Second Ending (3 page)

Five minutes later Ross was between the sheets, which turned out to be of fine, woven plastic. Their only sign of age was a tendency toward yellow in places. He tried to sleep but his curiosity kept him awake. The green folder, which he had brought along and hidden under his pillow, lay a few inches from his hand. In those unread pages he might find the answer to everything or he might be thrown into worse confusion. He was sure that the contents of the folder would do nothing to increase his peace of mind. But Ross was beginning to be afraid again and he wanted to do everything possible to find out exactly what he feared.

Groaning, he levered himself to one elbow, drew out the folder and began to read.

Immediately following the 508s which he had already studied there was a two-page instructional circular dealing with the transfer of staff to the extension of the five-mile level. This would be devoted to the study of non-sterile mutations. Two Doctors and four Sisters were listed by name and there was a note stating that owing to the shortage of staff the cleaners would also serve as nursing orderlies and be allowed to administer simple courses of treatment without supervision. Dated March, 2062, the circular was signed by Dr. Pellew.

The next five sheets dealt primarily with the reorganization due to the shortage of staff and covered a period of about twenty years. Apparently some of the wards were then operating with just a Sister and two Cleaners. In addition to the cleaning and maintenance work, these people, who had once been considered the lowliest members of the staff, were being given increasingly responsible duties with regard to the patients. They had become Cleaners with a capital C, like Doctors and Sisters.

Ross's mind was bursting with questions. He turned quickly to the next page, hoping that the answers to some of them might be there.

Two short paragraphs, in bold type and underlined, practically shouted up at him.

During the Emergency all sections shall be rendered self-contained and self-sufficient. Transfer of staff, food, medical supplies and servomechanisms is forbidden. Penalty for contravening this regulation, regardless of circumstances, is exclusion from the home section. Con-tact between sections shall be by intercommunication phone only.

All Deep Sleep patients with a favorable prognosis shall be transferred immediately to the Non-sterile Mutations section. Patients to be transferred are…

A list of case numbers followed, Ross's being one of them.

So there had been an Emergency. Ross didn't like the sound of that at all. His hand was shaking with more than fatigue when he turned that page over.

There followed four closely typed pages which were the minutes of a meeting held by all the medical staff of the section, dated 6th July, 2071, Dr. Hanson presiding. Under discussion were the new techniques for treating patients while actually in the Deep Sleep state. The only drawback was that the new treatment required many decades to effect a cure, and, with the exception of Dr. Hanson, who had been born in the section, all the Doctors were men in their sixties. They were therefore faced with the problem of reviving nearly thirty Deep Sleep patients in fifty-odd years later, at which time they themselves would have long since been dead.

The only possible answer was for the Doctors to go into suspended animation also until the time when their patients were due to be revived. However, at least one Doctor would have to remain awake to supervise and to continue with some of the more promising lines of research, which, if they were lucky, might result in cures for all of their suspended patients. A timetable of twenty years asleep and two awake was suggested, with a three-month overlap to allow the newly awakened Doctor to take over the reins. Being the youngest of the group, Dr. Hanson asked that his waking term be extended to five years, as he was working on a line which might produce a cure for the heart condition which had forced their previous director to undergo suspended animation. They must agree that if Dr. Pellew could be cured and revived, his help would be invaluable. Mention was made of the psychological dangers present in the scheme, and methods suggested for guarding against them, and the report ended with discussion of the staff problem. It was decided to give Cleaners more responsibility and allow the Ward Sisters the right to diagnose, treat and perform limited surgery.

Staring unseeingly at the page, which was the last one, Ross thought, And so endeth the first lesson. For that was what it had been. Unbalanced, over-short, composed of medical charts and instructional circulars, but withal a history lesson designed to help him fit into a strange present.

Something caught in his throat as he thought of those wonderful old men, forced by their short life expectancy to spread out their remaining years to carry the torch of their knowledge across two centuries, in a relay race against time. And young Hanson had been successful, because the circular was dated 2071 and Dr. Pellew had signed one of his 508 forms in 2233.

Suddenly he began to feel the stirrings of hope. A wild, exciting and purely selfish hope. The record had made no reference to nursing staff, but presumably they would have had to go into Deep Sleep also. Suppose one of them was Alice…

The lights went out.

His brain froze in mid-thought and the cold sweat broke on his forehead, hands and at the small of his back. Without knowing why exactly, Ross was terrified. In vain he tried to tell himself that the lights had gone out to let him sleep, that there was nothing frightening about that. But this darkness was absolute, a negation of light which was possible only when all power has gone five miles underground. Ross had left his room door open in the hope that anyone passing would notice and maybe call in; it was just as dark in the corridor. The folder slid to the floor and he lay motionless, his heart banging deafeningly in his ears and teeth jammed together to keep them from chattering.

