The Eternity Brigade Part 4

He got a room at the Holiday Inn, just north of Hollywood Boulevard.

The weather was gray and overcast-unseasonable, the desk clerk said, but Hawker hardly noticed. The leaden skies matched his mood only too well.Over the next several days he roamed Hollywood at random. He had originally intended to go all over Los Angeles, but the city's large size made that impossible. Instead, he spent his time wandering the length of Hollywood Boulevard, drinking in its diversity and yet still feeling unfulfilled at the end of each excursion. Bookstores and record shops, boutiques and emporia, even famous names implanted in stars along the sidewalk-nothing could lift the depression that had settled over him. He walked amid the bright lights and the chattering people like a premature ghost, in the world but not of it.

When he walked at night he received numerous solicitations from both men and women; he ignored them all and walked on. On his second night in Hollywood he encountered a prost.i.tute he couldn't easily get rid of, a woman in her forties with lipstick so garish on an overly whitened face that she looked almost like a clown. For some reason she attached herself to Hawker and would not leave his side. Resigning himself to the inevitable, he took her back with him to his hotel room, but despite the best efforts of both of them, he found himself impotent. At length angered by his inability, he chased the woman out of his room, then cried himself to sleep on the bed.

The world around him became progressively less real, a scene of shifting shadows. He had come here, subconsciously, to say goodbye, but the world seemed to have already left without telling him, leaving him alone in an emotionless void.

Three days before his leave was due to expire, he saw a dime on the sidewalk. He stopped and stood over it, mindless of the people who pushed by him on their hurried way. The small circle of silver became a mystic token, symbol of an entire world he was departing forever. Already it was considered an insignificant piece of change, but he remembered receiving a dime as a kid and buying himself some candy. The dime was a solid link to his past, but what of the future? What if there were no dimes when he awoke? What if there were no money at all, and everyone used credit cards or something? What if there was nothing familiar when he woke up, and he found himself facing a world of alien complexities? He had been frightened enough of the world he knew; could the future be any less terrifying?

He stared at the dime for half an hour, until a little boy noticed what he was looking at and ran over to pick it up. The kid ran off with the coin andHawker, jolted out of his reverie, returned slowly to his hotel room.

He spent the remainder of his leave in his room, not even venturing out to eat. He turned on the television and sat hypnotized in front of it, blinking uncomprehendingly as a series of images paraded across the tube. His face grew gaunt, and bags appeared under his eyes. He dozed a couple of times in front of the set, waking with a start each time and returning to his meaningless preoccupation.

His strange ritual finally completed, he checked out of his room and prepared to return to the base. Unshaven and haggard, he looked like a derelict, though he still had plenty of unused bonus money in his pocket.

Hawker didn't care what people thought about him. He had divorced himself from the present the only way he knew how, and was prepared to step into the future.

It turned out to be a longer step than he had counted on. He was not put into suspended animation immediately upon his return. Instead, he was placed in a separate barracks with the other volunteers, and was told there would be several weeks of special weapons training and physical testing before the experiment began.

Green was here too, as was Symington. Both were delighted to see him, and the threesome spent their first few minutes together thumping backs and swapping insults. Green and Symington both pretended they'd hardly missed Hawker at all; Hawker could see past the surface, though, to the concern Green had felt, and the relief that he now knew his friend was all right. But significantly, neither of the other two men ever asked Hawker where he'd gone or what he'd done. Each had probably gone through his own version of the psychological crisis, and knew there were some privacies it was not decent to intrude upon.

Of the ninety-three men who'd volunteered for the project, eleven did not return from leave. After twenty-four hours, they were listed as AWOL and dropped from the subject rolls. Hawker sometimes wondered about them, and whether their lives were better or worse for having made the decision they did.

