“If you provide the names of the others whom you killed, and tell us where their bodies are hidden, I will seek a reduction in your sentence.”

And then, of course, it was my turn to smile. “A reduction. Very fine. Father Diaz, I am thirty-six years old. What would be your estimate of my life expectancy?”

“Fifty years. Maybe as long as seventy.”

“Very good. I agree with that. But I was sentenced to fifteen consecutive sentences of forty years each. That’s a total of six hundred years of judicial sleep, a coma during which I will age at my normal rate. I will not live to serve even two of those fifteen sentences. So what are you telling me? That you can commute the total to twenty years? That you can arrange for all the terms to be served concurrently?”

“I can do neither one.”

“So what can you do?”

“I can try to arrange for you to be placed in abyssal rather than judicial sleep. I can make no absolute guarantees, but at the reduced body temperature your rate of aging will decrease.” He paused. “Or so I am told.”

I felt almost sorry for the man. They had sent him to me so inadequately briefed.

And then my sense of caution cut in. He was too innocent, too poorly informed.

“Father Diaz, how much do you know about my professional line of work?”

“Very little.” He was sensitive, exceptionally so, and his voice suggested that somewhere in the last few seconds the conversation had turned, and he knew it. “Before your arrest you were a medical doctor. One, I gather, of high reputation.”

“Perhaps. But not as a physician who treated sick patients. I have always been in research — and my particular line of research is in life-extension procedures. Although my primary thrust is not the study of abyssal sleep, I have done work in that field. I can assure you that the rate of aging of a subject in abyssal sleep, under optimal circumstances, is reduced by a factor of at most three. Even in AS I would die of old age before my sentence was one-third over.”