Lifeline

“No, I only meant that you should—” He stopped himself, cautious, then rephrased his words. “I would not presume to make decisions for you, since you are the acting director. But I did want to remind you of Dr. Langelier’s knowledge of Russian. I believe she is fluent in the language. Perhaps if she were over here, we would have a better chance of reviving one of the Soviets.”

Brahms looked at him with a stony expression that melted away into one of concern and friendship. “I’ll note that, Ramis. Maybe we’ll need to do it. But I think that would be a greater risk than having you try by yourself. Don’t you agree? Will you at least try before we ask Dr. Langelier to make the same dangerous journey you did? I wouldn’t want to risk her unnecessarily.”

Uncomfortable with what Brahms had just said, but not wanting to give a definite answer, Ramis replied, “I will be back in touch as soon as I have something to report.” He took a malicious pleasure in blanking the screen on Brahms.

Ramis stood outside the dimmed infirmary again, staring at the rows of glass coffins. The silence felt suffocating. He placed his hands on his hips and pressed his lips together, trying to be firm about his decision, about his resolve. But a chill made gooseflesh on his arms—strictly from the cooled-down station; he didn’t think it was from fear.

He wondered about the dead man he had discovered in the command center. The last one—the captain going down with his ship? Had someone remained behind, at the last minute remembering to scrawl a list of steps for reviving the rest of the people? What had happened?

It looked like the people in the four cubicles just inside the entrance had been the last four to go into the chambers. All of the Soviets wore loose, gray pajamalike outfits.

One burly man’s elbows bumped the sides of the glass; his knees were bent slightly, as if they had had to wedge him into the cubicle. He had reddish-blond hair. Two other men, dark-haired, occupied the coffins on either side of him. Last he saw a slim woman with a sharp nose, deep-set eyes, and gray-brown hair. Her face had a pinched look, not the serene emptiness of the other Soviets, as if she were still thinking even in her deep, cold sleep.

Ramis inspected the cubicles more closely. They were transparent, frosted on the inside with a light sketching of ice crystals. The Kibalchich workers had probably made the glass from the leftover lunar material that orbited the colony as a radiation shield.

This had not been done in a few days, Ramis thought. This had been a calculated, extensive project—something planned. He frowned.

Ramis went over to the burly man. Unconsciously he had made his decision. Perhaps it had no valid logic at all behind it, but he reasoned that if any of these people would have the strength, the stamina, to survive Ramis’s clumsy attempt at the reawakening process, it would be this man.

The glass looked sealed on all sides except for the end, which was opaque, metal, with a control panel mounted in the center. He placed his fingertips on the seam of metal against glass, wondering if he should attempt to pry it open to free the man from the chamber and let him thaw out in the air. But Ramis realized that was ridiculous. It would be certain death for the Soviet man.

On the wall, the handwriting indicated the first button to push that would activate the sequence, the proper numbers that each readout should display—though it gave no instructions on what to do if the numbers were wrong, or the time that must elapse before the second set of controls should be activated. Brahms was right—it did sound straightforward.

Ramis peered down, noticing that thin tubes ran from a reservoir beneath the coffin to where they plunged into the inside of the man’s elbows, anchored on blood vessels. A yellowish color in the tube showed him that a clear liquid was actually passing into the Soviet’s body. Some sort of nutrient solution? Electrodes were mounted on his temples and another on his sternum.

He kneeled in front of the control panel. He hoped it would be an automatic process, that he needed only to activate the sequence and let the machine take over, that everything would run smoothly.

It appeared to be a three-stage procedure with separate readouts. Of course he wouldn’t know what any of the numbers meant—blood pressure, body temperature, heartbeat, brain activity … the day of the week? If something went wrong, he wouldn’t know how to adjust it. He wouldn’t even know how to recognize that something was indeed going wrong! The instructions on the wall were abbreviated, with no detail.