Ice and Fire

by James Axler

  "Any signs of actual monitoring of the vital functions, Doc?" Ryan asked. "Those there?" He pointed at a number of display panels, each showing an unbroken line of pale green electrical light, accompanied by a thin, toneless bleeping.

  "Could be. If they are, then we're not going to strike too much gold. I've seen more signs of life in a petrified dinosaur's dropping."

  Another hour passed. The nine capsules were all open, but there was still too much mist in the cubicles to see what was happening.- And the monitors remained stubbornly unchanged.

  "Triple zero," J.B. muttered to Ryan. "Laid the ace on the line, best we could. Still got us a lot of nothing. Time we moved?"

  "One more hour. Then we go. Krysty says she can still 'see' something. Like she's never seen before. They gotta come around, don't they?"

  The Armorer pushed back the brim of his hat and shrugged his shoulders. "Mebbe, Ryan. Mebbe."

  The big digital clock on the far wall of the control room clicked over another forty-two minutes, then things began to happen.

  "The line's broke," Lori said, pointing at one of the monitors marked Vital Function 17. A blip had appeared, running slowly along, followed by another. And another. The tone changed to a more insistent cheeping, drawing attention to itself.

  "Number seventeen. That one, in the corner." Doc pointed to the booth with that number stenciled above it.

  Another monitor came to life, on one of the capsules nearest the main entrance. And a third one.

  Moments later the first appalling screams began.

  Chapter Eight

  KRYSTY SPOTTED a new display that had clicked into life on one of the many desks. It was labeled Time to Manual Override Unit Sec Lock.

  Most of the twenty-five numbers were blank, but nine glowed. Of the nine, six were showing a hesitant orange light. Three, including number seventeen, were showing a glittering emerald green, bright as the eye of the dragon.

  But everyone's attention had been torn away by the sound of the screaming.

  Faint at first, like the first stirring of a summer breeze in the top branches of a mighty pine forest, then louder and more insistent, drawing them to capsule 17.

  "Alive." Jak's eyes were wide in amazement. "Moving and 'live."

  The silver top had now folded all the way open, and the coolant mists had finally vanished, allowing the companions to see into the lined box.

  "We can open it in about ninety seconds," Krysty told them, checking the repeater chron over the armored glass door.

  "Dark night!" J.B. said. "It's a woman and she looks like she's already been chilled."

  Flat on her back, with a number of thin plastic tubes connected to her arms, was a woman, aged in her sixties. The hair was silver gray, tied in a neat coil. The hands jerked and twitched at the binding shroud in uncontrollable movements. Her brown eyes were open, staring sightlessly upward, and her mouth gaped, revealing pink gums. The screams rose and fell in a steady, racking rhythm, seeming beyond any conscious control of the freezie.

  What the Armorer had said was deadly accurate. The woman looked on the brink of the grave. Ryan recalled at that moment Doc's warning that many of the cryogenic experiments had been carried out either on the newly dead or on the imminently dying.

  "Forty seconds," Krysty said, raising her voice above the muffled cries.

  The freezie's arms were painfully thin, her narrow body showing every sign of extreme emaciation. Her hands were like a bunch of twigs, covered in opaque skin, and her cheeks were completely sunken in, stretched over sharp planes of bone. The eyes were almost hidden in the scraped caverns of the sockets.

  "What can we do, Doc?" Lori asked, tugging on his sleeve.

  "Precious little, I fear. If only we knew what ailed her we could—"

  "Fifteen seconds and we can open up the door and get her out."

  "Then what?" Lori was almost crying at the sight of the old woman's obvious suffering.

  The screaming stretched on, flat, barely rising and falling. Just a succession of mindless notes. The eyes of the freezie showed no sign whatsoever of any kind of consciousness.

  "There's 'nother one coming out!" Jak called from near the entrance. "Man. Doesn't look so close to chill."

  "Lock's open," Krysty said, reaching and turning the handle. As the door swung, the volume of the screaming became much louder, like the edge of a diamond saw drawn across a sheet of plate glass.

