The Long Sleep

by John Hill

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Copyright © 1975 by CBS Publications, the Consumer Publishing Division of CBS Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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I

“”

He was not dead, but nearly so.

Many times, the heavy breath of the void—cold, sweet, slow, and fetid—had been inhaled and exhaled over him. But it had failed to claim him.

For an inestimable length of time he had seen nothing except a hazy light emanating from an un-known source, filtered through (it seemed) the underside of a cosmic fly's unfurled wing: translucent white streaked through with pale blue veins. He had heard nothing at all in that time: not the breath of the void nor his own breath. He had required no nourishment. He had needed no entertainment. He drifted in syrupy warmth which had no odor, and received no tactile stimulation. As a substitute for the womb, this place, whatever it might be, was without parallel.

Perhaps because of this lack of stimuli, he had not even entertained a single thought in all those hours. Mindlessly, he had drifted, swimming down rivers of nothingness. . . He existed as much like a vegetable as like a man, insulated from everything except his own greatly reduced bodily functions.

All this changed in an instant.

The distant, blurred light burst apart and showered down onto the cosmic fly's wings, setting them afire instantly. The flames greedily consumed the veil. The warm air was filled with the shrill, awful shiek of destruction.

He was heaved abruptly upwards into dim purple light and cold dry air.

He was naked upon the couch that had risen from the long metal cylinder which he had in-habited during his sleep, but he was not the sort of man to be diminished in stature by the removal of his clothes. He was six-two, slab-shouldered, pinch-waisted, lean, and very broad across the chest. His arms and legs were roped with compact muscles, the result of weight lifting which had been performed until further development would have been cumbersome and detrimental.

In the background relays clicked.

Computers chattered as they produced printouts of his physical condition. Overhead, suspended from the ceiling, a teleprinter had flashed with dull green light when the cylinder opened, and now it was marked by white letters which drifted across from left to right: HEARTBEAT: 92/ RESPIRATION: 35 PER MINUTE/BLOOD PRESSURE . . .

Like unseen gods of concrete, heavy machinery growled in the floor, while hydraulic arms pivoted his couch to the right and angled it toward the floor. In a few seconds the couch had been brought within three feet of the floor, well below the level of the pod hatch from which he had come.

Relays ceased clicking.

Computers stopped rattling forth print-outs. The teleprinter above the cylinder went dark, The machinery—or the gods—beneath the floor sighed and was quiet. Deathly quiet.

The next move, this animated room seemed to be saying, was entirely up to him.

He sat up, swung to the edge of the couch, and dangled his legs so that his toes brushed the cold floor. Bewildered, he wiped one hand across his pale face and looked around for a clue to his whereabouts.

On three sides the white enamel walls were featureless except for a breathcoat of dust. On the fourth side, a door marred the chalky uniformity, as did several observation windows. The room behind those windows contained no light whatsoever. The ceiling of this room in which he had awakened was low and black, fixtured only with a long central light row that provided a minimal illumination like the glow of certain lichens in limestone caves. The chamber measured approximately thirty feet on a side and contained fifteen other pods like the one he had just vacated.

Each of these devices was half again as long as a man, fashioned from burnished steel; and each had a well delineated topside hatch the center of which contained a four-inch square of thick glass so that one might see who lay inside. From his current angle he could not see any of the viewplates or the sleepers who rested behind them. Beneath the big cylinders, conduits encased in pipe fed into the floor, out of sight. The pipes were coated with dust; spider webs laced the angles at the joints.

Without the steel pods, the place might have been a walk-in freezer for a modern but abandoned butcher shop. However, even without the pods, it was an altogether alien room, utterly beyond his experience.

He was still confused, but confusion no longer preoccupied him. Now, he was preoccupied with a growing fear . . .

He closed his eyes, counted to ten, opened them again and frowned when the scene remained the same. He had been hoping that it would prove to be a nightmare, that it would dissolve, fade away and permit reality to seep through the illusion. He didn't like the idea of waking up in a place where he could not remember having gone to sleep.

That hinted at madness.

He got off the couch and stood on the cold floor, shivering, exposed, vulnerable.

Where was he?

Suddenly he realized that there was an even more pressing question to be answered:
Who
was he? He looked down at himself as if he were a stranger. He saw only well ended muscles, unble-mished skin, a flat abdomen, a long-distance runner's legs without the scars and knots of competi-tion. He could not remember anything this body had done—anything
he
had done. His past was a blank. He felt newborn—but with an adult's mental capacity.

Behind him, an electric motor whined. The couch rose on its hydraulic arm, straightened above the open hatch, and lowered out of sight into the pod. The motor died. The hatch slid shut, locked itself with a
snick!
as final as a bullet in the face.

