CHAPTER SEVEN  Out of the Cold, into the Dark

Rear Admiral Anton Koffield awoke from the frozen depths of cryosleep, his body and mind both seeming lost, cold, impossibly at a distance from Koffield himself, and from each other.

His torso spasmed and his jaw clenched shut as his arms and legs strained futilely to shake and twitch. Anton Koffield’s body writhed in anguish, and yet it all seemed far off from him.

Every part of his body felt as if it were no part of him at all. The agonies seemed to be happening elsewhere to someone other than Koffield; and yet for all of that they battered Koffield with pain.

Even his own mind felt as if it were not his own. Someone other than Koffield was thinking the thoughts in his brain. He knew that was impossible, but impossibility seemed of little import. The weird detachment of thought and sensation seemed quite real enough, hallucinatory though it might be.

His body had spent more than a century of ship’s time cooled down to temperatures that should have killed it instantly. The heroic measures required in order for the human body to survive such conditions were in and of themselves an all-but-unendurable punishment. Beyond that was the simple fact that he was awakening after decades of total sensory deprivation. It took at least a little time for the nerves to remember their long-disused routings and reorder themselves. It was inevitable that he would experience pain and disorientation as his body struggled to sort itself out. He had been through it all many times before, and knew that it would, sooner or later, pass.

But mere understanding of the phenomenon offered little comfort as the uncontrollable paroxysms of agony swept over him and then vanished, only to return again and again. After a time, he came back to himself enough that the pain was unquestionably happening to hirriself, and to no one else, but there was no joy in claiming undisputed possession of his torment.

There were stories about those who woke up and never had the pain fade. If it went on much longer, Koffield would start to believe he was of that number. It was as if his body sought death as an act of rebellion against the indignities it suffered in deep freeze. But the human spirit has too strong an instinct for survival to allow any such antics. The spasms gradually subsided into a perfectly ordinary case of violent shakes and shivers, the mortal anguish faded into mere pain, and his quaking limbs returned to some semblance of control. Koffield lay there, grimly waiting it out until his body recovered.

It was starting to fade. That was the main thing. He was something like himself again, enough so that he realized how bad a shape he was in, how disoriented.

Supposedly it was difficult for most people to judge the passage of time for a while after awakening from cryo-sleep. It was certainly true for Koffield. Hours, or seconds, or days might have passed since he had awakened. Had Captain Marquez been sitting there, in the revival control room, watching him, for endless hours, perhaps so long that he had gone off to other duties now and then? Or had it all taken but a few seconds?

Such thoughts always went through Koffield’s mind when he woke up from cryo. But for some perverse reason, he had never made the trivial effort required to find out the answers, never asked how long it had taken to revive him. No revival operator had ever volunteered the information. Anton Koffield allowed himself few superstitions, but not asking about his own revival was one of them. Cryosleep was a close passage to death, and he had no desire to trifle with the rituals that had seen him through it so often in the past.

Finally the last of the pain faded away to nothing more than aches and stiffness, and the spasms subsided completely. His body was his own again. Koffield let out a sigh of relief and unclenched his fists, not even aware until that moment that he had had them clenched in the first place.

He risked opening his eyes, forcing the lids apart past the sleep grit and the last residue of cryosleep gel. There, above his head, were the blurry outlines of the revival chamber’s overhead bulkhead. It was real, solid. Once again, he had made it back. He knew the odds were good that one day he would not. But at least that day was not today. That in itself was something of a victory.

He tried sitting up, moving slowly and carefully, and immediately regretted it. His muscles were not quite revived enough to manage much in the way of concerted effort. Koffield gritted his teeth and tried again, levering himself up onto his elbows and ignoring the blackness at the edge of his vision. A featureless blob moved through his field of vision and extruded a brownish-pink appendage that reached out behind Koffield and touched him, with the ten-derest of care, on the small of the back, providing just enough support to hold him upright.

Koffield flinched back from the contact even as he felt gratitude for it. It hurt, it hurt like hell, but that was to be expected. Everything hurt after cryosleep. But whoever it was who was helping him to his trembling feet clearly knew that, and was touching him as little as possible while at the same time more or less holding him up.

By sheer force of will, Koffield caused his knees to lock, his aching back to straighten, and his iron-stiff shoulders to pull themselves straight. The supporting hands let him go, but stayed close, in case Koffield collapsed under his own weight.