  Ryan sniffed, catching a unique smell that was both sharp and flat at the same time, with a bitter overlay to it. Chemical and unpleasant.

  "The wretched woman had recently undergone some drastic surgery to her brain," Doc observed. "See? The sutures look almost fresh."

  "What's that mean?" Ryan asked. "What's making her scream?"

  "I would hazard that—pure speculation you understand—but I would guess it may have been a terminal brain tumor."

  The woman was trying to tear at the material of the winding-sheet, and her head was tossing to and fro. Her breath was fast and ragged, making a pulse at the angle of jaw and neck flutter and dance.

  Krysty had gone back to the console that recorded motor functions, gazing at the buttons and punching at one or two.

  She shouted to the group gathered around the open door. "What'd you say was wrong?"

  "I would guess a tumor, but—"

  "Intrinsic carcinoma near parieto-occipital sulcus? If I spoke it right."

  "It says that?" Ryan asked.

  "Her name's Joan Thoroldson. It also says she's sixty-four. There's been exploratory surgery. Then it says IIT."

  "Inoperable, imminent termination," Doc muttered. "She is near death, Ryan, and in the most dreadful agony."

  "Can't we…" Lori began, stopping as Doc solemnly shook his head.

  "Nothing. Unless we can…" He turned his questioning gaze to Ryan.

  "What, Doc? What can we do?"

  "We can ease her passing. The swifter the better for her."

  "Fireblast! Are all freezies gonna be like this? What's the point of…?"

  "If civilization had not plunged a knife into its own belly, then possibly there might have been advances in laser or even in cryo surgery that could have restored her and then immediately excised the cancer that rips at her brain."

  Ryan whistled softly between his teeth, trying to control his own disappointment. To spend all this time and to hope that there might be something of value from before the long winters… and to find a crazed, dying old woman!

  "What can we do, Doc?"

  "Put a bullet through her brain. Stop her suffering, Ryan Cawdor."

  The screaming continued, unrelenting in its panting harshness.

  "If you don't chill her, Ryan, then I will," Krysty warned.

  Inside the capsule, the woman was becoming more and more restless, her hands reaching up to pluck at the empty air, the tubes straining from her yellowed flesh.

  "Yeah," Ryan agreed, blinking his one good eye. He drew the P-226 blaster from its holster, pausing for a moment. Then he leaned around the open door, reached in and touched the muzzle of the SIG-Sauer to the shaved side of the woman's skull. He squeezed the trigger once.

  With a frisson of almost supernatural horror, Ryan saw the head kick sideways, a chunk of bone exploding on the padded pillow, releasing a flood of watery blood and pinkish brains. The eyes stayed open and the screams continued.

  "How can… ?" he began, feeling a thrill of something that was close to fear—until common sense reasserted itself. The noise of the screams was from behind him, not from the twitching corpse in the cryogenic cubicle.

  "Triple fucking crazie!" Jak shouted. "Look what's doing himself!"

  Krysty was still at the console, this time trying to punch up information on capsule number 3. "Henderson Otis. Age twenty-seven. Auto crash-up. Major brain damage."

  Ryan, J.B., Doc and Lori joined the white-haired teenager in front of the chamber, standing paralyzed by the dreadful sight inside. Fortunately the sec lock hadn't y
et sprung open and Henderson Otis couldn't get at them.

  But that didn't stop him from trying.

  He had clawed his way upright, tottering on shaky legs that were seamed with fresh scars, wrapped in moldering bandages. The wrap-sheet had been torn and kicked away, lying in a crumpled, bloodied heap on the floor.

  All of the feeder and drainer tubes had been ripped from the man's flesh, each one leaving a crimson mouth that dribbled fresh blood. But it was the face-that face and the expression smeared upon it—that held the attention of the five silent watchers.

  The accident that had led to Henderson Otis being frozen against the false hope of a better tomorrow had obviously done hideous damage to his skull. Now his face was pressed right against the glass of the door, disfigured with a slobbering leer of bestial hatred. Almost without realizing it, everyone had drawn their handguns, knowing that if the creature succeeded in liberating itself from the armaglass confines, it would surely attempt to rend them all limb from bloodied limb.

