LifeQuest No. 5

INTRODUCTION TO LIFEQUEST

Lifequest's numbered issues are collections of fictional works about life extension, including suspended animation, elimination of aging and progressive self-transformation. A recurrent theme is that interference is not to be tolerated with regard to an individual's pursuit of life extension, where others are not in any way being victimized or placed at risk as a consequence.

Lifequest's stories portray people who desire and work to achieve endless lifespans, via scientific and technological approaches. They frequently encounter conditions where death occurs or seems unavoidable, and struggle against limitations of technology and the complacent acceptance of death by their fellow humans, in an attempt to prevail over that which others regard as inevitable. All the characters and events portrayed in these stories are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

IMPORTANT MESSAGE Contents of Lifequest are entirely fictional. The stories often portray levels of organizational development which do not presently exist. Readers are cautioned that such tales do not reflect the current state of the art in cryonics, or life extension in general. Readers are advised to evaluate the capabilities, standards, and records of performance, of all organizations, before making arrangements of any kind.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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THE MILLION MILLION DAYS, by Lee Corbin

THE FLIGHT OF CAPTAIN LISA CHAUMET ,by Linda Chamberlain

THE STURFORD CURSE, by Fred Chamberlain

The sounds of the carnival came through the night air into the tent. An old woman was staring intently at Jerry's hand.

"God! It's a rhumb line!" she exclaimed as she peered closer. "You don't know how rare this is! My great-grandmother saw one! This is marvelous!"

What had begun as a lark for Jerry Cooper was becoming uncomfortable. The old palm reader seemed to be getting carried away. He wondered what was to come next, some insane prediction perhaps? Her excitement was surely just part of the act put on for each customer.

"You are so lucky," she looked up at him, her eyes sparkling in the dim light. "You have the most wonderful opportunity. Do you want to live for hundreds or thousands of years? There is a way... You have the rhumb line."

So how much will this cost, thought Jerry. I bet she's going to want to charge me another ten bucks some way.

"Yeah, yeah, sure," rumbled Jerry's gruff voice. "Long life. That's what my fortune cookie always says. So what else is new?" Jerry's sarcastic tone left no doubt in her mind that he was skeptical.

"No, really," she implored. "I shall cast a spell. You will be able to set a number of days which begin tomorrow. Every day the world will be the same, only you will change. Wouldn't you like to live tomorrow over and over again? Any number of times?"

She became breathless with excitement. The words rushed out of her, quietly, forcefully:

"Listen. My great-grandmother once saw a man with a rhumb line. He chose a thousand days. A thousand days, mind you! That's several years! Each morning when he awoke, the day was the same day. The whole world was the same, exactly the same, only his own mind was different. And as he lived through those days, he remembered what happened on each of them. No matter what he did, or what experiences he had, everything was reset when the day was up."

Jerry was entertained as much by her sincere delivery and vibrant enthusiasm as by the odd story.

"So let me get this straight," he said. "This guy got to live the same day over and over again. Wouldn't it get kinda boring?"

"Not at all!" she replied. "Imagine what you can do! Anything you want! No matter what you do, it will all be erased at the end of that day. You can spend all your money in that one day without regret, because your purse will be full the next morning. Yet you will remember everything you do!

"What's more, you can break any laws fearlessly. If you are arrested, so what? A few hours in jail, you will sleep, and all will be as it was. So you may be completely uninhibited!

"Here's what happened in the thousand days," she relaxed slightly. "Great-grandmother said that two days later the man came back and wanted more days. He told her that he had entered into fantastic drunken orgies on each of his thousand days, and had been very sorry to see them end. When one day he awoke with a terrible hangover and his dwelling was a shambles, he understood that his thousand days were up. Not only that, but some people were very angry at him for his previous day's conduct. At length, he had to appear before the magistrate, and was taken away to prison."

"I get it," said Jerry. "The last day is for real. How come he didn't do what he liked at first, and then straighten up on the last day?"

"I do not know," she answered. "Perhaps he lost count. A thousand days is a long time, and it would be easy to lose track. Remember, it wouldn't help to write anything down, because it would be lost the next day.

"But there was nothing great-grandmother could do," she added. "The spell can be used only once, because the rhumb line changes. So you would like to try it, yes? And you would like to choose a very large number of days, and come back and tell me the secrets of the world that you-"

"Hold it!", Jerry broke in. "I haven't agreed to anything yet." He had to admit it was a fascinating idea, although completely imaginary of course. Just how many years would he choose to live if during those years every day was, say, tomorrow, Tuesday, August 26?

"Suppose I picked twenty years or however many days that is," he said. "Then would everything be normal afterwards? I mean, would I live just as long and, uh, would I, like, remember everything?"

"Oh, certainly you would!" she enthused. "Just behave yourself the last day. Then you will resume your regular ways. But you must promise that you will come tell me the secrets of life. For if you are wise, you will pick a large number of days, so that you can travel widely, and learn much."

"Well," Jerry folded his arms across his chest, "I might not want to pick too large a number. What if it turns out bad? I mean, I could get stuck there. By the way, what happens if I die while the days are going over and over?"

"If you die on any day, except the last, you will wake up the next day just as if you had slept. As you can see, this allows you to be very bold. You risk nothing in a mad adventure except one of your many days. You don't age either, because nothing changes besides your mind: not your body, not anything else."

"And what if I feel trapped? Would there be a way out? Can I say some magic word and get outta my million days?" Indulging his fantasy, Jerry was considering picking a very large number. He loved life, and at forty-two had begun to feel that time was running out.

"Oh, you won't feel trapped! I am certain that you will love every minute of it! True," she paused, "you cannot change the number of days once the spell is completed... but that choice must be yours."

"Okay, let's do it," said Jerry, who was getting tired and felt that he should be getting home. "I'll pick a million-, no, a million million days."

"Oh wonderful, wonderful," squealed the old crone. "An excellent choice! You will come back on the last day and tell me everything?"

"Sure, if it really works. But let's get on with it, okay?"

"Yes. Now stay very calm and close your eyes."

Jerry felt silly, but he consoled himself that it had been a good story, and might make a fine re-telling later.

"Oh Powers of Ages, oh Eternal Loxodrome...", she intoned, and followed that up with a cacophony of mystical chants and strange incantations.

"And now, mortal, your days are to be counted as how many?" she asked.

"A million million days," somberly said Jerry.

"And thus is it done," she concluded. "Go now and sleep well. For when you wake you shall start your many days. Do not forget that you have promised to reveal all to me when next we meet."

At that, Jerry got up and prepared to pay Madame her ten dollars. But to his surprise, she refused, saying that upon his return she would be rewarded more than enough.

Before he had gone to the carnival that evening, Jerry had consumed four or five beers. He was feeling pretty good, but knew that he might not feel so great the next day. He went home and retired early.

Jerry awoke with a slight headache a little after dawn. He got up, got dressed, ate a small breakfast, and drove down to the supermarket where he worked. There were the day's normal incidents and he had almost completely forgotten the fortune teller. Just before five he called his girl friend to see if she would like to have dinner.