But the army gave him little time just then for idle speculation. The volunteers were given a course in weapons use conducted by a Special Forces instructor who did not tolerate failure. They spent four hours a day in a cla.s.sroom learning the theory of weaponry, and eight more hours aday in the field putting their knowledge to practical use. They started with the simplest weapons-knives, bows and arrows, spears- learning not only their use but how to improvise them in the field if they found themselves unarmed. They spent long hours on the target range until each of them was adept at these before moving on to more modern armaments. They learned about guns, from the earliest to the most modern, including some of the more experimental computer-guided models and the laser rifles that promised to add new dimensions to warfare. Hawker and his comrades learned to disa.s.semble, clean and rea.s.semble every firearm in the U.S. a.r.s.enal, plus a number of captured enemy models. They saw films and demonstrations of artillery pieces, and practiced in conjunction with field artillery teams.

There was no way of knowing what kinds of weapons would be available to them when they awoke. The best way to deal with this, from the army's point of view, was to make each of the volunteers as versatile and proficient as possible. By the end of their training, each of the volunteers was a specialist in calculated mayhem.

Their schedule was so exhaustive that they had little time for private lives. Between meals, cla.s.ses and field exercises, Hawker had little opportunity to talk with his friends. By the end of each day it was all he could do to crawl into bed and try to get a little sleep before the cycle repeated itself the next day.

Just as the recruits were congratulating themselves for surviving the weapons training, the physical examinations began. Each of them had been examined before being accepted into the program, and they thought the re-examinations were just a formality. They were wrong.

The army was fully aware that this cryogenic experiment was something that had never been attempted on this scale or for this duration. It wanted to make absolutely certain that each specimen was at the peak of health before committing him to the freezing procedure. Each volunteer was subjected to the same testing used on the astronauts both before and after a flight into s.p.a.ce. Every major organ was tested several ways, with readings correlated by computer for any systemic weakness that might fail under the stress of suspension. Three more men were eventually washed out at this stage of the operation, although since it was not their fault they were not required to pay back their bonuses. The word seeped back that the army was retaining them as combat traininginstructors, and most of the volunteers left in the program felt a little jealous. The washouts got all the advantages of the program, and cushy jobs besides, without having to face any of the risks.

The men were given little time to dwell on the possibilities of washing out, however. The day after the final weeding, the men were told to report to the laboratory building immediately after reveille. They were shown the equipment for the first time-large white coffins with thickly insulated walls. Hawker had expected to see tangles of wires leading from each coffin, as had been the case in the original films they'd been shown, but the machinery was much too sophisticated for that. These boxes were designed to be snipped anywhere in the world within thirty-six hours, if an emergency arose; they couldn't be entangled with needless spaghetti.

When Captain Dukakis announced that they were all to be prepped for the "final phase" of the experiment, there was a low rumbling through the group. None of the men had expected things to be this abrupt. "Don't we even get a last meal?" someone asked nervously. "Even a murderer gets that!"

"You had your last meal last night." Dukakis was nervous and impatient himself. "We've found the process works best when the subjects'

stomachs are empty-otherwise ulcers tend to form. If your bodies develop any nutritional needs while you're asleep, we can handle them intravenously. Now get moving."

The men were led into a waiting room and processed five at a time.

Green and Connors were taken in the same group, each man ignoring the other's existence. It was another forty-five minutes before Hawker, his stomach rumbling, was led off to the prepping room.

He was forced to strip completely, and underwent several enemas to clean out his bowels. This, the nurse explained brusquely, was to prohibit any impactions of waste products in his system while he was in suspension. His p.e.n.i.s would be catheterized as well, but that would be done after he was unconscious to minimize the discomfort. He was given a mild sedative shot and led to his own box-number 37, he noticed.

"Won't it be awfully cold?" he asked suddenly as he was climbing inside.

"You'll be asleep before you can feel any drop in temperature," thenurse promised him.

Hawker stretched out in his box and tried to make himself comfortable.

After all, he'd be here, he'd be in this box, for quite some time; he didn't want to wake up after ten years with a kink in his leg. But no matter how he stretched out, the box was just the triflest too narrow to allow him any comfort. But, on reflection, he thought that might have been done intentionally. The doctors wouldn't want him turning even slightly in his sleep and upsetting their instruments, so they'd make the fit as tight as possible.

Just as he thought he was settling in, the technicians around him began attaching instruments all over his body. One small disk was attached in the center of his 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 anesthetized. 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 brain 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 from the constant value. 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 ofthose men in the boxes was monitored more closely than humans had ever been monitored before.