Then it dawned on him. Weight. He had weight. He was not in zero gee. Being roused from cryosleep was an incredibly stressful business, made all the worse by putting stress on muscles and nerves that had gone unused for centuries of shiptime. It was, for that reason, standard operating procedure to waken cryosleep subjects in zero gravity, except in cases of emergency, when the several hours it often took to isolate the revival chamber from the ship’s grav system for zero-gee operations could not be spared.

He had weight. He was, therefore, awakening to an emergency.

“Wha—” he tried to say, but his voice with creaky with disuse, and his throat was suddenly raw. He coughed wretchedly and accepted a sip of the vile restorative drink offered by the helpful, half-seen blob-person holding him up.

He forced a swallow of the stuff down with a grimace and found that his sight had begun to clear a bit. He could see the kindly, worried face of the man who was supporting him. It had to be Captain Marquez.

He tried to speak again, with a bit more success. “What’s gone wrong?” he asked in a voice that was more croak than speech.

“Something big, sir. You told me to awaken you first if something unexpected happened. It has.”

“Are they here for me?” Koffield asked. No doubt they were. He had more than half expected it. They would have examined the preliminary data he had sent along via the Chrononaut VI. Assuming the C-VI and DP-IV had both stayed on schedule, the Chron-Six would have arrived about sixty days before the DP-IV. Plenty of time for the Solacians to go over his preliminary work. No doubt they would be here for him—either so as to seek further information—or to have him arrested and his information suppressed.

But Marquez looked puzzled. “No one’s here. Why would anyone be here? Did you think someone would meet us?”

“Yes,” Koffield said. It began to dawn on him that he had read the situation wrongly. “Obviously I’m making bad assumptions. What—what is the problem?”

“There’s been a—ah, navigation problem.”

“We haven’t reached Solace?”

Marquez hesitated for a moment, clearly unhappy about what he had to say. He grimaced and shook his head. “I’ve checked it very carefully, sir. It’s definitely the Solace system. That part is all right.”

“So what isn’t all right?”

Marquez hesitated again. “It seems crazy, sir, but—well, I’ve checked every way I know how, and I keep getting the same data. We’ve arrived at Solace a hundred twenty-seven years late. I don’t think we ever went through a timeshaft.”

Koffield swallowed and blinked again, and forced down all the denials and inane questions. Marquez was a superb pilot, and even the most hopelessly incompetent starpilot would be unlikely to confuse one planetary system with another. Marquez no doubt had his facts straight. Therefore, Anton Koffield would not allow himself the luxury of denial, of refusing to believe in something merely because it was unpleasant.

Koffield reached out and took the beaker of restorative drink back from Marquez, and forced down another sip of the horrid stuff, as much to stall for time and collect his thoughts as to clear his throat. Calm. Marquez was looking to him for guidance. Better not to show any outward emotion at all, rather than give vent to the swirl of confusion and fear and postcryo disorientation. “One hundred twenty-seven years,” he said, recovering something like his normal low, thoughtful voice as he spoke. “That’s not good.”

“No, sir. Not at all. We’re—we’re lost in the future.”

One hundred twenty-seven years! Koffield suddenly realized that his hands were trembling. Would Marquez think that the shock of his news had caused it, or would he simply put it down to postcryo reaction? Koffield himself wasn’t sure which it was.

One hundred twenty-seven years. Gone. His entire world utterly and irrevocably gone. Again. Stranded in the future for the second time. How was a man supposed to react to news like that?

There was no way, of course. And that was the way Koffield chose. No reaction at all. That was the best. “All right,” he said calmly. “Clearly we have some thinking to do.”

“Yes, sir,” Marquez said, vague disappointment in his voice.

Koffield looked at the man in mild surprise. Had Marquez somehow imagined that all one needed to do was wake Anton Koffield so that he could solve all problems with a wave of his omnipotent hand? There was much to be said for having a reputation, but there were limits. Still and all, Marquez’s reaction was to be preferred to some of the others Koffield had inspired.

One hundred twenty-seven years—maybe, just maybe, he had outlived his reputation. There were lots of old sayings to the effect that there was a bright side to everything. Perhaps they were true after all.

“Very well,” Koffield said. Suddenly the note of calm confidence in his voice was not quite as false as it had been a moment before. “Let’s get me cleaned up, then get a look at the future.”

