The Immortality Factor (31 page)

“Works pretty well for me,” the host said, stubbing out his cigarette in one of the dishes as he gave Pat a sly wink.

“It's falling apart,” I said. “Your body is, mine is, even this lovely woman's is. Little by little, but sooner or later something major breaks down and you die.”

“Well, that's natural, ain't it?”

Gesturing to the ceiling, I asked, “Is this house natural? Are the clothes we wear natural? The whole history of the human race is to improve on nature, to do better for ourselves.”

“Have we really improved things for ourselves?” Pat asked quietly.

“Do you want to drop dead of exhaustion and malnutrition at thirty? Or be clawed down by a leopard because you can't outrun it and don't have any tools to protect yourself?”

“But we still die,” said the host. “We live our three score and ten and then return to the dust from which we were made.”

“Three score and ten,” I muttered. “Despite all the advances we've made in medicine and sanitation and nutrition, the human body still seems to wear out around then. On the average.”

I caught the look in Pat's eye, then added, “Until now.”

“Until now?” the old man echoed.

Maybe the mescal was making me too relaxed. But what the hell, I thought, this old guy isn't an industrial spy. And besides, I felt like showing off a little for Pat.

“What would you say if I told you we'll be able to replace the parts of your body that wear out with new ones?”

“Like puttin' a new carburetor in a truck's engine?”

“Better than that,” I said, waggling one finger in front of his face. “It will be like
growing
a new carburetor in the truck's engine, and letting the old one fade away.”

Our host shook a fresh cigarette from his pack. “That—that'd be some-thin'.”

“You're damned right,” I said.

Pat leaned closer to me and asked, “What you said earlier, about the human body being a slipshod design. I've always thought it's a marvel of intricate workings. At least, that's what I've always been told.”

I grinned at her. “You've been talking to old fogies in the medical profession too much. The real marvel of the human body is that it holds up for seventy years. Just about everything in your body is an accident of history. A very lovely set of accidents, in your case.”

“What do you mean?”

I shrugged. “Take this regeneration work. Turns out there's a protein that induces neurons to grow. It's called noggin. Silly name, but that's what its discoverers called it.”

“So?”

“So how does it work? If you or I or our genial host here had designed the system, we'd design a protein that makes the neurons grow. Right?”

“That's what you said noggin does, didn't you?”

I waggled my finger again. A habit I can't seem to break. “Noggin doesn't do the job directly. It suppresses the activity of another protein that prevents neurons from growing. Instead of a chemical that says, ‘Grow!' we've got a chemical that stops another chemical from saying, ‘Don't grow.' ”

“I see . . . I think.”

“The whole human body is like that. More redundant systems than a NASA spacecraft. