The Curiosity: A Novel

by Stephen Kiernan

A media crowd loitered in the normally empty foyer, though it was only eight-thirty and we were not initiating till ten. Still, I was part of the nine-thirty briefing, so I signed in at the security desk, hustled to the elevators, swiped my badge, and grabbed the next car. The reporters spotted me, rushing over to shout questions as the doors closed.

  Like that, the morning’s calm evaporated. So the course of the day took shape: my main task would come before the reanimation attempt, turning my collected observations of the frozen man into a profile. My job was to tell everyone who this Subject One was. I’d gathered a few clues, researched several more, believed I had a fair idea of the man and his time.

  Time would reveal that I had only the barest inkling.

  CHAPTER 8

  Procedure Forty-seven

  (Daniel Dixon)

  Why Carthage chose me, I have no idea. There are nine TV crews here, plus the AP and Reuters, and an even dozen newspapers. Wilson Steele from the New York Times, author of two books on cryogenics, flew up from D.C. So did an associate editor from National Geographic, a woman who has stood on both of the planet’s poles, brought there by her own two feet. I am not being modest when I say this is out of my league. These are the heavyweights in my biz, the ones whose employers buy paper by the ton.

  So you should have heard my editor at Intrepid when I told him Carthage was going to use a press pool for the reanimation, and he had chosen yours truly to report for it. All the other media will work from the story I file. No tape recorder allowed, just old-fashioned handwritten notes. A global byline for me, no less. I love it, but I don’t get it.

  The briefing is moving as slowly as a coal train. Granted, we ought to know the science at least superficially. An intro by the techies makes sense. But after all these months of waiting, who can keep still? I’m a kid on Christmas Eve.

  Then who should present next but Dr. Kate, who I haven’t more than glimpsed since our shipboard days. May I say she is as delectable as ever, wearing a forest-green dress, looking slender and strong. Amazing what happens when a woman gets months of ocean salt out of her hair.

  “Here is what we know about the frozen man so far,” Dr. Kate says. Then she calms herself, settles in at the podium like a teacher comfortable with her class. “Some of this is evidence, some is deduction. The curious among you may find it interesting.”

  The projector throws a photo on the screen behind her: that famous outstretched hand, an image now seen round the world. “The partial thaw enabled us to learn a few things,” she continues. “He is male. He has no wounds nor, according to a CT scan, any internal bleeding. He was dressed not like a sailor but like a professional, possibly a ship-owning merchant.”

  Dr. Kate steps away from the podium. “Already these findings raise questions: Why was he on a ship? Where was he going? If he drowned rather than freezing, will that mean a lack of remnant oxygen in his cells, thus no hope of reanimation? Still . . .” She takes a deep breath. “Here’s what intrigued me most.”

  The projector shows a rough gray surface, with a vague shape in the middle. “This is the bottom of his right boot. If we look closer, with sidelighting for contrast—”

  The next slide shows a big C, with wheat sheaves on either side like you see on the back of old pennies. Dr. Kate is smiling now.

  “This image is the trademark of a boot maker. With a little digging, I determined that it belonged to Cronin Fine Footwear. That company, before its factory was destroyed by fire in 1910, was located in Lynn, Massachusetts.”

  “Wait a second,” calls out Toby Shea, a reporter from the Boston Globe. “Are you saying the frozen guy was from around here?”

  She nods. “His boots were, at least.”

  “Could we please desist from referring to Subject One as ‘the frozen guy’?” Carthage has stood up, hand on his belly like a portrait of Henry VIII. “There is historical value in Subject One’s past, but the central concern here is one of science. To wit, thank you, Dr. Philo, and allow me, ladies and gentlemen, to describe what happens now.”

  He has cut her off as if she were a telemarketer calling at supper time. Toby Shea hurries to the back of the room, dialing his cell phone on the way. Carthage launches into an explanation of the reanimation process: how the immersion solution will control melting, how pumping warm oxygen into the subject’s lungs will thaw the interior, and lastly, how a strong magnetic field will lift the electrons of his body to a higher valence.