  The teeth were mostly broken off in jagged stumps, and half of the protruding tongue had been sheared away in the crash. The left side of the skull had been stoved in above the ear, above where the ear had once been. The pale skin showed bruises, deep purple, yellowing at the edges. The left eye was closed, invisible behind a slab of puffy flesh.

  As the man scratched at the door, fingernails bent and broken, he made a feline hissing sound through his gnawed lips.

  "Another mercy killing?" Ryan said, hand on the butt of his pistol.

  "I think there is no possible option for us," Doc agreed.

  "Waste of time… recovering a freezie," J.B. commented, shaking his head at the gibbering apparition in front of them.

  "Only about a minute before the armadoor opens," Krysty warned. "Best get ready."

  But Henderson Otis took matters into his own hands, turning away from them, some rudimentary remnant of intelligence making him realize he couldn't get at the six watchers. Picking up one of the sharp-ended glass syringes that had been either nourishing him or drawing off the preserving liquids, he lifted it clumsily in his hands and glanced over his shoulder at the door, half smiling.

  "Thanks, but no thanks," the freezie said, the words quite clear.

  With an inflexible determination Otis lifted the syringe and drove it into his own right eye. Ryan winced, Lori shrieked in horror and Doc gasped. The others were silent.

  A clear fluid spurted, with the faintest subtle tint of pink. Otis grunted, drawing the spike out and ramming it into the bloodied socket once more. The tendons in the wrists stood out with the effort of pushing it clean through the back of the eye into the brain.

  The second attempt was successful. The arms flung wide as though some invisible force was crucifying him. His head snapped forward on the chest, and the corpse slithered to the floor of the chamber. Almost simultaneously there was a loud click of the sec lock opening.

  "Rest in peace," Doc said, bowing his head over his locked fingers.

  "Amen to that," Krysty whispered. "Come on, lover. Let's all get the fuck out of this bastard bone-yard."

  Ryan stood quiet, looking down at the wreckage of what had once been a healthy young man, trying to imagine the long darkness of a hundred years that Henderson Otis had endured, against the hope of being awakened, being resurrected and made hale and complete once more. Had there been consciousness at all? Had any part of the brain remained functioning? Or had it been the dim red glow of smoldering insanity?

  "We'll never know," he said, answering his own question.

  "We going?" Jak asked, shuffling nervously from foot to foot.

  "I want to see sky and trees," Lori said her face as pale as milk.

  "Sounds good to me," Krysty agreed. "Nothing to keep us here."

  "What about the other pods?" J.B. asked. "There's another six or so opening."

  "Leave 'em," Ryan said, more loudly than he'd intended. "I don't want to see any more things like that in there."

  "Could be that we could do another kindness… if any of them are in need of help in passing," Doc suggested.

  The stillness was interrupted by the clicking of another sec lock, which made everyone spin around to be greeted by the weak but steady voice.

  "What's the year? And who… who am I?"

  Chapter Nine

  "RICHARD NEAL GINSBERG, born March 22, 1970. Occupation…" Krysty turned away from the VDT screen. "Just says that his job was listed and sec-coded with a high B classification. That's all we know."

  The freezie was around five-ten in height and seemed to be around 160 pounds. His hair was very dark, cut short, with tight curls. Ryan noticed that his muscle tone was very poor, which could indicate some side effect of the cryogenic treatment, or it could show that Richard Ginsberg had worked in a sedentary job and rarely took much exercise.

  He had been sitting up in his polished capsule, peering out through the glass door. Other than the two short questions, he'd said nothing. He simply lay down again as the six friends moved toward him. Then he fell into what seemed a natural and peaceful sleep.

  Ryan and Jak had lifted him out, winding the crackling sheet of plastic off his naked body. They lowered him carefully onto the floor and covered him with some blankets that Krysty had discovered in a wall closet. In the cubicle, in a green locker, J.B. found what they guessed must have been the freezie's own clothes—laundered underclothes, a gray shirt with a trim collar, a suit in a darker gray material, light fawn socks and tan shoes in imitation leather. The only other item in the locker was a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles.

