The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 408
"Does that mean," she broke in, "that you think some of the people in the cubicles are already dead?"
Devlin shook his head. "I don't see how they could have managed it. If they killed themselves prior to or during a cooldown, it would have been flagged as a malfunction, and a crew-member would have been awakened to investigate. You were awakened, remember, to check on a possible malfunction in me."
She was silent for a moment, then she said very seriously, "I'm frightened. Some of those dreams were so bad that if I deliberately recalled them I, too, might think that suicide was the only answer. But I don't want to think that even if Purdy did. Maybe he was in an earlier intake. We don't know what kind of person he was, whether he was nice or nasty or stable or otherwise.
"Perhaps he was flawed in some fashion," she went on quickly. "I realize this is wishful thinking and not logic, but he was a different personality from you and me. I don't want him to influence us too much, or the people who awaken later—the ones who have this dream problem—will discover Purdy and us and be convinced that suicide is the only answer.
"There might even be a chain reaction of suicides," she ended grimly, "until nobody is left alive on the ship."
Devlin reached across and took her hand. Obviously there was a difference between physical contact to give comfort and to seek pleasure, because the memories which had threatened to overwhelm him earlier merely stirred restively and went back to sleep, and she did not pull her hand away.
"Suppose Purdy was the first to encounter this problem," he said, "and we are the second. I didn't know him, either. But there is one difference between his case and ours. He did not have anyone to talk to. It could be an important difference."
She nodded wordlessly, and Devlin squeezed her hand. He said, "First we check the status board ..."
It took many hours of concentrated, repetitious effort to call up and study each awakening in turn, and to check each one of them for differences that might indicate that a person on that particular awakening was behaving abnormally by not returning to his or her casket at the specified time. But they could find no evidence of it.
Devlin decided that they should make spot checks on the cubicles and look for the evidence at first hand. It would have been much faster if they had split up to make the checks, but somehow it was easier, when they worked together, to keep each other's minds off unpleasant memories.
Opening a statistically meaningful number of cubicles and performing the sequence of operations that would allow entry without initiating warmup of the occupant took an additional three hours. But it was the purely mental strain of controling their minds—of seeing cold-sleepers time after time without allowing themselves to think about the terrible dreams which must have been going on inside those frozen heads—that was much more tiring than the physical effort involved. When they returned to the control center, still without the evidence they had been seeking, their voices were slurred with fatigue and they kept yawning in each other's faces.
But their fatigue was filled with the fear of going to sleep, an abnormal fear which kept them moving about when they should have been resting in the couches. To help them stay awake they ran another detailed check on the status board and found nothing, except for one minor abnormality which had been plainly visible from the beginning.
Devlin pointed it out and said wearily, "I'm stupid. But surely it can't be as simple as all that. And if that is the only difference between us and the others, what the blazes does it mean?"
Her face was pale with weariness so that the scar tissue on her cheek stood out like an embossed pink star when she said, "I see what you mean. The Caldwell girl doesn't come into it because she died accidentally a long time ago, and the only thing Purdy had in common with us was that we three have been awakened more often than the others."
"Right," said Devlin, "Purdy and we have had one extra awakening. He had a test warmup during the first few years of the trip to check on the accuracy of the resuscitation timers. I had an extra awakening to attend to the Caldwell girl, and you were warmed because of me. That means ..." He yawned violently, then went on, "that means the trouble could affect everyone in the ship at their next awakening. We are not special cases, we have simply had an early warning."
"We have to help them," said the girl urgently. "We have to tell them what to expect—"
"They'll know what to expect as soon as they waken, dammit!" Devlin broke in. "What you mean is that we have to think of an answer for them when they do waken. But I'm too damned tired to think of anything."
"I'm tired, too," she said angrily, "and it keeps me from saying exactly what I mean. I meant that we must find a better answer than Purdy's."
"How long," said Devlin sharply, "do we have to find it? How long can we stay awake?"
She did not answer and he could see his own fear mirrored in her expression. Apologetically, he said, "I'm sorry. If we don't stop snapping at each other we'll have to send out for a couple of belts. Let's try, despite our tiredness, to think about Purdy's answer. Let's examine it, and the situation which drove him to it, in detail in case there is something there that we can use ..."
They had to assume that Purdy had been terrified by his dreams to an extent greater, or at least equal, to that which they had and were experiencing and that he had tried hard to find another answer. Probably he had tried so long and so hard that he had reached the same stage of physical and mental exhaustion that they had. But Purdy had been all alone. He had not been so selfish as to awaken someone else to share his troubles, but he had not panicked.
Knowing that he had to sleep sooner or later, he had delayed sleeping for as long as possible by taping open his eyelids. Then, after stripping off his coverall, he had gone to an extremely cold section of the module and arranged himself so that the greatest possible area of his body's surface was in contact with the cold plating. The taped-up eyelids and the freezing cold metal would have kept him awake for some time, but eventually he would have fallen asleep and dreamed briefly before dying from exposure ...
