Dr. Fevre said, “All this began when one of my grad students came running to me almost too excited to speak. She pulled me over to the cadaver she had been working on. She had opened the chest—that’s standard procedure in my class—and swore she had seen the heart beat. I touched it, and it seemed to me that I could feel a faint tremor. There are half a dozen ways to restart a heart, if it can be restarted. I lacked the equipment for most of them, but I tried two. The heart beat twice, then would not beat again. I told the student to come to my office the following afternoon at three.”
I nodded. “Did she?”
“Yes, she did. I told her we had stumbled across a fact of great importance, one that we had to pursue. I promised she would be credited in every paper I published. She gave me the same promise, and we shook hands on it.”
I said, “Would I get her name right if I tried to guess it?”
“I’m sure you would. She’s Professor Margaret Pepper now.”
I nodded. “What did you do?”
Dr. Fevre sighed. “For as long as records have been kept, people have been discovering bodies in tombs untouched by decay. I could spend hours describing all the strange beliefs that have been attached to them. Some people have closed the tombs again and prayed. Others have burned the undecayed bodies or driven stakes into their hearts.” He paused. “What’s going on, Mr. Smithe? Can you solve the mystery?”
“No,” I said. “No, I can’t.” I was sitting on the floor beside Ricci’s chair by then, and when I said that her hand tightened on mine.
“What’s the difference between a puppy and the sofa it hides behind? We would agree, I’m sure, that the puppy is alive and the sofa is not. But how do we know that? Is it because the puppy moves while the sofa doesn’t? A tree is alive, but without a wind the tree moves no more than the sofa.”
I shrugged.
“Biology says that living things grow and reproduce. You see the difficulties, I hope.”
I took a chance and said it seemed pretty narrow.
“It does not merely seem narrow, it is narrow. A hen lays a fertile egg. Is that egg alive?”
I said no, that it was the chick inside that was alive.
“A good answer. Let us assume that the chick hatches and in time becomes a hen. That hen lays more fertile eggs. Hasn’t the egg we began with reproduced?”
I thought that one over. “I don’t think so. The hen’s reproducing, not the egg. Besides, the egg hasn’t grown.”
“Nicely reasoned. I suppose you know how viruses reproduce?”
I shook my head.
“They move into living cells and alter the mechanisms of those cells so that they produce viruses. That is, they produce viruses of the same kind, the kind that reprogrammed them. The viruses don’t grow larger, only more numerous.”
“I’ve got it. According to the rule, viruses aren’t alive, but we know they are.”
“Exactly. Let’s not dawdle around trying to produce a better rule. I say that those undecayed corpses are alive. I say it, and I have proved it. In some cases, the heart still beats, like the heart of the cadaver Peggy opened. The heart beats very, very slowly. Perhaps one beat in a week. In others, it does not beat at all. It would be entirely reasonable to assume that the difference is of great importance. In point of fact, it is not.”
“The frozen people…” I let it trail off, not sure what I wanted to say.
“The great majority of them are truly dead, in the sense that they cannot be returned to life.” Dr. Fevre hesitated. “At least not by me. Perhaps another, knowing more than I, might do it. Possibly I myself will be that other in ten years, or twenty.”
I asked, “How can you tell?”
“Without trying? I can’t tell for sure. I look for bodies that show no signs of injury, no knife-thrust now hidden by a new shirt, no damage to the skull, no sign of disease now more or less disguised, no obvious cancers. When I find such a body, I attempt to revive it. More often than not, I fail. Occasionally, I succeed.”
I said, “What about old people?”
Dr. Fevre shook his head. “What would be the point? A heart that has failed will soon fail again. These girls? I examined both carefully, and could not discover the cause of death. Clearly then, they were ideal subjects.”
“They died, just the same.”
“Of course. The freezing point of seawater is lower than the freezing point of freshwater. Did you know that?”
I shook my head.
“It is. Ice floating on the sea is most often the result of rain or snow—freshwater—falling upon seawater not cold enough to freeze. Someone may have thrown these girls into the sea.” Dr. Fevre paused. “People say that God is dead, by which they mean that religion is dead in the modern world. Religion, we now discover, is delicate stuff. Superstition is tougher.”
“You think they were sacrificed.”
He shook his head. “No, I think they may have been. Beautiful girls, virgins of fifteen or sixteen? Many cults might consider such girls ideal sacrifices. Later their friends or relatives may have stumbled upon their bodies washed up on a beach, or found them floating in the freezing sea. They carried them home and interred them decently in an ice cave thirty or twenty or ten years ago.”
I whistled. “I was thinking hundreds of years.”
“I doubt it. Their breasts would have been covered then.”
An hour or so later, Chandra returned with Peggy and Audrey. Audrey, who was pretty well terrified of it, returned the green box (I’ll have a lot more about that later) to me; and we left pretty soon after I got that squared around. There were no spare coats for Ricci and Idona, or for Sven either. The angels wrapped themselves in blankets; Sven signed that he was okay the way he was.
Outside it had started to snow again, so we waited in the mouth of the cave until we heard the jingle of sleigh bells. I do not know whether Dr. Fevre had told the driver to come back at a certain time or called him somehow. It was pretty hard imagining that driver with an eephone, but you never can tell.
All this time, I was itching to get out the map and check to see if the cave mouth was really the rectangle on it, but I did not dare do it with our patron there in the sleigh with us. She did not know I had pulled it out of the book, contrary to orders, and I was still planning to paste it back in the first chance I got.
12
SOMETHING YOU DO ON A BOAT
Maybe I ought to skip over a good many things now, but I am going to give some of them, like the sleigh being pretty crowded going back to the village. I sat on the floor with Ricci on one side of me and Idona on the other. That was to keep me warm, Dr. Fevre said. I hate people who laugh at their own jokes.
Audrey had a nice, comfortable seat—she sat on my lap. This was one of the few times in my life I’ve enjoyed being uncomfortable. You never know.
Sometimes the four of us talked, and sometimes it was just Audrey whispering to me, or Ricci, or Idona. Audrey mostly whispered catty things about the two blondes. Ricci told me the story of her life, only without much background and way too many she’s and he’s, and not enough names. She was a sweet kid, and she had always wanted to go south of the island she was born on. I kept telling her that she was there now and not to be fooled by the snow. She said she knew it was someplace different because she could not hear the sea. (Only when we got nearer the village, we could.) Besides—here she glanced at me and looked away—the people were different. Nicer.