Lifeline

The Soviet man lay there, eyes closed. His skin had a flourlike pallor; his eyelids showed a faint intaglio of veins. He had thick lips, perfectly round ears, a square jaw covered with pale beard stubble. Ramis wondered if the stubble had grown in the month the Soviets had been in their frozen sleep … or if the man had simply neglected to shave a day or two before crawling into the chamber. The man had a small mole beside his left eye and a tiny scar at the bottom of his chin.

Ramis knew the face would burn in his memory for a long time. This man was still alive. Ramis had no right to steal that from him.

He could not try it. He was not sure of his own abilities. He could not be so arrogant as to play with this man’s life.

Then Ramis felt his stomach knot. He would have to go back to Brahms and tell him he refused, that he didn’t feel competent.

Instructions written in Cyrillic characters covered the control panels. The walls had preprinted posters with lines of text, but he could not be sure which were inane signs about maintaining one’s health and exercising in orbit, and which contained more crucial information for reviving the hibernating people.

He kneeled next to the controls once more. With the translucent touchpad controls, Ramis was not even sure which of the dimmed squares were activation buttons and which were blank readouts.

He could go back, get the portable video imager, and record every block of text for Karen to translate and interpret.

The START touchpad was in the upper left, according to the instructions. He wondered what the other controls were for—the ones not mentioned on the list. He could activate the chamber and hope everything proceeded automatically. Everything on the Kibalchich had been straightforward so far—the emergency hatch, the lift platform, the transceiver.

Ramis trusted technology. The Soviets wouldn’t try to make things difficult—they would make it obvious. Perhaps Curtis Brahms was right: if they had put themselves into their sleepfreeze to wait for someone else to come, they could not know who would be first to arrive at their station. They could not be sure it would be one of their Soviet compatriots.

Before his arm muscles could lock with hesitation, Ramis reached forward and pressed his finger against the upper left touchpad.

The three readouts suddenly came to life under indecipherable labels, displaying numbers that meant nothing to him. All the numbers remained close to zero and then began to rise. One changed rapidly, while the others crept up a digit at a time. Low numbers. That all made sense—body temperature, heartbeat, respiration.

Yellow lights came on, embedded along the corners of the coffin. The frost on the inside of the glass vanished with little wisps of steam. Warming up the chamber, Ramis decided. He nodded. The first readout still rose rapidly. He watched the digits tick off faster than his heartbeat.

A thick red fluid—blood?—pushed up through the transparent tube from the reservoir below the chamber. The new blood entered the vein in the man’s left arm. After a few moments the tube in the other arm began to carry a pinkish tinge, away from the body and draining down below. Ramis thought he understood that the nutrient solution was being replaced by stored blood.

Then the background light on that readout turned red. Ramis jumped and looked around, staring at the other dead squares on the panel. Keypads, or readouts? If he pushed them, what would happen? He stared at the instructions, but they gave no assistance for anything out of the norm.

The red light began to blink. The process was going wrong—he had to do something. He couldn’t figure out what it meant. He felt sweat prickle down his back. A second blank touchpad flashed red. He stared up at the instructions again, as if something might have magically appeared there. He had to do something.

Acting instinctively, holding his breath, Ramis pushed the flashing red light. It must be some sort of signal. The control panel had sensed an emergency situation and indicated the button he would have to push.

“Please, please, please!” he muttered to himself.

The numbers on the readout continued to rise. The red alarm lights kept flashing. Another red light blinked. Ramis pushed that one, too, then pushed the other one again.

He was panicking. He tried to fight it down, but everything was slipping out of control, falling through his fingers. He didn’t know what was going on. He couldn’t react to it; he couldn’t think fast enough and find a solution because he didn’t know what he had done.

“What am I supposed to do!” he shouted.

A tiny curl of smoke spiraled up from the electrode on the man’s sternum, then a minuscule blue arc popped the electrode off the skin, leaving a burned mark in the center of his chest.

Suddenly, inside the chamber, the Soviet man shivered and vibrated, bucking with his spine and banging his elbows against the sides of the coffin. His lips drew back and his teeth clenched in a seizure.