"This extreme fatigue which we feel, and which Purdy presumably felt, bothers me," Devlin went on thoughtfully. "All of us were fit at the beginning of the voyage, which is only a matter of days ago in biological time, and we have not been working so hard on the ship that we should be ready to drop from exhaustion like this."
He paused, squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head violently, trying to shake his brain cells into increased activity, then he went on, "Suppose the project people made a fundamental error in thinking that the long periods in cold-sleep were enabling us to rest—a justifiable assumption, in the circumstances. But let us suppose instead that the cold-sleep preserved the body's fatigue toxins along with everything else, and that we haven't in fact slept properly since the day before we entered the cold-sleep caskets on Earth. Sleep deprivation causes some odd mental effects—disorientation, reduced self-confidence, that sort of thing."
"Are you suggesting," said Patricia, smiling, "that we should have been awakened periodically and told to go to sleep?"
"Yes," said Devlin, "If they wanted us to stay mentally alert."
He did not smile.
Despite her fatigue she saw what he was driving at and began shaking her head, violently.
"I know how you feel—I feel the same way myself," said Devlin. "But we won't be able to think properly about anything until we've rested, even if it is only for a few hours. And we must not be asleep at the same time. One of us will stay awake to keep watch on the other, to awaken him or her if the sleep appears to be disturbed. We won't be in a cold-sleep casket, unable to stop dreaming. At the first sign of distress—I'll explain about the mechanics of sleep, the eye movements behind the closed lids that indicate natural dreaming, and so on—the other person will rouse the sleeper.
"We have to try it," Devlin ended firmly. "I'll go first."
But as soon as he said the words his fatigue disappeared driven away by the terror of dozens of remembered dyings. He could see that the same terror had the girl in its grip and, when she spoke, his strongest emotion was one of shameful relief.
"If we are going to try it, I'll go first," she whispered. "You have a better idea of the symptoms to watch for if I ... I ..."
But it was not easy to make her relax. She kept fighting sleep for what seemed like hours, even though Devlin spoke softly to her, held her hands and finally reran a close-range probe sequence from his first observation awakening which showed the beautiful, parklike scenery of the satellite of Planet Three. Gradually her eyes began to close more and more frequently and remain closed for longer and longer periods. Her breathing became deep and regular after she passed the restive period on the threshold of sleep, but there were no indications of disturbance or distress.
Devlin rubbed his eyes and thought, Poor Purdy ...
Watching her, he wondered what was going on in the mind behind that lovely tranquil face, and if it were possible that the fearfully sharp and intense dreams which they had both experienced could go on without some outward sign. He did not think so, and gradually he began to feel a little envious of her escape. He remembered the young king tired after a strenuous training session with Hawn, or lying exhausted in the arms of his favorite, or of the feel of sunshine and warm mud on his enormous, leathery body as he dozed in the shallows of a prehistoric lake ...
He came awake to find her shaking his shoulder and smiling. She said, "I don't know how long you've been asleep, but I've had nine hours. As a sentry you're a total loss!"
Chapter Fifteen
"HOW DO you feel? Any unpleasant dreams?"
She shook her head. "I feel fine."
"Me, too," said Devlin. "But we should try to remember as much as possible—the difference, that is, between cold-sleep and the normal kind of dreaming. It might help us to understand what is going on."
Devlin had never been very good at recalling dreams. He had been convinced that he did not dream at all until he discovered during medical training that everyone dreamed, whether they remembered dreaming or not. But now, with very little effort, he found that he could bring back the memory of what his mind had been doing while he had been asleep.
There had been chaotic flashes of dozens of unrelated incidents as his sleeping mind sorted and sifted through the records of his last waking period. His mind had tried to impose some kind of order and sense on them, with the result that people and places and incidents and timing were mixed in a fantasy world that was ridiculous rather than frightening. Then there had been dreams which had been logical within themselves—events, imagined or remembered, which fairly shouted out his fears regarding the voyage and his own reduced probability of surviving it. His cold-sleep memories had obtruded, as well, but not seriously enough to frighten him awake—and there had been one odd sequence involving Brother Howard.
The Brother had been talking very seriously to him, and Devlin had replied occasionally. But in spite of the conversation, the whole sequence had been completely silent.
Finally he said, "Find anything?"
"I don't think so." she said. "But then I'm not sure what I'm looking for. There was nothing in the dreams as frightening or intense as in the cold-sleep kind, although I'm pretty sure that if I tried I could recall them in just as much detail. My memory seems to be enormously improved. Some of the incidents—one involving Brother Howard, for instance—were completely ridiculous. I'm very hungry."
"What did you say?"
