The Eternity Brigade (7 page)

Their schedule was so exhaustive they had little time for private lives. Between meals, classes and field exercises, Hawker had little opportunity to talk with his friends.
By the end of each day it was all he could do to crawl into bed and try to get a little sleep before the cycle repeated itself the next day.

Just as the recruits were congratulating themselves for surviving the weapons training, the physical examinations began. Each of them had been examined before being accepted into the program, and they thought the re-examinations were just a formality. They were wrong.

The army was fully aware that this cryogenic experiment was something that had never been attempted on this scale or for this duration. It wanted to make certain each specimen was at the peak of health before committing him to the freezing procedure. Every major organ was tested several ways, with readings correlated for any systemic weakness that might fail under the stress of suspension.

The day after the final results were in, the men were told to report to the laboratory building immediately after reveille. They were shown the equipment for the first time—large white coffins with thickly insulated walls. Hawker had expected to see tangles of wires leading from each coffin, as in the original videos, but the machinery was much too sophisticated for that. These boxes were designed to be shipped anywhere in the world within thirty-six hours, if an emergency arose; they couldn’t be entangled with needless spaghetti.

When Captain Dukakis announced they were all to be prepped for the “final phase” of the experiment, there was a low rumbling through the group. None of the men had expected things to be this abrupt. “Don’t we even get a last meal?” someone asked nervously. “Even a murderer gets that!”

“You had your last meal last night.” Dukakis was nervous and impatient himself. “We’ve found the process works best when the subjects’ stomachs are empty—otherwise ulcers tend to form. If your bodies develop any nutritional needs while you’re asleep, we can handle them intravenously. Now get moving.”

The men were led into a waiting room and processed five at a time. Symington was in the first group. Green and Connors were taken in the same group, each ignoring the other’s existence. It was another forty-five minutes before Hawker, his stomach rumbling, was led off to the prepping room.

He was forced to strip completely, and underwent several enemas to clean out his bowels. This, the nurse explained brusquely, was to prohibit any impactions of waste products in his system while he was in suspension. His penis would be catheterized as well, but that would be done after he was unconscious to minimize the discomfort. He was given a mild sedative shot and led to his own box—number 37, he noticed.

“Won’t it be awfully cold?” he asked suddenly as he was climbing inside.

“You’ll be asleep before you can feel any drop in temperature,” the nurse promised him.

Hawker stretched out in his box and tried to make himself comfortable. After all, he’d be in this box for quite some time; he didn’t want to wake up after ten years with a kink in his leg. But no matter how he stretched out, the box was just the triflest too narrow to allow him any comfort. But, on reflection, he thought that might have been intentional. The doctors wouldn’t want him turning even slightly in his sleep and upsetting their instruments, so they’d make the fit as tight as possible.

Just as he thought he was settling in, the technicians around him began attaching instruments all over his body. One small disk was attached in the center of his forehead, two others at his temples, two more behind his ears, one on either side of his neck, one at the inside of each elbow, one at each wrist, four scattered over his torso and two at his groin. The sedative was beginning to take effect by now; Hawker watched the people work and felt only a distant detachment. He drifted peacefully off to sleep before the instrumentation was even completed.

The technicians and the nurses moved more quickly once the patient was fully sedated. They finished placing their instruments, monitored them for several minutes to make sure they were all in working order, inserted a catheter to empty Hawker’s bladder of the last drops of urine, and finally, when all was in readiness, they lowered the transparent cover over coffin number 37 and moved on to the next subject.

***

Hawker slept.

If there were dreams—or any mental activity at all, for that matter—they did not register on the sensitive instruments that monitored his condition. For all practical purposes, Hawker was a corpse in a cryogenic coffin. Pulse, respiration, brain waves, metabolic rate, all the normal systems used to register signs of life showed readings so close to zero as to seem negligible.

Those same vital signs, though, were monitored constantly by a series of computers, wary for even the slightest deviation. Those computers, in turn, were monitored by other computers, which were checked by human beings. The army was risking a great deal on this experiment, and wanted nothing to go wrong. There were fail-safes and redundancies built into every step of the process. The condition of those men in the boxes was monitored more closely than humans had ever been monitored before.

Captain Dukakis even made personal inspection trips down into “the Vault” to observe the men himself. Peering through the transparent coffin lids, his eyes searched in vain for any telltale signs of trouble. But as the days turned to weeks and the months to years, there was no trouble at all. Everything, for once, went exactly as planned.

Hawker slept—and outside his sleep, the world moved as usual.

***

His first sensations on awakening were of warmth and light around him. His skin was tingling oddly, like the pins-and-needles feeling when a foot goes to sleep, only all over his body. He thought about scratching, but he was so tired he was loath to make the effort just now. The sensation wasn’t that uncomfortable. He would just lie here for a few minutes and gather his strength.

He tried rolling over on his side and his muscles, sore from long disuse, protested. He drew in a sudden gasp, then realized what all this meant. If he were still in the suspension coffin, there wouldn’t be room to turn over. And if he were still frozen, he wouldn’t be able to think all these things.

He tried to open his eyes, but even that was too much effort for now. All he could do was lie in bed and think. He didn’t feel any different from when he lay down in the coffin; surely he couldn’t have been asleep for very long. The project must have been a failure for some reason, and they’d awakened him prematurely. There was a certain amount of disappointment in that thought, but even more relief.
He disliked the notion of being connected with something that flopped,
but on the other hand he wouldn’t have to face the future he’d feared, either. The army could scarcely blame him for the failure; he’d done his best. Maybe they’d give him the option of being a training instructor and let him stay in for life.

