Vital Parts (17 page)

But was it not, on the other hand, futile to question the origin of power? The Church had gone to seed when petty monks began to discuss how many angels might perch on a pinpoint.

“Do you think,” he asked Sweet, “that he might rejuvenate me?”

Sweet's chuckle was elastic and liquid—as if in fact he were chewing those gumdrops of Reinhart's chronological youth called Chuckles.

“Hans will be glad to freeze you,” he answered.

6

Streckfuss pronounced his name in the German fashion. “Shtreckfooss,” said he, clicked his heels, and raised and lowered Reinhart's hand once only before dropping it. He wore an ankle-length white laboratory coat and stood in the foreground of a room full of rectangular devices along with vessels of glass. But nothing revolved or whirred; there were no jacob's ladders of electrical sparks, no scurrying troglodytes or other props of horror movies. However, the lab was rather cold, and Streckfuss had on a sweater beneath the gown, a currently fashionable one, in fact, with a turtleneck of wool around his skinny column of tendons.

“
Enchanté
,” said he to Reinhart. To Sweet he said: “
Alors?
”

Reinhart peered down at Streckfuss' carrot nose, pitted cheeks, swarthy coloring, hectic, thick black hair, obsidian eyes which darted lizardlike up the fat bluff of Reinhart's front, froze briefly on his Adam's apple, and scampered down.

“Were you ever in Berlin?” Reinhart asked.

“
Jamais
.”

Sweet explained: “Hans is fluent in English except when he's very tired.”

“
Jamais
means ‘no,' doesn't it?” Reinhart asked them both, but it was Streckfuss who answered.

“Neffer,” said he, showing a line of chipped yellow teeth. He grimaced at Reinhart, still denying him his eyes.

“Hans has an understandable bias against Germans,” Sweet said.

“I certainly meant no insult,” Reinhart told the little scientist. “I expect the world is full of lookalikes.”

Streckfuss shrugged in a typical French gesture, at least in Hollywood movies, and made the typical French grunt. It sounded authentic enough. The fact remained however that Streckfuss looked and moved exactly like a strange little German Reinhart had known almost a quarter-century before while serving in the Occupation of the Teutonic capital; a person named Schatzi.

Streckfuss said to Sweet: “II
est très gras, hein?
”

Sweet smiled or winced. “Well,” he said in a bluff voice, “here we are, Carl. What do you think of our facilities?”

Outside, the building was an oblong of tile-faced cinderblock, ironically resembling a local crematorium which it had been Reinhart's duty to accompany his father's casket to. “I don't want to corrupt six feet of good earth,” always considerate Dad had said once long ago, hence his disposal by fire. “He would have wanted this,” said Maw as they sat side by side in a little chapel above the furnace.

“Very impressive,” Reinhart said now, in the layman's ritual awe. He nodded at the nearest panel of dials set in white enamel, then to a stainless-steel table full of glassware, and made an inept joke, but he was nervous for some reason. “Looks like a dairy.”

Streckfuss' violent laugh suggested a lung condition, then ceased abruptly, and he scuttled away as if on casters.

Sweet spoke confidentially to Reinhart: “He's a bit eccentric.”

Reinhart shivered slightly in the coolness. In the brief intervals between air-conditioned buildings and cars he had as usual exuded copious perspiration, which felt as if it were now icily coagulating. There were also inhuman odors abroad in this lab. In high-school general science he and fun-loving pals had doctored both milk-specimens with formaldehyde, corrupting an experiment supposed to demonstrate the preservative function of that fluid, the effectiveness of which could be measured only by the presence of an untreated example which soured. Neither half pint went bad for weeks. The dopey teacher kept tasting them, yet stayed unpoisoned. But Reinhart could well remember the first time he saw him doing it.

He thought of this now, perhaps because of the dairy reference, but what he said to Sweet, also sotto voce, was: “The damnedest thing. He's a dead ringer for this German I knew.”

Sweet said: “If it was so long ago, your German would have changed in appearance by now.”

“Of course,” Reinhart said. “That did not occur to me.”

