Fiasco (11 page)

Because they would be running throughout the journey, the ship accelerated steadily, maintaining on board a pull equal to Earth's gravitation. The pull acted only along the ship's longitudinal axis. For this reason each spherical section of the
Eurydice
was a separate unit. Her decks went transversely in the hull, from side to side; up meant toward the bow, and down was astern. When the whole vessel braked or changed course, the vector of the force diverged from the axes of the individual sections. Therefore, to avoid having ceilings turn into walls and decks become upended, each segment of the hull contained within itself a sphere capable of rotating inside the armored shell, much like a ball-and-socket joint. The gyrostats saw to it that on the decks of each sphere of the hull—there were eight in all, for living quarters—the force of the thrust would always come vertically. Although during maneuvers of this type the decks of the separate spheres diverged from the main axis of the ship's keel, one could still pass from section to section. There was a tunnel system of additional locks called "worms." It was only in these flexible tunnels that one experienced a change or lack of gravity, since the elevator ran through the cylinders between the sections.

At the time of this general council, the first after takeoff, the
Eurydice
had almost a year of continuous acceleration before her, thus there was nothing to interfere with her steady thrust.

The fifth section, called the Parliament, served for the meetings of the entire crew. Beneath a curved ceiling lay an amphitheater, not too high, a room surrounded by four tiers of seats that were divided at regular intervals by ramps. By the only flat wall was a long table, actually a line of connected consoles with screens. Behind this, facing the assembly, sat the navigators and their subordinate specialists.

The uniqueness of the expedition called for the unusual makeup of the command. Ter Horab was in charge of flight; the coordinator Yusupov, power; the radiophysicist De Witt, communications; and at the head of the corps of scientists, both of those needed in the journey itself and those who would be going into action only at its destination, stood the polystorian Jenkins.

When Gerbert and Davis entered the upper gallery, the deliberations had already begun. Ter Horab was reading aloud the requests of the physicians. No one turned to look at the latecomers. Only the Head Physician, Vahradian, seated between the Commander and the coordinator, indicated his reproof with a knitted brow. But they had not missed much. In the silence the impassive voice of Ter Horab came from all sides.

"…they are asking for a reduction in thrust to one-tenth. They consider this necessary for the reanimation of the remains that are in cold storage. It means throttling the drive down to the lower limit. I can do this. But then the whole flight program, with all its prepared computations, will be canceled. It is possible to make a new program. The old one was the product of five independent groups in the project on Earth, to rule out the possibility of errors. Five is beyond our means. We can make a new program with two teams—but it will not be as dependable as the first. The risk is small but real. So I ask you: shall we vote now on the physicians' request, without further discussion, or instead put questions to them?"

The majority were in favor of discussion. Vahradian did not take the floor himself, but called on Gerbert.

"Behind the words of our Commander lies a criticism," said Gerbert, not rising from his place in the highest row of chairs. "The criticism is directed at those who handed over to us, with no concern for their condition, the bodies found on Titan. One could conduct an investigation into this matter, to learn who the culprits were. Whether or not they are among us, however, does not change the situation. The task facing us is the complete resurrection of a man preserved little better than the mummies of the pharaohs. Here I must go into the history of medicine. Attempts at vitrifaction date back to the twentieth century. Doddering old millionaires had themselves interred in liquid nitrogren, in the hope that someday they would be restored to life. Complete nonsense: heating a frozen corpse only serves to make it rot. Then scientists learned how to freeze alive minute bits of tissue, egg cells, sperm, and microorganisms. The larger the body, the more difficult its vitrifaction. Vitrifaction involves the instantaneous congealing of all the organism's fluids into ice—skipping the phase of crystallization, since crystal formation causes irreversible damage to the subtle structure of the cell. The body and brain must be turned to glass in a split second. It is easy to heat an object to a high temperature in a split second; to chill it that rapidly to nearly zero Kelvin is incomparably more difficult. The bell vitrifaxes of the victims on Titan were primitive and worked brutally. When we accepted the containers on board, we were unaware of their make. That is why the condition of the bodies was such a surprise."

