（外文电子版资料）Niven, Larry - Defenseless Dead.doc

THE DEFENSELESS DEAD by Larry Niven ======================= The dead lay side by side beneath the glass. Long ago, in a roomier world, these older ones had been entombed each in his own double-walled casket. Now they lay shoulder to shoulder, more or less in chronological order, looking up, their features clear through thirty centimeters of liquid nitrogen sandwiched between two thick sheets of glass. Elsewhere in the building some sleepers wore clothing, formal costumery of a dozen periods. In two long tanks on another floor the sleepers had been prettied up with low-temperature cosmetics, and sometimes with a kind of flesh-colored putty to fill and cover major wounds. A weird practice. It hadnt lasted beyond the middle of the last century. After all, these sleepers planned to return to life someday. The damage should show at a glance. With these, it did. They were all from the tail end of the twentieth century. They looked like hell. Some were clearly beyond saving, accident cases whose wills had consigned them to the freezer banks regardless. Each sleeper was marked by a plaque describing everything that was wrong with his mind and body, in script so fine and so archaic as to be almost unreadable. Battered or torn or wasted by disease, they all wore the same look of patient resignation. Their hair was disintegrating, very slowly. It had fallen in a thick gray crescent about each head. òPeople used to call them corpsicles, frozen dead. Or Homo snapiens. You can imagine what would happen if you dropped one.ó Mr. Restarick did not smile. These people were in his charge, and he took his task seriously. His eyes seemed to look through rather than at me, and his clothes were ten to fifty years out of style. He seemed to be gradually losing himself here in the past. He said, òWeve over six thousahd of them here. Do you think well ever bring them back to life?ó I was an ARM, I might know. òDo you?ó òSometimes I wonder.ó He dropped his gaze. òNot Harrison Cohn. Look at hi