  “If we are correct,” he says, rubbing his hands together, “if this reanimation works, then we may have also identified the missing ingredient for the origins of life. What caused the primordial ooze to organize itself, all those billions of years ago, into separate objects, with internal coherence, purposes like survival, and a means of reproduction? What started the incredible machine? What was the spark? The great Albert Szent-Györgyi once said, ‘What drives life is a little electric current kept going by the sun.’ If Subject One awakens, however, we might venture that the primary catalyst for the creation of life may not have been electric, but magnetic.”

  His eyes are bright during this part, less clouded by self-regard. Erastus Carthage may be one of the world’s most disagreeable human beings, but when it comes to the science, he is Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays combined. Look, I’ve done my homework since August. Everything he has “ventured”—all the way back to his college thesis about the impact of soy crops on the nitrogen levels in the soil—every goddamn one of his theories has proven correct.

  I hate that my skepticism is weakening. I still can’t stand the guy; he’s as cuddly as a cactus. But here Carthage is giving me a killer byline, a global exclusive, on the story of a career. Also, let’s be honest: it’s still wide open whether this concept can work. Will we end up with some century-old guy who sits up, asking for a cigar and directions to a place where he can take the world’s biggest leak? Or could we find ourselves with a charred carcass that experienced nothing more than postmortem defilement?

  “Dr. Carthage?” It’s Steele, that guy from the Times. “There is growing controversy over your work, from religious conservatives to cell scientists of some standing—notably Sanjit Prakore from the University of Auckland, who was briefly part of your institute. They say you’re being hasty, perhaps even immoral. How would you respond?”

  Carthage shrugs. “They have questions. You have questions. Everyone has questions. Today we will find some answers. The time for unknowns has ended.”

  Then he claps his hands twice, like some sultan calling for a slave girl. Techies, grad students, and postdocs all leap into action. Until this moment he has not acknowledged my presence. Now, with the slightest lift of his chin in my direction, he signals that yours truly should follow him into the control room.

  Goofy Gerber is already in there, Grateful Dead riffing away at top volume. “Not Fade Away.” He spots Carthage and lowers the music, but his grin is mischievous and he’s humming to himself. Could he be high? Did the guy get stoned for the morning’s festivities? Not possible, this business is far too serious. But he jiggles his eyeballs side to side at me, and I have to wonder.

  The room is packed with equipment: monitors, gauges, and enough medical gear to crowd an ICU. There’s also some kind of counting device, with red numbers set at 00:00:00:00. Because of the haste with which things came together, all the wires run straight up into the drop ceiling, so looking across the room requires ignoring the cables and power cords running vertically from every desk.

  The staff physician struts past, a short bearded guy by the name of Borden. I haven’t had a sit-down with him yet, so I toss a softball as he passes. “Hey, doc, what are you expecting today?”

  He halts like a soldier, turns slowly to me. “I expect us to replace God.”

  Not what I was prepared for, is what it was. “Excuse me?”

  “What we do today will render the creation myth obsolete. We are as gods ourselves now.” Off he struts like a rooster ruling the barnyard.

&n
bsp; “Dr. Humility strikes again,” Gerber calls loudly. To everyone else it’s a typical Gerber non sequitur, but I know what he means. That Borden is one arrogant suck.

  I turn the other way, toward the far wall, which is all window. On the other side of the glass—in the temperature-controlled chamber now famous thanks to stories by yours truly—lies a body with a veneer of ice like the plastic of a convertible’s rear window. I can make out his ratty sideburns, the cut of his clothes. The room is sealed, equipment sterilized, and air filtered down to the microns to minimize the infection risk. One modern flu in this guy’s antique immune system, and we could kill him as we wake him.

  Billings is in there, too, wearing surgical scrubs and a mask. He’s checking the bedside gear, marking something on a clipboard. His brow is furrowed like someone hit him with an ax. Definitely not a Gerber attitude, definitely not high.

  The corpse—is that the right word for this thing?—is suspended by straps under its head, torso, and legs, hanging over a vat of salt water. They call it the animating vessel, I call it a tub. A bank of gauges on the wall shows the water’s temperature, salinity, pH, conductivity, viscosity, and a few other things. Old Frank is going to take a great big bath.