"I'm hungry," she repeated. "And I know that we shouldn't really be awake and should not, therefore, draw on the ship's consumables. But being practical ... well, Purdy and the Caldwell girl will not be using their allowance and we could—"
"A good idea," Devlin broke in, "but I didn't mean that. What I wanted to know was if the dream about Brother Howard was silent? Did he talk during it, but you couldn't hear him or yourself speaking?"
She did not reply, but her expression was answer enough. Once again he wondered what had been done to their minds.
After a long and baffled silence he went on, "Well now, it seems that we can stay warm and eat and sleep for about two weeks without using anyone else's rations. That should give us enough time to come up with an alternative answer."
She nodded and he went on, "I feel happier thinking about this in my own language, but if I forget something or seem to be going wrong, don't be afraid to interrupt, right? Now suppose we treat our problems as a dangerous and possibly lethal symptom of a disease. The first step would be to find out how the infection, or whatever it is, was introduced into our systems before we can begin negating its effects ..."
The possibilities, Devlin went on to explain, where that it had been deliberately introduced by mechanical means, either before the voyage had started or during it. If the former, then it had delayed-action effects that were only now becoming manifest; if the latter, the effects were cumulative and the method of introduction was probably incorporated in the cooldown processing or else it was taken with the food or water ...
"In that case," she broke in worriedly, "we shouldn't eat or drink."
"When we get hungry and thirsty enough," said Devlin wryly, "we'll find good reasons why it could not have been introduced with the food and water. But right now we have to search the ship's cold-sleep and life-support systems for indications that some form of medication is being introduced. We must also search our memories for clues to some form of treatment that might have been given us before we left Earth.
"I don't know what we are looking for exactly," he went on. "It could be a hallucinogenic drug, direct modification of memory by psychoradiation techniques—they were getting very good at that sort of thing before I left the hospital—or post-hypnotic verbal or visual triggers for an implanted memory sequence placed during training. It could be a mixture of all three, or combined with others which we can't even guess at.
"One good thing about this search," Devlin ended, "is that we can look in both places, the ship and our training period memories, at the same time."
But their detailed examination of the ship's cold-sleep, life-support and food dispenser systems turned up nothing suspicious. True, the information reached them through the relevant computer displays and it was possible that the computer had been programed to conceal the data they were seeking. But that would have introduced an unnecessary and highly dangerous complication into the mission, so they had to assume that the information given to them was accurate. As a check on this accuracy they returned again and again to the memories of their training, to lectures and simulations, conversational asides and wall charts, circuit diagrams and stores inventories—none of which they had thought themselves capable of remembering at the time. Their ability to remember, whatever the reason for it, was phenomenal. One important piece of information which they learned was that the ship was pushing hard against its limits of operational safety.
The next fly-by, due in just under one hundred and eighty-one years, would probably be the last with a fully functioning ship.
"I wish we hadn't found out about that," said Devlin later, while they were discussing their findings in the control center. "We're still trying to solve the cold-sleep problem, and that knowledge tends to sidetrack one's train of thought."
"Not necessarily," she replied. "The data on the next target system looks good—one of the best prospects we've had, in fact. Would it be possible for us to reprogram the computer so as not to awaken anyone at all until we go into landing orbit?"
Devlin shook his head in helplessness. "One of the things drummed into us was the necessity for mental and physical exercise at regular intervals. Besides, I wouldn't like to fool around with programs as important as that."
"But one of the things they were worried about," she argued, "was the possibility of memory loss due to the reduced temperature allowing the electro-chemical charges used for memory storage to leak away. That is not happening."
"I know, I know," said Devlin irritably. "Our problem is finding too many memories, not losing them. But you're forgetting that the period will be much longer than one hundred eighty-one years. If the fly-by shows a planet suitable for colonization we have to decelerate and return, so that it could be three times that period before we are in landing orbit. We don't know what effects that might have.
"If there were no physical or mental deterioration," he added. "I'm still not convinced that we should risk it. I mean, over three hundred years in cold-sleep. To crib from Shakespeare, what dreams might come ...?"
"But we must do something!"
Devlin was about to snap back at her, then stopped himself in time. They were both tired, and anxiety, as it usually did, was making him hungry. He smiled instead and said, "Let's eat."
She yawned suddenly and added, "And sleep."
Neither of them was afraid of what might happen during a warm-sleep so that they were able to relax in their couches. But perversely, sleep would not come. Devlin's mind would not leave the problem and Patricia could not stop talking about it.
"From what you've just been saying," she said, after yet another exercise in circular logic, "we can be sure, well, fairly sure, that any of the psychodrugs, whether they were hallucinogens, personality changers or whatever, would not remain active over this length of time. Despite the fact that an efficient cooldown system is supposed to halt all chemical and metabolic reactions, those particular drugs are composed of unstable material which is also highly complex structurally. As well, they had not been in existence long enough before our departure for proper long-term tests, a couple of centuries or more, to be carried out. They would not have risked the success of this project by using drugs with long-term effects which could have had unforeseen mental effects on us."
