CHILLER

by Gregory Benford

  Rough panting behind. She turned her head—

  A hand seized her shoulder. Spun her around.

  He shoved her roughly. She sprawled. Almost went over the crumbling edge. Caught herself.

  He stood confidently on the balls of his feet, looking at her with interest. Sweat soaked his dark blue running outfit.

  It was almost a relief to stop. Susan felt a rush of nausea, her mouth flooding with sour spit.

  Travis came laboring up the incline. Why doesn’t Travis attack him? she thought.

  Travis yapped angrily. He circled both of them, excited. Susan gasped, “Travis…”

  The man squatted and held out a sliver of beef. “Travis, good boy.”

  Travis hesitated, eyes jerking with anxiety, tail bushy.

  Then the man knelt and Travis came to him. He stroked the dog, and she saw with dawning terror that Travis snapped up the beef and then licked his hand. Friends.

  Susan cried, “Travis!”

  Travis jerked. Glanced at her, confused.

  Deftly the man reached down on the dog’s blind side and grasped its neck with both hands. He gritted his teeth, and she heard a sharp crack as he snapped the neck.

  Travis went limp. His claws rasped against the broken sandstone and then stilled.

  “Man’s best friend.”

  Susan gasped, “You… bastard…”

  “You see,” he said, “I have thought of everything.”

  “Who—what…”

  “You wanna bring the dead back,” he said, voice suddenly grating. “The walking dead, when what God desires is the valley of redeemed bones.”

  “I’m a doctor. I help people—”

  “Why not just join them?”

  “What? Who?”

  The cotton fog swirled restlessly about them. She could see the beach below and the distant winking lights of Coast Highway, infinitely far away in a preoccupied world, and there was no one to help. She thought of slipping by him, but he caught her glance and his slow mirthless grin showed that he was set to grab her if she tried.

  She looked down. A steep, impassable jumble of sharp rocks.

  “The dead.”

  “Join…”

  “You’re keeping them from their holy appointments.”

  “Join them? You mean to kill me.” It was not a question any longer. The man’s wide, bloodless mouth made that clear.

  “I was angry before. I was disorganized.” He said this earnestly, as though reciting in school.

  “At Immortality Incorporated?”

  “Yes. But now I am a serious killer.”

  Quickly he stepped forward and bent. She wrenched away, but that was what he wanted. From behind he snatched at her collar with one hand and her belted waist with the other. She slammed her elbow at him, but he ducked, chuckling.

  He yanked her backward and her running shoes lifted from the ground. She felt his other arm take her weight. He had her firmly supported from behind. She tilted farther back and was looking up into the ominous fog.

  Angrily she flailed at him, reaching awkwardly behind her. “Aaahhh!” she yelled in frustration as her hands grasped only his jogging suit. She ripped his sleeve, but he shook off her grip.

  Briskly he hoisted her up. He took her full weight, pressing her up. She gasped.

  She hammered her fists at his head. He grunted hard, shifted his weight, and raised her higher. Her hands found nothing in the cool air. He inhaled deeply, lifting her above his head in one smooth movement.

  She twisted to look over her shoulder. He was peering up at her, eyes distant, cheeks puffed out in exertion. His face was as unconcerned as if he were lifting weights in a gym.

  Beyond him, the rocks.

  “Bless you,” he said. “May you rise in the valley of bones.”

  She flew out in an arc that seemed to hang suspended for a long moment in the chilled salt air.

  Weightless. Then plunging.

  She saw him standing above, hands clasped together as if in prayer.

  Falling.

  Hard.

  Sharp.

  Black.

  FIVE

  THE DREAMERS OF THE DAY

  All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.

  —T. E. Lawrence

  1

  ALEX

  The MedAlarm on the bedside table beeped. Alex felt a spark of irritation. Of all things that cannot survive an interruption, heartfelt kisses ranked near the very top. Erections, more so. “Aaargh!” His head flopped back on a pillow.