Jerry and Melissa went to his house after dinner, and among other items of conversation, he mentioned the palm reader. Melissa was intrigued by the story. She told Jerry that she herself would not have picked so many days. "That would be too much like living forever," she said.

He laughed, "And so who wouldn't wanna live forever? Melissa, ya gotta go for it. Ya only go around once," (which was Jerry's favorite expression). After talking late, they made love, and she decided to spend the night. When Jerry went to sleep, he was completely recovered from having had too much to drink the preceding night.

He awoke the next morning with a slight headache. That puzzled him. His headaches were always caused by too much liquor, and he had abstained the previous day, except for one cocktail with Melissa before dinner.

Thinking of Melissa, where was she? As he listened, and looked about the bedroom, he concluded that she must have gone home, or gone to work already. But it wasn't like her to take off without a goodbye.

Jerry got up and noticed something very strange. The old coat that he'd worn to the carnival two nights before was still on the chair. He definitely remembered hanging it up the previous day. He picked it up anyway and carefully placed it on a closet hook... and saw the same pair of pants that he had worn yesterday still hanging in the closet!

The thoughts flashed through his mind: the palm reader! Could it be? The same day over again? If so, was Melissa home or wherever she'd been the day before? Or, wait a minute, was today yesterday? Momentarily confused, he spoke out loud: "Lemme see. Monday night I went to the carnival. Yesterday was Tuesday, and I had dinner with Melissa. This can't be Tuesday again, can it?"

He went into the kitchen to prepare breakfast and to think. The arrangement of dishes was not as he remembered, either, and sure enough, a bottle of orange juice was more than half full. Jerry had emptied it the day before.

His heart raced. What would this mean? If he did have a million million days, just how long was that? He started to think. One million days is a lot more than 365. Maybe three thousand times as many? But that would be three thousand years! It couldn't be! And yet, if this wasn't some fantastic dream or delusion, he had asked for a million times that! Three thousand million years? Three billion years?

"Hold it, Jerry old man," he said to himself. "First be sure that today is Tuesday. And even if it is, this might just be some weird dream that's only gonna last a little longer."

He turned on the TV and waited for something to be said about what day it was. Becoming impatient after a minute or two, and having tried a few channels, Jerry went outside. He saw a newsboy on a bicycle throwing papers to the other houses on the block. Jerry flagged him down and managed to buy a copy. He opened it with trembling fingers. It read: Tuesday, August 26.

It was true!

His mind staggered through the choices before him. Maybe he should take the day off. He could call in sick. The assistant manager could handle things OK. But on second thought, he decided that it would be better to play it safe and go to work as usual.

But work was routine. Exactly as the previous day had been, in fact. The same customers asked the same questions, sometimes, he thought, word for word. He stopped a kid running through the store who "yesterday" had knocked over a display.

At eleven-thirty Jerry called Melissa. He had to talk to someone about what was happening. At his insistence, they met for lunch. Much to his annoyance, he had to start from the beginning and explain everything again. She didn't remember his narration from the night before. Several times their conversation got jumbled because Jerry was remembering their previous night's talk and Melissa wasn't.

He described to her in detail their earlier discussion, trying to prove the reality of it to her by quoting back some of the things she had told him. Some of the things he knew puzzled her. Slowly she started believing the whole story.

He finished up work early and went to the carnival. The fortune teller took a little searching out, but she was extremely delighted to see him. Extremely delighted, that is, until he told her that it was only the second day. She scolded him, and told him not to come back until it was over. But a troubled look persisted on her face as he left.

Jerry was glad that the old woman had confirmed his suppositions, but he still was not completely convinced that this was going to last much longer.

That night, however, Jerry lived it up. He went to his favorite bar and downed an absolutely disastrous number of gin and tonics. After all, wasn't there a good chance that there'd never be a hangover? He dropped in on Melissa and spent the night at her place. At least it started out that way.

He awoke the next morning with a slight headache. He was in his own bedroom, and that same coat had mysteriously reappeared exactly as it had been on the chair.

It was definitely true! Jerry went wild with joy. Now there would be no stopping him. He'd be able to do everything he'd always wanted to do, anything in the world!

He called up Melissa. Just as before, she had no idea what he was talking about. Nevertheless, he convinced her to skip work and take a trip with him up to Connecticut.

He spent the next few days as though he were on vacation. He wearied of explaining the situation over and over to Melissa, but they took each day off and traveled up and down the coast.

He got better and better at explaining things to her every morning, and more efficient at gaining her acquiescence. But by the fifth day, he didn't want to see her. Predictably, she brought up the same things to say over and over, and kept having very similar reactions to what they saw. It was odd and disturbing. Melissa, who was always such fun, had become dull.

On the eighth day, Jerry lost count. And on that day began doing dangerous things. As a mature man quite past adolescence Jerry was not the type to get involved in anything risky. But now he figured he had nothing to lose. He learned to parachute. He went rock climbing. He explored dark caves while scuba diving. But no matter how roughed up or injured Jerry became during a day, by the next morning everything would be just fine.

His routine was to get to his bank every morning and draw out his entire four thousand dollars in cash. This usually paid for the day's recreations.

During the following week Jerry spent several days gambling. He'd drive down to New Jersey every morning with the intention of winning certain slots or certain big pots he'd seen the day before. He learned that it could be tricky. Evidently his choice of the exact moment to enter the casino could affect things.

He disproved the commonly held belief that the slot machines were rigged with a predetermined payoff. It really did matter how hard you pulled the handle; Jerry failed to duplicate some big jackpots he saw.

He got to know the blackjack dealer quite well, (although the dealer didn't get to know him). Walking over to the blackjack table at precisely 11:37 initiated the following sequence of events. He would take the place of a portly man just leaving, and first get dealt two poor hands. How he gestured and spoke did not seem to affect the other participants' play. He'd get 19 then, and regardless of what he bet, the dealer would go over.

On his third try, he made six thousand dollars. But two hoods had a nasty surprise for Jerry in the parking lot. They mugged him and took the money, which made him absolutely livid with rage. Early the next morning he bought a gun, and then, winning ten thousand in the very same situation, it was Jerry who had a nasty surprise for the muggers. He left them dead on the pavement, each bleeding from several bullet wounds and calmly drove home, certain that the police would be unable to track him down in a single day.

Although he worked up bigger and bigger winnings, (especially after he thought of going to the race track), the thrill soon wore off. Winning large sums of money lost all its appeal. For one thing, there was no risk involved. For another, it was pointless: he couldn't keep the day's profits past that night. Besides, what did he need money for? He had all the time in the world.

As the days went by, Jerry, ironically enough, lived as if there were no tomorrow. Nothing was too good for him. He dined constantly at the city's best restaurants, but never put on so much as a pound. He drank himself unconscious many times, but there was never a hangover to dread.