Captain (later Major) 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 that 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, and 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 himself. Everyone, himself included, was being fedintravenously from glucose bottles hanging beside the beds. His mind was still a little too fuzzy to count the other beds, but there were a lot of them.

He was not an individual case, then, a single accident within the program.

The army had thawed out most or all of the other volunteers as well. That did not speak well for the scientists behind Project Banknote; someone's head was likely to roll because of this. Not for the first time, Hawker was glad he didn't have to take responsibility for a mistake.

Even the minuscule exertion of looking around him was wearing, and he lay back on his bed, exhausted. He closed his eyes, and was asleep again before he knew it-a natural sleep, for a natural duration; and if there were any dreams this time, he did not remember them.

He awoke again to the sound of someone walking up to his bed. A hand reached under the covers to touch his arm and feel for a pulse. He opened his eyes suddenly and looked up into the nurse's face.

The nurse was a middle-aged, heavyset lady with gray-blond hair and a professionally concerned expression. She was wearing a tight white uniform that was unmistakably medical, though her short hair was cropped in an unfamiliar style. The mere fact that a nurse was still recognizably a nurse brought Hawker a sense of relief. Some things hadn't changed while he'd been "away"; whatever time in the future this was, he would not be a complete stranger to it.

The nurse saw him looking up at her and smiled. "Hi," she said in a pleasant voice. "How are you feeling?"

He struggled to return her smile. "Weak," he answered, and his voice was hoa.r.s.e and scratchy. "Tired," he added as an afterthought.

"Weak I can understand, but as for tired you've already done your share of sleeping. Although," she added, half to herself, "too much sleep can make you tired, too." She checked his pulse against her watch, and jotted the figures down on the chart at the foot of his bed.

"How... how long did I..."

The nurse shook her head. "Don't worry yourself about details right now. Just rest and gather your strength. The major will be in to brief you tomorrow, as soon as everyone is awake and recovered." And with that she moved off down the ward to check the rest of the patients.Hawker watched her make her rounds, until finally she left the ward.

Then he noticed one of the other patients half propped up on his elbows, looking at him. The man was on the other side of the room, about two beds down. Hawker tried to remember who he was, and the name Johnston came to mind.

"You won't get any straight answers out of her," Johnston said. His voice was weak, but a little better than Hawker's. "I've been awake for two days now, and n.o.body wants to tell me anything. I think they're afraid of something."

"Maybe they're afraid to shock us," came the voice of another man, Pastorelli. "Maybe they want to wait and tell us all at once, so rumors don't spread."

"I think maybe the whole thing was a failure," Hawker volunteered. "It sure didn't feel like I slept too long."

Johnston smiled. "Yeah, maybe that's it. Maybe they flopped, and now they're scared to admit it."

Hawker looked around the ward, taking in some more details. There were twenty beds in here, ten on each side of the long room. About half the patients now seemed to be awake to some degree. From his limited vantage point, Hawker couldn't see either Green or Symington in the room; they must be in other wards. He was disappointed at not being with them at this time of confusion, but he wasn't really worried. They were probably all right; for all he knew, they could be in the very next room.

The temperature in the ward was very warm, but whether it was summer or whether the hospital chose to keep the temperature up in the room, he couldn't tell. The other men in the ward who were awake were talking among themselves, exchanging theories on what had happened and how long they'd been asleep. Hawker didn't contribute further to the conversation. It was clear, after listening to what the various parties had to say, that no one knew anything. All they had to go by was guesses and opinions; to Hawker, such things were worse than useless. The nurse had said some major would be in tomorrow to brief them; he could wait until then. For the moment it was sufficient to know that he was alive and in good health; he'd worry about the rest when the time came. Right now, he needed his sleep.Every man in the ward was awake by the next day, and everyone-Hawker included, though he didn't show it-was intensely curious about the experiment's outcome. All eyes went to the door when Dukakis entered the room. The recruiter for Project Banknote was in a major's uniform now, but that meant little; the promotion itself could have come at any time, and the men needn't have been suspended for more than a week or two to have missed it.