  Kathryn blew an exasperated puff of air upward, feathering her long hair. “Technology strikes again,” she said. “Just when our little seminar was getting interesting.”

  “Seminar? This is an advanced lab.”

  “Well, maybe this will give us a chance to eat some of the fabulous little appetizers I brought along.”

  “I thought you were the appetizer.”

  “I’m the main course. Go on, make your call.”

  Alex felt no particular concern. A lot of MedAlarm alerts were just to keep him informed. A patient entering the hospital with chest pain would bring I2 to a state of moderate readiness, in case the situation worsened. Alex hit the key on his telephone that dialed the emergency I2 number.

  Within a minute he was glad that their preliminary short-breathed tussle on his bed, which had shown every sign of turning into the main course without benefit of appetizers, had not gone so far as to leave him undressed. That saved time as he hurried Kathryn into his Volvo.

  “Susan?” Kathryn gaped as he pulled out onto El Toro Road. “Our Susan?”

  “Yeah. I saw her less than two hours ago.”

  “Traffic accident?”

  “Might be. Gary Flint’s on watch and called me from the paramedic ambulance. He said our satellite fix puts her right on the coast, between Laguna and Corona del Mar.”

  “Coast Highway, then.”

  “Could be. That’s within the error bars of the satellite locator, he said. Gary called UCI Emergency. They can come down McArthur and reach her faster than we can.”

  “What did the MedAlarm say?”

  “Danger signs, but she’s alive.” He ran a yellow light that turned to red before he was halfway across Muirlands.

  “Does that tell you what’s wrong?”

  “The MedAlarms monitor electrocardiagram. As long as it’s regular, no trouble. Susan’s is wild.”

  “She could be, well, exercising. Walking on the beach.”

  “Running’s more her style. But exercise increases heart rate in a regular fashion. Hers is erratic. So the first thing the MedAlarm did was look for other problems. Her oxygen saturation is down and skin conductance way up. The MedAlarm program went bananas and blew the whistle.”

  “Might be a traffic accident, then.”

  “We’ll see,” Alex said grimly.

  El Toro deadended on Laguna Canyon Road. The rush-hour traffic was ebbing away, and even though the Canyon Road was one of the much-ballyhooed “superstreets” of Orange County, the flow speed was barely thirty miles per hour. Alex fidgeted and looked for every chance to weave through traffic. He passed on the right, zooming down the bike lane. When that got blocked he darted into an opening between two vans. He swore at them as he floored the gas and squealed across another lane. “Van drivers! Biggest, slowest hogs on the highway.”

  He noticed Kathryn staring at him, white-faced, and he had to laugh. “Thought I was Mr. Cautious, huh? Drives a Volvo, wants to live forever.”

  “Well…”

  “Notice I put my seat belt on first.”

  “That makes me feel so much better.”

  “Got yours on?”

  “Uh, no.” She reached for hers.

  He ran the red light at Canyon Acres and shot past the Festival of Arts.
Coast Highway was clear going north, and with difficulty Alex kept himself from pushing the Volvo over fifty. “See any police blinkers up ahead?”

  Kathryn peered out. “No. It’s getting foggy.”

  “Can’t see more than a hundred yards.”

  He did not slow down, though. He began to wonder how he would know exactly where they were. He tromped down and sped two miles along the Coast Highway. A car came off a feeder street from the big hotels inland, slowed slightly, and turned right without looking, even though the light was against it. “Tourist!” Alex swore vehemently and swerved around it. The lights of Corona del Mar appeared over the curve of the road, murky in the mist, and he saw nothing on the highway.

  “There!” Kathryn pointed at a cluster of police cars and ambulances, behind them and far over in the parking lot of the state park. Banks of white vapor wreathed the winking reds and yellows, making pulsing spheres in the mist.

  Alex hung a vicious left in front of an approaching brigade of cars, stomped the gas to make up the distance he had overshot, and nearly lost the rear end as they hit gravel on the turnoff into the parking lot. They left skidmarks behind the police black-and-whites.