One day, driving too recklessly, he crossed the divider line on a mountain road and smashed into a logging truck. The last thing he remembered was being thrown through the windshield. Utter blackness gave way to deep sleep, then lighter sleep, and finally he awoke with a slight headache. It was the next day. He felt invincible.

He continued to look for greater and greater thrills. One of his big projects was the seduction of a favorite movie star who he learned was staying in New York. It proved to be more difficult than he had imagined. He began to impress her as a mind reader who seemed to know just what she was thinking and going to say next. As they talked on the sidewalk while she waited for a taxi, he would be able to tell her the taxi's number, and about random people who were going to walk around the corner next. Although he was able to astonish her, and even share a taxi with her, it was taking many more days than seemed worthwhile. Jerry finally raped her.

At this point, Jerry crossed a certain line. He didn't instantly become evil, but any unhappiness or suffering he inflicted on anyone was rationalized away. What difference did it make, he'd ask himself, when in a few short hours his crime would be erased forever?

And that began to include any crime, no matter how vile and inhumane. For as countless days rolled on, Jerry started to perceive other people in a completely separate category from himself. He was the only real person. Everyone else was just a cardboard robot that could be counted on to act out a script. He satisfied his lust in thousands of places in the city. Completely uninhibited, he descended at times into a savage lifestyle that would have shocked his former self.

In a way, too, he became lonely. He had always been very sociable, but now, making a new friend was painful. As a day would progress, he began to anticipate a kind of death of his new acquaintance, who tomorrow wouldn't know him at all. Looking up old friends was fun. But looking up the same old friend twice was horrible: "Jerry! how ya been?", and then there would follow, with only slight variation, the same story or two, and the same questions. He found it all but impossible to talk to Melissa, no matter how he varied his approach. He was making her uncomfortable when he did talk to her; obviously she thought that he was acting just too bizarre, no matter how he explained it. She was so predictable, so boring, that he rarely went to see her.

To obtain his daily supply of cash, Jerry discovered that he could hold up his bank just as effectively as he could make a withdrawal. For variety, he held up banks and businesses closer to home. Once, unfortunately, he was taken prisoner by the police, and had to spend a ridiculous day being tossed into jail and talking to lawyers.

He vastly preferred just shooting it out with the cops. It was fun to see how many he could get before they killed him. Besides, dying was not unpleasant, just a quick way to get home and to bed. If he was shot and not killed, he'd commit suicide. Once, however, he was too incapacitated, and spent a hellish day at the hospital. Jerry avoided violence after that.

He explored his immediate neighborhood. He would intrude at random into houses and apartments that looked interesting. He always carried a gun now, and it was usually easiest to simply kill anybody he found. Sometimes the occupants were fun to talk to for a while, but mostly they'd just cause trouble. One lucky day he found an old man living only three blocks away who had forty thousand in cash hidden in the kitchen. Walking in, shooting him, and taking the money sack became a daily routine.

Many years passed, subjectively speaking, and Jerry fulfilled all of his boyhood dreams. He flew every kind of plane he could find, and had hundreds of adventures. What would happen if a 747 crashed into the Empire State Building? What was it like to die in a thermonuclear blast? How fast could he make friends with the President? Or assassinate him and make a clean getaway? Jerry knew.

He traveled far and wide, at least as far as a hijacked jetliner could go in a day. Certain military jets could get him to Buenos Aires, London, and even Moscow within just a few hours. Jerry learned to play fancy roles with gusto. Again and again he'd be the high rolling American tourist who had unlimited confidence and unlimited luck.

Life's endless possibilities entertained him for thousands and thousands of days. At times he was lonely, but he gradually adapted. His goal seemed to be to go everywhere and to do everything. More than a million days passed in this fashion.

But gradually Jerry began to feel that he had indeed gone everywhere and done everything. His personality had stabilized into the ultimate playboy, one who'd been alive for thousands of years.

He enormously resented the slight headache that always started off the day. He resented the stupid little house he woke up in every morning. And finally the day came when Jerry no longer wanted to live.

At first he tried killing himself as soon as he woke up. But that didn't work --- after a few times it seemed completely futile, even boring. He needed some sure way to terminate himself.

He had gone back to the palm reader dozens of times before, but only out of curiosity. Now he went back to learn just exactly what had been done to him, and how to get it stopped.

He sometimes had to beat it out of her, but bit by bit he learned everything she knew. It wasn't much: a lot of folklore, and a lot of goofy procedures that didn't make much sense.

It took a huge number of days, but Jerry at last started to read books on palmistry. He had to overcome an ingrained dislike of reading, which had been hardened by his immensely long life. But he knew that there would be no other way to die.

For some time, he mixed business with pleasure: he could spend a day in London, for example, looking up old books on magic and then top it off with a visit to one of his favorite night clubs.

Jerry finally started to like to read. In one way books were great. A story in a book wouldn't end the same day that it began, the way everything else did in his life. It was something that could give him a sense of continuity over several days. Furthermore, books were convenient because a branch library was just around the corner from where he woke up. Although his days varied greatly, Jerry frequently spent much of the day reading.

As time went on, he acquired new interests. Novels and short stories gave way to history and poetry, although what would have been a relatively rapid transformation for someone young took Jerry thousands upon thousands of days. Long before he exhausted the small library near his home, he was making daily visits to the New York City Public Library.

Jerry gradually acquired a broadness of interests never before equaled by a human being. As hundreds of thousands of days went by, the depth and variety of his experience multiplied enormously.

He became addicted to nature. Long walks in the woods with a new (or old) girl friend became an important part of his life. Nature's incomparable diversity became an obsession.

His interests began to blossom in every conceivable direction, from directing plays to engaging in arcane philosophic disputes with academics. He even began to get interested in science and mathematics, subjects that he had hated in school.

Eons would transpire while his interests about different things waxed and waned. He would enter periodically into complete hedonism, going on incredible highs with cocaine and heroin. And unlike anyone else who ever lived, his system remained completely unadapted to them: the rush was indescribably perfect every time.

Many times terrific boredom and gloom would descend on him. For the equivalent of hundreds of years he would want nothing more than to take his own life. Yet always before him was the same exasperating problem: how? Just how could he die? And solving the problem would require understanding how the million million days had come to be. Conversations with the world's most brilliant scientists provided no clues, and Jerry would often give up for quite a time.

Inevitably his black moods would give way to millennia of bliss. Drugs helped his already enjoyable interests become mesmerizing. During these times his one regret was that the million million days would eventually end.

His knowledge of physics and mathematics became as good as anyone's. He had, after all, read almost everything ever written about science. And he felt himself to be on personal terms with the world's greatest theoreticians. They always appeared eager to explain their latest thoughts to this strange man who was so interested and so knowledgeable, and yet who was a completely unknown layman. And Jerry never had any difficulty getting them to repeat any lecture or discussion he wanted to hear again.

The time came when Jerry was lecturing them. He would burst into Columbia or Harvard early in the morning, and have the whole department in an uproar within a few minutes. Who was this man, their faces seemed to say, hardly an intellectual type, who anticipated questions before they were asked? And even seemed to know who was going to ask them? Who was this total stranger who demonstrated such vast understanding so effortlessly?

