Филип Керр - The Second Angel

‘I feel sick already.’ Cavor swallowed.

‘You’re doing fine, Cav.’ Dallas clapped Cavor on the shoulder and then drew him to the leaded window of the containment room.

‘Time for a guided tour,’ he said. ‘On the right there, we have the steam generator. On the left, the primary coolant pump. Behind them is the reactor itself. It’s surrounded with a primary radiation shield, but don’t expect much protection from that. It’s designed to give you time to get the hell out of there, not to try for an endurance test. Behind the reactor is the wall dividing the containment room from the labyrinth. It’s made of three-foot-thick concrete blocks. Each block is just over two and half feet square and weighs around five hundred pounds. Of course, in microgravity it won’t feel like anything that heavy. The cement holding the block in place is smart in that it contains a length of heat-sensitive metal, part of a dedicated circuit that includes all four walls of the containment room. If the reactor encounters a loss-of-coolant accident and begins to overheat, the metal circuit is designed to detect that and create an alarm condition. The alarm condition will override all other operating considerations, scram the reactor, and initiate emergency core-cooling. That means the whole room will fill with extremely low-temperature helium gas, freezing everything in the reactor room, including us. However, it’s an imperfect system. A section of the metal circuit surrounding any concrete block can be bypassed, after which it can be easily melted. Melting it shatters the surrounding mortar, enabling us to push the block through and into the labyrinth.’

‘Mind telling me what’s in there? This stealth robot, for instance.’

‘Okay, the labyrinth is completely dark. A total blackout. And the robot could be anywhere in there. It’s light-activated. A series of photoelectric beam receivers throughout the labyrinth are designed to reflect any ambient light to another receiver on the robot. The robot converts that radiant energy into an electrical signal that is amplified for a detector processor which then arms the robot to hunt down the light source and kill intruders. Only seventy-five milliseconds of light appearing anywhere inside the labyrinth are required for all that to happen. Which means that we switch out the lights in here and shift the block using only the infrared flashlights.

‘The block I’ve selected is on the back wall of the room, nearest the floor. As soon as I’ve managed to bypass the circuit, we’ll each take one side of the block and start to melt the smart metal using the UHTs.’

‘I was nearly killed by one of those on Artemis Seven,’ said Cavor. ‘One of the other lunatics, screwing around.’

‘Is that how you lost your arm?’

‘No, that was a rock crusher. A UHT gun would have done a much neater job.’

‘Then you won’t need me to remind you to be careful where you point it. If a five-hundred-kilovolt beam of electrons, carelessly directed, were to penetrate the reactor, I hardly like to think what might happen.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll be careful.’

‘See that you are, Cav, otherwise my atoms will see your atoms in the next universe.’

With the blood component sent by the Descartes computer aboard, Ronica was glad to be kept busy preparing it for infusion to Rameses Gates. She had a pretty good idea of how he was feeling, although he didn’t complain. And being much larger than Ronica meant that donating two whole units still left him conscious, although very weak. His physiological response to such a large blood loss fell short of actual hemorrhagic shock, but there was no way Ronica could tell what the sudden decrease in hemoglobin and hemocrit might do to someone with P2. And in the knowledge that Gates was the only person who could fly them back to Earth, she worked as quickly as she dared. Blood was not something that could be rushed.

The deglycerolization process hadn’t changed much in almost a hundred years and involved three basic steps: first, the units were thawed at a steady forty degrees Celsius; next the units were diluted with 12 percent sodium chloride and also washed with solutions of gradually decreasing hypertonic strength; and, last, the deglycerolized red cells were suspended in an isotonic electrolyte solution containing glucose to nourish the red cells. All of this took time: Ronica did not think she would be in a position to infuse Gates for at least another three to four hours, at which point, Dallas and Cavor ought to be back on board the Mariner and in need of infusions themselves. But none of them — Gates, Cavor, Dallas — needed blood more than Lenina, who was very close to death. Ronica doubted that any amount of whole blood could save her now.

Gates himself never complained. He lay on a hammock next to Lenina, holding her small white hand in his larger and almost as pale fist. Ronica, trying to keep his spirits up, kept him informed of what she was doing.

‘At least I won’t have to waste time screening this blood for antibodies,’ she told him. ‘I’m absolutely sure that there’s nothing in these components that’s as bad as the clinically significant bugs you already have.’

‘Join the club,’ whispered Gates. ‘We’re one blood you and I. It’s like we’re married now. Everything I have is yours.’ He smiled. ‘And I mean everything.’

‘I still haven’t thanked you for giving me a life-threatening disease.’

‘Forget it.’

‘I wish I could. I must admit, it’s been kind of on my mind.’

‘You’ll learn to live with it.’

‘God, I hope not.’

‘A lot of people do, you know. How’s that component coming along?’

‘Be a while yet.’

‘Never had an infusion before. Comes to that, I never gave blood before. It made me feel good.’

‘I guess we’ve lost that forever,’ said Ronica. ‘As a race.’

‘Maybe. If Dallas and Cavor pull this thing off, you know what I think we should do with all that blood?’

‘Don’t tell me you want to drink it.’

‘I think we should just give it away. Just carry out our own private infusion program.’

Ronica gave a wry smile. ‘Hypovolemia’s starving your brain of oxygen and making you sentimental. Give away billions of dollars’ worth of blood? You’ve got to be joking. You can give away your share if you want, but me, I’m selling mine on the red market. I didn’t sign on for this little enterprise just to win my reward in heaven. I want mine now, in credits and cash. If you’ve got your health, then money’s all there is, my friend. Nothing else really matters in this life but life itself and its enjoyment. What the hell else is there? What the hell else could there possibly be?’

You can never know everything about a quantum state. That was what Dallas had said, quoting Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Too damn right. Working inside the containment room, uncertain was precisely the way Cavor felt. Because it was only too easy to picture the atoms that constituted the tissue of his own body, ionized and excited by their invisible encounter with all the fast electrons, ejected protons, gamma photons, and captured neutrons that filled the room. Even as Cavor waited for Dallas to burn a tiny hole in the smart mortar at each corner of the concrete block and, having located the heat-conducting wire, make four connections onto another length of wire he had previously isolated inside a sealed tube of liquid nitrogen, Cavor found himself glancing nervously at the TLD he wore on the sleeve of his space suit, wondering what quantum chemical changes were occurring in his bone marrow and blood-forming cells. Only five minutes they’d been in there and already he’d absorbed one hundred and fifty centigrays, enough to cause a fall in his white blood cell count and, as a corollary, his body’s ability to fight off infection. In cases of radiation sickness it was most often some kind of infection that killed you. Just thinking about that made Cavor feel nauseous, and he asked himself if, when the time came, he would be able to distinguish mere discomfort and fear from the nausea and sickness that Dallas had predicted for them as the first identifiable somatic effects of radiation exposure.