The Astral Mirror

by Ben Bova

  “If the jury finds you guilty, the judge has to impose the penalty,” the district attorney said, very seriously.

  “Jury,” del Vecchio almost spat. “Those twelve chidrools! I’m supposed to be tried by a jury of my peers, right? That means my equals, doesn’t it?”

  The district attorney frowned slightly. “They are your equals, Del. What makes you think...”

  “My equals?” del Vecchio laughed. “Do you really think those unemployed bums and screwy housewives are my equals? I mean, how smart can they be if they let themselves get stuck with jury duty?”

  The attorney’s frown deepened. His name was Christopher Scarpato. He had gone into the profession of law because his father, a small shopkeeper continually in debt to bookmakers, had insisted that his son learn how to outwit the rest of the world. While Chris was working his way through law school, his father was beaten to death by a pair of overly-zealous collection agents. More of a plodder than a brilliant student, Chris was recruited by the Department of Justice, where careful, thorough groundwork is more important than flashy public relations and passionate rhetoric. Despite many opportunities, he had remained honest and dedicated. Del Vecchio found that charming, even noteworthy, and felt quite superior to his friend.

  “And what makes you think they’ll find me guilty?” asked del Vecchio, just a trifle smugly. “They’re stupid, all right, but can they be that stupid?”

  Scarpato finally realized he was being baited. He smiled one of his rare smiles, but it was a sad one. “They’ll find you guilty, Del. They’ve got no choice.”

  Del Vecchio’s grin faded. He looked down at his plate of pasta, then placed his fork on the damask tablecloth alongside it. “I got no appetite. Haven’t been feeling so good.”

  With a weary shake of his head, Chris replied, “You don’t have to put on the act for me, Del. I know what you’re going to do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re going to get some tame doctor to pronounce you dead and then have yourself frozen. Just like Marchetti.”

  Del Vecchio tried to look shocked, but instead he broke into a grin. “Is there anything illegal about dying? Or being frozen?”

  “The doctor will be committing a homicide.”

  “You’ll have to prove that.”

  Scarpato said, “It’s an attempt to evade the law. That’s immoral, even if it’s not illegal—yet.”

  “Let the priests worry about morality,” del Vecchio advised his old friend.

  “You should worry about it,” said Scarpato. “You’ve turned into an asocial menace, Del. When we were in school, you were an okay kind of guy. But now...”

  “What, I’m going to lose my soul?”

  “Maybe you’ve already lost it. Maybe you ought to be thinking about how you can get it back.”

  Del Vecchio grinned at him. “Listen, Chris: I don’t give a damn about souls. But I’m going to protect my body, you can bet. You won’t see me in jail, old buddy. I’m going to take a step out of time, and when I come back, you’ll be an old man and I’ll still be young.”

  Scarpato said nothing, and del Vecchio knew that he had silenced his friend’s attempts at conscience.

  Still, that little hint of “yet” that Scarpato had dropped bothered del Vecchio as the days swiftly raced by. He checked every aspect of his plan while his health appeared to deteriorate rapidly: the doctors played their part to perfection, his wife was already comfortably ensconced in Switzerland, the bankers in Zurish understood exactly what they had to do.

  Yet as he lay on the clinic table with the gleaming stainless steel cylinder waiting beside him like a mechanical whale that was going to swallow him in darkness, del Vecchio could feel his pulse racing with fear. The last thing he saw was the green-gowned doctor, masked, approaching him with the hypodermic syringe. That, and frigid wisps of vapor wafting up from the tanks of liquid nitrogen. The needle felt sharp and cold. He remembered that parts of Dante’s hell were frozen in ice.

  When they awoke him, there was a long period of confusion and disorientation. They told him later that it lasted only a day or so, but to del Vecchio it seemed like weeks, even months.

  At first he thought something had gone wrong, and they had never put him under. But the doctors were all different, and the room he was in was not the clinic he had known. They kept him in bed most of the time, except when two husky young men came in to force him to get up and walk around the room. Four times around the little hospital room exhausted him. Then they flopped him back on the bed, gave him a mercilessly efficient massage, and left. A female nurse wheeled in his first meal and spoonfed him; he was too weak to lift his arms.

  The second day (or week, or month) Scarpato came in to visit him.

  “How do you feel, Del?”

  Strangely, the attorney seemed barely to have aged at all. There was a hint of gray at his temples, perhaps a line or two in his face that had not been there before, but otherwise the years had treated him very kindly.

  “Kind of weak,” del Vecchio answered truthfully.

  Scarpato nodded. “That’s to be expected, from what the medics tell me. Your heart is good, circulation strong. Everything is okay, physically.”

  A thought suddenly flashed into del Vecchio’s thawing mind. “What are you doing in Switzerland?”

  The attorney’s face grew somber. “You’re not in Switzerland, Del. We had your vat flown back here. You’re in New York.”

  “Wh... how...?”

  “And you haven’t been under for fifteen years, either. It’s only three years.”

  Del Vecchio tried to sit up in the bed, but he was too weak to make it. His head sank back onto the pillows. He could hear his pulse thudding in his ears.