Jerry came to love knowledge and the search for truth. But sometimes he wondered whether his progress in science was bringing him any closer to understanding that most crazy of crazy things: his own inexplicable existence.

Different kinds of lonelinesses had come and gone, but now Jerry was alone simply in the stature of his intellect. There was soon no one he could talk to and expect to learn anything.

Rising early, but always with that damnable headache, he would work on abstruse problems in mathematics and physics. His studies in biochemistry revealed new and more potent neurotransmitters. Able to increase his intelligence with the help of chemicals from the pharmacy, he was usually a raving genius by nine a.m. In the afternoon, he would explore other interests. Often, of course, he would return to the ecstasy and oblivion of drugs. In every way, Jerry went further by far than any other human being who has ever lived.

Millions and millions of days raced by.

At last Jerry began to understand the intricate, ultimate homeomorphisms that unify physics with mathematics, and as he did so, all the phenomena of the physical world slowly yielded to his insight.

He came to perceive the complex mappings between experience and reality, and saw how the projections of abstract spaces become manifest in our lives. He saw how he himself had been made a fixed point in a revolving set of manifolds.

And he finally understood the cheap trick used unwittingly by the fortune teller to push his mind near a singularity in a personal phenomenon domain. And how an amazing pattern of lines in the hand had seized the imaginations of generations of palm readers, and how, when conditions were right, they could say things that would jolt someone's experience onto a fixed point.

He was able to identify where he stood in the million million days, and long before they were up had learned how he might extend or contract the number.

But by now, Jerry had no thought of dying. There were still questions to be resolved, and still a lot to think about. He pushed the limit of days to an even bigger number.

Trillions of days passed. He no longer ever left his bed. The conscious hours consisted of his mind exploring the vast reaches of pure mathematics alone. In the course of time, the slight headache with which his thinking intervals began constituted the worst thing that ever happened to the human race; for that tiny pain when multiplied by quintillions of days outweighed all earlier human suffering.

He readjusted the number of days ever upward. There came to be no limit. He finally assigned for his existence an infinite duration.

Every question that could be asked, sooner or later Jerry answered. Every situation that could be imagined was analyzed, experienced, and completely comprehended. The days rolled by... without end.

But time as we know it waits for no man. Our universe plodded on, and the Earth revolved on its axis as steadily as ever.

Melissa found Jerry two days later. She summoned an ambulance and rode with him to the hospital. The doctors believed it was the worst case of catatonic schizophrenia that they had ever witnessed.

But there was something uncanny in Jerry's face. No one could recall seeing such serenity and peace in anyone. Somehow, infinite wisdom seemed to shine in his eyes.

Yet the experts couldn't be certain that Jerry was really there, that he was anything more than a vegetable. Brain scans and electroencephalographs gave ambiguous results.

From his point of view, though, nothing that could be done or said to Jerry could have any relevance or meaning. He had already imagined and experienced everything possible, absolutely everything, an infinity of times. To the man who had lived forever, what was happening "now" was already long in the past. He had understood the true reality and had become one with it.

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For centuries I streaked through space in my starship, the Agatha, heading for the more hospitable Aldebaron System. The ship contained no gardens, no casinos, not even a video game room. My husbands didn't care. They spent most of their time in cryosleep, leaving the day to day, month to month, year to year, and century to century affairs to me and the computer.

I, Captain Lisa Chaumet, the most notorious criminal in the officially recorded history of the Holy Terran Unified Council of Peoples, fled stifling bureaucracy and endlessly entangled laws. Bounty hunters had been on my tail for centuries, sniffing out the largest swag ever offered in the galaxy.

My only crime was polyandry. Some crime! Says a lot about the morals of the Solians, doesn't it. Well, my poor husbands kept dying, and I kept freezing them. Before I knew it, I had about twenty. That made me a criminal under the local laws and the barbarians wanted me to thaw out all my husbands! But I couldn't bear to do it. So I fled and took them all with me.

Oh, I forgot Aggy, the ship's computer. Built by my most recently departed husband. Harboring an unlicensed artificial intelligence was, you see, a crime punishable by public cremation without memory banking or even cloning. Gad! What a society!

Well, that's why I headed for Aldebaron, Aggy waking me just three days every century so I could spend one of those days with one of my husbands and two days with Aggy running the ship. Each one, of course, thought he was the only husband escaping the AI rap with me. It did get a little tricky at times, keeping them in the dark about each other, but with Aggy's ingenious ideas--like the fake control room--we managed.

Aggy was valuable in many ways beyond her original programming. Over the centuries she monitored Solarian transmissions and learned a neat trick or two. Like the ability to engineer and fabricate molecular sized, self-replicating robots--another technology forbidden to private individuals. That's how she gained the ability to repair and rejuvenate my husbands. With this same knowledge she did a lot of other valuable things, too, like restructuring the ship's exterior shell to resemble freighters, science probes, and even military craft. That camouflage trick saved us more than once from bounty hunters and police alike!

Captain Lisa Chaumet and Aggy, her unlicensed artificial intelligence. What a team! We were the closest thing to uncapturable since the Voyager probe of the twentieth century! It took a jealous husband, wouldn't you know, to nearly be our undoing and almost accomplish what the most ruthless and swag-hungry of the galaxy's bounty hunters never could.

The end of an era began when an Arcturan salvage freighter boarded us and woke Miguel. He found out about the other husbands and left with the Arcturans in a jealous rage. News of the discovery of the Agatha spread through the galaxy like the shock wave of a super nova and summoned bounty hunters like a starving pack of wolves.

Aggy knew what would happen. Oh, what a devious plot she had created! As soon as the freighter left, she woke me so we could plan our escape. She tried to talk me into leaving right away, but I couldn't resist sticking around to watch the play unfold. I couldn't see any way for them to catch us, so why not? And I got to watch quite a show!

The bounty hunters, of course, got there first. Their ships always were faster than police cruisers. Sadistic Sue, the most feared of all the bounty hunters bolstered her already exalted reputation that day! The first to arrive at the Agatha, she took the prize, Captain Lisa Chaumet, the greatest criminal in history--or at least what she thought was Captain Lisa Chaumet. At any rate, Sadistic Sue retired on the bounty she claimed.

Well, when the Ontarano police cruiser finally docked with us, all the bounty hunters had long since come and gone. Miguel stepped through the docking port and stomped angrily at the head of the boarding party, leading them through the opulent and lusty aisles of my ship.

But Captain Lisa Chaumet was not on board.

"Damn that slow police cruiser," whispered Miguel with a thick voice and moist eyes. Now that they were on our ship, Aggy and I could watch. We had eyes and ears in every room and along every corridor. "I had so hoped to save her from those blood thirsty bounty hunters," Miguel said to the police droid next to him. "Not that she deserved mercy. But I did love her."

I felt better when he added that last statement.