"For whom, and why?" asked someone in the first row.

"For me as a psychonicist, for Davis, who is a somaticist, and of course for our superior. Why? We received containers, having no specifications or diagrams of the old vitrifaxes. We did not know that the bells with their frozen occupants had been partly crushed by the glacier, or that at the site they were placed into thermos cylinders with liquid helium and immediately transported by shuttle to our ship. For the four hundred hours after takeoff, while Hercules pushed us, we were under two g's; we could not proceed with the examination of the containers until afterward."

"That was three months ago, John," said the same voice.

"Yes. During that time we determined that we could not possibly bring them all back to life. Three were ruled out at once: their brains had been crushed. Of the rest we can reanimate only one, although in principle two of the corpses are candidates for reanimation. The point is that all these people had blood in their circulatory systems."

"Real blood?" asked someone from another place in the hall.

"Yes. Erythrocytes, plasma, and so on. We have the data on the blood in our holofiles. We can't do transfusions without additional blood, however, so erythroblasts were taken from the marrow and multiplied. There is blood. But then we have the incompatibility of the tissues. Two brains are candidates for reanimation. But there are only enough vital organs for one person. Only one person can be put together, of these two. Abominable, but true."

"A brain can be resurrected without a body," said someone.

"We have no intention of doing that," replied Gerbert. "We are not here to run hideous experiments. At the present level of medicine they would have to be hideous. But the issue is not merely medical. We intrude here on navigational matters as doctors, not as astronauts. No layman can tell us how to proceed. Therefore, I will not go into the details of the operation. It is necessary to decalcify and metallize the skeleton. To remove excess nitrogen from the tissues with helium. To cannibalize bodies for one body. That's our area. I will explain to you only the basis for our request. We must have as little gravitation as possible during the reanimation of the brain. Complete weightlessness would be best of all. We realize, however, that that is impossible without shutting off the engines, which would totally ruin the flight program."

"Get to the point, John." The Head Physician did not hide his impatience. "The Commander and the people here want to know the reason behind your request."

He did not say
our
request but
your
request. Gerbert, pretending not to notice this slip of the tongue—but convinced that it was not innocent—said calmly:

"The neurons in the human brain normally do not divide. They do not divide because they constitute the material of personal identity, such as memory, and other qualities that are commonly called character, soul, and so on. In the brains of those vitrifacted in the primitive fashion that we saw on Titan, losses occur. We are now able to cause the neighboring neurons to divide, so that they fill the gaps, but in so doing we destroy the individuality of those neurons. To preserve personal identity, one must limit the number of divided neurons as much as possible, because the daughter cells are like the neurons of an infant—empty, new. Even at zero gravity there is no certainty whether and to what extent the one resurrected will suffer amnesia. A portion of the memory is irreversibly lost in vitrifaction, even in the best cryostats, because the delicate contacts of the synapses sustain damage on the molecular level. Therefore, we cannot claim that the one resurrected will be exactly the man he was some hundred years ago. We can only say that the weaker the gravitation during the reanimation of the brain, the greater the chance will be to save the personality. I'm finished."

Ter Horab glanced, as if casually, at the Head Physician, who seemed absorbed in the papers before him.

"There's no need for a vote," Ter Horab said. "By the power vested in me as Commander, I order the drive throttled at the time appointed by the doctors and for the duration they require. Meeting adjourned."

A subdued murmur went through the auditorium. Ter Horab rose and touched Yusupov's shoulder; both headed for the lower exit. Gerbert and Davis practically ran from the gallery before anyone could approach them. In the corridor they met the Dominican. He did not speak, only nodded, and continued on his way.

"I didn't expect that of Vahradian," Davis exclaimed, getting into the aft elevator with Gerbert. "The Commander, on the other hand—now, there's a man in the right place. I could feel our colleagues from the humanities, especially our 'psychonauts,' ready to jump us. He nipped that in the bud…"

The elevator slowed; the passing lights flickered less frequently.

"Vahradian doesn't matter," muttered Gerbert. "If you must know, Arago spoke with Ter Horab right before the council."

"Who told you that?"

