Whole blood is currently being stored in liquid nitrogen at —320°c. Hypothermia is now a standard surgical procedure, and experiments with cooling rats indicates that it has no adverse effect on the ability to think.

We have not been altogether the same since reading this story and perhaps after reading this title goody from the gory crypts, you will not be, either—

Thaw and Serve

Allen Kim Lang

  Doc WARNER’s BLOOD lubricated the handcuffs onto my wrists. A police-sergeant draped me in a sweated sheet to lead me from the bedroom where Mildred Warner crouched in a corner, screaming.

  “McWha,” his Honour said, “you’ve led a busy life.”

  Indeed.

  The years my contemporaries spent at basketball saw me at Bosky Knoll, an asylum where wolf-cub claws are blunted with Freudian snips. My talons proved tougher than my keepers’ clippers.

 At fifteen, seated with cant and honey, I paroled myself across the chain-link fence and rode the Citrus Express into the city.

  Establishing my stake with the aid of a stocking filled with gravel, I entered the pharmaceutical field. Unlike a certain fool who, asked why he held up banks, explained: “Because that’s where the money is.” I had decided that wealth is most easily pried from the fists of the poor, whose grip is weak. Proffer a Kopyright Kure for Kancer, and the carriage trade wrinkles its nose. But it clix on the brix.

  My welcome to the inner chambers of the Full-Service Bank I favoured was won with qat, an herb harvested in the sheikdoms of Yemen and unknown, until I introduced it, to our wholesomer clime. While fat-rumped lawmen slashed down groves of marijuana in the public parks, a weed benign as wine, Wolfman McWha pushed at schoolside soda-fountains a brand of tea habit-forming as sins against chastity; and I won for my industry at import the price of a harem of Yemen’s only other market-worthy crop, to be disposed of through a consortium of used-flesh dealers in another hemisphere.

 Competition was a bother until I discovered arguments developed in the Caribbean from Prussian pilot-models. Distrusting dangerous electrical paraphernalia, I used above all other tools a rod of steel long as a man’s forearm and of the diameter of his least external orifice; a device which served all commercial purposes from a mild reproof to the manufacture of a corpse mute to the canniest coroner’s physician.

 A carnivore in a world where gruel had become the native dish, I was too proud to hide my bristles under sheepskin. Had Slick McWha deigned to dole out dimes to starvlings (the Wicked’s Mite) he’d never have been exiled into Paradise. What doomed me was the lack of wit to be a hypocrite.

 The only revenge I had intended taking upon Doctor Warner was the seduction of his wife; however, to be brisk as surgery ante Morton, he surprised us in the consummation of his shame. I seized the nearest object sufficient to parry the doctor’s violent walking stick (a bookend; the Warners were a literate couple) and swung. He lay dead and she stood screaming.

 In gyves, Slick McWha served Telstar’s bouncy purpose. The camera showed the killer fenced in before the solemn bench, where a fat black bat twittered disclaimers to his sup of blood: “Ours is a civilization that no longer kills, but only cools.” The sentence, then (C.U. my murderer’s face, pan to my clenching fists):  “Kevin McWha, the servants of the State are directed to sequester you for 
“TWO HUNDRED YEARS,
 “at the end of which time, by the Grace of God and the Pace of Science, you will awake in a world prepared to deal with monsters healingly.”

 On the Stevie-set over the cash-register at your neighbourhood tavern you might have seen, after the penultimate commercial, the next step in the McWoeful way of McWha; the Helium Chamber of the Criminal Crypts. 

 Insidious Fu Manchu, thou shouldst have lived this hour! Vide: silicone straps to hold the delinquent while the smoking vats of liquid gas are tilted over his limbs. The medusoid headdress to lend a classic touch, together with junior lightings that leap the cleavage of brass breasts. The victim, calling out details of his regretted turpitude as he’s lowered into this tub of Time. . . .

 That schtick’s worn thin. The truth is this:

 A bed. A nurselet, cozy in blue-striped blouse and starched white apron (and nymphettophageous Wolfman knows cozydom!) leans primly over dexter deltoid with two-cc. syringe and stainless needle. ‘this won’t hurt a bit, Mister Son-of-Woe.”

 She stings. Two hundred years are gone.

 No sleep, no chill from my two centuries’ soak at 1° Absolute. Just a bee-sting that still smarts, a dozen decades after the dimpled bee’s decayed.

 The Future’s machines wake me and pat me to shape. A naked citizen, Tarzan, comes to walk me in the park. On his left biceps is strapped a silver disc. Anti-McWha device, I posit. “We know why you’re with us, Kevin.” Wry mouth. “Your dossier is foxed a bit, but we read it.”

