The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [79]
His working area was little more than a closet, half the size of McVey’s minuscule hotel room. Heaped helter-skelter among books, journals, correspondence, cardboard boxes and stacks of technical videos were dozens of vessels containing preserved organs from God knew how many species, some three or four to the jar. Somewhere among the clutter was a window and Richman’s desk and his desk chair. Two other chairs were piled high with books and file folders, which he immediately cleared off for his visitors. McVey volunteered to stand, but Richman wouldn’t hear of it and disappeared in search of a third chair. An exasperating fifteen minutes later, he reappeared, lugging a secretary’s chair with one caster missing, which he’d located in a basement storeroom.
“The question, Detective McVey,” Richman said as they all finally sat down, picking up McVey’s query asked nearly a half hour earlier as if he’d just now posed it—”is not so much ‘why?’ but ‘how?’”
“What do you mean?” McVey said.
“He means we’re talking about human tissues,” Michaels said, flatly. “Experiments with temperatures approaching absolute zero have been conducted primarily with salts and some metals, like copper.” Abruptly, Michaels realized he was overstepping courtesy. “Excuse me, Doctor Richman,” he said apologetically. “I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s quite all right, Doctor.” Richman smiled, then looked to McVey and Commander Noble. “What you have to realize is this all gets very muddied in scientific mumbo-jumbo. But the nut of it is the Third Law of Thermodynamics, which basically says science can never reach absolute zero because, among other things, it would then mean a state of perfect orderliness. Atomic orderliness.”
Noble’s face was blank. So was McVey’s.
“Every atom consists of electrons orbiting around a nucleus, which is made of protons and neutrons. What happens as substances get colder is that the normal movement of these atoms and their parts becomes reduced, slowed, if you will. The colder the temperature, the slower their movements.
“Now, if we took an external magnet and focused it critically on these slowly moving atoms, we would create a magnetic field where we could manipulate the atoms and their parts, and make them do pretty much what we wanted. Theoretically if we could reach absolute zero, we could do more than pretty much, we could do exactly as we wanted because all activity would be stopped.”
“That only gets us back to McVey’s question,” Noble said. “Why? Why freeze decapitated bodies and a head to that degree, assuming you could get them to absolute zero?”
“To join them,” Richman said, wholly without emotion.
“Join them?” Noble was incredulous.
“It’s the only reason I could begin to give.”
Tugging at an ear, McVey turned away and looked out the window. Outside, the morning was bright and sunny. By contrast, Richman’s office felt like the inside of a musty box. Swiveling back, McVey found himself nose to nose with the labeled brain of a Maltese cat suspended in some kind of liquid preservative inside a bell jar. He looked at Richman. “You’re talking about atomic surgery, correct?”
Richman smiled. “Of sorts. Simply put, at absolute zero, under the application of a strong magnetic field all the atomic particles would be perfectly lined up, and under total control. If we could do that, we could perform atomic cryosurgery. Microsurgery beyond conception.”
“Elaborate a little, if you would, please,” Noble said.
Richman’s eyes brightened and McVey could almost feel his pulse quicken. The whole idea of what he was discussing excited him tremendously. “What it means, Commander, assuming we could freeze people to that degree, operate on them and then thaw them out with no damage to the tissues, is that atoms could be connected. A chemical bond would be formed between them so that a given electron is shared between two different atoms. It would make a seamless