II

He turned toward the observation windows and called out: “Is anyone here?”

The moment he heard his voice booming through the quiet room, he felt like a fool. Of course there was someone here. From the look of the place, it was either a hospital or a laboratory, the kind of establishment that would not be left unstaffed at any hour of the day or night.

No one answered.

“Hey!”

Silence.

Standing in one spot and turning in a slow circle to survey the room more carefully, he understood the significance of the dust and spider webs for the first time. Neither a hospital nor a laboratory would tolerate such uncleanliness and neglect. The thought was disturbing, for if he were not in a hospital or a lab he couldn't begin to guess what else this place might be. He refused, for the moment, to worry about it. Until he knew for certain where he was, he would think in terms of hospitals despite the signs of decay and deteriorization.

His footsteps echoing softly behind him, he padded across the room to the narrow windows and stared into the unlighted chamber beyond: the monkey precociously spying on his jailers. In the backwash of the light from the pod chamber where he had just awakened, he could see decks of controls built into the wall beneath the windows. He could see a row of swivel chairs in there. Each chair faced the control decks, the windows, and, beyond the windows, the strange steel cylinders.

Behind the chairs the room was much too dark for him to see anything else it held. Anyway, it appeared to be deserted.

He was anxious to get out of the chilly air that hung between the enameled walls; he had to find clothes, warmth, people, some sort of explanation. However, he did not want to leave until he had looked in the peepholes of the other pods. He might recognize one of the sleepers. And if he did, that recognition might be the key to his entire locked memory. He recalled how his own cylinder hatch had latched itself; if the door to this room operated on a similar principle, he might not be able to get back in here once he had departed.

But that was absurd. Ridiculous. There would be people out there who could let him back in here any time he wanted. People. Lots of people.
Weren't there?

Hurriedly recrossing the room, his teeth chattering, he gripped the hatch rim on the nearest cylinder and pulled himself up the rounded side to peer into the pod.

Death returned his gaze . . .

A skull—thinly bound with ragged, cracked, and leathery skin—lay directly beneath the viewplate. Its eyes were gone. The bony sockets were pooled with darkness, not the slightest hint of corrupted flesh beyond them. The mouth was open in a yawning leer—or perhaps a frozen scream—that revealed fine, white teeth and a shriveled piece of hide that might have once been a tongue. Bright lemon hair billowed around the ghastly sleeper's calcimine cheeks, cradling the death's head in an anachronistically feminine pillow.

If he could have shifted his focus from the macabre countenance to the polished glass of the peephole, he would have seen his own face there, superimposed on the dead woman's face, suddenly drawn and haunted. But he was mesmerized by the specter's cold and empty stare.

For a time he hung there, arms aching with the effort, unable to drop. The black sockets of the dead woman's eyes pinned him in place, skewered his attention and trapped his soul. He could not imagine how she had looked in life; the hideous state in which she now lay was eternal, timeless, and provided no fuel for conjecture. Yet . . . he felt that he had known her. He reached for a name, felt his mind curl on emptiness. Finally, he let go. The floor felt unsteady beneath his feet.

Before his meager courage could bleed away altogether, he stepped to the adjoining pod and levered himself up to the viewplate. Another skull looked back at him. This one was sheathed in more unholy, weathered meat that the first had been, as if there had been too little air inside its coffin to allow the process of decay to go as far as it should have done. In the depths of the white-rimmed pit where its right eye had been, something yellow gleamed malevolently. No matter.

Though this corpse was in better condition than the other, it was still a corpse. And still unrecognizable.

Sliding to the floor again, he leaned against the cool steel pod and wiped perspiration out of his eyes, though the room had grown no warmer.

“They're dead!” he shouted.

He did not know whom he expected to answer.

No one did.

“
Damn you!”

If this had been an experimental laboratory—no matter
what
the subject of the investigations had been; time, later, to wonder about that—the experiments had gone wrong. The other sleepers had been permitted to die in their pods but he had been awakened without memory of even part of the affair. That was a hell of a way to run a scientific inquiry. Criminal negligence was what it was.

Simply outrageous! Someone would pay for it. Heads would roll when he found the men responsible.

That peculiar sense of isolation enveloped him again: that certainty that no one was left alive to be held responsible, that he was the only man here, that the scale of the disaster was larger than what this room exposed. He tried to pinpoint the source of his fear but could not.

Pushing away from the pod, unable to withstand the shock of looking at yet another corpse, he went to the door beside the observation windows, opened it, walked into the other room.