The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [53]
“McVey? you still there?”
“yes.”
“Doctor Michaels?”
McVey heard the young medical examiner’s voice join in. “Here,” he said.
“All right, then, tell our friend McVey what you’ve just told me.”
“It’s about the severed head.”
“You’ve identified who it is?” McVey brightened.
“Not yet. Perhaps what Doctor Michaels has to say will help explain why the identification is being so trouble some,” Noble said. “Go on, Doctor Michaels, please.”
“Yes, of course.” Michaels cleared his throat. “As you recall, Detective McVey, there was very little blood left in the severed head when found. In fact almost none. So it was very difficult to assess the clotting time in attempting to determine time of death. However, I thought that with a little more information I should be able to give you a reasonable time frame for when the chap was murdered. Well, it turns out, I couldn’t.”
“I don’t understand,” McVey said.
“After you left, I took the temperature of the head and selected some tissue samples, which I sent to the laboratory for analysis.”
“And—?” McVey yawned. It was getting late and he was beginning to think more of sleep than murder.
“The head had been frozen. Frozen and then thawed out before it was left in the alley.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I can’t say I haven’t seen it before,” McVey said. “But usually you can tell right away because the inner brain tissues take a long time to thaw out. The inside of the head is colder than the layers you find as you work outward toward the skull.”
“That wasn’t the case. It was thawed completely.”
“Finish what you have to say, Doctor Michaels,” Noble pressed.
“When laboratory tissue samples revealed the head had been frozen, I was still bothered by the fact that the facial skin moved under pressure from my fingers as it would under normal conditions had not the head been frozen.”
“What are you getting at?”
“I sent the entire head to a Doctor Stephen Richman, an expert in micropathology at the Royal College of Pathology, to see what he could make of the freezing. He called me as soon as he realized what had happened.”
“What did happen?” McVey was getting impatient.
“Our friend has a metal plate in his skull. Undoubtedly the result of some sort of brain surgery done years ago. The brain tissue would have revealed nothing, but the metal did. The head had been frozen, not just solid, but to a degree approaching absolute zero."
“I’m a little slow this time of night, Doctor. You’re over my head.”
“Absolute zero is a degree of cold unreachable in the science of freezing. In essence, it’s a hypothetical temperature characterized by the complete absence of heat. To even approach it requires’ extremely sophisticated laboratory techniques that employ either liquefied helium or magnetic cooling.”
“How cold is this absolute zero?” McVey had never heard of it.
“In technical terms?”
“In whatever terms.”
“Minus two hundred seventy-three point one five degrees Celsius or minus four hundred fifty-nine point six seven degrees Fahrenheit.”
“Jesus Christ, that’s almost five hundred degrees below zero!”
“Yes, quite.”
“What happens then, assuming you did reach absolute zero?’
“I just looked it up, McVey,” Noble interjected. “It means it’s a point at which mutual linear motions of all the molecules of a substance would cease.”
“Every atom of its structure would be absolutely motionless,” Michaels added.
Click.
This time McVey did look at the clock. It was 3:18 A.M. Friday, October 7.
Neither Commander Noble nor Dr. Michaels had had any idea why someone would freeze a head to that degree and then discard it. Nor had McVey, either. There was a possibility it had come from one of those cryonic freezing organizations that accept the bodies of the recently departed and deep-freeze them in the hope that at some future time, when there is a cure for whatever ailment killed them, the bodies could be unfrozen, worked on, then brought back to life. To every scientist in the world it was a pipe dream, but people bought