  Thomas is running the reanimation, the head honcho’s boy Friday. Nobody ever briefed me on his degrees or credentials. Most days he’s a glorified secretary, but today Carthage put him in charge. What’s that all about?

  Before I can noodle any further, Carthage gives one of those signaling chin lifts. Immediately Thomas pulls a clipboard from his briefcase and calls the room to order. “Subject One reanimation commences now, mark time and date.”

  Technicians along the sidewall all slap counters atop their computer screens. Gerber switches off his tunes.

  I feel the room’s tension, but I do not believe. My parents were beyond saving. Death is final. This is theater, nothing more.

  “Let’s try not to screw this up now, shall we, people?”

  That little motivational speech comes courtesy of Borden, our own lab Napoleon, who makes a little circle with the point of his beard as if to stretch his neck. I read annoyance on faces all over the control room.

  Thomas takes a pen and checks the first item on his clipboard. “Procedure one: begin oxygen pump.”

  Gerber pulls his crazy hair back from his face, sucks a hissing in-breath through his teeth, then presses a button. A compressor begins moving beside the body, an old-fashioned ventilator with visible bellows. From the machine, a tube runs into a black box that contains a heating coil. From there it snakes into Frank’s mouth, taped into place, and I don’t know how far in it goes. The bellows contract, the dead guy’s ribs rise. The bellows expand, his chest falls. It’s all machine, but still it’s spooky to see his body move. Through the audio feed we can hear flakes of ice dropping to the floor. Billings hovers over the body. Any skin newly exposed, he swipes dry and attaches electrodes.

  “Procedure two: fifty percent immersion.”

  Dr. Kate works two handles by the sidewall, and the straps lower Frank’s body into the salty bath. She stops when the water is even with his ears. Again Billings places sensors; on one of the screens I see him reaching inside the dead guy’s shirt. A gauge says the water temperature is 104 degrees. Hot-tub time.

  Thomas continues with procedures, item after item. It sounds somewhere between a laundry list and a recipe for baked Alaska—complicated, but maybe delicious. I pay partial attention as he drones on, procedures nineteen through forty-four. They take maybe two minutes each, a few run longer. Mostly I’m concentrating on the cameras. One shows Frank’s hands, another his face, still another his torso. If anything happens with this body, if anything changes, we will see it and the videos will capture it. A notion occurs to me then, the difference between a Frank and a Subject One: The first kind is a person who deserves some privacy. The second kind is a lab object that is not going to receive it. This is definitely not private. The guy could wake up and shit himself, and we’d all be right there watching, his every grunt and grimace immortalized on video.

  “Procedure forty-five.” Thomas is grinning like a jack-o’-lantern. “Commence magnetic field.”

  A technician near Gerber turns a large black dial. “Done,” he tells Thomas.

  Gerber turns to me. “Remember magnets when you were a kid?”

  “Excuse me?” I say. For nearly two hours, no one has been speaking but Thomas.

  “Remember?” Gerber says. “How you’d try to force the ends that didn’t like each other to touch anyway? My family had these colorful letters of the alphabet, for the fridge, right? Those little suckers had surprisingly strong aversion to one end of the other letters. That’s what we’re doing now with the electrons in this guy’s body. Pushing the magnetic dislike.” He sniffs. “I know it’s complicated science, but I keep thinking about those fridge letters.”

  “Gerber,” I reply, “sometimes you are one spacey dude.”

  He laughs, then sings quietly. “Friend of the devil is a friend of mine.”

  “Procedures forty-six and seven,” Thomas continues as if he hasn’t heard us. “Commence electric signal and initiate reanimation clock.”

  And there, far down the aisle of desks with their climbing wires, Dr. Christopher Borden flips a light switch on the board in front of him, then another, then another, down a long row of them. He stops with four switches left.

  There’s a low hum, and a meter jumps on the gauge before us. Carthage is staring at the floor. Dr. Kate covers her mouth with both hands. We wait.

