Read Online All My Sins Remembered by Joe Haldeman - Free Book Online Page A

Crowell aimed very high, fired and missed, fired and missed, and on the third try the man stumbled to the ground, but then staggered back to his feet and continued running, holding his arm. He still had the laser pistol in his hand, but didn’t seem disposed to use it. Good thing, Otto thought; if the man were a professional he would have figured out how lightly armed Crowell was—and would have just flattened down at that extreme range and given Crowell a leisurely roasting.
    He studied the rapidly dwindling figure. Nobody he recognized. Neither especially fat nor thin nor tall nor short. Crowell had to admit that he probably wouldn’t know the man the next time he saw him. Unless he had that arm in a sling or cast, which wasn’t unlikely.
    As soon as Crowell stepped into his billet, the radiophone started buzzing. He stood beside it for several seconds; then, with a mental shrug, he picked up the transceiver.
    “Crowell here.”
    “Isaac? Where have you been at this hour? This is Waldo—I’ve been trying to get you since three.”
    “Oh, I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep… so I took a little walk to tire myself out.”
    “Well, I… look, pardon me for calling so late, but… that sample you gave me—some of the cells in it are still alive!”
    “Still alive? From a two-hundred-year-old mummy?”
    “And undergoing mitosis—you know what mitosis is?”
    “Cells dividing, yeah, chromosomes…”
    “It was just a coincidence—I had the incubator stage on the microscope, that helped; I just put the sample in there rather than go through the rigamarole of changing to a regular stage. There was an interesting cell, a big nerve cell, that had evidently died in the middle of the anaphase—of mitosis, that is… I looked at it for a minute and then went off to get a beer, got sidetracked by some maintenance I had to do on the spectrometer—anyhow, I got back to the microscope a couple of hours later, and that same nerve cell was in a different part of the anaphase! Those cells are growing and dividing, but at a rate that must be several hundred times slower than normal Bruuchian cells.”
    “That’s incredible!”
    “It’s more than incredible—it’s impossible! I don’t know, Isaac. I’m a generalist, just an overeducated veterinarian. We need a couple of real biologists—and we’ll have them, too, dozens of them, as soon as the word gets out. Suspended animation, that’s what it adds up to. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if those Bruuchians had a hundred people studying them a year from now.”
    “You’re probably right.” For the first time, Crowell wondered who might be listening in.
    10.
     
    “Glad you could make it, Isaac.” Dr. Norman’s handshake was unusually firm.
    “Couldn’t pass up a chance to beat you again after all these years, Willy.”
    “Ha—believe I was four wins ahead when you left. Match you for white.” Willy removed the tray with his dishes from the chess table.
    “No, Willy, you go first. Out of consideration for your youth and inexperience.”
    The doctor laughed. “Pawn to King—4 and I’ll fix you a drink.”
    Crowell pulled a chair over to the chessboard and set up the men, making Willy’s first move for him. He looked at the pieces for a second and started his own opening game. “Have you talked to Waldo today?”
    “Oh yes, the mummy thing. Quite fantastic. He was most secretive as to how he came upon a sample, though. I can just see Waldo skulking into one of those huts with his dissecting kit.”
    Dr. Norman set a drink down beside Crowell and took the chair opposite him. “I don’t suppose
you
had anything to do with it, Isaac?”
    “Well,” Crowell said cautiously, “I’m pretty sure how he got the sample. But, as you say, it’s a deep dark secret right now.”
    “This world is full of secrets.” The doctor made his second move.
    Crowell responded almost instinctively, a stock opening.
    “A Ruy Lopez, Isaac? You’re getting