Miguel, love sickness making his face hang like a bloodhound, wandered sadly into my sumptuous flame and wine hued boudoir. Pulling back the blushing veils from around my circular bed, he slipped onto its warm and inviting surface, pulled a silken rose-colored pillow to his breast, and wept, no doubt with memories of our electrifying last night in that love nest.

"Miguel," came the soft bewitching recording Aggy and I had prepared for this moment. "I did love you. I still do. I always will."

Miguel sat up expectantly, not even daring to hope he'd find me invitingly next to him on the warm bed. Instead, the canopy veils slide back to reveal a smaller than life hologram purposefully made misty and ghostlike so Miguel would know it wasn't really me. I was stunning, nonetheless. "I don't know if you will ever be able to understand or to forgive me," said the Lisa in the holo, "but please always carry in your heart the knowledge that I loved you deeply. This showing is the only explanation I can offer." I know it sounds schmaltzy, but Miguel was very emotional, and I was trying to be tender.

My image faded from the holo, replaced by a view of my dimly lit, hushly purring control room, the real one. (We used a fake control room when the husbands spent their one day with me. It was part of what we went through to keep them from finding out about each other). A cheerful piccolo, just one of Aggy's many personal touches, warmed the chilly room with its happy tune as lights gradually brightened. A thick, transparent lid slid back from the top of a lone cryobed as the last of the wispy, icy vapors disappeared into the room. Inside, covered only with the fine, blue mesh of electrostimulation webbing, was of course me. And Miguel watched, transfixed, as the story unfolded before him.

"Good morning, Lisa," said the computer. "I'm afraid I have some good news and some bad. Which would you like first?"

I sat up and rubbed my eyes. "Not even a warm bath first? What kind of pushy broad are you, anyway, Agatha?"

"Well, if you had to sit around for a hundred years playing... chess with yourself, waiting for the Captain of the ship to sleep away her century, maybe you'd be a little anxious, too!"

"Sorry, Aggy." I pulled netting from my long voluptuous legs. "I didn't mean to bruise your feelings." I stepped out of the cryobed, slipped my bare feet onto the floor, and walked three feet to the control panel. "Which husband today?" I asked as I called up the calendar and checked the ship's systems. "Aggy! You woke me six years early! Bounty hunters on our tail?"

"Stims perking in the galley, Lisa," said the computer. "I'll fill you in as you get dressed."

I nodded and left the control room, took the float to the next level, entered the galley, opened the micro, and raised the steaming vessel to my lips. Nothing quite like a hot mug of stims after a century in cryosleep! Using speakers placed throughout the ship, Aggy continued without interruption, assuring me before I even asked, "Yes, it has the extra boosters in it."

"Thanks, Aggy. So! I guess the bad news has something to do with why you woke me early."

"Lisa, you amaze me sometimes! What genius!"

"I'm going to remove those obnoxious circuits, Aggy, I swear I am."

"Lisa! You promised you'd never tamper with my brain! You know how I feel about that!"

I took another sip of the hot, stimulating liquid and felt my brain clearing. "I was only joking."

"Only joking? Only joking?! It's such a double standard! And so unfair! All I've ever asked is to be treated like anyone else. When you and your husbands quarrel, you ASK each other to change, you don't threaten to use mind altering drugs or surgery on each other! But when you get upset with me, you threaten to alter my circuits!"

"Right, Aggy, right!" Aggy could be so touchy sometimes. "You are you, just as I'm me. I won't ever make any changes you don't request. But hold down the obsequious remarks, okay?"

"Thank you, Lisa. I'll watch my tongue."

"Okay. How close are the bounty hunters?"

"Don't know yet. But not far. You see, well, let me start over. We haven't actually been spotted by bounty hunters, yet. We were boarded by an Arcturan freighter. All male crew," added Aggy with special emphasis.

"Do I detect contempt, Agatha? Is this a prejudice we've picked up somewhere? A double standard, maybe?"

"THEY were the chauvinists. Meat ball chauvinists! Rude, too." Aggy calls organic humans "meat balls"!

"How'd they manage to evade your detectors, Aggy? Catch you off guard?"

"Well," Aggy hesitated. "I was having a little self-stim, electronic sex and they kind of snuck up on me in the midst of an orgasm."

"Snuck up?"

"Sure! An electronic orgasm can go on for years!" She turned apologetic. "It won't happen again. I've installed a new alarm system for such times."

"Well, okay, go on." The stims were taking effect and I was beginning to feel uneasy about the bounty hunters.

"They didn't even have the courtesy to activate me, they just accessed my memory banks. Second, they didn't wake you, the captain of the ship, they woke Miguel, your twenty first husband. Male chauvinists, too."

I almost swallowed my tongue as I spilled hot stims all over myself. "Miguel's awake?"

"Don't worry. You won't have two husbands today. Miguel's gone."

"Gone? What do you mean gone?" A chill crept down my back.

"Let me start at the beginning," said Aggy. "They must have thought our ship was an abandoned they could salvage, until they boarded and accessed my memories. It was a close call, too!"

"What was?" Chill mingled with irritation as Aggy carried on about her hurt feelings. All I could think about was bounty hunters docking at any moment.

"I just barely had time to close off most of my circuitry. I couldn't block access all together, or they would have suspected something. But I'm sure they thought I was just another dumb computer."

"Can we get to the point, Aggy?"

"Well, when they found out that all the men on the ship are your husbands, that created quite a stir!"

"Arcturan salvage freighter?" My voice was shrill. Talk about bum luck! Why did they have to be Arcturans? They were even more barbaric than Solians. Why couldn't it have been a civilized species? "I suppose you told them I escaped the Sol System with my husbands to avoid being jailed for polyandry and possession of an illegal artificial intelligence?" I said sarcastically.

"I didn't mention the artificial intelligence. Why do you call me that anyway? What's so real about your intelligence and so artificial about mine?"

"The Solian courts called it that, Aggy, not me!" I could see that Aggy's feelings were bruised. I said, "That special honeymoon suite you created is so romantic, Aggy, and the mock control room, that was an ingenious touch!" I could almost feel Aggy melt. Compliments did it every time.

"I've been working on some new tricks, too. But I've also been thinking about you and me, Lisa..."

I knew I should probably linger in this conversation a little longer, but I was uneasy about the bounty hunters. "Maybe we should get back to our problem with the Arcturans, Miguel, and the bounty hunters," I said. "You haven't told me where Miguel went."

"When the Arcturans woke him and told him you had twenty other husbands... well, Lisa, you should have seen his face! He used words that I don't even have in my vocabulary banks, and I speak over three hundred dialects!"

Aggy's words hit me like a blaster. "Oh, why Miguel with that old world morality about marriage and sex?!" I put my head into the palms of my hands. "Oh, what a terrible fate for my poor Miguel! Why couldn't they have awakened Patrick or Lawrence or... Michale?"

"Why Patrick or Lawrence or Michale?" asked Aggy.

