The Immortality Factor (22 page)

I needn't have worried. I had forgotten that Nancy liked to play games; before the snifters were half finished she was playfully auctioning off her clothes.

“Now the bra,” she was saying as she sat on the thickly carpeted floor at my feet, the firelight warming her bared shoulders, a sly smile on her lips. “The bra costs twenty-nine ninety-nine, retail. But under the circumstances I think I should get a lot more for it. A lot more.”

Grinning down at her, I said, “It's used.”

“That's what makes it worth so much.”

“I'll give you . . . thirty dollars.”

She shook her head.

“Thirty-five.”

“Nope. Fifty dollars or bust.” She giggled at her pun.

“How about forty-five?”

She tilted her head slightly, thinking it over. “Okay. Forty-five dollars. But for that price you're going to have to take it off yourself.”

I pretended resignation. “Well, if I have to, I have to.” I slipped down off the sofa and sat on the floor next to her.

I was a little afraid that the cognac was hitting her so hard she would pass out, but her drunkenness was only an act, I found once we started truly exploring each other's bodies. We made love eagerly, almost fiercely, there in front of the fireplace, Nancy yelling like a cheerleader while I gasped and snorted and gripped her so tightly I could see my finger marks on her flesh afterward. Then we padded to the bedroom and did it all over again.

Finally, as we drifted to sleep with her body warm and cuddled next to mine, I thought, Well, she said she wanted to make vice president. At least she's made
a
vice president. Twice.

But my dreams were haunted by Japanese samurai who were trying to slice me open with their bloodstained swords.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A
rthur didn't like me. He didn't like the way I dressed, he didn't like the way I did my work, and he especially didn't like the fact that I was younger than him and probably a helluva lot smarter.

For an old guy, though, the boss wasn't too bad. He was no feeb, far from it; Arthur was sharp and he was probably a helluva good scientist in his day. But you know what happens once you pass thirty-five or so: you stop doing any original work and get yourself bogged down in administration. Or worse, you go through the motions of doing research and just get in the way of the morfs who're trying to get some real work done.

So I was surprised when he called me into Darrell Walters's office that afternoon and told us to start thinking about organ regrowth. Like it was his idea. Shit, I did the basic work on differentiation factors when I was still at Berkeley. Got my PhD on it.

It wasn't that I didn't try to fit in with Arthur's idea of how his staff scientists should behave. Once I started getting a salary I bought myself the first new clothes I could afford since my graduate fellowship had run out. And I knew he
got freaked about my 'do, so I found a barber who could tone it down a bit, make it look more like a military buzz cut. I figured the boss would like a haircut that reminded him of West Point or Annapolis. I kept the earring, though. Well, a smaller one. I was willing to go so far in pleasing the boss, but no farther.

Of course, I didn't endear myself to him at the office Christmas party.

It's a very informal bash. Everybody just sort of stops work around four o'clock on the last working day before Christmas and we all get together in the cafeteria. BYOB. No drugs, which kind of surprised me a little. Arthur ran a clean operation that way. There were plenty of bright people who knew enough about chemistry to blow the roof off the place, but I never even sniffed any pot at the lab.

So I brought a bottle of Jamaican rum that my roommate at Berkeley had left behind when he cracked up and ran off to the woods to get away from the grind.

Arthur saw to it that the lab provided plenty of ice, chasers, soft drinks, and munchies. His chief of the administrative departments sent everybody a memo the Monday before the party, reminding us of the evils of liquor and telling us to pick designated drivers and all that shit. Got the company off the hook, I guess, in case anybody racked up his car driving home.

We had canned music and people were dancing where they'd cleared away the cafeteria tables. No spouses allowed at the office party. From what I heard about earlier parties, some pretty hot romances got started under the mistletoe.

But as I looked across the crowded cafeteria floor, I could see that there were about six guys to every woman, and a lot of the women were older, like Arthur's secretary, Phyllis. Nice lady, but nobody's going to screw around with her.

I had sort of hoped to get a chance to dance with Vince Andriotti's daughter, Tina. She's an exotic-looking knockout, but you couldn't get close to her with her father snorting right down your neck. At least at the party I figured I could dance with her and get to know her a little better. Maybe something good would come of it.

But there was Arthur, clutching Tina's hand and not letting go. The two of them were standing by the makeshift bar that Darrell and some of the technicians had put together. Arthur was smiling out at his people on the dance floor like the head of the family at a big Polish wedding. Tina looked to me as if she wanted to get out of his grip, but Arthur wasn't letting go of her hand. Vince, her father, was all the way over on the other side of the room, running the CD player that they had plugged into the cafeteria's sound system. Maybe he figured his daughter was okay as long as she was with Arthur; the boss would scare off any of us young, virile types.

Well, the hell with that. Tina was the best thing going at this party and I wasn't going to let Arthur monopolize her, boss or no boss.

The sound system was playing some ancient Beatles tunes, old enough so that even creaky geeks like Darrell could go out on the dance floor and hop around. So I walk up to Tina and say, “May I have this dance?”

She looked surprised and turned to Arthur. He looked surprised, too, and let go of her hand. I gave him a grin and took Tina out onto the floor. She's really a knockout, with almond eyes and high cheekbones. Great bod, too. She sort of looked embarrassed, wouldn't let her eyes meet mine.

As we danced I maneuvered her the best I could away from the bar, where Arthur was standing, and toward the other side of the room. Her father was on that side, but hey, my intentions were strictly honorable. Well, more or less.

By the time the CD had played out we were both puffing a little. I had let myself get out of shape, I guess.

“Well, thanks for the dance,” I said. It was the first chance I had to say anything since we started dancing.

“Thank you,” she said, her eyes finally looking straight at me.

“For what?”

“For rescuing me,” Tina said.