  Alex trotted toward the big UCI ambulance just as two paramedics appeared, rolling a gurney. They were sweating as they reached the top of a concrete path that led down to the beach. Alex knew well enough to step back, giving them plenty of room. Susan rolled by in a full neck collar, eyes closed, her body listless and somehow vulnerable on the stiff white sheets. Swiftly they got her into the ambulance with great speed. Only when the orderly slammed the door did Alex say, “I’m her friend. What happened?”

  “Fell down the cliff,” the woman paramedic snapped, and rushed for the forward door. The ambulance swiftly pulled away into the pearly fog.

  Alex turned toward the cliff, and there was Kathryn. She had found Gary Flint, a sandy-haired man in his early forties. Gary had on a checked work shirt and jeans. The I2 ambulance stood well to the side of the police cars, its logo deliberately subdued.

  Gary said, “We’ll follow them right now, Alex. Susan’s in pretty bad shape.”

  “What happened?”

  “Don’t know. We got here a few minutes after UCI. All I could do was watch the emergency crew work on her. She’d been pretty badly messed up on the rocks. Deep bruises, a contusion. Her pupils are unequal in size and inactive. She’s breathing, but low and slow. Pulse jumping all around. Blood pressure high but starting to come down.”

  “What’s your guess?”

  “Certainly concussion. Brain damage, maybe.”

  Kathryn said, “Oh no,” with a sinking tone.

  “Where did you find her?” Alex pressed.

  Gary gestured into the billowing fog. “Cops are all over it.”

  “Looks like she may need us,” Alex said. Distantly he listened to his own voice, flat and factual. That was the best way to be when you had to make clear decisions, not about a stranger but about one of your friends. But that wasn’t why he responded this way. Events had simply compressed him, switched him over to automatic.

  Gary nodded. “Looks like. Hope to hell not, but…”

  The heavy-set man shook himself, but not because of the clammy fog that now thickened around them. It was the way Gary worked off the stresses of being on the emergency team, giving vent to his need for physical action when there was really nothing to be done. Yet.

  The police cars yards away were visible only because of the diffuse winking halos of their lights. Behind the occasional rasping voices over the police radios and the idling engines, Alex heard the perpetual mutter of the waves.

  The moment of silence between them passed. “Look,” Gary said, “I got Pete with me in the unit. We’ll go on down to UCI. I’ll check in with the staff, check on the legal angles.”

  Alex gritted his teeth. “Not the best place. They’ve been giving her shit lately.”

  “I heard. That won’t make any difference at a time like this, will it?”

  “I’d rather not find out. Any chance we could transfer her to Hoag in Newport?”

  “Her patient’s directives specify UCI if at all possible.”

  Kathryn said, “That paperwork is from better days, though.”

  Gary nodded. “Nothing we can do, I’d say. We’re stuck. We’ve never done a suspension with them, or even met with their ethics committee.”

  “Right.” Alex grimaced. Though UCI General was one of the nearest to I2, it was only a few years old. Hospitals usually took a while to work the idea of cryonics through the bureaucratic labyrinth. Sometimes they never did. “We’ll come along. If we split up the jobs—”

  “No, stay here. The cops need some background on her.”

  “They can fill out their forms later. Right now—”

  “They’ve got some doubts.”

  “Huh? About what?”

  “Whether it was an accident.”

  Kathryn’s eyes widened. Alex felt a leaden apprehension in his stomach.

  “That’s why you should stay.” Gary looked significantly at Kathryn. “Both of you. Don’t let the cops get you alone, get you rattled.”

  Alex nodded slowly. Gary was an old hand in cryonics. He had dealt with some dicey suspensions. Once the police had arrested him for interfering with an investigation because he wouldn’t buy their suspicions, and worse, wouldn’t shut up about it. The charges had been dropped, of course, but it would be a good idea to keep Gary away from any cop with a long memory.

