Cold as Ice

by Charles Sheffield

  Shumi had chosen the worst possible time to lose his grip. "You are saying they're alive, aren't you?" Nell grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him, as he again stared right through her. "Doctor Shumi! You must answer."

  He was nodding absentmindedly. "They were dead, you know, when I opened the hatch. Both of them. No pulse, no heartbeat, stone dead. The air inside was poison. Too low in oxygen, too high in carbon dioxide, quite unbreathable. I declared them dead. They were dead. We began to pick them up, so we could move them out. And the second we lifted them they both gave a little body twitch, and then they started to breathe. First the man, then the woman. And now—"

  Nell didn't wait to hear any more. She ran around the submersible to the side away from Tristan, found a toehold on one of the Danae's free-swimmer supports, and hoisted herself high enough to reach the front window. One of the men holding Tristan started after her. She climbed higher, up onto the roof, where it was difficult for him to reach her, and hung head down to peer into the cabin and to allow her handheld minicamera a view of the interior.

  Jon and Wilsa were still in their seats. Their faces had a curious purple-red tinge, and their eyes were half-closed. Upside down, Nell could not read their expressions, but she could see that they were breathing. And they were laboriously moving their hands and feet at the medical team's urging.

  "Get off there—right now." The man following Nell had reached the roof and grabbed her arm. She meekly allowed herself to be helped down and led back to the group sitting on the bench. It now included Tristan.

  Nell went to his side and gripped his hand. "I saw them. They're alive and moving. They're going to be fine. That's all that matters."

  She spoke softly, but Gabriel Shumi somehow heard her. "All that matters to you,"he said mournfully. "But I will be asked to produce reports detailing just what happened. I will be called upon to provide explanations for all this. When no explanation is possible."

  "Ah. Explanations. A most timely word." Bat had been sitting motionless, staring straight ahead. He had seemed as far out of things as Shumi was. Now he roused himself. "With Wilsa Sheer and Jon Perry rescued and recovering, it is time to think of explanations. They are surely overdue. But this is not the place for them."

  He turned to Hilda Brandt. "If you would be so kind as to make available a warmer compartment within this vehicle, and find for me some alternative and less revealing form of body covering, both would be much appreciated. For although I am now ready to admit that I have misjudged you"—his glance included Cyrus Mobarak as well as Hilda Brandt—"I believe that we have much to say to each other. It is time . . . to talk."

  24

  Monsters

  The biggest unoccupied room that the Europan mobile lab offered was a data-review station, about three meters square—roughly the size of Bat's bed.

  He stared at the six people crowding in on him—sitting on top of him, by Bat standards—and decided that this was the worst day of his life.

  It was not his departure from the treasures and safety of Bat Cave, although he had missed them before he was three paces from his front door. It was not the ride from Ganymede to Europa, although he had been shoehorned for seven hours into a seat designed for some human shrimp one-third his size. It was not the ignominy of being led—near-naked, chilled, purblind, and encased like a monstrous green sausage—across the bleak prospect of Europa's surface. It was not even the presence, normally intolerable to him, of so many other humans close enough to touch, nor the narrow, uncomfortable seat on which he was now perched.

  It was something worse than all of those. It was knowledge that he had been guilty of basic error.

  He had obtained the first hint of a problem in his logic when the arrival at Europa went unquestioned and unimpeded; he had suspected a major blunder when he peered through the insulating green plastic of his improvised suit and noted the composition of the group assembled around the frozen-over circle of Blowhole. He had confirmed his error when he saw Hilda Brandt commanding Camille Hamilton, and observed the latter's dreamlike trance.

  And yet—he tried to comfort himself—he must also be at least partially right. Surely there were limits to how far logic, strictly applied, could have led him astray.

