Free The Eternity Brigade by Stephen Goldin, Ivan Goldman Page A

forehead, two others at his temples, two more behind his ears, one on either side of his neck, one at the inside of each elbow, one at each wrist, four scattered over his torso and two at his groin. The sedative was beginning to take effect by now; Hawker watched the people work and felt only a distant detachment. He drifted peacefully off to sleep before the instrumentation was even completed.
    The technicians and the nurses moved more quickly once the patient was fully sedated. They finished placing their instruments, monitored them for several minutes to make sure they were all in working order, inserted a catheter to empty Hawker’s bladder of the last drops of urine, and finally, when all was in readiness, they lowered the transparent cover over coffin number 37 and moved on to the next subject.
     
    ***
     
    Hawker slept.
    If there were dreams—or any mental activity at all, for that matter—they did not register on the sensitive instruments that monitored his condition. For all practical purposes, Hawker was a corpse in a cryogenic coffin. Pulse, respiration, brain waves, metabolic rate, all the normal systems used to register signs of life showed readings so close to zero as to seem negligible.
    Those same vital signs, though, were monitored constantly by a series of computers, wary for even the slightest deviation. Those computers, in turn, were monitored by other computers, which were checked by human beings. The army was risking a great deal on this experiment, and wanted nothing to go wrong. There were fail-safes and redundancies built into every step of the process. The condition of those men in the boxes was monitored more closely than humans had ever been monitored before.
    Captain Dukakis even made personal inspection trips down into “the Vault” to observe the men himself. Peering through the transparent coffin lids, his eyes searched in vain for any telltale signs of trouble. But as the days turned to weeks and the months to years, there was no trouble at all. Everything, for once, went exactly as planned.
    Hawker slept—and outside his sleep, the world moved as usual.
     
    ***
     
    His first sensations on awakening were of warmth and light around him. His skin was tingling oddly, like the pins-and-needles feeling when a foot goes to sleep, only all over his body. He thought about scratching, but he was so tired he was loath to make the effort just now. The sensation wasn’t that uncomfortable. He would just lie here for a few minutes and gather his strength.
    He tried rolling over on his side and his muscles, sore from long disuse, protested. He drew in a sudden gasp, then realized what all this meant. If he were still in the suspension coffin, there wouldn’t be room to turn over. And if he were still frozen, he wouldn’t be able to think all these things.
    He tried to open his eyes, but even that was too much effort for now. All he could do was lie in bed and think. He didn’t feel any different from when he lay down in the coffin; surely he couldn’t have been asleep for very long. The project must have been a failure for some reason, and they’d awakened him prematurely. There was a certain amount of disappointment in that thought, but even more relief. He disliked the notion of being connected with something that flopped, but on the other hand he wouldn’t have to face the future he’d feared, either. The army could scarcely blame him for the failure; he’d done his best. Maybe they’d give him the option of being a training instructor and let him stay in for life.
    After a while he finally pried his eyelids open, and had to blink back the tears until his eyes could get adjusted to the room’s brightness. When he could look around, turning his head slowly against neck muscles that protested every movement, he could see he was in a large ward with many other men. All were lying still in their beds, covered by sheets and blankets, as he was. Everyone, himself included, was being fed