Streckfuss was perched on a high stool at an enamel counter emanating from the wall. Before him was a sort of rectangular glass fishtank from which sprouted many wires and tubes. From Reinhart's perspective these squirmy lengths seemed to grow from Streckfuss' own head, transforming him into a Gorgon. Away down at the far end of the windowless room a large metal cylinder, shaped like a space capsule, lay on its side in a wooden cradle. It claimed Reinhart's gaze because it was the thickest horizontal in his perspective. Everything else was tenuous, fragile, or polished blandly dumb like the tile walls. A man of his bulk felt uneasy in an enclosure full of wires and glassware, and Sweet stood there smiling at him inscrutably.

Suddenly he understood the function of the capsule.

“That's to hold the first frozen person, right?”

Sweet walked smartly down the corridor between the gimcracks of science, and Reinhart trailed him. It seemed to take forever to get there, and he sensed that on the way he passed bits of organic matter under glass.

Sweet thumped the tank with the heel of his hand. “A rocket ship into Time.” The tank ominously replied with a boilerlike
clang
, rather less than hollow.

Reinhart blanched. “Good God,” he said. “Is something or someone in there?”

“Not yet, worse luck.” Sweet struck it again. “It is of necessity very thick, and the welds must be perfect. You wouldn't think, would you, that the program might hinge on the craft of a welder? Rather like the battle lost because the blacksmith forgot to put the nail in the shoe of the general's horse, etcetera. Young men aren't going into that trade any more, and the old welders tend to be pretty slipshod. Precision has been on the wane in all areas. But we are talking about a tank that must hold up for centuries. That means a perfect seal. The tiniest leak would be disastrous.”

“Something I wanted to ask you, Bob. A pretty obvious consideration, really.” Reinhart was about to lean on the tank but thought better of it on grounds of taste. “What if the power goes off, as it might at some point in that period of time? Remember the great New York blackout of some years ago? There go your frozen bodies out the window.” Or into a cocked hat. He regretted his choice of jargon and sought to make up for it with passion. He struck the tank with a heavy fist. Very obdurate walls. Hit a Detroit fender that hard and you'd be through to the tire.

Sweet leaned comfortably against the capsule, crucifying his arms. His french cuffs were monogrammed. His initials were the beginning letters of RSVP, Reinhart realized pointlessly. Sweet's attitude was boyish. He seemed to have a personal feeling for the tank. He turned his hands over and stroked its curving sides as one might caress the globed surface of a woman.

“But no power is used, Carl. I forget you know almost nothing about the process. This is not a home-style deep-freeze full of Birds-eye products which spoil when a storm brings down the high-tension lines. The body will be immersed in either liquid nitrogen or liquid helium.” He frowned. “Did I not mention that on the
Alp Show?
We are talking of temperatures so low—well, let me say this by way of negative example. It has been suggested that when the program achieves public acceptance we might run out of space in which to store bodies. Also demand may at first exceed the supply of tanks and refrigerants. Therefore, could we not store some frozen people in Siberia or, better, the Antarctic, which is empty and otherwise useless?”

Reinhart raised his eyebrows while sucking his sore knuckles.

“The answer,” Sweet said harshly, “happens to be no.
Not even Antarctica is cold enough
. Can you grasp that? Yet even in the comparative warmth of the South Pole, certain foods left there by Scott were maintained in an edible condition for decades. Spoiling, which is rot, which is death, is caused by bacteria, to put it simply. Bacteria cannot live at extremely low temperatures.”

“Then how can people?” asked Reinhart. “That's another thing I wanted to inquire about. How do you explain freezing-to-death?”

Sweet tenderly patted his metallic baby. “A misnomer.” He flexed his forehead and peered expectantly at Reinhart's elbow, attached to the arm whose fingers had gone to test the dampness in one under-shoulder cavity.

Reinhart himself curiously looked there too. Had he dipped his sleeve in some chemical? No, it was Streckfuss. He had stolen up silently. The floor was concrete, and he wore rubber-soled shoes, no, actually, rubbers, perhaps because of all the electricity hereabouts. At any rate, there he was at Reinhart's elbow. Reinhart, or so his fingertips would have it, was still gushing sweat though feeling generally cold: queer.

Streckfuss was of the same indeterminate age as his Berlin double, but how long could anyone have kept that up?

“The popular impression of zese tings,” Streckfuss said, glaring up at Reinhart, “is really what I should call literary.
Boom!
A man is
shot to death
. But he iss not, you see, except in cinema. Nor is poisoned, froze, electrocuted, and so on,
to death
. What happens is his vital organs are damaged so that they cannot continue to function properly and,
alors!
he dies zooner or later. It is not like to turn off a machine.”