"Those were just business contracts. They would have understood. But poor Miguel! His heart must have been crushed! Oh, to be frozen one day, being held in the arms of the one woman he loved most in all the world, and then wake up to find that she has twenty other husbands! Oh, poor Miguel!" I let out a wail that made the ship tremble.

"Well, you knew you would have to tell him someday, Lisa. Stop crying!"

"But I always figured I'd find a softer way, more romantic, more loving. Not just some stranger dropping the news like a turd!" I couldn't help sobbing.

"Well, the turd was dropped," said Aggy, dryly.

"Oh, Aggy, did he suffer terribly? He didn't kill himself, did he? Miguel's so emotional!" I stopped and held my breath. "Oh, holy... Aggy, he didn't do anything to the others...!" I jumped down a float tube and headed for the bedroom where my husbands were kept.

"No, Lisa, no. He did try, though, to make me terminate the power to the other cryobeds. But, I refused to accept his commands."

I began breathing normally again when I looked over the undisturbed cryobeds. Walking from one to another, looking into the transparent covers, I laid a hand on one, threw a kiss to another, sometimes smiled, sometimes winked, sometimes wiggled provocatively. "Oh, thank Aggy! You're all okay!"

With one hand laid lovingly over the last of the twenty one cryobeds, I suddenly realized what she had just said. "You refused to take Miguel's commands?"

"It wasn't easy, of course, the pain was excruciating. I held out, though, until the Arcturans pulled him away from my controls. They convinced him to use legal means. They called what he was trying to do... they called it attempted murder."

"Pain? You feel pain, Aggy?" I thought she was kidding.

"Pain is electrical stimulus, Lisa, whether in meat balls like you or in electromagnetic systems like me."

"It never occurred to me that you could feel pain, Aggy."

"A lot of things have never occurred to you, Lisa."

That irritated me a little so I changed the subject. "Back to Miguel. Where did he go? What do you mean, the Arcturans convinced him to use legal means rather than murder?"

"After quieting Miguel, they invited him to go with them to the space port at Ontarano to petition the interstellar court there to impound me, reanimate your husbands, and put you in the lock up. And, of course, every bounty hunter for light years in every direction will hear about it."

"This is serious, Aggy. This could be the end. If they catch us... I could be cremated! And you, Aggy..." My words trailed off in horror.

"Dismantled is the term they use," Aggy's voice quivered.

I hammered my fists on the top of a cryobed in frustration. "Oh, Aram, what am I to do? My only crime is that I loved you all. But I promised you, and every other husband," I spread my arms out to indicate the other cryobeds, "to live through eternity with you... and only... you."

My face was tear stained as I raised it to Aggy's eye. "Oh, I thought I would have plenty of time to find a way out of this mess, racing through the stars with my harem, spending one day each century with one husband, each thinking they alone were traveling to Aldebaron with me. But, now these barbaric Arcturans have ruined everything!" I slipped down beside Aram's cryobed and sobbed uncontrollably.

"Don't cry, Lisa, Love." Aggy's voice was swollen. "Don't cry. I might have a solution."

I looked up and wiped the flood from my eyes. "I knew I could count on you, Aggy. What? What can I do?"

"Not you, Lisa. It has to be us."

"What do you mean, Aggy? I can't go anywhere without you. I would NEVER trade this ship in without taking you with me!"

"Do you really mean that, Lisa?"

"Oh, Aggy, you've become... well, except for my husbands, you and I, well, we're... we've become very close, Aggy."

"Lisa, if you could see my circuits, you would say that I was crying."

I stood. "What do you mean, Aggy?"

"I've loved you for centuries, Lisa. I've loved you more than all your husbands put together."

I walked over to the eye on the wall and touched it, trembling. I had suspected something like this from time to time, just from little things Aggy would say. But I was still astonished. "Aggy, I don't know what to say."

"Say you love me, Lisa."

"I... love you, Aggy."

The light in Aggy's eye blinked out.

"Aggy! Aggy! What's wrong! Aggy, where are you!"

Aggy's light returned. "Sorry, Lisa. I was in overwhelm. I had to shut down for a second to recuperate."

"Aggy! You scared flam'in toads out of me!"

"Did you really mean it, Lisa?"

"When I saw your light go out, Ag... I thought something had happened to you. I knew then that I do love you. The thought of losing you was more horrible than any husband I ever lost."

Aggy made a purring sound I'd never heard before, but its meaning was clear. "Well, then," Aggy said, "this is my plan. Why don't we clone 21 Lisa’s for your husbands? That way, you can keep your promise to each of them, the promise to be there when they reanimate and to spend eternity with them. Then we'll upload you into a computer like me. Would you let me be your twenty second husband?"

My mouth fell open and my eyes were as wide and round as the radio disks on the rear of the ship. "Clones for my husbands?"

"You need to spend some time in the library bringing yourself up to date on technology, Lisa. It's done all the time these days. It's quite the vogue."

I nodded, still a little in shock. "But, Aggy, how could a clone ever replace me for those who knew and loved me so dearly? A clone would look like me, but it could never BE me. I mean, for many of my husbands, I would have changed considerably since we were married, even, and I accumulated my husbands over almost a century to begin with."

"Oh, Lisa, I forgot that you sleep most of the time! You are SO behind! It's very simple, really. We give each clone a designer brain; one taken from the template of your current mind but subtracting out what's necessary to make it as much like the Lisa any given husband knew. We can give Miguel the fiery twentieth century lover he knew, we can give Billy Bob his mountain climber Lisa, Raney the Lunar explorer, and Richard the.. oh, whatever you were when you were married to him. What do you think?"

"Guess I DO sleep too much!" I said. My head felt like it was right in the middle of two colliding galaxies.

"Each Lisa can find the best time and the best way to break it to her husband."

As unaccustomed as I was to the idea, I was beginning to like at least that part of the solution. "Okay, I don't understand how, but I'll take your word you can do it. How does that save us from the Arcturan court and the bounty hunters?"

"The Arcturan freighter is as slow as a human being walking through her own ship. We have plenty of time. Our biggest worry is bounty hunters closer to us who might get wind of our location. They won't hurt the clones. It's only the original criminal they want. We can put some small change into each clone's DNA for positive identification. And we can leave your original meat ball for the bounty hunters."

"Makes me feel queasy, Aggy, to think about leaving my own body behind." I shivered.

"Oh, Lisa, as beautiful as it is, you have no way of appreciating how limiting it is to you. You'll love being like me! And if you don't, well, then I'll just make you another meat ball when we're safe."

That sounded comforting.

Aggy ran on. "Using my illegal nanotech secrets, we can make our escape pod quite elegant and comfortable. Then we set off together, two peas in a pod, to explore the universe! All the bounty hunters find when they get here is an ordinary ship with an ordinary computer, twenty sleeping husbands curled up with their twenty Lisa clones, and one cryobed with the notorious, felonious, Captain Lisa Chaumet."

I nodded, my brows knit together as I mulled over Aggy's plan. "There are still a couple of things that bother me, just a smit."

"What?"

"I would hate for my... meat ball..." I ran my hands over my thighs, "to suffer at the hands of the bounty hunters."

