Between the Strokes of Night

He looked straight ahead, steadfastly refusing to allow his glance to stray toward any of the ports. The turning knot in his stomach slowly loosened. “I guess the cats came through in worst shape,” he said at last. “They’re all alive, but we’ll have a hell of a time sorting out how much of their troubles are caused by the trip up here, and how much is progressive deterioration in their experimental condition. We lost a couple of sloths — don’t know why yet, but looks like it may be a drug-induced cardiac arrest. Cannon warned about that before we started, but nobody had any bright ideas how to prevent it. The other small mammals all seem in pretty good shape, and we had no real trouble moving them to their quarters. That wasn’t true with the Kodiaks, though.” He managed to smile into the camera. “They’re big mothers. Thank God we don’t have any experiments going on with elephants. You had to be here to see what a job we had with old Jinx. Great fat monster. We’d tug and heave on him for a while, and feel he wasn’t moving, then after we finally got him drifting in the right direction we’d find we couldn’t stop him. I was nearly flattened against one of the walls. It’s a good thing the people on the station are used to handling big masses in space, or I never would have made it.

“I’ll cut out the tales of woe. We finally got him in place, ‘nuff said, up near the hub of Workwheel. It’s a horrible place — no gravity to speak of. I don’t know how low, but less than a hundredth of a gee for sure. Hans says that in a month or two I’ll enjoy it there, but now just thinking about it makes me sick. I’ll say one thing for the crews here, they know how to build. All the tanks and the supporting equipment we asked for were ready and in place — and it all worked. A couple of hours ago I gave Jinx the treatment, and I have him stabilized now in Mode Two hibernation pattern. You’ll get the detailed logs with the official transmission, and all the video, too. But I thought you’d like to see something at once, so I’m going to run a clip for you right in with this. Here, see what you think of Jinx.”

Wolfgang took a long, deep breath and pressed the calling sequence. He did it slowly and painfully, with the fragile and exaggerated care of an old, old man. His fingers stumbled several times, but at last he had a correct pattern entered. He leaned back and massaged his midriff as a copy of the recorded video was displayed before him and simultaneously sent down as a signal to Earth. Jinx was shown at center screen. The bear was sitting upright on a bed of soft shavings, sniffing curiously at a massive chunk of fish protein held in his front paws. His long black tongue came out and licked tentatively at the flaky surface. The bear’s movements were a little jerky, but well-controlled and accurate. Wolfgang watched with approval as Jinx took a neat bite, chewed thoughtfully, then placed the rest of the protein block down on the shavings. When the mouthful was swallowed Jinx yawned and scratched peacefully at a fur-free patch on his left side. The implanted sensors there lay close to the surface of the skin, and it was still a little sensitive. After a few seconds more he picked up the fishy slab and the monstrous jaws began to nibble around it contentedly.

“Looks good, eh?” said Wolfgang. “You’ll see more when you get the full coverage later, but let me give you the bottom line now. We saw the first signs of this in those last experiments in Christchurch, and what JN had been predicting all along seems to hold up exactly. We hit the correct drug protocols right away this time. Jinx’s body temperature was seven degrees above freezing in that segment of video. His heart rate was one beat per minute — and still is. I estimate that his metabolic rate is down by a factor of about eighty. He’s slow, but he’s sure as hell not hibernating — look at him chew on that slab. What you’re seeing is speeded up, by a factor of sixty-eight over real time. The trickiest piece so far was finding something that Jinx is willing to eat. You know how picky he is. Seems like things feel different to him now, and he doesn’t like it. We got the consistency right after about twenty tries, and he seems to be feeding normally.”

Wolfgang rubbed ruefully at his midsection. “Lucky old Jinx. That’s more than I can say for myself. Best of all, his condition seems to be completely stable. I checked all the indicators a few minutes ago. I think we could hold him there for a month if we had to, maybe more.”