anyone would find me. I had some hope. Hope that would have reduced those odds somewhat. I placed my faith on someone and I guess they failed me. Perhaps it wasn't their fault. Maybe they died before they could even hunt for me.”
'But how did you do it?' asked Gary. 'Even today suspended animation has our scientists stumped. They've made some progress but not much. And you made it work a thousand years ago.”
'Drugs,' she said. 'Certain Martian drugs. Rare ones. And they have to be combined correctly. Slow metabolism to a point where it is almost non-existent. But you have to be careful. Slow it down too far and metabolism stops. That's death.”
Gary gestured toward the hypodermic. 'And that,' he said, 'reacts against the other drug.”
She nodded gravely.
'The fluid in the tank,' he said. 'That was to prevent dehydration and held some food value? You wouldn't need much food with metabolism at nearly zero. But how about your mouth and nostrils? The fluid…”
'A mask,' she said. 'Chemical paste that held up under moisture. Evaporated as soon as it was struck by air.”
'You thought of everything.”
'I had to,' she declared. 'There was no one else to do my thinking for me.”
She slid off the table and walked slowly toward him.
'You told me a minute ago,' she said, 'that the scientists of today haven't satisfactorily solved suspended animation.”
He nodded.
'You mean to say they still don't know about these drugs?”
'There are some of them,' he said, 'who'd give their good right arm to know about them.”
'We knew about them a thousand years ago,' the girl said. 'Myself and one other. I wonder…”
She whirled on Gary. 'Let's get out of here,' she cried. 'I have a horror of this place.”
'Anything you want to take?' he asked. 'Anything I can get together for you?”
She made an impatient gesture.
'No,' she said. 'I want to forget this place.”
Chapter Three
The Space Pup arrowed steadily toward Pluto. From the engine room came the subdued hum of the geosectors. The vision plate looked out on ebon space with its far-flung way posts of tiny, steely stars. The needle was climbing up near the thousand-miles-a-second mark.
Caroline Martin leaned forward in her chair and stared out at the vastness that stretched eternally ahead. 'I could stay and watch forever,' she exulted.
Gary, lounging back in the pilot's seat, said quietly:
'I've been thinking about that name of yours. It seems to me I've heard it somewhere. Read it in a book.”
She glanced at him swiftly and then stared out into space.
'Perhaps you have,' she said finally.
There was a silence, unbroken except by the humming of the geosectors.
The girl turned back to Gary, chin cupped in her hands. 'Probably you have read about me;' she said. 'Perhaps the name of Caroline Martin is mentioned in your histories. You see, I was a member of the old Mars-Earth Research commission during the war with Jupiter. I was so proud of the appointment.
Just four years out of school and I was trying so hard to get a good job in some scientific research work. I wanted to earn money to go back to school again.”
'I'm beginning to remember now,' said Gary, 'but there must be something wrong. The histories say you were a traitor. They say you were condemned to death.”
'I was a traitor,' she said and there was a thread of ancient bitterness in the words she spoke. 'I refused to turn over a discovery I made, a discovery that would have won the war. It also would have wrecked the solar system. I told them so, but they were men at war. They were desperate men.
We were losing then.”
'We never did win, really,' Gary told her.
'They condemned me to space,' she said. 'They put me in that shell you found me in and a war cruiser towed it out to Pluto's orbit and cut it loose. It was an old condemned craft, its machinery outmoded. They ripped out the rockets and turned it into a prison for me.”
She made a gesture of silence at the shocked look on their faces.
'The histories don't tell that part of it,' said Herb.
'They probably suppressed it,' she said. 'Men at war will do things that no sane man will do. They would not admit in peace the atrocities that they committed in the time of battle. They put the laboratory in the control room as a final ironic jest. So I could carry out my research, they said.
Research, they told me, I'd not need to turn over to them.”
'Would your discovery have wrecked the system?”
Gary asked.
'Yes,' she said, 'it would have. That's why I refused to give it to the military board. For that they called me traitor. I think they hoped to break me. I think they thought up to the very last that, faced with exile in space, I would finally crack and give it to them.”
'When you didn't,' Herb said, 'they couldn't back down. They couldn't afford to let you call their bluff.”
'They never found your notes,' said Gary.
She tapped her forehead with a slender finger. 'My notes were here,' she said.
He looked amazed.
'And still are,' she said.
'But how did you get the drugs to carry out your suspended animation?' Gary asked.
She waited for long minutes.
'That's the part I hate to think about,' she said. 'The part that's hard to think about. I worked with a young man. About my age, then. He must be dead these many years.”
She stopped and Gary could see that she was trying to marshal in her mind what next to say.
'We were in love,' she said. 'Together we discovered the suspended animation process. We had worked on it secretly for months and were ready to announce it when I was taken before the military tribunal. They never let me see him after that. I was allowed no visitors.
'Out in space, after the war cruiser left, I almost went insane. I invented all sorts of tasks to do. I arranged and rearranged my chemicals and apparatus and then one day I found the drugs, skillfully hidden in a box of chemicals. Only one person in the world besides myself knew about them. I found the drugs and two hypodermic syringes.”
Gary's pipe had gone out and now he relit it. The girl went on.
'I knew it would be a gamble,' she said. 'I knew he intended that I should take that gamble. Maybe he had a wild scheme of coming out and hunting for me. Maybe something happened and he couldn't come. Maybe he tried and failed. Maybe the war… got him. But he had given me a chance, a desperate chance to beat the fate the military court had set for me. I removed the steel partition in the engine room to make the tank. That took many weeks.
I etched the copper plate. I went outside on the shell and etched the lines beside the lock. I'm afraid that wasn't a very good job.”
'And then,' said Herb, 'you put yourself to sleep.”
'Not exactly sleep,' she said. 'Because my brain still worked. I thought and thought for almost a thousand years. My mind set up problems and worked them out. I developed a flair for pure deduction, since my mind was the only thing left for me to work with. I believe I even developed telepathic powers.”
'You mean,' asked Herb, 'that you can read our thoughts?”
