“What on earth could be worse?”
“The people who have been revived. Their minds are gone.”
“Gone? What do you mean?”
With a helpless spread of his hands, Nobuhiko repeated, “Gone. The body can be revived, but apparently the freezing process wipes out the brain’s memory system. Those we’ve revived are mentally like newborns. They even have to be toilet trained all over again.”
Dan sank into one of the plush recliners. “You mean Sai’s mind… his personality… gone?”
“That’s what we fear. Apparently the neural connections in the brain break down when the body is frozen. The mind comes out a virtual tabula rasa.”
“Shit,” Dan muttered.
“We have our research scientists working on the problem, of course, but there’s no point to reviving my father until we know definitely, one way or the other, how his mind has been affected by the freezing.”
Dan hunched forward, forearms on his thighs. “Okay. I understand now. But get Sai’s body to Selene. Now! Before these religious fanatics make it impossible to move him.”
Nobuhiko nodded grimly. “I believe you’re right, Dan. I’ve felt that way myself for some weeks now, but I’m glad that you agree.”
“I’m heading up to Selene next week,” Dan said. “If you like, I’ll take him with me.”
“That’s very good of you, but this is a family matter. I’ll take care of it.”
Dan nodded. “Okay. But if you need any help—anything at all, just let me know.”
Nobuhiko smiled again, and for the first time there was real warmth in it. “I will, Dan. I certainly will.”
“Good.”
The younger man rubbed at his eyes, then looked up at Dan again. “Very well, I’ve told you my problem. Now tell me yours. What brings you here?”
Dan grinned at him. “Oh, nothing much. I just need a couple of billion dollars.”
Nobo’s face remained completely impassive for a long moment. Then he said, “Is that all?”
“Yep. Two bill should do it.”
“And what do I get in return for such an investment?”
With a chuckle, Dan replied, “A bunch of rocks.”
LA GUAIRA
Pancho looked up, bleary-eyed, from her desktop screen. Across the room that she and Amanda were sharing, Mandy sat at her desk with virtual reality glasses and earphones covering half her face, peering intently at her own screen.
“I’m goin’ for a walk,” she said, loudly enough to get through Mandy’s earphones. Amanda nodded without taking off the VR glasses. Pancho squinted at the screen, but it was nothing but a jumble of alphanumerics. Whatever Mandy was studying was displayed on her glasses, not the computer screen.
Their dorm room opened directly onto the patio. Cripes, it’s almost sundown, Pancho saw as she stepped outside. The late afternoon was still tropically warm, humid, especially after the air-conditioned cool of their quarters.
Pancho stretched her long arms up toward the cloud-flecked sky, trying to work out the knots in her back. Been settin’ at that stupid ol’ desk too damned long, she said to herself. Mandy can sit there and study till hell freezes over. She’s like a dog-ass computer, just absorbing data like a friggin’ machine.
Dan Randolph had put them to studying the fusion drive and working with the engineering team that was converting a lunar transfer buggy into the ship that would carry them out to the Belt. They saw Randolph rarely. The man was jumping all across the world like a flea on a hot griddle, hardly ever in the same place more than one night. When he was in La Guaira he drove the whole team hard, and himself hardest of all.
Peculiar place for a corporate headquarters, Pancho thought as she walked from the housing complex out past the swaying, rustling palm trees, toward the seawall. La Guaira was more suited to being a tourist resort than a major space launching center. Randolph had settled his Astro
Manufacturing headquarters here years ago, partly because its location near the equator gave rockets a little extra boost from the Earth’s spin, partly because he found the government of Venezuela easier to deal with than the suits in Washington.
Strange, though. Randolph was rumored to have been in love with President Scanwell. There were whispers about their being lovers, off and on, a stormy romance that only ended when the ex-President lost her life in the big Tennessee Valley earthquake.