The Far Arena (24 page)

McCardle said he was aware of that.

'The problem is not freezing a body. That can be done quite well. The problem is in unfreezing. I could freeze you very well now, I just couldn't bring you back to life. Even in single cells, thawing is only seventy per cent effective. Which leaves, under the best conditions, thirty per cent damaged or, if you will, dead. The human body is so complex with so many billions of cells, it is impossible to perfuse it thoroughly with glycerol, assuming glycerol works perfectly which I do not think it does. And with the brain - hah, hah, hah - you get something that looks like a brain, is composed of brain cells, smells like a brain, feels like a brain, and might as well be a cauliflower. People are not frozen dinners, Dr McCardle. Dead is still dead.'

'And when did you change your mind ?'

'When it started talking. When it started talking, I would have had to believe that under less than ideal conditions, a brain had been revived intact with more than ninety per cent, if not one hundred per cent, recovery. All this with all the other organs. I couldn't do it with our little frog here, and yet nature is supposed to do it with an incredibly more complex human body with its original blood?'

'The blood looked brackish.'

'No. No. No. What happened, my dear Dr McCardle, was you thought you had killed him near the hospital and froze the poor person ineptly so that the brain never froze, the organs never froze, and gullible trusting Semyon Petrovitch provided you with the disposal of a body you had just tried to kill. Or maybe the CIA tried to kill him. I am no murderer. I do not know how your mind works.'

'So
why didn't you phone the police?’

'I want no trouble here. I am on loan to the university. I told my embassy.'

'So it's not your problem.'

‘
It is not a political problem, it is a scientific one.'

'Well, friend, you have a bigger one right now. You've got a doozy. You'll hear it.'

McCardle opened his attache
case with slightly wet hands slipping on the brass snaps. Careful not to wet one of the tapes, he found an early one and snapped it into a slim aluminium recorder, also taken from the case. In the case was a Latin-English dictionary with a few corners already worn.

'I have friends who have heard those ramblings from John Carter, and they declare them peculiar.'

'At your embassy, KGB?' asked Lew, although it was a silly question. Of course they had. They weren't going to be drawn into something blind. They didn't run their country like men ran their lives. Dr Petrovitch had to have their permission.

Petrovitch pointed to the frog. McCardle rewound the tape. Petrovitch pressed his finger down on the little frog's back. The shiny skin gave way under the finger. It was thawed. But for the once-shiny black eyes, it looked alive. They were white. The crystallization of water had destroyed them. It
had also, McCardle knew, destroyed the brain.

'Dead,' said Dr Petrovitch, 'is dead.' He clasped a slippery hind foot of the little frog delicately and finally dropped it into a small bucket.

Only moisture and a small black speck with a small red streak remained on the white sink top. Even if the eyes had returned to their shiny blackness, it still would have been just as dead.

McCardle played the tape and this time, listening for it, he heard the name 'Publius'.

'So ?' said Dr Petrovitch.

'So undoubtedly your friends, who understand the criminal mind, have heard some of the tapes, if not this one already.'

'I do not know how they operate,' said Dr Petrovitch, using superiority like a fence,

'They have, have they not ?' said Lew McCardle.

'I imagine,' said Dr Petrovitch.

'Let's assume they had copies of the tapes right away, and let's assume they tried translating within, oh, a day. I'd say an hour, but let's say a day, all right ?'

Petrovitch shrugged as if it were of no matter to him.

'And let's say,' said McCardle, 'they still don't know what language it is, because if they did, you wouldn't be here calling me some sort of murderer. I'm telling you your secret police still haven't translated this tape because they're so suspicious. Their own mentality has protected them from the truth.

'They say it is a form of Italian.

'No, Semyon. Italian is a form of this language and so is Spanish and French. It is Latin. Classical Latin. The tape stopped and the forward button clicked up.

'So it is a dead language, said Dr Petrovitch. 'So your victim speaks a dead language. 'To whom is he speaking, Semyon ?

'Someone else in a Latin class. You have those things. You study Greek, too.

‘I
n a semi-comatose state, Semyon ?

'He is reciting a childhood lesson. It happens.'

'Seven days in a row with no other language present ?' asked McCardle.

He was not sure the person had not lapsed into some other language until he saw Semyon's face, which did not flinch. McCardle was correct. The body spoke only Latin, and Semyon's embassy staff had yet to identify the language, because Dr Petrovitch himself had assured them the patient could not have been more than twenty minutes in ice. The Russian embassy apparently had examined every tape.

'How old is he?' asked Dr Petrovitch.

'At least sixteen hundred years, probably older,' said McCardle.

'Are you lying, Lew ?'

'No. That is too big a lie.'

it is too big a truth,' said Petrovitch. He rubbed his balding scalp and sat down on a high stool. He peered down into the waste bucket where the dead glistening little experiment was and shook his head.

'How ?' asked Petrovitch finally. 'How ?'

'That's what you've got to find out. Now you yourself have admitted that one of the problems with Soviet science is its taste for the spectacular. What's breathing upstairs is pretty spectacular. Do you think if this becomes public knowledge too soon, you're going to have the slightest chance of working scientifically?'

Petrovitch gulped for air. He shook his head. He wouldn't, he knew.