  “We’ll stay here,” Kathryn said. “When we’re done, I’ll go back to I2 and help with communications.”

  Alex was pleased with how cool and quick she was. As Gary left in the I2 ambulance, they walked cautiously down the concrete path. At the brow of the hill the police had yellow-taped it off. Two officers stopped them, and Kathryn used her nicest voice to get through to the officer in charge. He was a thin man with an earnest look who immediately told them to stand where they were and not to walk around.

  For fifteen minutes this was all the attention they got while some plainclothes police arrived. Alex’s mind churned with possibilities, plans, fears—just as they always did when a suspension might have to start soon, with no preparation time. But this time Kathryn was there and he found himself rattling on, not editing his thoughts into presentable form, just letting them gush out. It was a fresh sensation in the midst of the free-floating anxiety he so often felt at these times, and as the words tumbled out he realized that he was calming, thinking more clearly. On impulse, in midsentence, he kissed her. None of the cops noticed.

  Then for long minutes he stood with his arm around Kathryn and watched the soldiers of the law at work. He had crossed swords with them before, as was inevitable in cryonics. He could still clearly remember a car accident scene years before, when he had helped carry out a cryonic suspension in the face of obvious distaste from the police. But that was not what had troubled Alex.

  Cops spent their lives in a world ruled by the worst impulses, peopled by vermin. Constant reminders of mortality flourished. They became cynical, inured to calamity. “You’re not staring at a person,” an obviously veteran detective had said calmly at the car crash site, making notes on his clipboard. “The suffering is over, and that’s just something that got left behind.”

  A healthy way of dealing with accident, maybe, if you had to face it every day. But, he reminded himself, at least for a while, it was wrong. Even if Susan died this instant, the structure of her would not be inescapably lost for several hours more.

  A flinty-eyed plainclothes detective nodded at them. “I’m Detective Stern, county office. You know the woman?”

  “Yes,” Kathryn answered promptly, while Alex, still amid his memories, stayed deliberately silent. “She is Dr. Susan Hagerty, a physician on the faculty at UCI.” She rattled off Susan’s address and other details from memory, which Alex found impressive. It was another sign of how thoroughly she had taken over the I2 office, getting it into cri
sp shape after years of volunteer casualness.

  “Know why she was down here?”

  Alex said, “She went running here nearly every day. I’ve gone with her a few times, when she took her dog out.”

  “She usually took her dog?”

  “I”—a little caution here, Alex thought, though he did not quite know why—“I don’t know. Sometimes.”

  Stern squinted, but not because of the harsh white spotlights that officers were setting up on the pathway. “A jogger. Pretty agile?”

  “She was in her forties and stayed in good shape. But if she ran this far from El Morro Beach, I’d guess she might be tired.”

  “How’d you know she started at El Morro?”

  “I didn’t. Just seemed logical. When I was with her we started there.”

  Stern nodded. “We found her car parked in the lot down that way.”

  Kathryn said, “She probably ran here on the beach, and—”

  “We know she did.” Stern led them down the path, by some investigating officers, and stooped to pick up a plastic bag holding two running shoes. “We’ve matched her prints down below.”

  As Stern led them down the path, Alex firmly kept his anxiety in check. He had never been much of an actor and his wariness was bound to come through to Stern. Better to say as little as possible, he decided.

  They reached the beach and stood beside a stretch of sand sliced out of the shrouded dark by piercing spotlights. Two plainclothesmen were taking pictures. A third seemed to be making plaster casts of footprints.

  “She left a clear track coming from the south and up this ramp. There are other prints, too.” He pointed at several different tread marks. One set was deeply gouged into the sand, as if by a big man running hard. Alex couldn’t help but follow them into the distance with his eye. They followed the same curve up to the path as Susan’s.

  Stern said, “Those tracks run into the surf, so we’re pretty sure they were made much earlier, when the tide was out.”

  Alex nodded, and then he saw the dog prints. They ran roughly parallel to Susan’s.