Flatlander - Larry Niven [31]
Elsewhere in the building some sleepers wore clothing, the formal costumery of a dozen periods. In two long tanks on another floor the sleepers had been prettied up with low-temperature cosmetics and sometimes with a kind of flesh-colored putty to fill and cover major wounds. A weird practice. It hadn’t lasted beyond the middle of the last century. After all, these sleepers planned to return to life someday. The damage should show at a glance.
With these, it did.
They were all from the tail end of the twentieth century. They looked like hell. Some were clearly beyond saving, accident cases whose wills had consigned them to the freezer banks regardless. Each sleeper was marked by a plaque describing everything that was wrong with his mind and body, in script so fine and so archaic as to be almost unreadable.
Battered or torn or wasted by disease, they all wore the same look of patient resignation. Their hair was disintegrating very slowly. It had fallen in a thick gray crescent about each head.
“People used to call them corpsicles, frozen dead. Or Homo snapiens. You can imagine what would happen if you dropped one.” Mr. Restarick did not smile. These people were in his charge, and he took his task seriously. His eyes seemed to look through rather than at me, and his clothes were ten to fifty years out of style. He seemed to be gradually losing himself here in the past, He said, “We’ve over six thousand of them here. Do you think we’ll ever bring them back to life?” I was an ARM; I might know.
“Do you?”
“Sometimes I wonder.” He dropped his gaze. “Not Harrison Cohn. Look at him, torn open like that. And her, with half her face shot off; she’d be a vegetable if you brought her back. The later ones don’t look this bad. Up until 1989 the doctors couldn’t freeze anyone who wasn’t clinically dead.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Why not?”
“They’d have been up for murder. When what they were doing was saving lives.” He shrugged angrily. “Sometimes they’d stop a patient’s heart and then restart it to satisfy the legalities.”
Sure, that made a lot of sense. I didn’t dare laugh out loud. I pointed. “How about him?”
He was a rangy man of about forty-five, healthy-looking, with no visible marks of death, violent or otherwise. The long lean face still wore a look of command, though the deep-set eyes were almost closed. His lips were slightly parted, showing teeth straightened by braces in the ancient fashion.
Mr. Restarick glanced at the plaque. “Leviticus Hale, 1991. Oh, yes. Hale was a paranoid. He must have been the first they ever froze for that. They guessed right, too. If we brought him back now, we could cure him.”
“If.”
“It’s been done.”
“Sure. We only lose one out of three. He’d probably take the chance himself. But then, he’s crazy.” I looked around at rows of long double-walled liquid nitrogen tanks. The place was huge and full of echoes, and this was only the top floor. The Vault of Eternity was ten stories deep in earthquake-free bedrock. “Six thousand, you said. But the vault was built for ten thousand, wasn’t it?”
He nodded. “We’re a third empty.”
“Get many customers these days?”
He laughed at me. “You’re joking. Nobody has himself frozen these days. He might wake up a piece at a time!”
“That’s what I wondered.”
“Ten years ago we were thinking of digging new vaults. All those crazy kids, perfectly healthy, getting themselves frozen so they could wake up in a brave new world. I had to watch while the ambulances came and carted them away for spare parts! We’re a good third empty now since the Freezer Law passed!”
That business with the kids had been odd, all right. A fad or a religion or a madness, except that it had gone on for much too long.
The Freezeout Kids. Most of them were textbook cases of anomie,