“We pay you to think,” Filitov observed. “Comrade Minister, I find myself in agreement with this young man.”
“Mikhail Semyonovich, why is it that I sense a palace coup on the part of my colonels?” Yazov ventured a rare smile, and turned to the younger man. “Bondarenko, within these walls I expect you to tell me what you think. And if you can persuade this old cavalryman that your science-fiction project is worthwhile, then I must give it serious thought. You say that we should give this program crash status?”
“Comrade Minister, we should consider it. Some basic research remains, and I feel that its funding priority should be increased dramatically.” Bondarenko stopped just short of what Yazov suggested. That was a political decision, one into which a mere colonel ought not stick his neck. It occurred to the CARDINAL that he had actually underestimated this bright young colonel.
“Heart rate’s coming up,” the doctor said almost three hours later. “Time zero, patient conscious.” A reel-to-reel tape recorder took down his words.
She didn’t know the point at which sleep ended and consciousness began. The line is a fuzzy one for most people, particularly so in the absence of an alarm or the first beam of sunlight. She was given no signals. Svetlana Vaneyeva’s first conscious emotion was puzzlement. Where am I? she asked herself after about fifteen minutes. The lingering aftereffects of the barbiturates eased away, but nothing replaced the comfortable relaxation of dreamless sleep. She was . , . floating?
She tried to move, but . . . couldn’t? She was totally at rest, every square centimeter of her body was evenly supported so that no muscle was stretched or strained. Never had she known such wonderful relaxation. Where am I?
She could see nothing, but that wasn’t right, either. It was not black, but . . . gray . . . like a night cloud reflecting the city lights of Moscow, featureless, but somehow textured.
She could hear nothing, not the rumble of traffic, not the mechanical sounds of running water or slamming doors . . .
She turned her head, but the view remained the same, a gray blankness, like the inside of a cloud, or a ball of cotton, or—
She breathed. The air had no smell, no taste, neither moist nor dry, not even a temperature that she could discern. She’ spoke . . . but incredibly she heard nothing. Where am I!
Svetlana began to examine the world more carefully. It took about half an hour of careful experimentation. Svetlana kept control of her emotions, told herself forcefully to be calm, to relax. It had to be a dream. Nothing untoward could really be happening, not to her. Real fear had not yet begun, but already she could feel its approach. She mustered her determination and fought to hold it off. Explore the environment. Her eyes swept left and right. There was only enough light to deny her blackness. Her arms were there, but seemed to be away from her sides, and she could not move them inward, though she tried for what seemed like hours. The same was true of her legs. She tried to ball her right hand into a fist … but she couldn’t even make her fingers touch one another.
Her breathing was more rapid now. It was all she had. She could feel the air come in and out, could feel the movement of her chest, but nothing else. Closing her eyes gave her the choice of a black nothing over a gray one, but that was all. Where am I!
Movement, she told herself, more movement. She rolled around, searching for resistance, searching for any tactile feeling outside her own body. She was rewarded with nothing at all, just the same slow, fluid resistance—and whichever way she turned, the sensation of floating was the same. It mattered not—she could tell not—whether gravity had her up or down, left side or right. It was all the same. She screamed as loudly as she could, just to hear something real and close, just to be sure that she at least had herself for company. All she heard was the distant, fading echo of a stranger.
The panic started in earnest.
“Time twelve minutes . . . fifteen seconds,” the doctor said into the tape recorder. The control booth was five meters above the tank. “Heart rate rising, now one forty, respiration forty-two, acute anxiety reaction onset.” He looked over to Vatutin. “Sooner than usual. The more intelligent the subject . . .”
“The greater the need for sensory input, yes,” Vatutin said gruffly. He’d read the briefing material on this procedure, but was skeptical. This was brand-new, and required a kind of expert assistance that he’d never needed in his career.
“Heart rate appears to have peaked at one seventy-seven, no gross irregularities.”
“How do you mute her own speech?” Vatutin asked the doctor.
“It’s new. We use an electronic device to duplicate her voice and repeat it back exactly out of phase. That neutralizes her sound almost completely, and it’s as though she were screaming in a vacuum. It took two years to perfect.” He smiled. Like Vatutin he enjoyed his work, and he had here a chance to validate years of effort, to overturn institutional policy with something new and better, that had his name on it.
Svetlana hovered on the edge of hyperventilation, but the doctor altered the gas mixture going into her. He had to keep a very close watch on her vital signs. This interrogation technique left no marks on the body, no scars, no evidence of torture—it was, in fact, not a form of torture at all. At least, not physically. The one drawback to sensory deprivation, however, was that the terror it induced could drive people into tachycardia—and that could kill the subject.
“That’s better,” he said, looking at the EKG readout. “Heart rate stabilized at one thirty-eight, a normal but accelerated sinus rhythm. Subject is agitated but stable.”
Panic didn’t help. Though her mind was still frantic, Svetlana’s body drew back from damaging itself. She fought to assert control and again felt herself become strangely calm.
Am I alive or dead? She searched all her memories, all her experiences, and found nothing . . . but . . .
There was a sound.
What is it?
Lub-dub, lub-dub . . . what was it . . . ?
It was a heart! Yes!
Her eyes were still open, searching the blankness for the
source of the sound. There was something out there, if only she could find it. Her mind searched for a way. I have to get to it. I must grab hold of it.
But she was trapped inside something that she couldn’t even describe. She started moving again. Again she found nothing to grab, nothing to touch.
She was only beginning to understand how alone she was. Her senses cried out for data, for input, for something! The sensory centers of her brain were seeking sustenance and finding only a vacuum.
What if I am dead? she asked herself.
Is this what happens when you’re dead . . . Nothingness . . . ? Then a more troubling thought:
Is this hell?
But there was something. There was that sound. She concentrated on it, only to find that the harder she tried to listen, the harder it was to hear. It was like trying to grab for a cloud of smoke, it was only there when she didn’t try to—but she had to grab it!
And so she tried. Svetlana screwed her eyes shut and concentrated all of her will on the repeating sound of a human heart. All she accomplished was to blank the sound out of her own senses. It faded away, until it was only her imagination that heard it and then that, too, became bored.
She moaned, or thought she did. She heard almost nothing. How could she speak and not hear it?
Am I dead? The question had an urgency that demanded an answer, but the answer might be too dreadful to contemplate. There had to be something . . . but did she dare? Yes!
Svetlana Vaneyeva bit her tongue as hard as she could. She was rewarded with the salty taste of blood.
I am alive! she told herself. She reveled in this knowledge for what seemed a very long time. But even long times had to end:
But where am I? Am I buried . . . alive? BURIED ALIVE!
“Heart rate increasing again. Looks like the onset of the secondary anxiety period,” the doctor observed for the recording. It really was too bad, he thought. He’d assisted in preparing the body. A very attractive woman, her smooth belly marred only by a mother’s stretchmarks. Then they’d oiled her skin and dressed her in the specially made wetsuit, one made of the best-quality Nomex rubber, so smooth that you could barely feel it when dry—and when filled with water, it hardly seemed there at all. Even the water in the tank was specially formulated, heavy in salt content so that she was neutrally buoyant. Her gyrations around the tank had twisted her upside down and she hadn’t known. The only real problem was that she might tangle the air lines, but a pair of divers in the tank prevented this, always careful not to touch her or to allow the hose to do so. Actually, the divers had the hardest job in the unit.