 Nudism is the style of these comely pedestrians; they’ve tamed the weather to make it bearable. Wolfman slavers, two centuries celibate, as a girl’s gym-class prances past to the tennis-courts. 

 “No cities; we’re beyond the need for efficiency.” Milder than milk, which presupposes active glands, my cicerone smiles.

 Wolfman smiles, too. Six Trix Fix Hix flix his inner pix. “No drug-addiction?” I ask.

 “Goodness, no.” The finx from the future frowns. “We do have something of a coffee-problem,” he confesses.

 Add another Black Battalion, thinx Slick McWha. Illicit Java. “No other vice?”

 “Perhaps self-satisfaction,” says the sweet meech.

 No license, I, to peddle ennui. “You’ve got Cloud-Cuckoo-Land indeed,” says cloud-dispelling, cuckoo-cuckolding, land grabbing Slick McWha.

 “We like it “here.”

 “So do I ... to visit,” testifies the sheep-thief.

 “You can’t go back.” A lion, curry-combed to a comeliness no President’s-daughter-pony had in my day yet attained, stalks up to a nearby yew-tree, where he lies down with a lamb. Leo yawns. Lambkin, big-eyed as a peace-walker discovered in a Legion bar, feels her cud turn sour.

 “What do you intend to do with me?” ask I, the devil’s willingest advocate.

 “Well study you,” my ribbon-clerk replies. “You’ll do well to co- operate. Well use force if need be.”

 “Shame!”

 “. . . to prevent, say, murder. Rape.” Taut look.

 “You remember the four-letter lyrics, but you’ve lost the four-letter lilt,” I comment.

 “You appear to think that civilized means soft,” protests History’s Minion. He sees a honeybee light on a golden flower and closes his eyes.

 “The truth with this Future,” I muse, “is that it’s trimmed of testicularity. Fortunately, thanx to the magic of cryogenics (Anything That Goes In Can Be Frozen; “Break The Law,” You’ll Freeze & Thaw, etc.), your hormone-gap is about to be plugged.” Dead to shame, Slick McWha voyeurs honeybee twiddling butt-up in butter-cup, wondering. Do monsters on pulp-magazines seize macromastic Earthgirls to sup such innocent dew?

 Virgil opens his eyes, pale blue like watered milk. “We want no snakeseed scattered here in Eden,” he says. “In any case, our women wouldn’t have you.”

 “Like Poland wouldn’t have the SS,” growls the Wolf. No response. The Future has no nasty Past.

 I think then the thought uppermost in the mind of every fictive Sleeper Waking, the urgency to inspect the headlines that I’ve missed. “You’re at peace?” I inquire.

 “Of course,” my dainty superman agrees, his mouth a butter-cooler.” Through antenatal conditioning, we’ve eliminated the birth trauma. Since there’s no poverty, there’s no anxiety. Look there:” Twin teenaged darlings, Geminae, dusted with freckles like cinamoned sweet-cakes, stroll hand in hand past Wolf and Rabbit, nod golden heads and pass, not ceasing to sing together in voices like young violins.” The body is no longer the vessel of shame,” Rabbit babbits. “Our Ids are sanitary as our Superegos.”

 Wolfman licks his lips, tasting sugared cinnamon. “I spoke,” I say, “not of you alone, gentle pewt; but of your world.”

 “Earth is no more a circle of blood-sprent sand,” says my beefcake Fauntleroy. Then, like the handsome stranger in a ladies’ magazine, he croons, “But let’s talk now about you.” He indicates two stone benches, dos-a-dos, cushioned with a moss velour. A little stream, fast-moving, runs to our right, fraying against the three stepping-stones. The air smells of cold water, of pine-needles and grass bruised by naked childfeet. I lust after an atavistic cigar. “It’s my privilege to help you find your new career,” the milksop says.

 “My work was chosen in the dice-fall of my genes,” I tell him. I am, by gland-drive and by training, an entrepreneur.”

 “A thief,” interprets my man from Intourist. “We’ve seen your dossier, remember?” He touches pinkies tip-to-tip, the top tip to his lips, accurate counting in his head the cucumber-sandwiches he requires for the Parsonage tea. “There’s no business here for dope-peddlers,” he says. “Nor do we, Kevin McWha, solicit the services of panders, cancer-quacks, or Big-Board bandits.”

 “A man from the past deserves subsidy,” I suggest. “Like a Ming vase, he should be preserved as a national treasure.”

