Flatlander - Larry Niven [50]
“I keep thinking the ten billion voters will eventually work their way down to me. Go ahead, grin. Who’d want your liver?”
Garner cackled. “Somebody could murder me for my skeleton. Not to put inside him. For a museum.”
We left it at that.
* * *
The news broke a couple of days later. Several North American hospitals had been reviving corpsicles.
How they kept the secret was a mystery. Those corpsicles who survived the treatment—twenty-two of them out of thirty-five attempts—had been clinically alive for some ten months, conscious for shorter periods.
For the next week it was all the news there was. Taffy and I watched interviews with the dead men, with the doctors, with members of the Security Council. The move was not illegal. As publicity against the second Freezer Bill, it may have been a mistake.
All the revived corpsicles had been insane. Else why risk it?
Some of the casualties had died because their insanity was caused by brain damage. The rest were cured, but only in a biochemical sense. All had been insane long enough for their doctors to decide that there was no hope. Now they were stranded in a foreign land, their homes forever lost in the mists of time. Revivification had saved them from an ugly, humiliating death at the hands of most of the human race, a fate that smacked of cannibalism and ghouls. The paranoids were hardly surprised. The rest reacted like paranoids.
In the boob cube they came across as a bunch of frightened mental patients.
One night we watched a string of interviews on the big screen in Taffy’s bedroom wall. They weren’t well handled. Too much “How do you feel about the wonders of the present?” when the poor boobs hadn’t come out of their shells long enough to know or care. Many wouldn’t believe anything they were told or shown. Others didn’t care about anything but space exploration—a largely Belter activity which Earth’s voting public tended to ignore. Too much of it was at the level of this last one: an interviewer explaining to a woman that a boob cube was not a cube, that the word referred only to the three-dimensional effect. The poor woman was badly rattled and not too bright in the first place.
Taffy was sitting cross-legged on the bed, combing out her long, dark hair so that it flowed over her shoulders in shining curves. “She’s an early one,” she said critically. “There may have been oxygen starvation of the brain during freezing.”
“That’s what you see. All the average citizen sees is the way she acts. She’s obviously not ready to join society.”
“Dammit, Gil, she’s alive. Shouldn’t that be miracle enough for anyone?”
“Maybe. Maybe the average voter liked her better the other way.”
Taffy brushed at her hair with angry vigor. “They’re alive.”
“I wonder if they revived Leviticus Hale.”
“Leviti—? Oh. Not at Saint John’s.” Taffy worked there. She’d know.
“I haven’t seen him in the cube. They should have revived him,” I said. “With that patriarchal visage he’d make a great impression. He might even try the Messiah bit. ‘Yea, brethren, I have returned from the dead to lead you—’ None of the others have tried that yet.”
“Good thing, too.” Her strokes slowed. “A lot of them died in the thawing process and afterward. From cell wall ruptures.”
Ten minutes later I got up and used the phone. Taffy showed her amusement. “Is it that important?”
“Maybe not.” I dialed the Vault of Eternity in New Jersey. I knew I’d be wondering until I did.
Mr. Restarick was on night watch. He seemed glad to see me. He’d have been glad to see anyone who would talk back. His clothes were the same mismatch of ancient styles, but they didn’t look as anachronistic now. The boob cube had been infested with corpsicles wearing approximations of their own styles.
Yes, he remembered me. Yes, Leviticus Hale was still in place. The hospitals had taken two of his wards, and both had survived, he told me proudly. The administrators had wanted Hale, too; they’d liked his looks and his publicity value, dating as he did from the last century but one. But they hadn’t been able to get permission