After a while he finally pried his eyelids open, and had to blink back the tears until his eyes could get adjusted to the room’s brightness. When he could look around, turning his head slowly against neck muscles that protested every movement, he could see he was in a large ward with many other men. All were lying still in their beds, covered by sheets and blankets, as he was. Everyone, himself included, was being fed intravenously from glucose bags hanging beside the beds.

His mind was still a little too fuzzy to count the other beds, but there were a lot of them. He was not an individual case, then, a single accident within the program. The army had thawed out most or all of the other volunteers as well. That did not speak well for the scientists behind Project Banknote; someone’s head was likely to roll because of this.

Even the minuscule exertion of looking around him was wearing, and he lay back on his bed, exhausted. He closed his eyes, and was asleep again before he knew it—a natural sleep, for a natural duration; and if there were any dreams this time, he did not remember them.

He awoke again to the sound of someone walking up to his bed. A hand reached under the covers to touch his arm and feel for a pulse. He opened his eyes suddenly and looked up into the nurse’s face.

The nurse was a middle-aged, heavyset lady with gray-blond hair and a professionally concerned expression. She was wearing a tight white uniform that was unmistakably medical, though her short hair was cropped in an unfamiliar style. The mere fact that a nurse was still recognizably a nurse brought Hawker a sense of relief. Some things hadn’t changed while he’d been “away”; whatever time in the future this was, he would not be a complete stranger to it.

The nurse saw him looking up at her and smiled. “Hi,” she said in a pleasant voice. “How are you feeling?”

He struggled to return her smile.
“Weak,” he answered, and his voice was hoarse and scratchy. “Tired,” he added as an afterthought.

“Weak I can understand, but as for tired you’ve already done your share of sleeping. Although,” she added, half to herself, “too much sleep can make you tired, too.” She checked his pulse against her watch, and jotted the figures down on the chart at the foot of his bed.

“How… how long did I—?”

The nurse shook her head. “Don’t worry yourself about details right now. Just rest and gather strength. The major will be in to brief you tomorrow as soon as everyone’s awake and recovered.” And with that she moved off down the ward to check the rest of the patients.

Hawker watched her make her rounds, until she left the ward. Then he noticed one of the other patients half propped up on his elbows, looking at him. The man was on the other side of the room about two beds down. Hawker tried to remember who he was, and the name Johnston came to mind.

“You won’t get any straight answers out of her,” Johnston said. His voice was weak, but a little better than Hawker’s. “I’ve been awake for two days now, and nobody wants to tell me anything. I think they’re afraid of something.”

“Maybe they’re afraid to shock us,” came the voice of another man, Pastorelli. “Maybe they want to wait and tell us all at once, so rumors don’t spread.”

“I think maybe the whole thing was a failure,” Hawker volunteered. “It sure didn’t feel like I slept too long.”

Johnston smiled. “Yeah, maybe that’s it. Maybe they flopped, and now they’re scared to admit it.”

Hawker looked around the ward, taking in some more details. There were twenty beds in here, ten on each side of the long room. About half the patients now seemed to be awake to some degree. From his limited vantage point, Hawker couldn’t see either Green or Symington in the room; they must be in other wards. He was disappointed at not being with them at this time of confusion, but he wasn’t really worried. They were probably all right; for all he knew, they could be in the very next room.

The temperature in the ward was very warm. The other men who were awake were talking among themselves, exchanging theories on what had happened and how long they’d been asleep. Hawker didn’t contribute further to the conversation. It was clear that no one
knew
anything. All they had to go by was guesses and opinions; to Hawker, such things were worse than useless. The nurse had said some major would be in tomorrow to brief them; he could wait until then. For the moment it was sufficient to know he was alive and in good health; he’d worry about the rest when the time came. Right now, he needed his sleep.

Every man in the ward was awake by the next day, and everyone—Hawker included, though he didn’t show it—was intensely curious about the experiment’s outcome. All eyes went to the door when Dukakis entered the room. The recruiter for Project Banknote was in a major’s uniform now, but that meant little; the promotion could have come at any time, and the men needn’t have been suspended more than a week or two to have missed it.

But it was Dukakis himself that caused the men to stare. The man had aged perceptibly. His face was lined, now, and his hair was graying at the temples and sideburns. He was twenty to thirty pounds heavier and there was a slower, more tired feeling to his walk. Hawker began to feel nervous again. Perhaps the experiment wasn’t such a failure after all.

Dukakis walked slowly to the center of the room, turning so he could look at each of the men who were staring at him. There was a smile on his lips, but it never reached his eyes.

“Hello again, men,” he said. “First of all, I again want to thank you for taking part in this experiment. The army has already learned a great deal, and we expect to learn still more in the future with your continued assistance.

“To cover the subject that I’m sure is uppermost in all your minds, let me say first that Project Banknote has been an enormous success, far exceeding our most optimistic expectations. The group of you was kept in suspended animation for eleven years, five months and thirteen days, and it took a mere three days from the time of taking you out of your suspension chambers until this present moment.”

A startled gasp went through the room. Although Dukakis’s appearance had given the men some warning that time had passed, none of them was quite prepared for the actual amount. Almost a dozen years had slipped beneath them. And yet none of them felt any different, or even as much as a day older, than they had when they settled into their coffins.

Dukakis paused to let the basic facts sink into the men’s minds. When he had their full attention again, he continued his briefing. “You have all survived the most unknown phase of the experiment—more than survived, in fact. Each of you, and all your colleagues in the other wards, appears to be in perfect physical condition. You’ve all mentioned experiencing weakness, but we anticipated that; even though your minds don’t notice any time discrepancy, your muscles do. There’s eleven and a half years of disuse to overcome, but we’ve established a program of physical therapy and calisthenics that should mold you back into fighting shape in less than two weeks. Once that’s accomplished, we’ll be moving into the next phase of the experiment.