He was fluent enough in English, it seemed, with an accent that as yet could have been from anywhere: French or German uvular
r
's, the occasional special treatment of sibilants, a difficulty with
th
, but a firm way with
h
alone that could not be called Gallic.

“Even,” Streckfuss went on, “should a liffing body be disintegrated by explosion, literally blown into many fragments, bits of matter remain vital for a time.”

Reinhart said: “You know what has always fascinated me? The running of a motion-picture film backwards, bringing the diver back up out of the water, sucking the splash-down into a mirrorlike surface of the pool, reassembling the cliffside blown off with dynamite.”

Streckfuss ran a hand through his disorderly scalp, stretching the forehead ravines smooth, an instant and startling facelift. “
Quelle bêtise!
” said he to Sweet.

Sweet smiled at Reinhart. “I think it shows the right spirit. Carl is reluctant to accept the popular idea of reality with its narrow-minded emphasis on finality.”

“Of course,” said Reinhart, “I know that is merely a trick of light and not existence.”

“Still,” said Sweet, “it is a beginning. Can you imagine what a man of some earlier century would say if exposed to that? He believed in unicorns and dragons without ever seeing one, yet accepted death as inevitable despite the material evidence of life which hummed through his veins.”

“Well,” Reinhart said, trying to contribute, “the belief in dragons has been traced to, I have read, the discovery of dinosaur remains—”

Streckfuss suddenly howled in rage. “Zis is no discussion!” he cried. “Vot are your credentials?” He slapped a small foot, clad in a shiny black rubber, on the concrete.

“I meant no—” Reinhart began.

“
Silence!
” cried Streckfuss, clearly making it a French word. “
Pas de mot encore!
” He clapped both hands to his face and dry-washed it. Then stared at Sweet. “Ray-olly, Bopp.” He marched back to his counter at the other end of the lab.

“What's wrong now?” asked Reinhart. “I don't understand much French.”

“He's highly strung, Carl, as I told you. He'll be all right in a moment. … You see, it is not freezing as such that damages tissue. No one has ever ‘frozen to death,' in the common sense of the phrase. Cold does not destroy, but rather preserves.”

“But persons lost in the Arctic—”

“Exactly,” said Sweet. “I know, I know. The damage may be caused by ice crystals which form in the body fluids, expanding and bursting the cells or puncturing vessels. What Hans was getting at, I think, is that the common supposition about causes of death is too general. There are poisons, for example, which cause death by suffocation; they arrest the muscles which work the lungs, or perhaps more subtly, derange the nerves which tell the muscles to move the lungs to take in and expel air. The body is a terribly complicated apparatus, Carl.”

Streckfuss appeared to rest: his shaggy head was buried in his folded arms. He was rather a prima donna.

“But,” Sweet went on, “there is much reason to believe that the damage is not done by freezing but in the existing procedures of thawing.” He stared at Reinhart. “That is pretty revolutionary, don't you think? Can you remember as a boy being told to treat frostbite by rubbing the affected area with snow?”

“I have done it,” said Reinhart. “Many times when out sledding—”

“No, you have not,” Sweet said decisively. “Unless the area was not actually frostbitten. If it were you would have by that means ensured the loss of the limb. We know today that the effective therapy is boiling water or at any rate as hot as can be borne, and no abrasion of the tissue. Victims have not lost their toes to frostbite, but to its cure. Can you appreciate that?”

“If you say so.”

“Hans could demonstrate it, if you like. As it happens this is now accepted medical practice. Your family doctor would concur.”

“I doubt it,” said Reinhart. “Doc Perse still prescribes mustard plasters for chest colds. He still has not caught up with the sulfa tablets, let alone penicillin. Of course, he is an oddity. I go to him merely for sentimental reasons. Actually, I have never yet had a serious ailment, touch wood.” But there wasn't any within reach. Reinhart loved wood, leather, ivory, and copper, but had spent his life amid galvanized metals and plastics. Perhaps he consulted Doc Perse merely because the old physician's waiting room offered a genuine horsehide sofa, if cracked. At least the stuffing it leaked was kapok and not that loathsome foam which looked like something a robot might ejaculate.