Contact - Carl Sagan [172]
All of this required a substantial space capsule, so substantial that you need no longer be limited to mere tissue samples. You might as well send your body whole. If you could quick-freeze yourself after death, so to say, there was a subsidiary advantage. Maybe enough of you would be in working order that whoever found you could do better than just reconstructing you. Maybe they could bring you back to life-of course, after fixing whatever it was that you had died of. If you languished a little before freezing, though- because, say, the relatives had not realized you were dead yet-prospects for revival diminished. What would really make sense, he thought, was to freeze someone just before death. That would make eventual resuscitation much more likely, although there was probably limited demand for this service.
But then why just before dying? Suppose you knew you had only a year or two to live. Wouldn't it be better to be frozen immediately, Hadden mused-before the meat goes bad? Even then-he sighed-no matter what the nature of the deteriorating illness, it might still be irremediable after you were revived; you would be frozen for a geological age, and then awakened only to die promptly from a melanoma or a cardiac infarction about which the extraterrestrials might know nothing.
No, he concluded, there was only one perfect realization of this idea: Someone in robust health would have to be launched on a one-way journey to the stars. As an incidental benefit, you would be spared the humiliation of disease and old age. Far from the inner solar system, your equilibrium temperature would fall to only a few degrees above absolute zero. No further refrigeration would be necessary. Perpetual care provided. Free.
By this logic he came to the final step of the argument: If it requires a few years to get to the interstellar cold, you might as well stay awake for the show, and get quick-frozen only when you leave the solar system. It would also minimize over dependence on the cryogenics.
Hadden had taken every reasonable precaution against an unexpected medical problem in Earth orbit, the official account went, even to preemptive sonic disintegration of his gall and kidney stones before he ever set foot in his chateau in the sky. And then he went and died of anaphylactic shock. A bee had buzzed angrily out of a bouquet of freesias sent up on Narnia by an admirer. Carelessly, Methuselah's capacious pharmacy had not stocked the appropriate antiserum. The insect had probably been immobilized by the low temperatures in Narnia's cargo bay and was not really to blame. Its small and broken body had been sent down for examination by forensic entomologists. The irony of the billionaire felled by a bee did not escape the notice of newspaper editorials and Sunday sermons.
But in fact, this was all a deception. There had been no bee, no sting, and no death. Hadden remained in excellent health. Instead, on the stroke of the New Year, nine hours after the Machine had been activated, the rocket engines flamed on a sizable auxiliary vehicle docked to Methuselah. It rapidly achieved escape velocity from the Earth-Moon system. He called it Gilgamesh.
Hadden had spent his life amassing power and contemplating time. The more power you have, he found, the more you crave. Power and time were connected, because all men are equal in death. That is why the ancient kings built monuments to themselves. But the monuments become eroded, the royal accomplishments obliterated, the very names of the kings forgotten. And, most important, they themselves were dead as doornails. No, this was more elegant, more beautiful, more satisfying. He had found a low door in the wall of time.
Had he merely announced his plans to the world, certain complications would ensue. If Hadden was frozen to four degrees Kelvin at ten billion kilometers from Earth, what exactly was his legal status? Who would control