  He glanced around at the people crowding in on him: David Lammerman and Camille Hamilton, close together physically and, he suspected, now closer than ever mentally; Nell Cotter, her eyes noting everything; Tristan Morgan, impatience written on his face, fidgeting, on the point of speech; Cyrus Mobarak, staring steadily at Bat and quite impassive—but still Torquemada, and therefore neither to be underestimated nor taken for granted.

  And finally, Hilda Brandt. She nodded to him. Go ahead, it's your move.

  She was right. This was Bat's show. And he was not sure where to begin. He might never be able to restore his self-esteem, but if he botched this he could certainly make himself feel even worse.

  Then go slowly. The desperate run from Ganymede was over. No one was going anywhere, and there was no need for haste.

  "I would like to tell you a story." His dark eyes flickered from person to person, and his voice was little more than a whisper. "To at least one of you, it will already be familiar. To others, it may be incomprehensible. Still others among you may even find it boring. For this is not merely a story, it is a story of long ago. A war story, in fact. A tale of the last days of the Great War."

  Bat stirred in his hard chair. He had been provided with adequate clothing: a vast cylinder of cloth with holes cut through for his arms and head. But there was nothing to eat; he was still cold; and he yearned for his kitchen, his own robes, and the comfort of the padded seat deep in Bat Cave.

  "Both sides performed weapons development throughout the war," he went on. "That is well-known. And new weapons, almost by definition, are secret weapons. Full advantage cannot be gained from their use if the enemy knows of their existence, since then they can build defenses against them.

  "One such secret weapon had been in development on a small asteroid called Mandrake." Bat scanned the group. Every face wore a look of mild interest or polite incomprehension. No information there. "From its designer's point of view, the weapon was almost perfected. But when it was described to the Belt leaders, they decided that it had two big problems. The first—a minor point to them—was that it involved a form of biological experimentation strictly forbidden by all military and civilian codes. The second, and from the leaders' point of view much the more important, was that the weapon would be of no practical use for years. With the war going badly for the Belt, this could not be the secret weapon to snatch victory from defeat.

  "Now permit me one general observation: In the Great War, Earth and Mars were the big losers in terms of casualties, but it was the other side—the Belt colonies—that was forced to surrender unconditionally. The Belt lost the war. Its production facilities were shattered, its people starved to submission, its leaders in danger of postwar trial as war criminals. After the war, popular sentiment said that the Belt leaders were human monsters. They deserved their fate of annihilation in the final battles. The only pity was that they were not available to be put on trial.

  "That is a typical postwar attitude of victors. War history is written by the winners. But suppose that in this case, the written history were true? Suppose that the Belt leaders were truly cold, ruthless, and self-serving?"

  Cyrus Mobarak was nodding. "They were. I was there, and I remember the situation clearly. You did what you were told, or that was the end of you."

  "Very well. So those leaders would not have hesitated to employ an awful weapon, or been averse to destroying a useless one—especially a weapon that after the war might cause them more trouble. Of course, the Belt leaders did not alert anyone on Mandrake to their plans. They simply arranged for a full-scale attack on the asteroid, one that would reduce all evidence of experiments to ash and lifeless rock.

  "But somehow, almost too late, the science chief of those biological expe
riments—who happened to be away from Mandrake at the time—learned of the plan to destroy the asteroid. Word was sent secretly to Mandrake. A few of the scientists managed to find a ship, a converted ore-carrier named the Pelagic. They fled, taking some of their experiments with them. But they were too late. A Seeker missile had already been commanded to destroy anything that tried to escape from Mandrake. It followed the Pelagic and blew it apart. Everyone on board perished.

  "That should be the end of the story. All of the Belt political and military leaders died in the final days of the war. Good riddance, surely, for everyone in the system. The labs on Mandrake were destroyed. Records of the work, stored on Pallas, had already been purged. The Pelagic had been vaporized. The developer of the destroyed biological weapons was still alive, but no more eager than any other human to be offered as a scapegoat for war crimes. It was better by far to leave the Belt, lie low, and later build a new career somewhere else.