  “I tried to warn you,” Scarpato said, “that night at dinner in Providence. You thought you were outsmarting the law, outsmarting the people who make up the law, who are the law. But you can’t outwit the people for long, Del.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, del Vecchio saw that the room’s only window was covered with a heavy wire mesh, like bars on a jail cell’s window. He choked back a shocked gasp.

  Scarpato spoke quietly, without malice. “Your cute little cryonics trick forced the people to take a fresh look at things. There’ve been a few new laws passed since you had yourself frozen.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as the state has the right to revive a frozen corpse if and when a grand jury feels he’s had himself frozen specifically to evade the law.”

  Del Vecchio felt his heart sink in his chest.

  “But once they got that one passed, they went one step further.”

  “What?”

  “Well, you know how the country’s been divided about the death penalty. Some people think it’s cruel and unusual punishment; others think it’s a necessary deterrent to crime, especially violent crime. Even the Supreme Court has been split on the issue.”

  Del Vecchio couldn’t catch his breath. He realized what was coming.

  “And there’s been the other problem,” Scarpato went on, “of overcrowding in the jails. Some judges—I’m sure you know who—even let criminals go free because they claim that putting them in overcrowded jails is cruel and unusual punishment.”

  “Oh my God in heaven,” del Vecchio gasped.

  “So—” Scarpato hesitated. Del Vecchio had never seen his old friend look so grim, so purposeful. “So they’ve passed laws in just about every state in the union to freeze criminals, just store them in vats of liquid nitrogen. Dewars, they call them. We’re emptying the jails, Del, and filling them up again with dewars. They’re starting to look like mortuaries, all those stainless steel caskets piled up, one on top of another.”

  “But you can’t do that!”

  “It’s done. The laws have been passed. The Supreme Court has ruled on it.”

  “But that’s murder!”

  “No. The convicts are clinically dead, but not legally. They can be revived. And since th
e psychologists and sociologists have been yelling for years that crime is a social maladjustment, and not really the fault of the criminal, we’ve found a way to make them happy.”

  “I don’t see...”

  Scarpato almost smiled. “Well, look. If you can have yourself frozen because you’ve just died of a heart ailment or a cancer that medical science can’t cure, in the hopes that science will find a cure in the future and thaw you out and make you well again... well, why not use the same approach to social and psychological illnesses?”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re a criminal because of some psychological maladjustment,” Scarpato said. “At least, that’s what the head-shrinkers claim. So we freeze you and keep you frozen until science figures out a way to cure you. That way, we’re not punishing you; we’re rehabilitating you.”

  “You can’t do that! I got civil rights...”

  “Your civil rights are not being infringed. Once you’re found guilty by a jury of your peers you will be frozen. You will not age a single day while in the liquid nitrogen. When medical science learns how to cure your psychological unbalance, you will be thawed, cured, and returned to society as a healthy, productive citizen. We even start a small bank account for you which accrues compound interest, so that you’ll have some money when you’re rehabilitated.”

  “But that could be a thousand years in the future!” del Vecchio screamed.

  “So what?”

  “The whole world could be completely changed by then! They could revive me to make a slave out of me! They could use me for meat, for Chrissakes! Or spare parts!” He was screeching now, in absolute terror.

  Scarpato shrugged. “We have no control over that, unfortunately. But we’re doing our best for you. In earlier societies you might have been tortured, or mutilated, or even put to death. Up until a few years ago, you would have been sentenced to years and years in prison; a degrading life, filled with violence and drugs and danger. Now— you just take a nap and then someday someone will wake you up in a wonderful new world, completely rehabilitated, with enough money to start a new life for yourself.”

  Del Vecchio broke into uncontrollable sobs. “Don’t. For God’s mercy, Chris, don’t do this to me. My wife... my kids...”

  Scarpato shook his head. “It’s done. Believe me, there’s no way I could get you out of it, even if I wanted to. Your wife has found herself a boyfriend in Switzerland, some penniless count or duke or something. Your kids are getting along fine. Your girlfriends miss you, though, from what I hear.”

  “You sonofabitch! You dirty, scheming...”

  “You did this to yourself, Del!” Scarpato snapped, with enough power in his voice to silence del Vecchio. “You thought you had found a nice fat loophole in the law, so you could get away with almost anything. You thought the rest of us were stupid fools. Well, you made a loophole, all right. But the people—those shopkeepers and unemployed bums and screwy housewives that you’ve walked over all your life—they’ve turned your loophole into a noose. And your neck is in it. Don’t blame me. Blame yourself.”

  His eyes still flowing tears, del Vecchio pleaded, “Don’t do it to me, Chris. Please don’t do it. They’ll never wake me up. They’ll pull the plug on me...”

  “Don’t think that everyone’s as dishonest as you are. The convicts will be kept frozen. It only costs a thousandth of what it costs to keep a man in jail. You’ll be safe enough.”

  “But they’ll thaw me out sometime in the future. I’ll be all alone in the world. I won’t know anybody. It’ll be all strange to me. I’ll be a total stranger...”

