“But there’s no way for you to tell which,” Sam Wasserman said.
“And I wouldn’t want the responsibility of making the evaluation. But a person on the verge of suicide is terminally ill! The Psych people could selectively, secretly, offer us as an avenue of last resort.
“There are a few objections to allowing that, though; sticky ones. Sooner or later, it would become general knowledge. Cynics would claim we were using the patients as human experimental animals, and there would be some truth in that. And at the current state of the art, we would be offering them a kind of Russian roulette, a four-to-one chance of suicide, technically deferred.
“Then there’s the basic human rights problem. If we were to allow cryptobiosis to everybody who declared intent to suicide—which arguably we would have to do if we allowed the first one—we could wind up with a large fraction of the population out of commission. Some of them might be absolutely vital to us in an emergency.”
“And you can’t just thaw them out at will,” Dan said.
“No; it’s a continuous process, a gradual slowdown of metabolism and an even more gradual revivification. Currently it takes at least forty-eight years. And unless we come up with a totally different approach, that number’s not going to change much.”
“I remember the interview with those volunteers in New New,” O’Hara said. “I was about ten years old when they came out of it. That was pretty strange, like people suddenly appearing from your grandparents’ time. Are any of them aboard?”
“Only one, and he works for us. A GP named Horatio Horatio. All the others are dead or were too old to make the trip.”
A man O’Hara didn’t know raised his hand. “Anything unusual about their mortality? Causes, rates?”
“Well, you wouldn’t want to generalize from such a small sample—twelve went in and nine survived—unless they all had died of the same thing, which wasn’t the case. All of them but Double-H were pretty old at the start, which in retrospect was a mistake. But I’m sure all but one lived to be at least ninety, not counting the forty-eight years’ cryptobiosis. One died on Earth, murdered.”
“Did they have any sensation of passing time while they were in the tanks?” Sam asked. “Dreams?”
“It’s hard to separate fact from fancy. A lot of them had more elaborate recollections after they’d had time to think about it and talk to one another.”
“Elaborate?” Sam said.
“One man was very upset. He claimed he could remember every minute of the forty-eight years.”
“I remember him,” O’Hara said. “But it wasn’t true.”
“He was fantasizing, trying to get attention. After a few months he admitted it. But we’d made the mistake of not isolating them from each other—it seemed to make sense to keep them all in the same ward; compare their recovery signs.”
“And this guy’s craziness was infectious?” Sam said.
Hagen nodded. “Or maybe it just jogged people’s memories, to be fair. But people who had initially said it was like a dreamless sleep later came up with descriptions of dreams, even nightmares, that came and went for a half-century.
“It doesn’t seem likely at all, since during suspension there’s almost no electrical activity in the brain. Any normal patient who came up with the signs of a cryptobiote would go straight to the recycle chute. Waking them up is like reviving the dead, except that these are dead people who’ve been specially prepared.”
“I heard they can even survive exposure to vacuum,” O’Hara said.
“The animals have; we never did the experiment on humans. And they can handle ten thousand times as much hard radiation as we can. They’re basically inert. Dried-out mummies.”
“How were they mentally when they came out?” Sam said. “Besides the crazy one.”
“Of course we gave them standardized tests, before and after. They all came in within the predicted standard deviation—even the crazy one. His problem was emotional, not mental. And I’m sure that problem was firmly in place before he volunteered. Getting freeze-dried didn’t cause it.”
Dan checked his watch. “So what would you like us to do for you? Don’t be realistic—if we had all the power people seem to think we have, what could we do?”
Hagen smiled politely, tiredly. “Like everyone, we need more information specialist help. Reconstructing our library. Beyond that… I guess the main thing would be to move us up the totem pole of priorities. Both Engineering and Policy. We’re treated like some exotic biotech specialty—which was true enough before Launch. Now we’re actually more a part of Life Support.”
“I’d go along with that,” said Aaron Busch, Marius Viejo’s assistant director. “If you want, I’ll talk to Marius about a connection at some level—not so close as to give all of us one vote instead of two, but at least some way we could lend you more visibility. Everybody’s always worried about Life Support.”
She hesitated. “I’d appreciate that.”
“Call you tonight after I talk to him.”
Coordinators rarely showed up for these presentations, since they had plenty opportunities to rain on people’s parades without volunteering for more, but there was one woman from Eliot Smith’s office, Kara Lang. “I wish we could help you with the information people,” she said, “but you really are pretty low on the totem pole. Not because we think your work is unimportant. It’s just that in terms of functionality…” She paused, groping for jargon. “The part of your program that’s really important to us overall is that practical lifeboat function. The technology supporting that is completely automated, as you say, and the fact that it’s seventy or eighty years old just increases our confidence in it.”
“But it isn’t adequate! If some emergency forced us into the tanks right now, seventy-five percent of the ones who went in would probably survive—but thousands of people wouldn’t be able to go in; the young and the old. Some of the elderly are our most valuable resources. Your own boss would be a borderline case.”
“I’ll point that out to him. But I know what he’ll say.”
“Women and children first,” Dan said. “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.”
“Something like that.” She pointed at O’Hara. “Marianne, how many information people have you seen in the past two weeks, the past month?”
“None. None since July.”
“See? Now I personally put a high priority on reclaiming Shakespeare and Mozart and Dickens. But we do want to have an audience around to enjoy them. That means that all but a handful of the information people are sweating it out in Engineering. Once all the repair manuals are reclaimed, we can push in other directions.”
It went on like this for some time. O’Hara followed the bickering with interest, but she was more interested in the bickering—good and bad techniques—than the subject matter.’ It wasn’t especially relevant to her personally. Those cryptobiotes that had frightened her as a child, emerging from a half-century’s darkness wrinkled, wet, confused; they had made up her mind about suspended animation.
She would rather take a deep breath and step out the airlock.
3. A MODEST PROPOSAL
15 August 99 [25 Muhammed 295]—I’m not often at a loss for words, but when Sam gave me a present today, I really didn’t know what to say. A beautiful gift.