Russian Spring (80 page)

“Grounds? You want grounds?” Wolfowitz shouted at outraged reporters. “He’s fomented a revolution in a foreign country, which violates any number of laws that no one has paid attention to for thirty years, and now he’s unilaterally involved us militarily in a potential nuclear confrontation without even bothering to get a Congressional resolution. If we don’t get rid of Carson forthwith and use that as a fig leaf behind which to back out of this lunatic commitment, the idiot is liable to blow the whole world to atoms. Grounds for impeachment? There’s enough grounds to put him in a rubber room forever and throw away the key!”

When asked for the President’s reaction, Presidential Press Secretary Marvin Watson said that the President had nothing to say that was remotely fit to print.

—AP

“Uhhh . . . ?” grunted the voice on the other end of the line.

“Dad? It’s me. . . .”

“Bobby . . . ? Jeez . . . it’s—”

“I’m calling from Palo Alto, Dad.”

“And . . . ?” Dad grunted.

“Well, Dad, there really
is
an outfit here called Immortality, Inc.,”
Bobby said, “and they do offer so-called death suspension, but, well . . .”

There was a long pause at the other end of the line, as Dad no doubt struggled to full wakefulness, for while outside the motel room window Bobby could see people sunning themselves around the pool in the bright California sunshine, in Paris it was the middle of the night.

Immortality, Inc., had turned out to be a low concrete building behind a brick wall in a lightly wooded grassy compound, indistinguishable from the biotech labs, electronic plants, and defense industry spook-shops that formed the main economic base of the Palo Alto area.

Bobby had been met in the reception area by a Dr. John Burton, a smooth smiling type with long blond hair who looked like a surfer who had incongruously encased himself in a very expensive gray silk business suit.

Burton had taken him into a slick office filled with tropical plants, where he had explained the operation to the “reporter from StarNet,” his blue eyes sparkling with the intensity of the true believer, or maybe that of a star used-car salesman.

“You’ll find out sooner or later, Mr. Reed, so I might as well admit up front that we are operating under a funeral home license,” Burton told him.

“A
funeral home license
?” Bobby exclaimed. “This place doesn’t exactly look like a mortuary to me.”

“It isn’t,” Burton said. “But under present California law, we’ve had to get death suspension certified as a legal form of burial in order to operate at all. Needless to say, it’s something of an embarrassment. And unfortunately, it means we are not allowed to process a client before legally certified clinical death, which we do not believe is the blue max.”

“Blue max?”

“Polymerize before brain death to minimize the chance of cerebral deterioration. The blue max for sure. Catch the brain before the hardware has a chance to erode.”

“You mean
kill
them?”

“Come on, man, don’t be ghoulish! We’re talking about clients in a terminal state!” Burton shrugged. “But the law’s the law, and we’re stuck with it right now,” he said unhappily. Then he brightened again. “Of course in the long run,” he added hastily, “it’s not anything we won’t be able to get around.”

“The long run?”

“Years, decades,” Burton said expansively. “We know how to preserve our clients, but of course we still don’t know what tech we’ll
need to revive them. That’s why we go for so much redundancy—tissue samples
and
genome recording, brain polymerization
and
chip storage of instantaneous electrohologrammic patterns.”

His eyes seemed to become a bit furtive. “And since we are talking about indefinite preservation of biological material and data storage, as well as covering the cost of the necessary continued research, which could take decades, we are forced to require a fee of two million dollars.”

“
Two million dollars!
” Bobby exclaimed. Even in today’s rubber money, that was more than the whole family could possibly afford.

“Sure it’s a lot of money,” Burton said airily. “That’s why we’ve got a deal with the banks to treat it as a mortgage situation. Given an acceptable credit profile, you can get a pre-need contract for as little as 20 percent down on a twenty-year loan at only 6 percent above prime.”

Bobby choked on that one. What did the banks do if you failed to meet the payments, repossess the brain? But he held his tongue, nodded politely, and let Burton take him on a tour of the facilities.