It was a few minutes before Koffield felt strong enough to walk unassisted. When he did, Marquez walked him down the corridor and showed him to his cabin. “Refresh yourself, Admiral,” he told Koffield as he opened the cabin hatch and gestured for his guest to step in. “Take as much time as you need. I will be in the command center whenever you are ready.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Koffield said. “I won’t be long.” He stepped into the cabin and shut the hatch behind him with a distinct sense of relief. He needed a shower and a meal, of course—but he also, desperately, needed to collect his thoughts.

Koffield stripped out of the thin gown he had worn in the cryo chamber, opened the cabin’s refresher unit, stepped in, and powered up the pressure shower. The jets of hot water seemed nearly strong enough to push him back against the opposite wall of the compartment. It felt good. My first shower in over a century, Koffield thought. I bet I really need it. The weak little joke was no doubt as old as timeshaft transport, if not older, but it cheered him up a trifle all the same.

Anton Koffield was not a particularly impressive physical specimen at the best of times, and times had not been good for him, even before entering cold sleep. He had entered the cryocan in a state of near exhaustion from overwork. The effort needed to complete his research in time for departure, the desperate urgency of his mission, and plain, old-fashioned fear of what he had found had combined to leave him completely drained. After the further stress of cryosleep, he was verging on the cadaverous. His cheeks were hollowed, his skin drawn tight.

The outer layers of dead skin disintegrated in cryosleep, turning into a grimy and unpleasant powder that covered the entire body and itched like the devil. He leaned into the jets of water and scrubbed as hard as his still-rubbery arms would let him.

Clearly the first step was to establish, to his own satisfaction, exactly what their situation was. Accepting reality was one thing, but there were also such things as confirming important data and gathering supporting data. Anton Koffield had faith enough in Marquez to believe him, but not so much faith that he did not want to verify it all. Trusting unconfirmed information was a shortcut to getting killed.

And, no doubt, Captain Marquez, being no fool himself, was more than eager to have Koffield check his work. The good captain would be delighted if Koffield found an error, but Koffield had no realistic hope of that and doubted that Marquez did either.

Hurry could kill them too. Fresh out of cryosleep—if fresh was the word—no one was ever in any condition to do precise work. He stepped from the shower, dried himself, and pulled underclothes and a pair of coveralls out of the cabin’s storage locker. He pulled on the clothes and extracted a quickmeal module from the cabin’s galley unit.

He folded the refresher unit back into one bulkhead of the tiny cabin and pulled table and chair down from the opposite bulkhead. He activated the meal module and waited for the unit to heat the food. His shifted uncomfortably on the chair. His coveralls were tight under the shoulders, and the fabric seemed awfully scratchy. His skin was always oversensitized after cryosleep. A faint odor clung to the cloth of the coveralls, a musty, damp smell that put him in mind of mold and the cellar under his grandfather’s house outside Berlin. Did that house still stand, a hundred twenty-seven years since he had last seen it? No, it was over two hundred years now. He had been time-stranded again, cut adrift from even the weak and tenuous roots he had set down eight decades before, after the Upholder disaster.

The meal module chimed, signaling that his food was heated. He opened the module and looked at the meal inside. There was nothing readily identifiable. A bowl of thick brownish-grey liquid that might be soup or stew, some beige-looking stuff that might be mashed-potato substitute, and some sort of green puree.

No doubt it was all edible, and nourishing, and precisely what the diet specialists knew he would need after cryosleep, but none of that made it appetizing. Of course, the dieticians made the postcryo meals bland and soft on purpose, to avoid overworking jaw muscles that hadn’t moved for decades, or overstimulating the senses of taste and smell after they had gone unused for just as long. Still, considering he was about to have his first food in over a century, it was something of a perverse accomplishment to sit down to a meal and not wish to eat it.

He allowed himself a small smile. Well, what could he expect? The food had been in cold storage as long as the coveralls, as long as he himself. He took the fork out of its compartment on the side of the module and began shoveling the nutritious glop into his mouth, eating mechanically, experiencing no more pleasure than would a machine taking on fuel, paying no attention to what he ate.

They were in trouble, very serious trouble. The situation was far more complicated and dangerous than Marquez could even suspect. There were wheels within wheels, hidden opportunities, and pitfalls. He continued to feed himself as he tried to work it all through, his mind as far removed from his body as it had been on first awaking from cryo.

Still thinking over the situation, he finished up his joyless repast as quickly as possible. He stood, folded up the table and chair, and put the meal module into the cleanup bin. He needed to go forward, see what Captain Marquez had found out.

Except that Marquez did not, could not, know the half of it. Koffield had already reached out for the handle to the cabin door when he forced himself to stop, to consider.