  "And that is exactly what happened. It was as though the experiments on Mandrake had never been. The past vanished, for a full twenty-four years. And then, two years ago, a routine search of Belt debris came across the flight recorder of the Pelagic.

  "The recorder showed that although nineteen people had embarked on the ship at Mandrake, only ten were on board when the Pelagic was annihilated. Where were the other nine? They must have been jettisoned, dead or alive, into space.

  "All that would mean nothing to almost anyone in the system. It meant little to me, when I first learned of it a few months ago, even though I am far more interested than most people in relics of the Great War. I am very interested.

  "Ah, but then why was I so delinquent? Only because I could find no record of the recovery of a life-support pod within a reasonable time of the Pelagic's destruction, and at a place consistent with the ship's final position. I concluded, quite reasonably, that anyone in a survival pod was long dead.

  "The information from the remnant of the Pelagic might mean something more to just one person—to someone who had waited for a quarter of a century for new information about that ship, without any real hope that it would ever be forthcoming. That person did not conclude, as I did, that those in the pods must be dead. Why not? Because there was another relevant fact."

  Bat was interrupted. The door of the room opened in a blast of cold air. Jon Perry and Wilsa Sheer, pale-faced but otherwise apparently normal, were ushered in by Buzz Sandstrom. He glanced questioningly at Hilda Brandt.

  She nodded. "Sit down. Not you, Buzz. You go and make sure that Blowhole is opening up all right. Apply heat from on top if you have to. And close this door behind you. It's too cold in here already."

  She turned back to Bat as Nell and Tristan squeezed room between them for the two new arrivals. "Very well, Rustum Battachariya. There is no need for you to continue. I am ready to end this charade. I admit my guilt. After what I did with Camille out there on the surface, in front of witnesses, it would be pointless to deny it. I led certain biological research projects in the Belt during the Great War." She ignored Cyrus Mobarak's head-jerk of surprise. "If I also tell you that I had to cooperate with the Belt government or die, and that I opposed the whole war, it does not alter the facts. Now tell me what you propose to do with this information."

  "I, personally? Very little." Bat stared sadly down at his rolling belly. "Not now. One day ago—one hour ago—I believed that murder would soon be committed on Europa. I thought that Jon Perry's life was in danger, and from something far more inimical than an accidental oxygen shortage. I rushed here from Ganymede for that reason. And I learned, within minutes of my arrival at Blowhole, that I had made a gross error. To save Jon Perry and Wilsa Sheer, you proved willing to risk exposure. That was not the action of my war crimes perpetrator. I had been wrong in thinking you dangerous simply because you are devious.

  "I could and should return at once to Ganymede. But I must satisfy my own curiosity. Be assured, I will take your answers no farther. I cannot, of course, say the same for others here, or ask their silence. What you say to me may have direct relevance to them."

  "It does indeed. But ask on. The time for silence is past."

  "The survival pods. Nine were launched. What happened to the rest of them? I found evidence of only three having been recovered."

  "So did I." Hilda Brandt was visibly troubled for the first time since the Danae had bobbed to the surface of Blowhole. "We have to assume that the other six were lost, and the children with them. Of the nineteen people on the Pelagic when it left Mandrake, only three have survived: Jon Perry, Wilsa Sheer, and Camille Hamilton."

  The rest of the people in the room had been sitting quietly, aware that they were eavesdroppers on a private dialogue. But Hilda Brandt's final words were too much for them. Everyone began to talk at once. They stopped only when they realized that she was continuing, quietly and conversationally.

  "—and survived then, of course, only because of what they were. They floated free in space for many months—and lived. Just as they survived experiences in and below the Europan ice that would have been fatal to anyone else. I had my hopes that Camille would revive, you see, even when everyone swore that she was frozen and dead. And recover she did. After that, although I wanted Jon and Wilsa returned to the surface as fast as possible, I had less worry that their experience would prove fatal. I even allowed myself to gloat a little bit at how well I had done my work so long ago. And although I have no desire to learn by experiment, I cannot help but wonder how far their survival abilities might extend."