At least to Bobby’s scientifically untrained eye, Immortality, Inc., seemed to be impressively funded and lavishly equipped. There was a complete operating theater and whole rooms full of computers. There was a storage chamber where tissue samples were kept in liquid nitrogen cooled by superconducting refrigeration units able to function independently for four months in the event of external power failure. There were research labs. There was a room full of arcane electronic equipment that supposedly recorded the “instantaneous hologram of consciousness” on chip.

Burton showed him the brain-storage unit. This was the only part of the facilities that at all reminded Bobby of anything like a mortuary. It was a modest-sized hermetically sealed room with what looked weirdly like ranks of filing cabinets lining the long walls, row after row of small steel drawers from floor to ceiling.

“Would you care to see one of our clients?” Burton said.

“You mean you’ve actually . . . uh . . . processed people already?” Bobby exclaimed in some surprise.

“Hey, we did Tessa Tinker, it was in all the papers. And we’ve done another twenty-three clients already. With pre-need contracts with about a hundred more, some
very
heavy people whose names I am not at liberty to divulge. You might be interested in a pre-need plan yourself.”

“Pre-need plan . . . ?” Bobby stammered. The whole thing was getting more and more ghoulish by the moment.

“We take a tissue sample and record your genome right now. Your
instantaneous hologram of consciousness too. And free updates as often as you can get here for them. When the time comes, your brain gets polymerized as soon as it becomes legal to do so, so you retain all your long-term memories, and we dump everything up until the time of the last hologram update into the hardware when we install it in the clone.”

And as if
that
wasn’t ghoulish enough, Burton opened one of the drawers and let Bobby look inside. There, cradled in Styrofoam like an enormous egg, was a human brain tightly packaged in some kind of clear shrink-wrap.

“Jesus . . .” Bobby muttered.

“Go ahead, touch it, man,” Burton said.

Bobby goggled at him.

“Just to make a point,” Burton said, smiling.

Gingerly, Bobby reached out and tapped the brain twice with his knuckles.

It was hard as a rock.

“No longer meat,” Burton said. “Polymerized hard as a rock and twice as chemically inert. You could dunk it off a backboard and you wouldn’t hurt it. Needs no refrigeration or special conditions. It could survive like that for centuries.”

That was the capper of the guided tour, after which Burton took Bobby back to his office, gave him a large packet of lavishly illustrated promotional material, and asked if he had any questions.

Bobby, quite dazed by now, could think of only one question, and that was the only one that mattered. “Look, Dr. Burton, you’ll pardon me for being brutally frank, but are you really
serious
about all this? Do you seriously think that someday you’ll actually be able to clone bodies, depolymerize brains, and bring these people back to normal life?”

Burton just smiled his wide-open surfer’s smile. “Can we really bring back dead people? Well, that’s a philosophical question, man. Will they be the same people, or only feel like the same people? Depends on your beliefs about the soul. . . .”

He shrugged. “We don’t have
those
answers,” he admitted. “But you want certainty, why then you can always have yourself stuffed in a hole in the ground.”

Bobby had planned to wait till a decent hour in Paris before he called his father, but by the time he got back to the motel, his head was reeling from the most macabre experience of his life, his sense of reality was slipping, and he needed to dump it all on someone
right now
.

So he had gone straight to the telephone and woken Dad up in the middle of the night.

“So tell me about it, Bob,” Dad said, after a long pause, now, apparently, more or less fully awake. And Bobby did.

“Well, Bob, what do you think?” Dad said when he was finally finished.

“Hey, Dad, I’m no technical expert. . . .”

“But you
are
a journalist. Tell me what you feel. Is this a fly-by-night outfit or are they substantial?”

“Seemed pretty gilt-edged to me.”

“Do you think these people are sincere or is this a fraud?”

Bobby had to think long and hard about that one. “Both, I think,” he finally said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s all an expensive set for a high-budget science-fiction movie, but if it’s bullshit, I think they’ve really sold it to themselves too.”

“Good enough for me,” Dad said immediately.

“Dad, I just got through telling you—”

“If these scientists have convinced themselves they’re really onto something, then we can certainly convince your mother, she wants so much to believe. . . .”

