The local peasants called the vaults "coolers" or "ice cubes." I
suppose the reason had something to do with the fact that they were
cool and rectangular, on the whole--perhaps because, like icebergs, the
great bulk of the vaults was below the surface. But whatever you called
them, they were huge. And the clinic at Anzio was only one out of
hundreds scattered all over the world.
It was all a matter of viewpoint. To me, the clinics were emblems of
the Company's concern for the world. In any imaginable disaster--even
if some fantastic plague struck the entire race at once--the affected
population could be neatly and effectively preserved until medicine
could catch up with their cures.
To Rena, they were prisons big enough to hold the human race.
It was time to find out which of us was right. I hurried through the
corridors, between the tiers of sleepers, almost touching them on both
sides. I saw the faint purplish gleam where Rena had spilled the fluid,
and knelt beside the cocoon that held her father.
The UV sterilizers overhead made everything look ghastly violet, but in
any light, the waxy face under the plastic would have looked dead as
death itself. I couldn't blame Rena for weeping.
I took out the little radiation counter and looked at it awkwardly.
There was nothing complicated about the device--fortunately, because
I had had little experience with them. It was a cylinder with a
flaring snout at one end, a calibrated gauge at the side, marked in
micro-roentgens. The little needle flickered in the green area of the
dial. I held it to myself and the reading didn't change. I pointed it
up and pointed it down; it didn't change.