“Yes, and then only if they’re not too old or too young—it would be certain death to someone who was still growing—and only if their cardiovascular and pulmonary systems can handle the shock of the slowdown. There are easier avenues to euthanasia available.

“We are directed to preserve the intent of the original designers, which was for the cryptobiosis unit to serve as an emergency lifeboat for all of us, in case something drastic happened. Maybe it will be different if we can eventually do as well on humans as we can on chickens. For now, no exceptions.”

She turned off the image and sat down. “If it were up to me, I would make exceptions. You know how it is. Too many of us are finding out this isn’t the cruise we signed up for. It isn’t like living in New New at all. A lot of the people I turn down for cryptobiosis are going to wind up in the mental ward or kill themselves.”

“But there’s no way for you to tell which,” Sam Wasserman said.

“And I wouldn’t want the responsibility of making the evaluation. But a person on the verge of suicide is terminally ill! The Psych people could selectively, secretly, offer us as an avenue of last resort.

“There are a few objections to allowing that, though; sticky ones. Sooner or later, it would become general knowledge. Cynics would claim we were using the patients as human experimental animals, and there would be some truth in that. And at the current state of the art, we would be offering them a kind of Russian roulette, a four-to-one chance of suicide, technically deferred.

“Then there’s the basic human rights problem. If we were to allow cryptobiosis to everybody who declared intent to suicide—which arguably we would have to do if we allowed the first one—we could wind up with a large fraction of the population out of commission. Some of them might be absolutely vital to us in an emergency.”

“And you can’t just thaw them out at will,” Dan said.

“No; it’s a continuous process, a gradual slowdown of metabolism and an even more gradual revivification. Currently it takes at least forty-eight years. And unless we come up with a totally different approach, that number’s not going to change much.”

“I remember the interview with those volunteers in New New,” O’Hara said. “I was about ten years old when they came out of it. That was pretty strange, like people suddenly appearing from your grandparents’ time. Are any of them aboard?”

“Only one, and he works for us. A GP named Horatio Horatio. All the others are dead or were too old to make the trip.”

A man O’Hara didn’t know raised his hand. “Anything unusual about their mortality? Causes, rates?”