“Sorry. We don’t offer tours.”
“Well, dang,” Richter said facetiously and backed away. He waved. “I guess I’ll just have to come back someday when you do offer tours.”
The greeter said, “Don’t know when that’ll be.”
Back in the car, Richter said, “Pull out and then around a corner. We’ll have a walk around and see if we can see in any of their windows with the binoculars.”
“Have a better shot at that early in the morning or late in the afternoon,” Joe said. “When hard light isn’t shining on the windows.”
***
When Kaem got to Staze after his morning classes, he found everyone clustered around something on one of the tables. Walking over, he peered over their shoulders. There was a large mirrored box on the table. It looked like it was composed of a Stade box with a mirrored acrylic box inside it. Though he was pretty sure he knew what it was, Kaem asked, “What’s this?”
Gunnar said, “It’s my prototype people stazer.”
Kaem’s eyes went to Arya, expecting her to be fuming.
Gunnar said. “Don’t worry. Arya’s not upset. I built it with my own money. I do hope to be reimbursed by the company once it’s solvent, but I’m not the cause of us running in the red at present.”
“Whew!” Kaem exclaimed theatrically. “I thought I could feel my skin burning.” He frowned, “Why’re you in such a hurry? Couldn’t it wait until we had money?”
“Because,” Gunnar said seriously, “we currently have…” his eyes shifted, “Arya, how many requests from people who want to be stazed?”
“Thirty-seven,” she said with a grimace.
“Holy crap!” Kaem breathed. “I knew there were some, but, thirty-seven? Are they all serious, or are some of them crazy people wanting to travel to the future and thinking we can bring them back?”
“There are two of those,” Arya said, rolling her eyes. “And one guy who plans to buy some stock and wake up rich in a hundred years. The other thirty-four are all people who’re sick with things that can’t be cured at present. They’re estimating they’ll be stazed for somewhere between one and fifty years at which point they think a cure will be available. One guy wants his healthy wife to go in stasis with him…” Arya hesitated, then said, “and I’m not sure she wants to do it.” She shook her head, “There are a lot of issues with this we’re not set up to handle.”
“Are any of them critically sick?”
“Not like Simone, no. But about five of them are…” she sighed, “not expected to live another year.”
Gunnar waved at his prototype. “Therefore, this. I think most of you know my wife died of cancer.” He looked across the table at Emmanuel who’d become his friend. “The same cancer Emmanuel survived last spring because… Well mostly because of politics, but Emmanuel got a new therapy she couldn’t get approved for even though she was dying. So, I’ve been through what these folks are going through and I feel for them. I wanted to move us along.”
“Speaking as someone who’s been sick himself, I respect and appreciate that,” Emmanuel said.
“Seconded,” Kaem said. He turned his eyes on Gunnar’s device, “Um, it looks a lot like a coffin.”
Gunnar shrugged, “Convergent evolution.”
“Huh?”
“When two different evolutionary paths converge to produce unrelated animals that occupy the same niche and do the same things, and they, therefore, tend to look the same. The same kind of thing happens when two, or many machines have the same function. All of them tend to have a lot in common, for instance, cars, they tend to have a lot of features in common… four wheels, seats in the middle, a motor, etcetera. Here we have a stazer that fits around a human body and a coffin that does the same. They’re gonna look alike.”
“But it’s so deep,” Kaem said. “Why couldn’t—”
“Kaem,” Gunnar interrupted, “Some people are thicker than others. Do you need me to spell it out for you?”
Kaem looked embarrassed and the others laughed. “Well, to keep from being excessively humiliated by you guys, I would like to point out that it’d be nice if they weren’t all as deep as the thickest patient that might go in them.”
“Why not?”
“In a crisis, if there were so many people being stazed that they had to be stacked up in the corner, it’d be nice if they weren’t all two-feet deep.”
“Ah,” Gunnar said, rubbing his chin. “I see what you mean. Let me show you how it works. Maybe someone’ll have an idea for how to make an adjustable sized version.” He stepped forward and pulled up on the stazer’s lid. It tilted up from the foot end like the hood of a car. This let them see down into the mirrored box. There was a sheet laying in the bottom of it.
With the lid off, he flopped down the two side panels to give a large flat surface with solid end pieces and the top hood still angled up in the air from the foot end.
“Why do the sides fold down?” Lee asked.
“So you can slide a patient onto it. People stand on each side and pull them over on the sheet that’s under the patient. The sheet that was on their bed. Or on their gurney or stretcher. If the box had solid walls, you’d have to pick the patient up and lower them into the box which would be harder on both the patient and the team that moves them.”
“Oh,” Lee said with sudden understanding. “Seems like, once the sides were up, the lid could be made to lower down between them.”
Gunnar rolled his eyes. “That’d take a very sophisticated mechanism. It’d be a violation of the KISS principle that’d probably fail to work sometimes.”