 “Ming vases of your pattern are commoner than milk-bottles,” Mister Interlocutor tells me. “Do you forget the crime statistics of your unkempt day? How your courts, more merciful to contemporaries than to descendants, chilled the mischief-makers and shipped you ahead like frozen fish, to be thawed out stinking in our gentler age?”

 “The judge assured me you’d have new techniques,” I pointed out. “He said you’d have a medicine for misdemeanants.”

 “We have a rod,” answers Exquisite, tracing a steely line in the air, ‘two hand-breadths long, and very thin.”

 “I know that red,” says Wolfman, his insides gone albino. The conjunctiva of one eyesocket is pierced, the eyeball being cushioned on the sufferer’s cheek,” my new unfriend elaborates. “Through a small incision, in the upper orbit, the rod probes for and disrupts those precincas of the brain-mantle where the Id lives. The eye is then screwed back: into its socket, and the whilom sociopath returns to the company of his fellows clean and open-hearted as a child.”

 “Charming,” I say. “Is it not true, however, that your brain-scoured convalescent is apt to find poetry a bore, and love a fiction?”

 “Ah, yes,” sighs this coaxial-clipper. ‘to be quite candid, Kevin, our prefrontal philanthropy often leaves our new “brother paretically impotent. But the new you will find celibacy no heavy burden.”

 “How absolute the knave is!” I cry, crossing my legs. “If you’re bound to prune me, you’ll come at me with an honest gelding-knife, not short my fuses like a burglar.” There is sonic asperity in my tone. My therapist fondles the silver Wolfbane on his left arm, and I unclench my fists.

 “Most of you say that,” sheepdog says. “We’re not bound, all the same, to let the sinners of our forefathers visit upon us unchecked. We must, as you say, defuse you, as one would defuse a . . . what was the thing called? Bomb?"

 “Is there no need in this pleasure-park of demolition?” I demand. “Are assassins’ blades now dry letter-openers, coy fingernail parers?”  

 “Do I hear rightly, Kevin McWha?” asks the nude frontiersman, his cheeks flushed with rude haemoglobin. “Had you really rather kill than be cured?”

 “Five-by-five,” I answer. “Yes!”

 Kewpie glances up, gauging the altitude of the sun. “You must be hungry,” he suggests.

 “I haven’t had a bite to eat in six generations,” Wolfman points out. “A ham sandwich could bridge the void of centuries.”

 “Ham? No, Kevin. We no longer exploit our fellow-beasts for protein.”

 “No matter,” I sigh, rising to follow him down the garden path. “I’m sure there’s no mustard, either, here.”

 We pass the mausoleum.  Son-of-Woe shudders with a chilly thought of the two hundred years he lay there, ripening like a cicada in the earth. I consider the gelid thousands buried still in that time-proof dungeon, waiting for a Lincoln to strike free their icy chains.

 The park cuddles about the village of Adamites, who are strolling its paths placidly soaking sunlight, not flinching even at the sight of preserved great-great-grandpa’s Twentieth-Century walking-shorts. The houses, Black Forest clock-cases, scatter about playing fields where snow topped gentlefolk croquet with balsa balls, and wading-pools where bare babies laugh and slop their feet. I see virgins whose breasts have not conceded gravitation bouncing about a-bowling on the green.

 The community hall bears above its entrance a motto my host translates to mean Don’t Rock The Boat.

 We enter the dining-hall and take a table between the fountain and the orchestra. Gymnosophs of all shades, patent-leather Zulu to chamois-skin Finn, stop to gossip with my tour-director. Their language is soft and open-mouthed, like Hawaiian. My English speech, raucous echo from Baltic marshes and Rhenish forests, is not unknown. “Welcome,” one says; another, “Eat hearty!” A young man grins. “We’ll be seeing you,” He says.

 After a reflection of biscuits and crisp greens, we move to a table in the small motion-picture theatre. The film is patently a love-story. We are in, so to speak, at the kill. The hero and heroine are sealing their troth in a triumphant act of kind, string-music racing bedsprings to crescendo. Drums, hautboys, and a trumpet-blast; Fade Out.

 “Now,” announces Adonis, ‘the Feature.” He hands me a sweet from the shallow bowl on our table.

 On the stereo screen “blooms the planet Earth, photographed from perhaps the moon. A Zeus-size-zoomar hurls us down. Space-sick, I grip the table-edge to make it creak. We’re falling toward Australia, old continent of exile.

