The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [161]
The facts they had were as follows:
Paul Osborn’s father had designed and built a prototype scalpel capable of remaining razor-sharp even at the most exotic and improbable temperatures, most likely extreme cold. Category: HARDWARE.
The following, according to Benny Grossman were facts: Alexander Thompson, of Sheridan, Wyoming, designs a computer program that allows a computer to guide a machine built to hold and guide a scalpel during advanced microsurgery. Category: SOFTWARE.
David Brady, of Glendale, California, designs and builds an electronically driven mechanism with the range motion of a human wrist, capable of holding and controlling a’ scalpel during surgery. Category: HARDWARE.
Mary Rizzo York, of New Jersey, experiments with gasses that can bring temperatures down and cool surroundings to at least minus 516 degrees Fahrenheit. Category RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT.
All this happened during the period 1962 through 1966. Each scientist worked alone. As each project was completed, its inventor or scientist was terminated by Albert Merriman. By Merriman’s admission to Paul Osborn, the person who hired him and. paid him for his work was Erwin Scholl. Erwin Scholl, the immigrant capitalist who by then had acquired the means and the business acumen to fund, through dummy corporations, the experimental projects. This was the same Erwin Scholl, who, according to the FBI, is now, and has been for decades, an esteemed personal friend and confidant of a series of United States presidents, and is, therefore, all but untouchable.
Yet what did they have in the freezer in the basement of the London morgue but seven headless bodies and one bodyless head. Five of which were confirmed to have been frozen to a degree approaching absolute zero, a figure close enough to Marry Rizzo York’s work to be of considerable significance.
Earlier McVey had asked eminent micropathologist Dr. Stephen Richman, “Assuming the state of absolute zero could somehow, someway, be reached, why freeze decapitated bodies and decapitated heads to that temperature?”
Richman’s clear-cut answer: “To join them.”
Had Erwin Scholl, nearly thirty years earlier, been bankrolling research into cryosurgery with the idea of joining deep-frozen heads to other, deep-frozen, bodies? If he had, what was so secret that he’d ordered his researchers killed?
Patents?
Possibly.
But as far as anyone knew—according to the investigation by the Metropolitan Police Special Branch throughout Great Britain and Noble’s recently concluded telephone conversations with Dr. Edward L. Smith, president of the Cryonics Society of America, and Akito Sato, president of Cryonics Institute, Far East—no similar cryonic surgical experimentations were being done anywhere in the world.
Now, as twilight settled over London, Noble, McVey and Osborn faced each other in Noble’s Scotland Yard office. McVey had discarded the Mickey Mouse ball cap but still wore the EuroDisney sweatshirt, and Osborn had traded Noble his French fireman’s coat for a well-worn dark blue cardigan with a gold Metropolitan Police emblem stitched over the lefthand pocket.
A patent search by RDI International of London had turned up no known patents worldwide on hardware or software designed for the kind of advanced microsurgery they were talking about.
A combination Moody’s/Dun & Bradstreet review of the corporate histories of the companies employing Albert Merriman’s victims had been requested through the Serious Fraud Office but had not yet been completed.
There was a light tap at the door and Noble’s forty-three-year-old, six-foot-tall, never-married secretary, Elizabeth Welles, entered. She carried a tray with cups and spoons, a small pitcher of milk, a silver dish holding cubes of sugar and a pot each of tea and coffee.
“Thank you, Elizabeth,” Noble said.
“Of course, Commander.” Drawing herself up to her full height, she glanced sidelong at Osborn and left.
“She thinks you’re quite the handsome chap, Dr. Osborn.