Judith Merril - The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 7

While he waited for the reply Gerald clumsily fingered one of the tag-like books and discovered that it opened concertina-wise, a series of small metal plates hinged together printed on one side in English and on the other in Portuguese. The first leaf carried little print, but what there was, was striking. It ran: “CAUTION! Do NOT open suit until you have read these instructions or you will KILL the wearer.”

When he had got that far the Duty Officer’s voice came in again: “Hullo, Ticker. I’ve called the Doc. He says do NOT, repeat NOT, touch the two men on any account. Hang on, he’s coming to talk to you. He says the Hapson System was scrapped over thirty years ago. He — oh, here he is….”

“Ticker? Laysall here. Charles tells me you’ve found a couple of Hapsons, undamaged. Please confirm and give circumstances.”

Troon did so. In due course the doctor came back:

“Okay. That sounds fine. Now listen carefully, Ticker. From what you say it’s practically certain those two are not dead — yet. They’re — well, they’re in cold storage. That part of the Hapson system was good. You’ll see a kind of boss mounted on the left of the chest. The thing to do in the case of extreme emergency was to slap it good and hard. When you do that it gives a multiple injection. Part of the stuff puts you out. Part of it prevents the building-up in the body of large ice crystals that would damage the tissues. Part of it — oh, well, that’ll do later. The point is that it works practically a hundred per cent. You get Nature’s own deep-freeze in Space. And if there’s something to keep off direct radiation from the sun you’ll stay like that until somebody finds you — if anyone ever does. Now I take it that these two have been in the dark in an airless ship which is now in the airless hold of your ship. Is that right?”

“That’s so, Doc. There are the two small meteorite holes, but they would not get direct beams from there.”

“Fine. Then keep ‘em just like that. Take care they don’t get warmed. Don’t try anything the instruction-sheet says. The point is that though the success of the Hapson freeze is almost sure, the resuscitation isn’t. In fact it’s very dodgy indeed — a poorer than twenty-five per cent chance at best. You get lethal crystal formations building up, for one thing. What I suggest is that you try to get ‘em back exactly as they are. Our apparatus here will give them the best chance they can have. Can you do that?”

Gerald Troon thought for a moment. Then he said:

“We don’t want to waste this trip — and that’s what’ll happen if we pull the derelict out of our side to leave a hole we can’t mend. But if we leave her where she is, plugging the hole, we can at least take on a half-load of ore. And if we pack that well in, it’ll help to wedge the derelict in place. So suppose we leave the derelict just as she lies, and the men, too, and seal her up to keep the ore out of her. Would that suit?”

“That should be as good as can be done,” the doctor replied. “But have a look at the two men before you leave them. Make sure they’re secure in their bunks. As long as they are kept in space conditions about the only thing likely to harm them is breaking loose under acceleration, and getting damaged.”

“Very well, that’s what we’ll do. Anyway, we won’t be using any high acceleration the way things are. The other poor fellow shall have a proper space-burial…”

An hour later both Gerald and his companion were back in the Celestis’s living-quarters, and the First Officer was starting to maneuver for the spiral-in to Psyche. The two got out of their spacesuits. Gerald pulled the derelict’s log from the outside pocket, and took it to his bunk. There he fastened the belt, and opened the book.

Five minutes later Steve looked across at him from the opposite bunk, with concern.

“Anything the matter, Cap’n? You’re looking a bit queer.”

“I’m feeling a bit queer, Steve…That chap we took out and consigned to space, he was Terence Rice, wasn’t he?”

“That’s what his disc said,” Steve agreed.

“H’m.” Gerald Troon paused. Then he tapped the book. “This,” he said, “is the log of the Astarte. She sailed from the moon-station third of January, 2149—forty-five years ago — bound for the Asteroid Belt. There was a crew of three: Captain George Montgomery Troon, engineer Luis Gompez, radio-man Terence Rice____

“So, as the unlucky one was Terence Rice, it follows that one of those two back there must be Gompez, and the other — well, he must be George Montgomery Troon, the one who made the Venus landing in 2144… and, incidentally, my grandfather….”

“Well,” said my companion, “they got them back all right. Gompez was unlucky, though — at least I suppose you’d call it unlucky — anyway, he didn’t come through the resuscitation. George did, of course….

“But there’s more to resuscitation than mere revival. There’s a degree of physical shock in any case, and when you’ve been under as long as he had there’s plenty of mental shock, too.

“He went under, a youngish man with a young family; he woke up to find himself a great-grandfather; his wife a very old lady who had remarried; his friends gone, or elderly; his two companions in the Astarte, dead.

‘That was bad enough, but worse still was that he knew all about the Hapson System. He knew that when you go into a deep-freeze the whole metabolism comes quickly to a complete stop. You are, by every known definition and test, dead…. Corruption cannot set in, of course, but every vital process has stopped; every single feature which we regard as evidence of life has ceased to exist….

“So you are dead….

“So if you believe, as George does, that your psyche, your soul, has independent existence, then it must have left your body when you died.

“And how do you get it back? That’s what George wants to know — what he keeps searching for. That’s why he’s over there now, praying to be told____”

I leaned back in my chair, looking across the Place at the dark opening of the church door.

“You mean to say that that young man, that George who was here just now, is the very same George Montgomery Troon who made the first landing on Venus, half a century ago?” I said.

“He’s the man,” he affirmed.

I shook my head, not for disbelief, but for George’s sake.

“What will happen to him?” I asked.

“God knows,” said my neighbor. “He is getting better; he’s less distressed than he was. And now he’s beginning to show touches of the real Troon obsession to get into space again.

“But what then?… You can’t ship a Troon as crew. And you can’t have a Captain who might take it into his head to go hunting through Space for his soul….”

This short sad story of the last days of Argo III — as lost a soul as ever lifted jets — is included (along with some happier interludes in the Emperor’s early life) in Mr. Russell’s collection, Sardonicus and Other Stories (Ballantine, 1961). The author, who was executive editor of Playboy for most of its first seven years, has now turned full-time writer. Besides the short-story collection, and the movie of the same name, he has recently published a novel. The Case Against Satan (Obolensky, 1962).

The once young Argo III — now gnarled by age and debauchery — was on the run. After a lifetime of atrocities, all committed in the names of Humanity, Freedom, Fair Play, The Will Of The Majority, Our Way Of Life, and The Preservation Of Civilization As We Know It, an aroused populace led by his son, Argo IV, was out gunning for him. He raced from asteroid to asteroid, but his enemies followed close behind. He tried elaborate disguises and plastic surgery, but the infra-violet, ultra-red dimension-warp contact lenses of his son’s agents saw through all facades. He grew so weary that once he almost gave himself up — but he blanched at the thought of what he had made the official and now sacred mode of execution: a seven day death in the grip of the Black Elixir.