James Axler - Ice and Fire

Ryan supported the dark-haired man, sitting him up on the bed. Krysty sat at his side, licking her lips nervously, looking at Ginsberg. "He's starting to show a beard. Look. All that stubble frozen for ten decades."

"Get on with it," Ryan urged her.

"Gaia help me," she whispered. "May the force of the Earth Mother act through me to save this stranger from the past."

Ryan noticed how the sensory curls of her crimson hair had retreated in tight bunches, as if seeking to protect her. Krysty swung her arm back, and then whipped it forward, hitting Ginsberg a solid slap across the left cheek. Though Ryan was braced against it, he was still rocked.

"Fireblast! You don't have to force his skull off his spine, lover."

"No point unless I do it hard. Keep him still there."

This time she used her left hand, leaving the vivid imprint of palm and fingers on the pale skin. Ginsberg's eyes jerked open, unfocused, then closed once more. Ryan could feel that the man's breathing had quickened.

"Again," he ordered.

Krysty slapped the helpless freezie's face twice more — a sharp back-and-forth motion, making the head roll from side to side.

This time the eyes flicked open, and stayed that way.

"Again?" Krysty asked, hand lifted ready.

"No," Richard Ginsberg gasped in a weak but clearly audible voice. "Thank you, but no. Not again."

"Welcome to the future," Doc said.

Cryogenics at the level of federal government was still highly classified at the end of the twentieth century. Carried on in a small number of top-secret redoubts, the experimentation was one of the many peripheral projects linked to the Totality Concept.

Richard Ginsberg had been put forward as a suitable candidate for freezing in the last months of the year 2000, late in October and just ninety days before sky-dark blotted out the United States of America and replaced it with the Deathlands.

Richard Ginsberg, of course, knew nothing of that. He had been locked into dreamless sleep, in his chromed coffin, far beneath the mountainside redoubt.

The last things he'd seen as the anesthetic shut down his mind and body had been the cornflower-blue eyes of Sister Magdalena Cohen, winking at him over the top of her surgical mask — eyes as brilliant as the bright circle of lights that had dazzled him from the ceiling of the operating theater at the Air Force base in Nebraska. Then a face mask came, smelling of a sickly mixture of warm rubber and disinfectant. And the angles inside his own skull folded in on his brain, like a Japanese paper sculpture.

The risks had been explained to him in advance, and he'd also undergone extensive counseling therapy to try to prepare him for his eventual reawakening.

His psychiatrist had gray hair, shaved to a fine stubble, with an enormously bushy mustache that overwhelmed his narrow, foxy face.

"We don't know when you might be revived, Rick," he said. "One month. One year. One century. One millenium. Who knows? I don't know. Nobody knows. All we know is that eventually medical science will be able to cure your illness. Until then you will be ceaselessly monitored."

A thousand years!

"I believe, from the best current information, that research into your ailment points to a cure within five years. Tops."

"Five years. Tops," Richard Ginsberg mumbled, cradled in the arms of Ryan Cawdor.

His eyes were still blurred, but now he was able to make out some details. Perhaps if he could be given his spectacles he'd be able to see better. Because what he saw didn't make any sort of sense at all.

There was a tall young woman with very red hair, like molten copper, sitting on the bed by his feet. Ginsberg was recovered enough to know that this woman was called a nurse. She was a future nurse, in an odd dark blue uniform, with a massive, shiny automatic pistol at her hip. She'd been slapping him on the face! What kind of a hospital was this?

"He's starting to come around." Doc leaned forward and stared into the man's white face. "Guess he doesn't know where in tarnation he is. I was like that. It takes time."

An old man, with a lined face, wearing a denim shirt and a weird Victorian frock coat. Pleasant, deep voice and some very expensive orthodontic work. Ginsberg tried to smile in pride at remembering that word. Must be a surgeon. Eccentric genius, perhaps.

"He's tried to grin," Lori said, looking over Doc's shoulder and beaming at the helpless figure on the bed.

"Nurse," Ginsberg said, with an effort. Pretty from what he could make out. Hair like Kansas wheat and eyes like a Montana skyscape. She looked to be very tall. She moved out of his line of sight and he could hear a peculiar tinkling sound like tiny brass cymbals.

"Lay him down and I'll go heat some soup for him," J.B. offered.

Porter? Middle-aged, eyes hidden behind glasses. But why was he wearing a hat in a hospital ward? And he had a gun at his hip, as well. And another slung over his shoulder, making him look like a guerrilla.

"What's... I mean, where and when?.." But the connections between brain and speech were temporarily down.

"Just take it quiet," Ryan said, standing up so that he could look properly at the freezie.

Richard Ginsberg freaked out at the sight — a mat of unruly black hair above the hardest, most cruel face that he'd ever seen; one eye that glinted like polished marble, the other lost beneath a leather patch; a fearsome scar that seamed the cheek, tugging at the right-hand corner of the mouth. He struggled to lift his head, checking to see if this man, too, was carrying a gun.

However hard he tried, the disoriented freezie couldn't fit Ryan into his futurist scenario. The one-eyed man looked like a killer. It just wasn't possible to pretend otherwise.

"What soup?" Jak asked, popping into sight at the end of the bed, appearing to Richard Ginsberg like a demented demon from the locked door of a psychotic imagination, a little boy with immensely long hair that was as white as snow and as fine as sea wrack. His eyes blazed like coals in an open hearth.

"Veg soup," Ryan replied, turning away from the freezie for a moment. He missed the fraction of a second when the eyes rolled upward in the skull before the man slipped back into the safe harbor of unconsciousness once more.

While Ginsberg slept on, Doc called the other five together to make a short speech to them.

"My dear friends. Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I declare this laboratory to be well and truly... What am I saying? Goodness, but my mind seems to have slipped a gear or two."

"Or three or four," Lori added in a less than kindly tone.

"Our newfound and defrosted companion will require much help."

"If he stays awake long enough for us to help him."

"Indeed. It seems clear that the sight of us, perfectly normal though we might appear to one another, was not quite what the poor man had expected. I would imagine he had thought to recover in a hospital amidst the best of medical care."

"Will he not know he isn't... he is in Deathlands, then?" Lori asked, and was rewarded with a broad smile from Doc.

"Excellently deduced, my little bitty pretty one. A positive Hercules of the intellect. A veritable Napoleon of... No, that's not it. But, Lori is right. This is what we must take care with. Richard Ginsberg will think he has been thawed out to be cured of whatever it is that ails him. In a future world of peace and wonder."

"What's sickness?" Jak asked. The heating of the can of soup had been put on the back burner until Ginsberg recovered again.

"It was obvious — painfully so in both cases — what was wrong with the other freezies. Here, it is less so. Perhaps leukemia, or some associated blood disease. Looking at him, I can see no evidence of any particular illness. Since he has been frozen for a hundred years, his muscle tone is, understandably, not good. Or, might there have been some progressive sickness there? I have no doubt that he will be able to tell us himself, when he finally recovers. But, I say again, be cautious about how we break the news of the long winters. It could topple his frail hold on sanity forever."