  I watch those video screens. Zilch. The only change is that the last of the ice has melted, and we see his face at last. It’s thin, hungry-looking, and blue as if it were bruised. His lips are pursed, like he died in the middle of an argument. It strikes me again: this is a dead man. I know the look, believe me. He is just as gone as Mom and Dad on the lawn that night with the house in flames behind them, and me on my knees sucking air like a sprinter. You could fill the room with flowers and play Jimmy Durante’s greatest hits, it won’t change a thing: this experiment is being performed on a dead guy.

  The electronics hum, the ventilator wheezes, the clock counts. Nada.

  Thomas casts his eye up and down the procedure list. Carthage reads the gauges one by one. Gerber sits back in his chair, hands behind his head. We wait. Nothing.

  Thomas coughs, kicks weakly at the air. “Hell.”

  “Patience,” Carthage says. “We’ve waited decades. We can withstand a few minutes more.”

  Abruptly he turns to Borden, who tilts his head back as if he’s been asked a difficult question. Carthage clears his throat. “Doctor?”

  Borden blinks slowly, like an owl. “You should know, we’re nearing the ceiling.” He flips another switch, then one more. “Anything above that, you’re not going to want what wakes up anyway.”

  Which makes me wonder why he designed a system with those two remaining switches in the first place.

  Carthage turns back to the gauges. We wait.

  And there it is, the faintest thing: a beep.

  No one needs to tell me what it means. Another fifteen seconds pass, and we hear it again. One beep. Carthage nods at Thomas, who uses a remote to start the red counting device. One second passes, two, five, while the numbers to the left stay at 00:00 and the ones to the right blur through tenths and hundredths of a second. A device beside the clock reads 4 bpm. The EKG oscilloscope shows one set of the peaks and valleys of a heartbeat. Now there are two beeps and a silence, and the reading is 6 bpm.

  Carthage has his eyes closed, one fist against his chest, like a conductor in a moment of orchestral bliss. A flurry of beeps, the reading is 12 bpm, then silence. I’m watching the clock, jotting in my notebook when each beep occurs. But there are no more. Dr. Kate goes to the window, peering in on the motionless body. The silence stretches: half a minute, forty-five seconds, a minute.

  Carthage opens his eyes. “Dr. Borden?”

  “Ther
e is a risk.”

  “Which is?”

  Borden clasps his hands like he’s making here’s-the-church. “We could . . . possibly . . . set him on fire.”

  “I am listening,” Billings calls into the audio feed. “Good morning, gents, the man in the oxygen-saturated room is paying attention here.”

  Carthage ignores him. “How high would we be going?”

  Borden runs his eyes down the row of switches. “This would be—I’m approximating here—about the voltage of an electric-chair execution.”

  Dr. Kate spins with her mouth open, but Carthage speaks before she can: “Proceed.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Thomas speaks up: “Dr. Carthage is always sure.” And Carthage gives the slightest revelation of a smile.

  “Really would hate to get roasted alive, you know.” Billings backs away from the tub, edging toward the door. “This is safe, right, lads?”

  “You bet,” Gerber mutters. “If you like toasted marshmallows.”

  And Borden throws the next switch.

  The electric hum grows louder. The video feed shows water around Frank jiggling as though it were about to boil.

  Dr. Kate shakes her head. “This cannot be right—”

  But the beeping starts again. It’s stronger, the oscilloscope shows regular peaks and valleys, the counter reads 31 bpm.

  “We’re getting blood pressure,” calls a postdoc whose desk faces the wall. The lights of his screen are reflected in his glasses. “Fifty over thirty-two.”

  “Amazing,” whispers Dr. Kate, and I watch her return to the window beside Frank’s body. She touches two fingers to the glass. “This is a miracle.”

  Carthage frowns at her. The beeps gain steadiness: 44, 54, 61 bpm.

  “Dr. Carthage, we’re at ninety over sixty-six. And steady.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Carthage declares, “we have reanimation.”

  Everyone roars. There is loud cheering, clapping of hands. Gerber yells “woo-hoo” and spins himself careening on his chair. Borden lets out a whoop: “We did it!” Billings puts two fingers in his mouth and whistles as loud as a fan at a hockey game. Thomas pumps Carthage’s hand like he’s a politician who just won an election. “Congratulations, sir. Congratulations.”