But it was Dukakis himself that caused the men to stare. The man had aged perceptibly. His face was lined, now, and his hair was graying at the temples and sideburns. He was twenty to thirty pounds heavier and there was a slower, more tired feeling to his walk. Hawker began to feel nervous again. Those changes hadn't come about overnight, and he realized that perhaps his initial thought was wrong, that perhaps the experiment wasn't such a failure after all.

Dukakis walked slowly to the center of the room, turning so he could look at each of the men who were staring at him. There was a smile on his lips, but it never reached to his eyes.

"h.e.l.lo again, men," he said. "First of all, I again want to thank you for taking part in this experiment. The army has already learned a great deal, and we expect to learn still more in the future with your continued a.s.sistance.

"To cover the subject that I'm sure is uppermost in all your minds, let me say first that Project Banknote has been an enormous success, far exceeding our most optimistic expectations. The group of you was kept in suspended animation for eleven years, five months and thirteen days, and it took a mere three days from the time of taking you out of your suspension chambers until this present moment."

A startled gasp went through the room. Although Dukakis's appearance had given the men some warning that time had pa.s.sed, none of them was quite prepared for the actual amount. Almost a dozen years had slipped beneath them. And yet none of them felt any different, or even as much as a day older than they had when they settled into their coffins.

Dukakis paused to let the basic facts sink into the men's minds. When he had their full attention again, he continued his briefing. "You have all survived the most unknown phase of the experiment-more than survived, in fact. Each of you, and all your colleagues in the other wards, appears tobe in perfect physical condition. You've all mentioned experiencing weakness, but we antic.i.p.ated that; even though your minds don't notice any time discrepancy, your muscles do. There's been eleven and a half years of disuse to overcome, but we've established a program of physical therapy and calisthenics that should mold you back into fighting shape in less than two weeks. Once that's accomplished, we'll be moving into the next phase of the experiment.

"As you recall, the main reason for conducting this program was not to see whether men could be frozen for indefinite periods of time; that had already been pretty well established by earlier experiments. No, we had you suspended because we knew that sooner or later there'd be another war, and we'd need good trained fighters to help us in the initial phases, until more of our draftees can become battle-hardened. That war is here, and you're going to have to prove yourselves in battle once again. The army is hoping you'll do as well there as you did in the suspension tanks."

"Who are we fighting, sir?" one of the soldiers asked.

A portion of the old Captain Dukakis showed through, the man who hated having his well-rehea.r.s.ed spiel interrupted. He turned and glared at the man who'd asked the question, then had to recalibrate his mental processes to answer it. "The situation is very complex," he said slowly.

"You'll be given a much more thorough briefing on the exact political nature of the endeavor in due course. For right now, let me just say that there is a civil war in China. The inc.u.mbent government is being challenged by a reactionary clique of Maoist/Leninists. The Russians stepped in to help the rebels, so we ended up being forced to help the official government."

"You mean we're fighting to save Communists?" One of the men, Litwak, thought this was incredibly funny, but his humor was lost on Dukakis.

"I see nothing to laugh at," the major said. "And I doubt you will either, once you're dropped into combat. This is a hard and dirty war, as bad as any action you saw in Africa. It had already been going for nearly two years before we became involved, and the casualty rate is very high.

Fortunately, according to our agreement with the Chinese government, the troops we provide will be mainly for support; their own soldiers will do most of the actual fighting. Still, we thought it best to activate you and see how you do under actual field conditions. Don't expect a picnic over there;neither side shows the slightest bit of restraint or mercy to the other. The atrocities make My Lai and Katumbwe look like Sunday school outings."

Dukakis paused. "My portion of this particular experiment is over. I doubt you'll be seeing me again." One soldier started clapping, but Dukakis stared him back into silence. "Starting tomorrow, there's more hard work in store for you. As I said, lots of physical therapy and calisthenics. There are also a few new developments in weapons that you'll have to familiarize yourself with-nothing you can't handle, though, in view of your special training.