Bobby groaned. “That’s it, isn’t it, Dad?” he said wearily. “You just want to use this to convince Mom to help you get your spaceship ride. I dragged my ass all the way out here with the world coming apart just to—”

“You’ve got to get to Paris, Bob! Together, I know we can convince her, the mere fact that you believe it enough to finally—”

“Jesus, Dad, you know that’s impossible! Especially now! Don’t you have any idea of what’s going on in the world? That asshole Carson has put Battlestar America on yellow alert! Red Army units are moving toward the Ukrainian border! All flights to Europe have been suspended.
No one
can get in or out of the country now, let alone the likes of me!”

“You’ve got to try, Bob, you’ve got to try!”

“I have been trying, Dad, you know I have,” Bobby told him guiltily. “Maybe when all this is over, if we haven’t all been blown to bits . . .”

“Soon, Bobby, soon, I haven’t got that much time.”

Maybe none of us has, Bobby thought somberly.

And as he thought it, he at last understood his father’s single-minded obsession with the wisdom of a sympathetic heart.

The whole world was staring death in the face now, just as Dad had been ever since the accident. The only difference was that he knew for a certainty when and how.

As he sat there in the sunny California motel room, Bobby found himself suddenly envying his father his inspired madness, his vision of something worth throwing away what was left of his life over. He
even could find some empathy with the crazy schemes of John Burton.

Millions of lives might soon be thrown away for nothing more worthwhile than the fanaticism of the Ukrainian nationalists and the reckless stupidity of the imbecile in the White House.

Including his own.

Only now did that awful reality seep into his bones and his gut, only now had it really become something more than a hot news story. Time might very well be running out on everyone. This macabre conversation with Dad had suddenly made that theoretical truth terrifyingly personal.

He could die at any moment, he could be vaporized with no warning. The things that might be left undone, the debts that might be left forever unpaid, the words that he might never get to say . . .

“You’re a lunatic, Dad,” Bobby said tenderly. “You’re a real space cadet. But I love you very much.”

“Does that mean you’ll help me, Bob? Does that mean you’re on my side?”

Bobby sighed. “Yeah, I’m on your side,” he said, and found somewhat to his surprise that now he really meant it. The dream might not be his, but the feeling behind it was now all too comprehensible. “I’ll do what I can.”

CARSON DEMANDS
WOLFOWITZ RESIGNATION

After days of official silence, President Harry Carson has finally responded to Vice President Wolfowitz’s call for his impeachment.

Speaking to a group of selected reporters in the Oval Office, President Carson, whom those present described as flushed, and tense, and barely controlling his fury, demanded that the Vice President resign.

“If he doesn’t, we’ll see who impeaches who!” the President declared. “That s.o.b. is a traitor, he always has been, and now he’s gone and proven it! He oughta be tarred and feathered and run all the way to Siberia on a rail in his underwear, not just impeached.”

The President said that he had summoned the Vice President to a Cabinet meeting tomorrow to tender his resignation or face impeachment on charges of treason.

When reached for comment, Vice President Wolfowitz said that he would “accept the invitation.” As for resigning, the Vice President said that he had no intention of stepping down unless the President resigned simultaneously.

“I hope he
does
try to impeach me,” Vice President Wolfowitz declared. “At least it would force the House to debate the real issues
instead of just clicking their heels and screaming Heil Carson on cue. So go ahead, Harry, do it, get your feeble little rocks off. Go ahead and make my day.”

—
San Francisco Chronicle

The tension in Prague had been so thick you could cut it with a knife, and while the Americans were still considered the main villains of the piece, and the Czechs certainly had nothing good to say about the Ukrainians, there had been a big demonstration in Wenceslas Square by Slovak nationalists supporting the admission of the “Republic of the Ukraine” to Common Europe behind the banner of “A Common Europe of Peoples, not Nation-States,” there had been a strident anti-Russian undertone, and Franja had been glad to get airborne on her way back to Moscow.

According to the news, it was the same all over Europe. A broad coalition of Basque, Breton, Scottish, Catalan, Slovak, Corsican, Flemish, Welsh, and Lapp delegates had sponsored a resolution in the Common European Parliament calling for the admission of the Ukraine, and while they clearly did not have the numbers to push it through, it seemed likely that they would be able to force a formal vote.