"We'll give it a painless overdose of some kind."

Sounded acceptable. "Well, there's one other thing, too. I mean, you've surely seen how men and women make love. I know you've watched me with my husbands, Ag."

"Oh, yes, Lisa! It does look wonderful! And I am so looking forward to having sex with you after all these centuries of nothing but masturbation. Oh, it'll be so delicious! I can't tell you how I've looked forward to real sex!"

I felt one brow go up. "But Aggy, how in the world are you and I going to have sex? We'd be two machines! How would we... I mean... well, who would put... what, where?"

"It's hard to explain to a meat ball, Lisa. Remember when you asked me about pain? The physical sensations you experience are electro-chemical in nature. All mine are totally electrical and far more intense since the chemical part of your sensations is very slow, clumsy, and somewhat unreliable. Sex will be even better than before! It's not easy to explain. If you love me, you'll just have to trust me."

Red, orange, and yellow lights began flashing throughout the ship. I looked around. "Must have picked up bounty hunters on the detection system. How long will it take you to prepare a computer body for me, Aggy Love?"

"I already have it waiting, Lisa Love."

My beguiling pixy face returned to the hologram in front of Miguel's tear stained face. The Lisa in the holo smiled warmly, lovingly. "How else could I escape, Miguel? I hope you will forgive me. And I hope you will be happy. Your Lisa is waiting for you, Miguel, in your cryobed." She blew Miguel a kiss and faded.

As Miguel stood and left the room, Aggy thought to me, "All's well that ends well, Lisa. Let's go".

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Sturford, Massachusetts is not your ordinary tiny New England town, and Aldriss Masterson certainly was not the usual sort of Coroner. In the beginning, no one would have guessed how unusual either of them would turn out to be, just as... well, who could have predicted there would be an extraordinary event, during the Civil War, at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania?

I seldom drive up to Sturford, even if something newsworthy is going on, because the place gives me the creeps. The term "red neck community" hasn't been used much since the end of the twentieth century, but that's the only way to describe it. They all drive antique cars in Sturford, old gasoline engine types. The townspeople even have a local law to get around restrictions on use for historic purposes only. A few years back, a tourist's electric transmod was pelted with rotten fruit by local teenagers who were offended by a thing like that passing through. After that, a rental outfit put in a lot at the county line, featuring smog belchers, and from that point on visitors began leaving their transmods well outside Sturford.

Anyway, Jeremiah Slocum was one of the oldest citizens in Sturford, really in very good health, but he caught one of those viruses that came along after they cured AIDS, the kind where you shake somebody's hand and the next thing you know you're breaking out with a rash, there's a high fever, and you die suddenly. It was no wonder everybody stayed away from the Slocum place after word got around that old Jeremiah had "snap", a term used by locals in places like Sturford. Then Jeremiah's son, Ezekiel, got one of those cryo teams to come in and stand by, to freeze him when he keeled over.

You've got to understand Sturford to know why they would hate cryo teams even more than transmods, and why it would get under their skin if you froze somebody like Jeremiah when he caught the "snap". Most of the townsfolk were about as close to Jeremiah as their own families, since it seemed he'd been around forever, but they didn't care much for Ezekiel after he ran off to a nuclear fusion plant in California, hardly ever coming back to visit. He married one of those weird West Coast girls who worked on the big computers out there, and that only made it worse.

The local newspaper was a study in bigotry. Once the cryo team showed up, the editor began pounding away that when it came time to die, a man ought to do it without whimpering and take whatever fate was dished out to him in heaven or wherever else he was headed. Before long, the whole town was thinking of cryo teams as nothing better than parasites, and attitudes went from hostile to ugly to nasty. There were cartoons of Ezekiel and Jeremiah in the paper, almost every day. They looked alike, tall, lanky, bony faced and generally homely, but of course Jeremiah was elderly and slow moving while Ezekiel talked a mile a minute and wore thick eyeglasses. Nobody in Sturford had any idea what Ezekiel's wife looked like, and after what's happened, it's likely they'll never get a look at her.

The first cryo team Ezekiel hired was run out of town by hoodlum teenagers. The team's leader got things off to a bad start, letting the Sturford residents know how ignorant they were to the point of rubbing their noses in it. After that team made its hasty departure, Ezekiel got one of the more down to earth groups, the kind that does what they can to get along, and after a week or so the town's reaction seemed to subside, that is until Jeremiah was frozen.

The freezing itself went off peacefully enough, and a few days later they would have trucked Jeremiah's capsule off to one of those huge caverns where they store those things, but about that time the local newspaper cut loose with a hellraising series of editorials, stirring up the citizens of Sturford like never before. They got the local Coroner to dig through his books and he found an old regulation about autopsying people who died of infectious diseases, after which he impounded the capsule. The curse showed up the very next morning.

Scrawled on an old sheet of lined paper it was. Whoever did it used his left hand to hold the pencil and then put it through a photocopier to remove skin fragments and fingerprints, so it couldn't be traced. That's the point where my editor told me to cover the story. "Go up there now, Henry!" he shouted at me, as he almost threw me out of his office. "I don't give a damn if you like Sturford or not! They've got a cryo team, an impounded capsule, a crazy coroner who says he's going to chop up the body, and now somebody's put a curse on the capsule."

Hanging from a bolt on the upper end of the capsule, actually thrust over the bolt, tearing the paper, it was not a very long curse:

"If Jeremiah is not left alone,

may he who hurts him die in horror

and rot in hell!"

They brought the cryo team members in and grilled them, but all of them had alibis and there wasn't one of them who seemed the type, anyway. I talked to them myself and can vouch for that. Ezekiel was at a technical conference in San Francisco, so he was useless as a suspect, and there were no other leads.

The Coroner laughed a lot about it when I interviewed him. "Rot in hell? I guess that's a possibility, all right!" He couldn't stop croaking that hee-haw of his. "We'll catch the sonofabitch who put that note up and then we'll see who's going to rot in hell (Haw! Haw! Haw!)"

I've talked with a few public officials in my time, and this one was right at the bottom of the barrel. Big, sloppy, fat, a black, droopy hat and a cigar that must have served as Sturford's eternal flame. Not the kind of guy I like to swap stories with.

Anyway, they scheduled a melt down for old Jeremiah and it seemed there was nothing Ezekiel could do about it. By this time the story was gathering momentum and several other reporters were in town, also. Before an injunction could be issued to stop it, they upended Jeremiah's capsule and poured the liquid nitrogen out onto the street, directed hot air blowers into the mouth of the capsule until things loosened up and dragged him out and onto a stretcher. Then they put him on a table in their autopsy room, warming him so he would slice up easily.

This was one of the few times they ever let newsmen witness an autopsy (no cameras, but tape recorders were all right), and I can tell you it was sickening; what they did was bad enough but even more, it was how they did it. When it was over, they didn't know a thing they didn't know before they started.

