The deglycerolization process hadn’t changed much in almost a hundred years and involved three basic steps: first, the units were thawed at a steady forty degrees Celsius; next the units were diluted with 12 percent sodium chloride and also washed with solutions of gradually decreasing hypertonic strength; and, last, the deglycerolized red cells were suspended in an isotonic electrolyte solution containing glucose to nourish the red cells. All of this took time: Ronica did not think she would be in a position to infuse Gates for at least another three to four hours, at which point, Dallas and Cavor ought to be back on board the Mariner and in need of infusions themselves. But none of them — Gates, Cavor, Dallas — needed blood more than Lenina, who was very close to death. Ronica doubted that any amount of whole blood could save her now.
Gates himself never complained. He lay on a hammock next to Lenina, holding her small white hand in his larger and almost as pale fist. Ronica, trying to keep his spirits up, kept him informed of what she was doing.
‘At least I won’t have to waste time screening this blood for antibodies,’ she told him. ‘I’m absolutely sure that there’s nothing in these components that’s as bad as the clinically significant bugs you already have.’
‘Join the club,’ whispered Gates. ‘We’re one blood you and I. It’s like we’re married now. Everything I have is yours.’ He smiled. ‘And I mean everything.’
‘I still haven’t thanked you for giving me a life-threatening disease.’
‘Forget it.’
‘I wish I could. I must admit, it’s been kind of on my mind.’
‘You’ll learn to live with it.’
‘God, I hope not.’
‘A lot of people do, you know. How’s that component coming along?’
‘Be a while yet.’
‘Never had an infusion before. Comes to that, I never gave blood before. It made me feel good.’
‘I guess we’ve lost that forever,’ said Ronica. ‘As a race.’
‘Maybe. If Dallas and Cavor pull this thing off, you know what I think we should do with all that blood?’
‘Don’t tell me you want to drink it.’
‘I think we should just give it away. Just carry out our own private infusion program.’
Ronica gave a wry smile. ‘Hypovolemia’s starving your brain of oxygen and making you sentimental. Give away billions of dollars’ worth of blood? You’ve got to be joking. You can give away your share if you want, but me, I’m selling mine on the red market. I didn’t sign on for this little enterprise just to win my reward in heaven. I want mine now, in credits and cash. If you’ve got your health, then money’s all there is, my friend. Nothing else really matters in this life but life itself and its enjoyment. What the hell else is there? What the hell else could there possibly be?’
VIII
You can never know everything about a quantum state. That was what Dallas had said, quoting Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Too damn right. Working inside the containment room, uncertain was precisely the way Cavor felt. Because it was only too easy to picture the atoms that constituted the tissue of his own body, ionized and excited by their invisible encounter with all the fast electrons, ejected protons, gamma photons, and captured neutrons that filled the room. Even as Cavor waited for Dallas to burn a tiny hole in the smart mortar at each corner of the concrete block and, having located the heat-conducting wire, make four connections onto another length of wire he had previously isolated inside a sealed tube of liquid nitrogen, Cavor found himself glancing nervously at the TLD he wore on the sleeve of his space suit, wondering what quantum chemical changes were occurring in his bone marrow and blood-forming cells. Only five minutes they’d been in there and already he’d absorbed one hundred and fifty centigrays, enough to cause a fall in his white blood cell count and, as a corollary, his body’s ability to fight off infection. In cases of radiation sickness it was most often some kind of infection that killed you. Just thinking about that made Cavor feel nauseous, and he asked himself if, when the time came, he would be able to distinguish mere discomfort and fear from the nausea and sickness that Dallas had predicted for them as the first identifiable somatic effects of radiation exposure.
With all four corners connected, the heat would now be conducted through the length of wire inside the tube of liquid nitrogen. Dallas severed the wire in the smart mortar with a short burst of electrons from his UHT gun.
‘Now it’s just dumb mortar, like any other,’ he said, and checking his dose rate, he pointed Cavor to the left-hand side of the concrete block. ‘You work on that side, and I’ll take the right.’
Cavor hardly hesitated. Taking his UHT gun in his prosthetic hand — this was now stronger and steadier than his natural hand — he held it to within a couple of inches of the mortar and squeezed the handle, focusing a series of heated electrons onto the vertical target area. The irony of what they were doing was not lost on him.
‘As if there aren’t enough boiling electrons and X rays in this room already,’ he grumbled.
Dallas said nothing. Unlike Cavor, he found it difficult to hold the UHT’s bright blue beam steady down the vertical line of the mortar, and after only a minute or two, he had to stop and rest for a few seconds. Glancing at Cavor’s better progress, he remarked upon it.
‘Seems like you’re just cut out for this kind of work, Cav. I had hoped you might be. And to be quite frank, we’ll need every bit of strength in that arm of yours to push out that block.’ Dallas took up his UHT gun and started work once more.
Such was the concentrated strength in his arm that Cavor could keep on firing an electron beam into the mortar while glancing briefly at his TLD. ‘Two hundred and ninety centigrays,’ he reported.
‘Don’t think about it. Put it out of your mind.’
‘Be a lot easier if I could put it out of my body.’ Inside his EVA suit, Cavor felt the sweat dripping off his face and running down his back like a rogue atom. The space fridge and the refrigerated electric car were already a distant, pleasant memory. ‘I wish I could wipe my face. It’s as hot as hell in here.’
‘That’s not the reactor, and it’s not radiation,’ Dallas said, trying to reassure his partner. ‘It’s the steam generator. It’s just like a hot-water tank.’ Shaking his head inside his helmet to dislodge a dewlap of perspiration from the tip of his nose, Dallas caught sight of his own TLD reading. Three hundred and ten centigrays. A lethal dose to an untreated 30 percent of people.
‘Done this vertical,’ declared Cavor. ‘I’ll take the upper horizontal. It’s at times like these I’m glad I’ve got this false arm. Only don’t you get ideas about it having any superhuman strength. My arm feels good. Since I started taking those pills of yours, it feels better than the real one, maybe. More easily controlled, certainly. But for pushing a dead weight, Gates’s arm would have done the job just the same.’
‘We’ll see about that,’ said Dallas. ‘Moving dead weight’s always a lot easier than shifting it for the first time. Even on the Moon. It requires a more applied kind of strength. The smallest force to overcome static friction between two surfaces at rest is always greater than the force required to continue the motion, or to overcome kinetic friction.’