 We drop into the woods of Arnam Land, the front ear of the kangaroo I saw in the atlas as a child. “This used to be an Aboriginal Area,” chuckles Constant Companion. “Unfortunately, the little brown boomerangers have lost their forests to a fiercer breed.” The camera that feeds our screen swoops and ducks through fat-stemmed gum-trees. Tropical birds, blood-red bile-green, caw and chatter from the tufts of screw-palms. The swampmud belches bubbles.

 One man appears, wearing a kilt of pounded bark. His blond beard is streaked with the yolk of his breakfast eggs; his feet are wrapped in buskins of crocodile-hide. He waves his right arm –the left holds a nine-foot spear — and companions scruffy as himself skulk from behind the cycadpalms and stringybark trees into the clearing. Our camera perches on a convenient wild-fig tree to kibitz the making-camp.

 “That’s a death-spear the leader carries,” my interpreter whispers. “Bits of shell and stone are stuck to its point with resin, to wipe off in the wound and cause a festering death.”

 The camera flutters off its porch to inspect the band of junglemen in detail. A red-bearded giant whose right eye lies buried in its crushed arch swings his morning-star about his head, cursing the camera. One-eye’s weapon, a rock the size of two hands clasped, bagged at the end of a liana, whips up toward the eavesdropping automaton. The camera hops in the air; the rock drops back to its hurler.

 The rest of the primitives ignore our watchbird. Some twenty men beat about in the bamboo-clumps for hidden enemies. All clear. Blondy whistles through his teeth. Four hags, leeched dry by heat and protozoa, herd children from the bush. The camera peers. Kids are everywhere. These youngsters are skinny, their hair plastered back with mud. We’re treated to a close up of one of the girls, some twelve years old. Her skin is pebbled with rasberry lesions, and her hair has mostly fallen out. A boy of six is led to the centre of the clearing by his sister. The camera holds a clinical conference on his white-filmed eyes. A worm uncoils behind one translucent pupil. “My God!” I bark.

  “We’re not religious here,” Nig-Nog remarks. “But watch now, Kevin lad.”

  One of the leather women takes a sack of fish from her shoulder and spits bits on twigs. Another, who carries coals in an earthenware pot, piles up the jungle-duff the children bring her and starts the cookfire. The men rest on their haunches, crutching up exhaustion on their spear-shafts.

  As though the perfume of roasting fish were their signal, a second troop screams from the jungle. Ambush! One of the attackers swings his string of pawnbroker-balls about his head, releases it, and straps Blondy to his useless spear. Another kneels at the jungle-edge to fit flints into the pouch of his pellet-bow, flinging bullets against the skulls of the defenders. The blind boy, howling, blunders into the legs of a man with a mace, who swats him dead with a hammerblow.

  Victory for the ambushers. One hero drags the girl with yaws to the fringes of the clearing, where he bangs her head against a log and rapes her. The camera swoops to remind its audience of the Psalmist’s Fourth Wonder, the way of a man with a maid.

  Blondy is trussed between forks above his cookfire. The winners snatch fish from under his screaming body to tear and fingerlick. Others gather about the victims with stone knives, giggling and holding up from time to time bits of bloody flesh. The women are enjoyed in order of the victors’ rank.

 After half an hour, the stolen fish all eaten, the battered women are led off into the jungle on halters. Flies settle to police the area.

 Wolfman fights back peristalsis. “I thought you didn’t have war,” I say.

 “We don’t,” says my fellow-viewer, leading me into the sunlight. “But you fellows do. It’s your nature.”

 We sit again on the mossy benches by the stream. “It really happened?” I ask.  

 “Ten minutes to go,” he says.

  “You give the men and women you thaw from the Criminal Crypts a choice,” I say. “Zombihood or transport to Australia.”

  “The first is the wiser option,” says the surgeon’s nark. “Some of our most pleasant citizens were once as wild as you are, Kevin. The others, as you saw, furnish us the excitement healthy humans need, making the blood sing through our veins in the ancient poetry of slaughter.”

  He is strong, but with his right arm broken he can’t trigger the Wolfman-gun on his left. He belches as I hold his golden head under the singing creek. At last I wedge him between the first and second stepping-stone. I strap to my arm his silver disc and run. I run past the Crypts, where companions wait an unhallowed resurrection.

  I hear dogs, now, “baying beside the little stream where I washed away the trail. I’m heading into the mountains, wolf-country.

  When I come downhill again, when I’ve crowned myself King of the Frozen Pirates, I’ll make the blood sing through the veins of these loving folk. 

 And from them.

Taken from “Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine.” 
May 1964, British Edition.
E-text by E-book_Worm Dec 2002.