So she
did
want to get away from the boss. We drifted apart; Tina stayed near her dad and I danced with a few of the other younger women. Once I figured a decent interval had passed, I tracked her down again and we had another dance together, a slow one, so I could hold her and talk to her a little. It was really nice, almost romantic, except I could feel two pairs of laser beams staring at me from opposite sides of the dance floor.

Tina and I dated now and then afterward, nothing serious. She was a good kid, great to be with, great sense of humor, but she wasn't going to get serious with any guy and I didn't want any commitments, either. We just had some fun together, that's all. But I was certain that Arthur had it in for me after that. I didn't see him at my lab all that winter, and when I had to give presentations on the work I was doing he seemed to frown at me all the time I was on my feet talking.

So it was sort of a shock when I was brought into Darrell's office that afternoon to brainstorm Arthur's new idea about curing paraplegics. His new idea! My first impulse was to remind him that half of what he was talking about came straight out of my doctoral work. But I stayed cool, because I quickly saw that only half of it was from my work. Arthur had strung together some other ideas; I didn't know where he had gotten them, but he had put them together brilliantly, I had to admit. Maybe he wasn't generating the original ideas anymore, not at his age, but he sure could put things together. He was super sharp, all right, and before long we were shooting the shit like equals.

That's when it came to me. This work he wanted to do, curing paraplegics
and regrowing organs and limbs—this was my big chance! It was right down my alley, and I could really sink my teeth into this program. I was going to become Arthur's fair-haired boy, by Jesus. I was going to become the lead man in this research effort. Phat city. I'd make them all proud of me, especially the boss.

And maybe even Tina. I realized that I wanted to be a shining star in her eyes.

It wasn't until a lot later that I finally realized that this was the way Arthur got his people motivated. He could get you excited about a new program, so excited you'd bust your balls trying to succeed. You wanted to please him, he had that power to make you want to make him smile at you. Because the best way to please him was to break new ground, make a success of yourself. Push ahead and get the job done, no matter how tough it was. Make a success of yourself and you made him happy.

I guess that's what they call leadership.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

W
ithin two days we got down to a routine at the tent city surrounding the field hospital. And within three days Julia came down with a high fever.

I was frantic, even though Captain Eberly assured me that most Westerners are hit by fever or dysentery when they first arrive.

“Goes with the territory, I imagine,” he said calmly. “We're aliens here; even the local bugs don't like us.”

Yeah, sure. But I could see Arby's face frowning at me and hear him saying how he warned me not to take her with me. I didn't have anywhere near the diagnostic equipment or facilities that I needed. I took blood samples from Julia's arms, checked her temperature hourly, dosed her with antibiotics and aspirin.

“Don't neglect your real patients,” Julia said from her cot, sweating and shivering.

“I just hope it isn't malaria,” I muttered as I sat on an empty wooden crate beside the cot. I mean, they didn't even have decent chairs for us.

“Eberly told me it's the wrong season for malaria,” Julia said weakly. “The mosquitoes don't come 'round until the rainy season.”

Then it might be dengue fever, I thought, trying to remember how long the incubation period for dengue was. She couldn't have come down with it so soon. I radioed back to the UN medical center in Cairo for as much information as I could get, and faxed the results of Julia's blood tests to them over the radiophone. It took days before they sent back the results, and at that all they said was that it was negative on dengue fever.

“It's just the heat,” Julia assured me. “I'll get acclimated in another day or so.”

I stared down at her, trying to make her fever disappear by sheer willpower.

“There are all those other people who need you,” she urged. “Don't waste your time on me.”

“They can go fuck themselves,” I snapped. “You're the only one I care about.”

Julia pushed herself up on one elbow. The sheet covering her dropped away slightly and I could see that her shirt was soaked through with perspiration.

“Jesse, darling,” she said in the tone she reserved for outstubborning me, “we are here to help those poor starving people out there. I'll be fine in a day or so. Go out and do the work you came here to do.”

So I went, reluctantly, and spent the day among the hopeless, examining, tapping, testing, inoculating, looking at babies with famine-bloated bellies and mothers too weak to move. I gave injections, bound up wounds, handed out pills, prescribed ointments for open sores. A half dozen Ethiopian nurses assisted me, three grave men and three silent women, with dark unsmiling eyes in their darker faces. The line coming into my examination tent seemed to go all the way out to the horizon and then some. When I took a break to dash back to Julia, the line was just as long as it had been when I'd started.

“What they need is food,” Captain Eberly told me while he and I grabbed a quick bite of the prepackaged stuff the plane had brought in.

It didn't take a medical genius to figure that out. “Most of what I'm seeing is hunger-related,” I agreed. “Parasites, infections; they haven't got the somatic vigor to fight them off.”

“How's Mrs. Marshak?”

“Holding her own,” I said. “I've put enough antibiotics into her to make a herd of elephants get up and fly.”

“She should be better in a day or two. Almost everyone comes down with a fever when they first arrive here.”

I guess he was trying to cheer me up, but every time he repeated that dumb line it irritated me more. I got up and headed back toward the examination tent.

“I'll look in on her, if you don't mind,” Eberly called after me.

By the end of the first week Julia was strong enough to leave our tent for short, wobbly walks. Eberly went with her when I was too busy with his endless stream of starving, dying people. Mothers came in, scarecrow-thin, carrying babies that had been dead for days. Children burned and blasted by artillery shells up in the hills. Men without legs, women with tapeworms in their intestines twenty feet long and festered sores all over their bodies. AIDS was spreading through the camp and we didn't have enough prophylactics to do a damned thing about it. The Ethiopian nurses gave lectures about it, but it didn't do a bit of good. I started wearing surgical gloves all the time. And a mask and goggles, when I had to work on their mouths.