for a reason he could not name. Beneath those mild waters lurked shadowy recesses, forests of seaweed, the cold black spaces.

  A shudder lanced through him, but not from dread at what he was about to do. Something more. Something dark and cold and deep within.

  He shook off the strange, seeping emotions. He must be a warrior now. Silent warrior of the Lord. He carefully checked to be sure he had everything ready, righteous energy snapping in his trembling muscles.

  7

  SUSAN

  Straightening up her office took most of the day. After the discussion with Marilyn Jacobs, she had pondered her lab notes for a while. They were in good order. There were some points she would have to recheck. A measurement or two to perform again, to be sure. She disliked leaving any point not firmly nailed down. Still…

  If she pulled a few all-nighters, she could get out a short paper on the revival of Sparkle. That would send a few ripples through the medical-scientific world. Maybe enough to upset Blevin’s little boat. Worth a try, anyway.

  The decision lifted her spirits. On the way home she decided to stop at Immortality In
corporated in late afternoon, enjoying the winding drive through canyons rippled by the warm puffs of a fitful Santa Ana wind. Her skin jumped with prickly energy. The natural world could always draw her out of herself, remind her that the laboratory was a deliberately antiseptic lie that managed to tell deep truths about the sprawling, mad reality of nature.

  Physicians fight against nature’s slow insults of age, the hardening arteries and Alzheimer’s and silent cancers. People accept the signatures of crow’s-feet and sagging jowls, have another beer, and forget about it. But research showed that aging is a comparatively recent invention of evolution. Ancient, primitive organisms like rockfish, bristlecone pines, and the queens of lowly anthills all keep their youth. Maybe man’s ejection from the Garden had indeed cost him immortality. Still, humans did better than nearly any other mammals, lasting up to 120 years, whereas Susan’s lab rats had palsy and cataracts at the age of two. Somehow the genes ordained all this, plunging forward by their own designs. Fretting over mortality was a property of complicated soups like humans. Genes were ferociously single-minded. Seen from their view, a chicken was an egg’s way of making another egg.

  Susan inhaled a crisp eucalyptus zest in the air and parked at Immortality Incorporated. As usual, there was only one car in the lot. The company was running on a shoestring.

  Alex waved greetings to her with his free hand, and they had a cup of coffee together. It was pleasant to sink even momentarily into the consolations of simple friendship. Perhaps the little speech she had given Marilyn Jacobs, about men liking cryonics better than women because it was like an exploratory voyage, was truer than she knew. Maybe women were more dependent on community than men. She seemed to need a lot of it lately. And she got it here, not at UCI.

  Alex nodded at her theory. “I fit that, sure. After my divorce I went backpacking in the Sierras every other week. If I didn’t, I started putting away a bottle of wine a day.”