  Cyrus Mobarak had been uncharacteristically silent. More than anyone else in the room, he understood the personalities of Battachariya and Hilda Brandt. And he had been forming his own odd conclusion. "Are you two saying what I think you're saying? That these three"—he swept his arm past Jon Perry, Wilsa Sheer, and Camille Hamilton—"are the result of those biological experiments on Mandrake twenty-five years ago? But you didn't know until just one year ago that they were still alive?"

  "Dr. Brandt knew it more than a year ago," said Bat. "She tracked the pod trajectories long before I did. I learned it myself only very recently."

  "Why didn't she know it a generation ago, when the pods were first found? Didn't it show up in the news media each time one was discovered?"

  Bat raised dark eyebrows, as severe a criticism of naivete as he would ever offer to Cyrus Mobarak. "In a solar system still reeling and staggering after the greatest disaster in human history? We all know better than that. For years after the end of the Great War, information systems were a blind chaos. The discoveries were recorded, certainly, but they were not publicized. And I suspect that at the time, Dr. Brandt had certain other postwar priorities."

  "Maybe at that time." Mobarak turned on Brandt accusingly. "But if you knew they had survived a full year ago, why didn't you say something then? You owed it to them."

  "Say what, and to whom?" Hilda Brandt snapped back at him. "Think about it, Cyrus, and tell me what good it could do. I knew that I would probably tell them eventually, but only after I'd had a chance to take a good look at them and convince myself that it was the right thing to do. They've been living happy, healthy, normal lives for a quarter of a century. Are you telling me that I ought to have had them labeled as biological experiments, so that people could start treating them as freaks and monsters?"

  Understanding had been dawning slowly on Jon, Wilsa, and Camille. They had heard, but they could not believe.

  Camille, sitting in the meeting from the beginning, was the first to react. "Are you agreeing with Mobarak . . . that we are just experiments? Human freaks, that you made on Mandrake?"

  "No! I'm saying anything but that. You see, Cyrus, that's exactly the sort of thing I was afraid of." Hilda Brandt swung back to Camille and spoke with great emphasis. "You are not monsters or freaks, any one of you, and I should have my tongue cut out for using those words. You are human beings—superior human beings."

  "But what did you do to us?" asked Wilsa.<
br />
  "Improved you. You were modified before you were born, to give you control over your autonomic nervous system and a better interface between conscious and unconscious thought. If necessary, you three can slow or speed up your metabolic rate and reaction times. You can modify all bodily functions. You can achieve levels of muscle control impossible for anyone else. You can also—with sufficient urging—integrate data in ways that the rest of us find hard to even imagine. It's mental superiority, as well as physical. Camille, you are like other people—only you are better."

  Nell Cotter thought suddenly of Jon Perry, with his absolute sense of position, coolly guiding the Spindrift through the seaquake while his fingers rippled across the submersible's controls too fast to follow. Of Wilsa at her keyboards, her fingers and toes performing as twenty independent instruments of impossible coordination and precision. And of Camille, her attention turned totally inward, performing under Hilda Brandt's direction the feats of computation that everyone—including Camille herself—had believed could never be done without a computer.

  Then Nell had another vision, of ice blocks bulging beneath fair skin bloated with liquid. "You mean that when Camille was trapped and frozen—"

  "—her body did what it had to." Hilda Brandt nodded. "She drank all the water that she could find. As that water froze near the surface of her body, she used the released latent heat to keep her core temperature up and allow her to remain alive. It was a form of hibernation, but Camille never knew consciously what was happening. Her built-in survival mechanisms took over." She turned to Jon and Wilsa. "And the same with you two. You managed with too little air, for far longer than Gabriel Shumi said was possible."

  "We just sat in the ship," said Wilsa. "We fell asleep, but we didn't do anything special."