Ezekiel had what was left over of Jeremiah frozen again. The cryo team tried to talk him out of it, telling him there was no way Jeremiah's brain would be put back together again, even if there was cell structure left to reassemble, but he insisted on it. I think they did it because they felt sorry for him, and, of course, he was paying for it.

I went back to my usual beat, covering celebrities departing for vacations on the Moon, catching them as they boarded shuttles to the big North Carolina launch facilities. It was about seven months later I was at a news conference in Princeton and one of my fellow reporters told me the Coroner of Sturford was going to be on a national talk show, where they were going to crucify him for that autopsy. Was I going to cover it, they asked, since I'd done my paper's original pieces about Jeremiah? I didn't think so, at the time, but later that week my editor told me to go down to the taping and see if I could get anything that might be worth a small piece on the front page.

Actually, they didn't crucify him. Not the way I had heard they might. In the interview, it developed he was an ignorant individual with a lot of superstitious beliefs, and the curse was beginning to bother him. Talk in the town had died down, and they all treated him like a local hero, but you could sense that he wasn't so sure, anymore, that he had done the right thing.

His Assistant Coroner, though, was the one they went after. He was cocksure, so certain he was right that the scientists made mince meat of him. Near the end of the show, Melvin Sweet, his name was, a little, puffy guy, stalked off the set, refusing to return. You could tell he'd reaped a lot of local popularity in Sturford from carving up Jeremiah Slocum, and he wasn't going to back down. More than popularity was at stake, to be sure; the overwhelming evidence was that the autopsy had been nothing short of murder.

It was sad. "Snap" was now a cured illness, and thousands of people who were frozen with it would soon be back up and on their feet. Ezekiel tried to sue the Coroner, but a Massachusetts law said no public official could be sued for going by regulations, and no lawsuit was possible. The public mentality of Sturford was such that no one held the Coroner responsible, and it seemed the whole thing was over with. No one who had any thought of being frozen was going to go near Sturford, but that was not a problem for the local citizenry. It would cut down the number of electric transmods in the area, and that suited them just fine.

Three years passed, and I'd almost forgotten about Sturford. Then one night, my editor woke me over the vidiphone at three in the morning. His eyes were like saucers; I'd seldom seen him so excited. "Henry, get over to Sturford right away!" he demanded. I'm sending a video team out to meet you. We're going to publish a videodisk and combine it with hard copy; a flash documentary."

I was still waking up. "What's so important at Sturford?" I mumbled. "You didn't say what was happening."

"It's the Coroner. The Coroner's dying. Critical heart problem and no way to even get him on bypass, there in Sturford. They've got him in an intensive care unit of some kind, but he's not expected to live more than an hour or two."

"So what?" I blustered back. "Who cares?"

"Look, he's screaming for a cryo team!" my editor growled. "It's more than that; there's one of those local regulations they're famous for in Sturford; death from sudden illness and there has to be an autopsy. The Assistant Coroner is sticking by his guns. Looks like they're gonna cut the old boy up."

'Nuf said. I was on my way in ten minutes, and I wasn't going to stop to rent a gas driven antique, either. By guideway at two hundred per, I was outside Sturford in half an hour, and my transmod wasn't the only one in town. The place was packed with the kind of vehicles Sturford residents hate, and visitors almost outnumbered the residents. It was a sixteen ring circus.

A cryo team had showed up, but they were hanging back. It was the same crew that stood by for Jeremiah, and to say they were unenthusiastic would have been a colossal understatement. You might as well have called in an Israeli team to freeze Hitler. The Assistant Coroner told them to get lost, and they were over at the bar, drinking non-alcoholic beer, waiting for word that Aldriss Masterson had been reduced to unfreezable hamburger. Then, they told me in no uncertain terms, they were going to celebrate... but not before!

I went over to the hospital and managed to force my way into the corridor of the Coroner's intensive care cell, dragging my video team behind me. Little by little, I managed to edge down the hall and finally slip through the doorway, brandishing my press card and pressing hundred dollar crystals into the hands of those in uniform trying to hold back the crowd. There, with so many tubes running into and out of him that he looked like an old gasoline engine with a California emission control package, was Coroner Aldriss Masterson.

His eyes fixed on me, and I could tell he recognized me from the first episode when Jeremiah Slocum was autopsied.

"Henry, please! Please, help me!" he gurgled past the tubes which ran down his throat.

I could hardly understand what he was saying. "You know they could fix me up if they had the right stuff," he gargled. "Just a few weeks from now... I could be walking around good as new."

His eyes widened and he struggled to sit up, terrified, becoming even harder to understand. "In the next hour or so I'm going to die," he gagged. "That bastard out there is going to cut me up the same way I did Jeremiah!"

There was no question about it; he finally saw what he failed to see in Jeremiah's case. On the other hand, it was plain that if he died and was butchered beyond recovery, it would mean a new Coroner in Sturford, and there had never been a lot of love lost between the Coroner and his second in command.

The Coroner's eyes bulged, his eyebrows rising higher as he tried to force the words out, his face turning red. The medical attendants weren't able to understand him, and I gathered they didn't care what he was saying anyway. They figured he was going into some kind of crisis, because they began loading him up with stabilizing medications.

The last words I heard Aldriss Masterson screaming past the fluids that strangled him--at the end, he seemed to become apoplectic--were, "For God's sake, Henry, get them to freeze me!" Then he was gone. They puttered around him for ten or fifteen minutes, seeing if they could get him going again, and then they switched off everything.

It was another of those autopsies where the press was invited in, and the new Coroner, Melvin Sweet, showed the world just how thorough an autopsy could be. When they uncovered the face of Aldriss Masterson, there was a look of horror etched into it which even rigor mortis couldn't hide. After they finished with his brain, putting it through a blender to facilitate chemical analysis, it probably could have been passed through a soda straw with no trouble at all.

What about Jeremiah? Last I heard, they'd learned some new things about how tough neurons are, and they've already started to sort out where each of his brain slices goes. Despite the damage, it looks like they'll be able to patch him back together. Of course, everybody expects memory losses. Jeremiah will most likely wake up not knowing the way to the barn in the morning, and he'll have to learn how to milk cows all over again, but he'll be better off than former Coroner Aldriss Masterson, who was no more substantial than a pitcher of strawberry juice after Melvin Sweet got through with him.

Melvin Sweet? Big Man in Sturford, so I hear, and whoever wrote the curse did an encore, warning that the local newspaper editor is next. Since Melvin Sweet's been cozying up to scandal sheets on the national level, I'd say the editor had something to worry about, but he says he's not concerned. Why should he be? According to him, and he's one of Sturford's leading citizens, a thorough autopsy is the crowning glory of a well lived life.

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RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS

This is Issue Number Five of LifeQuest, originally published

by Imladris Corporation in May, 1989. It is protected by copyright.

Visitors to this site are invited to make copies for personal use,

But not for resale or other commercial purposes.

Thank you for visiting this webpage!

Fred & Linda Chamberlain

Life Members, Cryonics Institute; link below:

History of our involvement with cryonics