  Now that they'd actually got themselves a live one, none of the group quite knew what to do with him. In the end they agreed it was best to let him rest peacefully for a while, so that he could sleep off his hundred years of sleep.

  "Wish there was more in the computer about him," Ryan said. "Name, age and a secret job. Not much to go on."

  "When he comes around he can tell us himself, can he not? "Doc asked.

  "Think his brain shitted up," Jak offered.

  "I wouldn't be surprised. I trust that none of you has noticed anything amiss, but there are, confidentially, times that I find my own brain becoming a touch fuzzy at the edges."

  Ryan grinned at the old man. "We never would have guessed if you hadn't told us, Doc." And now that he'd thought about it, Ryan was amazed at how lucid Doc had been since they'd entered the cryo section.

  While they were waiting they checked out the other six capsules that had been activated by the master control. Each of them had been occupied. Five men and one more woman.

  What had happened to them gave a dreadful insight into how experimental the freezing process must have been, and how unreliable were the systems that controlled the thawing out.

  All of them were dead.

  Extremely dead.

  Doc's guess was that somehow the controls had malfunctioned, causing a grotesque speeding up of the unfreezing.

  The flesh seemed to have puddled off the bones in a sludge of instant decay. The cubicles reeked with the warm, sweet scent of rotting meat.

  Fortunately it was possible to keep the capsules hermetically sealed, so that the odor scarcely filtered out into the main control area.

  "It's like opening a domestic freezer in the middle of August," Doc observed, "and finding that the power had been disconnected three weeks earlier. Or like poor Monsieur Valdemar, if that was his name."

  "Who's he, Doc?"

  "Who, Krysty, my dear?"

  "Somebody Valdemar?"

  "Oh, yes. A character in a tale of grue. A man on his deathbed who is miraculously given the blessing of eternal life. But it becomes a curse as he is permanently fixed at the moment of death. He is finally released from this damnation and his body liquefies and rots to nothing in a matter of moments. Rather like those poor devils in those gleaming coffins. Better they should have passed on in a natural way, I think. Far better."

  Richard Ginsberg woke several times,
but never seemed to come all the way back to anything approaching full awareness. He opened his eyes and blinked around, showing only a mild bewilderment at where he might be. But he would almost immediately slide back into sleep.

  Once he spoke. "Thirsty," he said.

  Everyone pulled out small ring-pulls of clean water, and it was Lori who opened one of hers and held it for Ginsberg to sip. He coughed and choked, but managed something that might have been a crooked smile.

  "Probably getting dark soon," J.B. said. "Best get him to the sleepers for the night. Be instant chill to go out into strangeness with him. Any trouble and we're all dead meat."

  Ryan sucked at a tiny hole he'd recently noticed in a back tooth. "Yeah," he agreed reluctantly. "Rather have moved. We're all ready. But you're right, J.B. It'd be self-death if we tried." He looked at the others. "We're going to where we slept last night. We'll take turns carrying the freezie. Let's go, friends. Let's go."

  Ginsberg seemed to be slipping into a deeper sleep, verging on coma. When they got him to the living quarters in the middle of the redoubt, Doc examined him, peeling back his eyelids, finding no response.

  "Shock, maybe. He's becoming catatonic, switching off his mind so he won't have to come to terms with what must be a great disturbance. The alternative, sadly, is that the thawing hasn't worked quite as it should…or we have omitted something important. And poor Mr. Ginsberg is, quite simply, dying."

  "Nothing we can do. Jak's given him some of that soup. Most dribbled right on out again. We've wrapped him warm and snug. Figure someone should stay with him through the night?"

  Krysty's question wasn't answered immediately. Ryan broke the silence. "No. He's next door to us and the partition doesn't run to the ceiling. Jak and J.B. are to the other side. If he makes any noise, one of us'll hear him and wake."

  BY MORNING, Ginsberg looked close to death. His pulse and respiration had both fallen away to critical levels. His skin felt cold, and he failed to respond to any kind of stimulus.