Ryan's high expectations began to evaporate as soon as they set foot within the ruined complex. The devastation was worse than it had appeared from the outside. Many of the roofs had collapsed under nuke-waves of shock, and rain and humidity had done the rest.
The floors were rotted and slippery, and pools of warm brackish water had accumulated in doorways and at turns of corridors. Broken glass cracked underfoot, from the myriad windows and skylights. The interior had been totally ravaged, probably within the first few weeks of the center's destruction. It crossed Ryan's mind to wonder what kind of appalling chemicals had been set free at that time. The botanical complex had created this bizarre tropical oasis within rural Minnesota. So what could the germs, diseases, nerve gases and hallucinogens have wrought?
The companions picked their way through the linked buildings. The huge pharmacy was ankle deep in a mixture of mossy green sludge and smashed vials and syringes, which had once contained who knew what blasphemous obscenities?
"No freezies around here," Jak stated, shaking his mane of hair.
Ryan wiped sweat from behind his eye patch. "Guess you're right. Still, we know the institute was here once. Let's at least try to dig out where the freezies used to be."
A large hornet buzzed into the room, making straight for Krysty. Her reflexes were good enough to swipe it out of the air. It landed in one of the dirty puddles, swimming and whining in an infinity of crazed desperation. J.B. finally set his boot on it.
"Hope there aren't too many of that," he said. "I don't see many good hiding places around here."
The deeper they walked into the complex, the more the buildings seemed to have suffered. They walked out through a broken wall, facing nothing but dozens of piles of variegated rubble and a windowless rectangular concrete blockhouse, which looked relatively undamaged.
The structure was two stories high, and above the dark green doors they could all read the weathered sign that said: Shelley Cryonic Institute. Private.
Ryan's optimism inched up a few more notches.
The sec doors showed signs of innumerable attacks on their titanium-vanadium steel exterior. Dents, scratches and chips marked the smooth green finish. When J.B. pushed at it, the lock seemed as solid as the day it had been made.
"Better and better," Ryan said quietly, squeezing Krysty on the arm.
"What?"
"If it's still locked and wired into the main nuke-power source of the redoubt, then there could still be freezies down there. Alive."
The woman shuddered. "No, lover."
"You mean you can't feel any life inside? That it?"
"No. I mean, I can't. But that wasn't... I can still remember too well what happened when we tried to thaw out those other poor folk."
"Rick made it."
"Sure. But I kept feeling there were a lot of times that he'd mebbe rather not."
"You think we shouldn't even try?"
She smiled at him. "Course not. I think you always have to try. Just hope it's not as bad as it was the last time."
"Got to get in here first," J.B. said practically.
"You got some fresh plas-ex yesterday?" Ryan asked.
"Yeah. Take a handful to blow this mother out of the way."
"Do it." Ryan took Doc by the arm and led him back among the ruins, to protect him from the blast.
The old man followed him without making any kind of protest.
Several minutes later J.B. joined them unhurriedly, as if he were going for an afternoon's fishing in a trout stream. He glanced at his wrist chron as he crouched at Ryan's side. "Ten seconds to go, if the fuses are still reliable."
Ryan nudged Doc. "Put your hands over your ears, Doc, and open your mouth."
"Why?"
"Save you from the bang. Do it."
The explosion came almost immediately, flat and dulled from being out in the open. Since the Armorer hadn't been able to use the confining force of the plas-ex, he'd been forced to use a lump the size of his fist. As the yellowish smoke cleared away Ryan wondered whether it might have been too much and brought the whole building down.
But J.B. had gotten it just right.
The doors had peeled back on their concealed hinges like wet cardboard. The reinforced concrete had been cracked just above the doors, bringing down the faded sign. But the main structure didn't seem to have been damaged.
"I confess myself somewhat at a loss," Doc said as he peered at the wrecked sec doors in confusion.
"Someone lost key," Jak explained, which seemed to satisfy the old man.
"Worth leaving a guard?" J.B. asked. "Bang like that'd be heard from here to the Lantic and back."
Ryan hesitated. Their party was so small that to reduce its size at all would be to greatly weaken it. And they hadn't seen any signs of recent humanoid life around the region.
"Stick together," he said, leading the way into the entrance hall of the cryonics center.
Everything was functioning perfectly.
It was an uncanny time capsule, sealed in 2001 and not disturbed until this moment. The lights were steady, pitched at a moderate level. The air-conditioning hummed quietly away, keeping the air clean, cool and circulated every forty-eight minutes, as per regulations for United States Government buildings.
There was almost no dust, and no trace of the green lichen that had seemed to stain everything in the area. They walked across to a desk marked Reception.
Krysty smiled. "Gaia! I swear I expect to see some nurse or doctor in a white coat come out to ask us what we want and would we mind leaving. It's just like being in an old vid."
Under a sheet of curling plastic was a staff rota for January 2001 and a red-typed notice giving the details of the final hasty evacuation. Filled with mistakes and showing all the signs of having been circulated at the shortest possible warning, it gave details of how all the automatic servo-systems should be switched away from Manual.
As soon as the state of ergency ends, the entire center will revert to all normal procedures.
"Never did," Ryan said.
"Let's go see if we can find some freezies," Krysty suggested.
The building was just about the best preserved that any of them had ever seen. Yet oddly, there was very little there to interest them. It was obvious that the cryonics complex had been fully staffed and functioning right up to the last moment, and that it had then been successfully evacuated. But it was such a sterile environment that nothing personal remained. It wasn't like a hospital with living patients, more like a totally disinfected laboratory.
The brittle pieces of paper tacked to boards didn't cast any light on what had happened or how people had been feeling. Someone was selling a '94 Chevy, and someone else had some rabbits for sale; there was a dance in the cryo-tech's quarters on the next Friday; the local branch of the Seventh-Day Adventists was holding a doughnuts-and-coffee morning to raise funds for some child with leukemia; a woman named Medina was selling her precious record collection and wouldn't refuse any reasonable offer.
"The trivia of living and dying," Doc commented. "They shouldn't have planned anything for tomorrow. Tomorrow was the yesterday you worried about... No, I fear that I have that a tad incorrect." He shook his head sadly.
Ryan caught Krysty's eye and rubbed at his chin thoughtfully. Doc kept showing tiny signs of recovery, then he'd go plunging all the way back down into the abyss.
"Look," J.B. said, pointing to a sign that hung at the far end of one of the corridors. "Seen it before."
Ryan remembered it too — in the redoubt where they'd met Rick Ginsberg: Cryo. Medical Clearance 10 or B Equivalent Only Permitted.
"Down there," Ryan said.
"Hope the freezies don't go triple-fucking crazy like last," Jak muttered. "Dreamed bad. Real bad."
Ryan fervently hoped that as well. Remembering the nightmare scenes in the last cryo-bunkers made his mouth go as dry as neutron bones.
They continued onward until they encountered a sec barrier that would once have been manned by armed guards. Now only the silken whisper of a crumbling spiderweb stretched across the wide passage. Beyond it stood a pair of doors marked Air Lock — Do Not Enter.
"If there's any freezies left, lover, they'll be through there." Krysty's hand dropped automatically to the butt of her blaster.
The tension was so strong it could almost be tasted, prickling on the tongue. With the exception of Doc Tanner, all of them were wrestling with bad memories.