Then, above the relative din of his racing pulse, he heard movements from the corridor outside.

It was a soft, regular, thumping sound accompanied by a gentle sighing. Outside his door it stopped briefly, then grew louder as it entered his room. Ross strained his eyes desperately into the blackness, trying to give shape and substance to the blotchy retinal images which slid about in the darkness. The faint sighing and thumping seemed to be moving about the center of the room, and he could hear some small objects being lifted or laid down, quietly. The sounds were quiet but, somehow, not stealthy. Whoever was making them knew what he was doing, and could see very well in the dark. Undoubtedly they could see him. Any second now they would come over to his bed…

"Who… who's there?" said Ross.

"Ward Sister," replied a voice out of the blackness, a pleasant, impersonal and unmistakably feminine voice. "You are doing fine, Mr. Ross. Now go to sleep."

The sounds moved toward the door without approaching his bed and began to fade along the corridor. The door leading onto the ramp slid open and closed, and a few seconds later the lights blinded him.

Ross lay back and shielded his eyes until they became used to the lights again. Four self-heating food containers had been placed beside Beethoven, but otherwise nothing had changed in the room. He pulled the sheets up to his chin and relaxed for the first time since his revivication. Weariness made his mind work slowly, but the mental processes were clear and logical. At last he was beginning to make sense out of the mad puzzle facing him, and the Sister who had visited him in complete darkness was the key incident, he thought.

Beethoven, his case history, a Sister who could see extremely well in pitch-blackness…

The most urgent problem when Ross had gone into Deep Sleep had been the sharply declining birthrate, and according to the contents of the folder the problem had worsened steadily. Staff shortage was mentioned on every page. Human life had become a rare and precious thing — so rare, perhaps, and so very precious, that the meaning of the word had widened somewhat. Devoted to the study of non-sterile mutations… Ross thought. That might explain Sister's extraordinary eyesight, and her visit under a cloak of darkness. They didn't want to shock him, possibly risk driving him insane, by confronting him too suddenly with what the human race had become. That had to be the answer. They were breaking it to him gently, giving information by indirect means, even to the extent of supervising his revivication at a distance.

Ross thought that he was prepared for the shocks now. He probably wouldn't like them, but he wouldn't be terrified or disgusted by them. And if things got tough he could always console himself with the reminder that there were a few real, old-time human beings still in suspended animation. One of them might even be Alice.

The one piece of the puzzle which did not fit his theory was the nightmares. There had been two of them, almost identical, and he still had the conviction that they had occurred after, or at least during, the process of awakening. Thick metal bars pressing down on his head, chest, abdomen and legs. Others crushing his arms into his sides, jamming his legs together, threatening to squeeze in the sides of his skull. Fighting to escape that vicious, inexorable pressure, struggling desperately to see, to move, to breathe. But he could not see, he could only feel and hear: the savage construction of uncaring metal, and an irregular ticking sound…

Until that gap in the picture was filled, Ross thought, he would feel very uncomfortable about going to sleep. He was uneasily wondering who had introduced an Iron Maiden into the hospital when sleep sneaked up on him.

Ross awoke hungry. His first act was to remedy that condition, and he was lucky in that only one of the four food containers had spoiled. While the air conditioner was dispersing the stench of two-hundred-year-old soup, he moved across to his clothes locker and began to dress. His next action must be to go out and find somebody, the Doctor in charge, Sister, anybody, and while the sight of his unclothed body was unlikely to shock any member of the hospital staff, having a few clothes around him would boost his morale considerably.

He hadn't realized just how few clothes that would be.

His socks and underwear fell apart when he tried to get into them, his shirt had gone brittle and cracked when he forced his head into it, and the elastic in his shoes had ceased to be. The slacks were in good condition — they were all wool and had been rather an extravagance in a day of largely synthetic clothing — but his belt came to pieces in his hands. And his hips had shrunk so much that they refused to hold them up. Ross swore, feeling ridiculous.

One of the other lockers contained the woven plastic sheets, he discovered after a brief search. He opened out one of them and began to work at the middle of it with his teeth until he had a hole that he could get his fingers into. The stuff wasn't easy to tear. When the hole was big enough he put his head through it and let the sheet fall down around his shoulders. It came almost to his knees. Working his arms free, he tore one of the pillow coverings into strips, tied one around his waist and made two others into figure-eight bandages which held the shoes on his feet. In the locker mirror the effect wasn't too bad, he thought, but it needed something. A turban, maybe, or a chaplet of laurel leaves?