"You'll find you can talk about the project openly, now. The secrecy was lifted a couple of months ago, when we were debating whether to use you in this war. Everyone knows the sacrifices you made, and the courage it took to make them. In some circles, you're even being regarded as heroes.

People are only now beginning to appreciate the applications of these suspended animation techniques to civilian life. You helped make it possible, and the United States is grateful.

"In two weeks, you'll be shipped out to China. You've been in battle before, you know what to do. Just acquit yourselves as well in the field as you've done so far in the laboratory and I know that the army-and I personally-will be proud of you."

Dukakis saluted smartly twice, once to each side of the room, then turned and walked down the center aisle and out the door. Behind him he left a silence that lasted well over a minute as the men considered what he'd told them, and how their lives would be affected-both by the war and by their eleven-and-a-half-year isolation from the world.

That evening, while the glucose tubes were still in their arms, the soldiers received their first meal since awakening: lukewarm chicken broth and a dish of lemon Jello. The men started an uproar all at once; if they were heroes, they should eat like heroes. They'd been cheated out of a big "last meal" before being frozen, and they felt that their first meal after waking should be a little more impressive. The nurses listened to the complaints with a minimum of tolerance, and continued to serve the food as ordered.

Despite their protests, the volunteers found they had trouble eating even as basic a meal as this. Their digestive systems needed time to readjust to real food, the nurses told them afterward. It was all perfectlynormal, and had been antic.i.p.ated. By the next day, most of the men would be eating normally again. In the meantime, less than half the men were able to finish the meager servings they were given, and some ended up vomiting what they'd eaten. Hawker himself had eaten three quarters of his meal, and paid for it the rest of the night with a painful series of stomach cramps that kept him from getting much sleep.

The meal the next morning was virtually the same, except for the addition of tea. After breakfast, the nurses removed the soldiers' IV tubes; most of the men were fed up with bedpans, and the nurses spent a large percentage of their time helping the volunteers walk to the lavatories at either end of the ward.

After that, the patients were placed on gurneys and wheeled to a large physical therapy room-actually a gym that had been converted for this purpose. They lay on tables and were placed at the mercy of machines that stretched and bent them in more ways than they knew existed. All of them were sore and exhausted by the time they returned to their ward for lunch, but they were not allowed to sleep. After the bland midday meal, each man got a small TV and headset, and they watched a videotaped briefing on the background of the Chinese civil war.

There had always been factionalism within the Chinese Communist hierarchy, the briefing officer explained, and as a result the country went through periodic violent upheavals. By the middle of the 1970s, the moderates had gotten into power, and were noted for placing the improvement of their country above ideological purity. With a few major and explosive lapses, the moderates had held control of the central government ever since-but the militant Communists, who believed in their doctrine with religious fervor, were seldom happy with the course the moderates charted.

Running as a parallel thread through modern history was the antagonism between the two major Communist superpowers, China and the Soviet Union. Border incidents had flared between the two almost since the Chinese Communists' takeover at the century's halfway mark.

There had been reports of occasional fighting over the years, but the harshest sniping of all had been on the propaganda front, where each nation accused the other of the most disreputable behavior. There had always been the threat of all-out warfare, but until recently it hadn't materialized.Now the Russians saw their opportunity. The Chinese militants were stronger than they'd been for years, and intelligence reports indicated they'd been making life h.e.l.l for the ruling moderates. When the moderates finally clamped down, the militants appealed to Moscow for aid. The Russians were actually being invited into China by a revolutionary group that needed their a.s.sistance. The Kremlin leaders saw this as a perfect chance to drive a solid wedge into their enemy's territory and at last gain the upper hand in their decades-long war of nerves with China.

Their only consideration, of course, was how the United States would react. The United States had been playing off the two Communist superpowers for years, and would not look favorably on a Russian effort to tilt the scales. The Russians tested the waters and elicited an angry U.S.

response, but judged that America was not willing to commit itself fully to China's defense. After months of indecision, the Russians stepped in on the side of the Chinese militants.