"Yusupov. Arago was at Ter Horab's before we met with him."

"You think he—?"

"I don't think, I know. The priest helped us."

"But as a theologian…"

"I'm no authority on that. But
he
knows both medicine and theology. How he reconciles the one with the other is his affair. Come, let's change. We have to get everything ready—and to set the hour."

Before the surgery, Dr. Gerbert read the record from the holofile one more time. In the course of their work the massive planetary machines had halted, because their sensors detected metal and, enclosed in the metal, organic material. One by one, seven old striders were pulled from the Birnam heap, and from those striders, six bodies. Two of the Diglas lay no more than a few hundred meters apart. One was empty; the other contained a man in a bell vitrifax. Compared to the eighth-generation excavators gnawing through the glacier, the Digla was a dwarf. The command center stopped the robot giants and sent out walking drill towers with highly sensitive bioreaders in search of other victims, because the Birnam Depression had claimed nine men. Of the man who left his Digla, no trace was found. The armor of the striders had been crushed beneath accumulating piles of ice, but the vitrifaxes held up amazingly well. The supervisors wanted to ship these immediately to Earth for reanimation, but that meant subjecting the frozen bodies to above-gravity force three times: at the takeoff of the small shuttle from Titan, at the acceleration of the transport rocket on the Titan-Earth line, and during the descent to Earth. X rays of the containers revealed serious injuries in all the bodies, including fractured skulls, so that such an involved move was considered too risky. Someone then hit on the idea of conveying the vitrifaxes to the
Eurydice,
which had the latest reanimation equipment. Also, the acceleration, when it departed, would have to be inconsequential, considering the ship's tremendous rest mass.

There remained the question of the identification of the bodies, which could not be done until the vitrifaxes were opened. Vahradian, the Head Physician of the
Eurydice,
made an agreement with SETI headquarters that specific data and the names of those taken from the ice of Titan would be transmitted to the ship by radio from Earth—because all disks of computer memory, for computers long since dismantled, lay in the archives of the Swiss center of SETI. Up until the moment of takeoff, the communication channels were overcrowded; someone or something—man or computer—assigned the incoming data a low degree of importance; and the
Eurydice
left the circumlunar orbit before the doctors became aware of the lack of this information. Gerbert went to the Commander, but nothing could be done; the ship was on its way, picking up speed, pushed by the Herculean lasers like a missile.

In this initial phase, Titan took the full brunt of the recoil, and some planetologists believed that it might split apart. Their fears did not materialize, but the acceleration did not proceed as smoothly as the planners expected. Hercules pressed the moon's crust deep into the lithosphere, violent seismic waves set in motion the mountings of the laser throwers, and although they withstood these earthquakes (Titan quakes, rather) the solar column wavered and shook. It was necessary to lower the power, wait out the diminishing tremors, and re-aim the collimated lasers at the mirror-stern of the ship.

This created interference; unsent messages piled up. What was worse, Titan, pushed two years earlier from the vicinity of Saturn and stopped in its rotation so that Hercules, while relatively stationary, could drive the
Eurydice
outward with its light, began to undergo libration. Many hundreds of thousands of old thermonuclear warheads, embedded as an emergency reserve in the heavy moon, finally extinguished this movement as well. It was not easy. As a result, the physicians could not commence with the reanimation. The
Eurydice,
hit-and-missed over a series of weeks, received each return of the solar column to her stern as a blow that spread throughout the ship.

The difficulties with the collimation of the beam, the seismic shocks of Titan, the few boosters that failed to fire, all postponed the operation. To many on board, the postponement was justified also by the fact that the odds of returning the victims to life did not seem good. With each day of now steady acceleration, communication with Earth worsened, and, on top of that, priority was given to radiograms that concerned the success of the expedition. At last the ship got from Earth the names of the six frozen castaways, and their photographs and bios, but that was insufficient to determine identity. With vitrification, which took place explosively, the facial parts of the skull were crushed. Secondary implosions inside the cryo-containers tore off the clothing worn under the spacesuits, and its shreds were forced by the oxygen from the bursting suits into the nitrogen coffins, where they turned to ash.