'Not at all. Now I need the same thing. I need to be free of the kind of intense, wild publicity that will surround this guy when they find out what you've done.'

‘I
f he lives,' said Petrovitch.

‘I
s there a doubt?'

'I do not know. I do not know,' said Petrovitch. He stared vaguely at the ceiling. 'The blood. Of course. The blood.' 'What?'

'The blood,' said Petrovitch, as though Lew had been part of the scientist's innermost thoughts. 'The blood. At the wound, It did not feel crystallized, although it might have been melting. I didn't know.'

'What ?' asked Lew. 'Is that possible below freezing ?'

'Yes. But not for blood. But this blood was different.'

'How?'

'We are finding out. The final tests are not in yet. But somehow the bloodstream at one point did not carry completely normal blood. We saved the blood. We'll find out what it was.'

'It was whitish, yellowish, sort of, when I saw it first. But wouldn't that be natural for its state of existence ?'

'Of course. The red cells were driven out by the temperature.' said Petrovitch. 'That wouldn't explain it. There was that odour. That blood was not normal blood. Not at all. There was another element in that bloodstream. And we'll find it.'

'When the core sample came up with that piece of thigh...'

'The gracilis muscle.'

'Whatever. When I felt it, it felt sort of rubbery. There was no crunch under my fingers.'

'Yes,' exulted Petrovitch. He clapped his hands with a loud crack, blew a kiss to the trash barrel with the remains of the frog, and danced three light steps around the table. 'Yes. Yes. Yes. There was no crystallization. None. None. None. None.'

'We must be cautious with this,' said Lew.

'Absolutely. Absolutely,' said Petrovitch, his mind still grappling with medical facts, while Lew was emphasizing political ones. 'But why is it so important to you ?'

'With the kind of miracle you've done, there will be armies of people and journalists and kook hunters running around looking into where I've been and double-checking where I claim to have found him, which won't be the place I really found him, but they'll find that.'

'That you would lie about ?'

'Semyon. I want oil. I look for oil. We want to find it by ourselves, so that we can get the rights cheaper. Your own people must have told you that. That's why I don't want the great publicity for a while. That is my area of interest.'

'Why would your people tell my people ?'

'Because, Semyon, in this business, on the project I was working on, the gieat enemy is not the Soviet Union but Royal Dutch Shell, Phillips Petroleum, Standard Oil. Those are our enemies in this, not you.'

'Capitalism,' said Petrovitch, as though that explained all sorts of peculiarities and that to delve further would be a waste of time for one would find only more peculiarities.

'So, we share the same interest. You will work with discretion and a shield that I help provide, and when you are ready, and we are ready, we will announce what a great thing you have done. We laud Soviet science and you laud the commitment of an American oil company. We get the oil. You get the prestige.'

'It has to be the blood. It's got to be the blood,' said Petrovitch. 'A maximum of sixteen hundred years, Lew ?'

'No. Minimum, Semyon. It could be two thousand, three thousand. Sixteen hundred is the youngest it could be.'

Petrovitch shrugged, his dark eyebrows rising with an acceptable thought. 'Sixteen hundred. Actually, at certain temperatures sixteen hundred, a minute and a half, ten thousand years. At certain temperatures they become the same. Organic functions like decomposition need heat. Did you know that ?'

'I guess you're right, yes.'

'We have another problem, small this time, Lew. Who talks to it, if it recovers enough to talk to people instead of itself.'

'The woman suggested by the Romance professor, Semyon, She's a nun. I saw her. She identified the language.'

Petrovitch shook his head. "They will try to prove some religious thing. They will.'

'I think we could use her and she wouldn't have ambitions.'

'Then we must exact a promise, she would not try to prove some religious thing with it.'

'She has gone to Oxford.'

'I don't trust religious things.'

'Meet her.'

'Religious people make me uncomfortable. I don't like them.
’
'Meet her first, and then decide. She is quite taken with the language. I just know she is not the sort who would let religious convictions interfere with academic facts.'

'Nuns are lesbians,' said Petrovitch.'

'Do you know any ?'

'If they were not lesbians, why would they become nuns ?' 'Is it possible,' said Lew smiling, 'that you are being a bit irrational ?' 'A bit,' conceded Petrovitch.

'We have benefits if we use a nun. She is not going to hold press conferences or sell her memoirs or go running off with someone who might sell information.'

'What about the nurses ?'

'They don't know what we have, and only one is with us who remembers its condition when it arrived. Everyone else thinks it's some dirty-minded executive.'

'Let me think about it. If recovery continues, then we will interview her. I have sent her a package without getting a reply. One advantage to having a lesbian is that she will not play around with the subject.'

'Maybe she is hoarding a passion and will sexually attack John Carter,'said Lew.

'Not John Carter. It should have another name. A Roman name.'

'Not yet.'

'Yes. You're right. You don't think she would rape a patient, do you?'

'I thought she was a lesbian, Semyon.'

'You are right. I am being irrational. Let us see her tomorrow . in case we need her. I will talk to her. Although I think it is a waste of time. I cannot imagine anyone so religious being scientific, but who knows? I really don't know if she is a lesbian or what or anything. But I do know there has to be some reason why she would live without men.'

'You can ask her tomorrow.'

'I might,' said Semyon.