Now all the pressure shifted to the United States. As long as Russia and China had been evenly balanced, America could let things ride and drift with the political currents. The Russian invasion changed all that. If Russia succeeded in this power grab, they would end up ruling the largest empire in history, encompa.s.sing nearly a third of the human race. They would become an enemy more formidable than even the United States could effectively counter. There was strong pressure to step into the fighting on the Chinese government's side.

This pressure was countered, though, by an ideological pressure within the United States. To step in and preserve a Communist government seemed counter to American politics of the last sixty years. There were conservatives who loved nothing better than the thought of Russia and China fighting among themselves, hoping they'd knock each other off and leave the United States free to step in and pick up the pieces. President Livingston, himself a conservative Republican, wavered for nearly two years while pressure to intervene-coming from both the left and the center-grew ever stronger. The decisive factor, finally, was the Soviet nuclear strike-accidental, they claimed-against Shanghai. The United States could not remain neutral after that, and so, with great reluctance, President Livingston committed the nation to a military alliance with the Chinese government.

There would be further briefings, the men were told, about the natureof the fighting in China and the extent to which America had committed itself to aid its new ally, as well as briefings on the new weapons systems developed during their period of inactivity. But this briefing had lasted most of the afternoon, and it was now time for dinner. There was only so much these men could be expected to absorb so soon after their emergence from suspended animation.

The next day began the same way, with a painful physical therapy session. The men were feeling much stronger, however, and afterward they were led into an exercise yard, where they were reunited with the rest of the volunteers from other wards. There was great rejoicing when people saw that their friends had also survived the experiment; even the normally taciturn Hawker let out a whoop at seeing Green and Symington again for the first time since his awakening.

The three friends compared their waking experiences, which were basically similar, and complained about the food. Green remarked that the "chicken broth" was an insult to chickens the world over, and that his grandmother would spin in her grave if she knew he'd been drinking it.

The men were allowed little time for chatting, though; a tough old drill sergeant named Jenks-whom everyone promptly termed "Jinx"-came out and set them a series of calisthenics that drove them all to the brink of physical exhaustion. The men could barely make it back to their wards under their own power at the end of the session.

The days pa.s.sed in a regular progression. The men were introduced to the new weapons, including the laser rifles and the satellite-guided bullets, whose trajectories could actually be altered by instructions from a spy-satellite overhead for pinpoint accuracy against the enemy. The men took these developments in stride; what mattered to them the most was that there had not been similar great advances in the army's food preparation technology.

By the end of the two weeks, Hawker felt he was in better condition than ever before in his life. He was fully recovered from his hibernation and in perfect health. His fears about this project had melted away to the point where he was actually looking forward to combat duty. It was something he knew, something he could cope with. The world was no stranger than it had been before, despite his earlier fears.

The only negative note was sounded by Green early in their second week of recuperation. During a short pause in the exercise period, theyoung man looked around the yard and frowned. "Hawk, how many of us were there the morning we all got frozen?"

"Seventy-nine, I think. Why?"

"That's what I thought. There are only seventy-seven of us here now, and as far as I can remember that's all there's been since we woke up. I wonder if anything happened to the other two."

A chill went down Hawker's spine. The army had been emphasizing how pleased it was with the success of the project, and how it had exceeded all their expectations-but nowhere was it stated that the project was free of mishaps. Had two men actually died during the experiment, or had they perhaps merely been awakened early because of some malfunction of their equipment? It was a question he never learned the answer to-and to make matters worse, no matter how hard he strained his memory he could not remember which two men were no longer a part of the group. They had simply vanished from his universe as though they'd never been.

Hawker's mind was flexible. During his previous combat tours, dozens of people had drifted in and out of his acquaintance, never to be seen again. And, after nearly a twelve-year gap, he would have to get used to the fact that there were many things in life that had pa.s.sed from his acquaintance. After a while, he ceased to think of the missing men. They were just statistics; let the army take care of them.

At the end of the two weeks, when the volunteers had fully recovered from their long sleep, they were sent to China as promised. Once there, their group was broken up and disseminated among other outfits. The whole point of the experiment, after all, was to put these combat veterans into units with greener troops, thereby pa.s.sing on the benefit of their experience; there was little to be gained by keeping them together.