Anxious as he was to go forward to the control center and get a look at the data firsthand, it was starting to dawn on him that so doing might be a mistake. He made himself sit back down and consider. Think it through. Consider it as a chess game, and try to think at least a few moves ahead.

One hundred twenty-seven years was a long time in human terms. Things got lost, or forgotten, or thrown away. Even if his preliminary warning, sent on the Chron-Six, had gotten through and gotten .to the proper people, could they have acted on it? Would they have?

In a cold, rational analysis, there was no argument that could be raised against his data. But who would abandon a planet based on nine pages of obscure formulae? Koffield had known the data itself would not be enough the day he had sent off his preliminary findings on board the Chron-Six. That was why he had booked passage on the Dom Pedro IV in the first place, so that he could speak for the data, work to see that it was read and understood.

Unless she had been lost in transit as well, the Chron-Six had arrived at Solace 127 years ago, and she had delivered his data. What had happened then? Had his preliminary report changed the history of this and other worlds—or had it been lost and forgotten? Was it enshrined in a place of honor in the archives, or had it never been set down in the public record?

What sort of planet was waiting for them, out ahead of the DP-IV? Marquez had told him nothing about the state of the planet itself, but had merely reported the bald fact that it was there.

He, Koffield, at this exact moment, had no knowledge whatsoever concerning the state of the planet. That might well prove to be an important point.

There seemed to be three broad possibilities.

One—he had been right, and they had listened, tested his data, seen it to be true, and abandoned the planet. If so, the DP-IV was now entering an all-but-lifeless star system, littered with abandoned equipment and populated only by the descendants of the inevitable lunatics who refused to leave their space habitats, and whatever motley crew of vermin and microbes had found some way of surviving on the planet’s surface. It was unlikely, but possible.

Two—they had lost, ignored, disbelieved, disproved, or suppressed his data, and events had proved his theory wrong. In which case the DP-IV was about to arrive on the garden planet that DeSilvo and all his experts had predicted. The advanced terraforming procedures had been triumphant, and Solace was a paradise, and he, Koffield, was either totally forgotten or else remembered as a figure of fun.

Or, three—he had been right, and they had ignored his work at the time, and long since forgotten it, and there was a planet full of people dying out there. Given human nature, the third option seemed by far the most likely.

In that case—in that case he might well need some proof that he had made his predictions 127 years in the past, and that he had made them before he had any way of knowing what sort of shape Solace was in.

He stood up and found the intercom set in the usual place, mounted on the bulkhead just inside the hatch. After a moment or two, he figured out how to hail the command center and did so. The captain answered almost at once. “Marquez here. What is it, Admiral Koffield?”

Just for a moment, Koffield found himself wondering how Marquez had known who was calling. Then he smiled to himself. Who else could it have been? He wasn’t going to get far thinking ahead in this chess game if he couldn’t think any more clearly than that. “Captain, I’m sorry to call you back here this way, but I have thought of something that needs doing, and it needs to be recorded and witnessed. I can’t tell you more than that just now. Could I ask you to come back to my quarters, and to bring a longwatch camera and a secured container—one large enough to hold a cryosleep personal pack.

“Admiral, there are a number of ship’s systems I haven’t done checks on since arrival. I really do have a lot of work to—”

“This is important, Captain.”

“Well, what is it?”

“I can’t tell you until after it’s done.”

“Then why should I—”

“I apologize for not explaining everything now,” Koffield said, smoothly cutting in, “but there was a rule of thumb in my old investigative outfit that the most objective witness was the one who knew the least and saw the most—and I need you to be objective.”

The line was silent for a moment, and then Marquez spoke, making no effort to keep the puzzlement and annoyance out of his voice. “I am not in the mood for games, Admiral, and I don’t have time for them. Your rank doesn’t entitle you to give me orders on my own ship.”

“I know, Captain. But my guess is you know enough about me.to know I likewise have little time for games. But if you can take ten minutes of your time to witness something, there is at least a chance that you will be helping to save lives, a great many lives, on Solace.”

“I can’t quite see how that could be possible,” Marquez replied, the disbelief plain in his voice.

“But it is, Captain, I assure you,” said Kof field. “It is. I’ll be happy to explain after the fact. Please.”

There was a heartbeat’s worth of silence before Marquez answered, a silence that could have meant a great many things. “Well, if ignorance makes a man objective, I guess I will be, because I don’t know a damn thing. It’ll take a few minutes to collect the equipment from stores. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”