  “No you won’t,” Scarpato said, his face grim. “It’s practically certain that Marchetti and Don Carmine will both be thawed out when you are. After all, you’re all three suffering from the same dysfunction, aren’t you?” That’s when the capillary in del Vecchio’s brain ballooned and burst. Scarpato saw his friend’s eyes roll up into his head, his body stiffen. He slammed the emergency call button beside the bed and a team of medics rushed in. While Scarpato watched, they declared del Vecchio clinically dead. Within an hour they slid his corpse into a waiting stainless steel cylinder where it would repose until some happier day in the distant future.

  “You’re out of time now, Del,” Scarpato whispered as a technician sealed the end of the gleaming dewar. “Really out of time.”

  Science Fiction and Reality

  Once a year, with the regularity of springtime, Sylvia Burack suggests that I write an article for her magazine, The Writer. She is a remarkable woman and a dear friend, and she always manages to hit upon an intriguing idea that fastens itself inside my brain and refuses to let go until I’ve completed the requested article. For the prospective writers among us, this essay, thanks to Sylvia Burack, a woman who has spent her life trying to help writers.

  Writers are always urged to base their stories on their own experiences. “Write what you know about,” is the watchword. But in science fiction, where the story is inevitably set in a world that does not exist here and now, how can you “write what you know about?”

  To make the problem even more confusing, most science fiction stories are written in a very naturalistic, realistic style. Fantastic scenes and incredible deeds are set on paper in a fashion that’s almost journalistic. The “grand old men” of the field—H. G. Wells and Jules Verne—wrote with meticulous attention to realistic detail. Modern science fiction writers lean much more toward Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, stylistically, than they lean toward Henry James or William Faulkner.

  How can you write realistically about things that have never happened, places that no human eye has ever seen, times that are yet to come?

  Over the many decades of science fiction’s existence as a distinct literary form, science fiction writers have developed skills and techniques that have allowed them to explore the whole wide universe of space and time in stories that are wholly believable. In fact, in many cases science fiction stories are more realistic than the neurotic mumblings of so-called “contemporary” fiction. (Indeed, this is one reason why many writers from outside the science fiction field are using science fiction ideas and techniques to write their stories today.)

  We should pay special attention to six of the techniques that the science fiction writers have developed. They are:

  1. Characterization

  2. Extrapolation

  3. Research

  4. Projection

  5. Speculation

  6. Consistency

  Characterization. Every piece of fiction succeeds or fails on the strength of the story’s characters. Readers identify with strong, well-defined characters. They tend to dismiss stories in which the characters are dull or demeaning.

  Many science fiction stories have been written in which the characters play a strictly secondary role to the scientific or political ideas in the story. For the most part, these are “gimmick” stories—interesting, but not memorable. The best science fiction stories, just like the best of any kind of fiction, present interesting characters who struggle mightily to solve weighty problems.

  The best—and easiest—way to make a story realistic is to people it with realistic characters. Always pattern fictional characters on people you know personally and have studied firsthand for some time. A painter or a sculptor uses a model for his work; why shouldn’t a writer? Don’t be afraid that your model will recognize him or herself in the finished story. As you write, the story’s characters will take on their own personalities—each character in the story will become a blend of several persons you know, plus your own fictional inventions. People hardly ever recognize themselves in fiction, unless their “portrait” has been very deliberately made into an exact replica of the model.

  Write about people you know, and emotions that you have personally experienced. If the closest you have been to the Pentagon is a hike through the woods of Virginia, don’t expect to be able to write realistically about the inner workings of the men and women in the Pentago
n!

  In science fiction, the characters are not always human beings. They can be alien creatures, robots, computers, or even intelligent dolphins. But they must behave like humans, or they will either bore or baffle the reader. Each character, no matter what he/she/it looks like, must experience human problems and show some semblance of human emotions. Think of Spock, on TV’s classic Star Trek series. He is alien in appearance and most of the time he is alien in behavior. But underneath it all (and not so deep that the viewer cannot see it) Spock has human emotions of loyalty, courage, humor and love.

  Arthur C. Clarke made the computer HAL the most human character of his 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL had great strengths, but he went neurotic, became a murderer, and was “executed” by the robot-like human astronaut in the story. Everyone who saw that film felt a pang of regret as HAL was “turned off.”

  Robert A. Heinlein—another giant of the field—created an even more human-like computer in his masterful novel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. This computer, nicknamed Mike (after Mycroft, Sherlock Holmes’ older brother) led a war of liberation on the Moon, and suffered tragically as a result.

  In science fiction, the characters don’t all have to look human, but they must behave in human ways. The reader will accept, trust, believe a story that has interesting, exciting, believable characters in it.

  Extrapolation. Many science fiction stories are triggered when the author asks a question that begins with, “If this goes on...?”

  If we use up all the energy fuels on Earth without developing new energy sources to replace them, what happens?

  If medical science finds cures for every disease and people begin to live for hundreds or even thousands of years, how does the world change?