“But is he alive now?” asked Art. He hurried to join her. He felt sure that Dana was not going to risk opening the drawer.
He was right. “You tell me,” she said, and stood warily by as he opened the catch. “I don’t smell anything bad.”
“Because he’s not dead!” Art watched the slow rise and fall of a naked chest, then looked down the long aisle as Seth approached to give them more light. “The trickle supply system must still be working. What now?”
“Put him back. Tough for him, but we’re not here on a prisoner humanitarian release program. He’ll have to take his chances.”
“I didn’t mean that.” Art closed the drawer and tagged the latch. “My question was, how do we find Oliver Guest? He should be somewhere on this level with the other maximum sentences.”
“Unless he’s already been taken,” Seth said.
“Why would anyone except us do that?” But Art was following the beam of Seth’s flashlight, and now he saw it, too. A drawer, all the way along, was open and empty.
“We knew somebody was here before us,” Dana said. “We shouldn’t be surprised.”
“And they weren’t after Guest. That’s good news.” Seth had moved along to examine the ID on the other drawer. “The name’s sort of familiar but I can’t place it. Who the devil is Pearl Lazenby?”
“I don’t know. Whoever she is, she should have been iced down for a long time.” Art pointed to the date. “2670. Somebody didn’t want her around for a while. She’s out of here way ahead of time.”
“She was the leader of that big religious group,” Dana said. “The Legion of Argos. Her people didn’t use her real name much, that’s why you didn’t recognize it. They called her ’The Eye of God’ and they said she could foresee the future.”
“That woman!” Seth closed the drawer. “Then she oughta be in here forever. Her group killed a ton of people. It wasn’t a religion, it was a cult.”
“Your cult, my religion. The Legion of Argos certainly got one thing right. They prophesied a coming disaster.” Art unwrapped the cloth from his face. “I think we can manage without these — even you, Dana.
But our problem isn’t solved. How do we find Oliver Guest?”
“The hard way. We look at every drawer.” Seth started walking. “Come on.”
Art did the arithmetic as he followed. Eleven thousand prisoners in judicial sleep at this facility. Twelve levels occupied. They might have to examine close to a thousand IDs if the prisoners were spread evenly.
But what better way to spend your time? Art walked behind the other two in silence, up and down each aisle, checking to make sure nothing was missed.
Five aisles covered, out of a total of ten. They crossed to the other side. A sixth, and Art began to wonder what they would do next. Without Oliver Guest the last hope of telomod therapy was gone.
“Jackpot,” Seth said. He was leading, and he spoke so softly and casually that Art, ten yards behind, had no strong reaction. It was Dana’s gasp and cry of excitement that brought him hurrying to join them.
“How about that.” Seth was cranking furiously, and his light pointed straight at the ID plate.
Art read the inscription. 12-0456-97. Dr. Oliver Samuel Guest. 2621. Below it were handwritten words. You are a monster. May all your dreams be nightmares, your final hours agony, and may you rot in hell forever.
“Not too popular with somebody,” Seth said. “And now the real question. Dana, want to do the honors?”
The body drawer was six feet off the ground. Dana stood on tiptoe, opened the front panel, and peered in. “He’s alive!”
“And we have to make sure he stays that way. Seth and I will have to loan him clothes, otherwise he’ll freeze.” Art stared around in the gloom. “There must be special equipment to lower the drawer to the ground. But I don’t see it, and chances are it’s not working.”
“We’ll have to do it ourselves.” Seth began to reach up, then paused. “I was gonna say, we bring the drawer out all the way an’ lower it between us. But that’s too risky. Suppose the drawer weighs five hundred pounds? We’d drop it an’ kill him.”
“Dana will have to stand on our backs and unplug him. Then — if the publicity about somnol and judicial sleep isn’t one big pack of lies — he ought to wake up without any action on our part. And then we can roll him off and lift him down.”
“Yeah. And then it gets really interesting.” Seth leaned over, placing the top of his head against the bank of closed drawers. “I’m ready. Your move, Dr. Frankenstein. Wake the monster.”
Dana hesitated. “Do I just unhook everything?”
“We don’t know. I guess so. He shouldn’t need any life-support system once he’s awake.” Art was also bent and waiting. “Use your good judgment.”
“Right.” She placed one foot into Seth’s cupped hands and scrambled onto their backs. “Though I’m not sure ’good judgment’ applies at all if you wake up a man who killed eighteen people.”
Dana inspected Oliver Guest with the aid of Seth’s little flashlight. His nude body was festooned with monitor cables and sensors and tubes, but after the horror of Desmond Lota’s bloated corpse he looked reassuringly normal. He might have been simply sleeping. True, his skull was hairless, and his skin cool to her touch, but the muscles beneath had atrophied little during his five-year coma. The electronic stimulator apparently worked as advertised.
The spray delivery system worked through skin osmosis, and those attachments were easily removed. So were the twin tubes at the corner of Guest’s closed mouth and the sensor at his left eyeball. The harness that held and rotated Guest’s body ought to be easy, too; she could just undo the straps. The urethral catheter would be straightforward, and the anal peristaltic activator was already uncoupled from the body. Guest was lucky. Had the gamma pulse arrived during the once-a-month period when that device was in the rectum and operating, he would now undoubtedly be dead.
The six IVs were another matter. They entered veins at both elbows, at the hips, above the navel, and on one side of the neck. The skin around the six slender tubes was red and slightly puffy. She wasn’t sure how to remove them to do the least damage.
One of the two backs she was standing on moved a little under her foot. “How’s it goin’ up there?” Seth said from his head-down position below her. “You makin’ progress?”
“I’m going as fast as I can. I don’t want to kill him.”
“That’s all very well.” It was Art, wheezy and muffled. “But you’re damn near killing us. You should have taken your boots off.”
“A bit late to tell me. Hang in there.” Dana made her decision. She had hesitated because she wasn’t sure what to do. Waiting added no information. She unstrapped the harness and opened it, then pulled out the urethral catheter. It seemed to come out forever, but maybe that was normal for a man. Oliver Guest would probably scream the next time he had to pee. From everything she had heard, he deserved that and worse.
The IVs gave the most cause for concern. She tugged delicately at the one in his left elbow vein, and it didn’t move.
No time for niceties. She yanked harder until it came free.
Blood? She bent low. A few drops but nothing to worry about. They would wipe him later, once he was off the drawer.
She removed the other IVs, wincing a bit when the tube in his navel came out snaking and bloodied for a foot and a half. Where had it been connected, and what did it deliver or remove?
Oliver Guest should be able to tell her, he was a doctor. But first he had to survive and waken from the coma. Was there any change in the infinitesimal rise and fall of the chest? She couldn’t see one, though in principle the process of awakening had already begun.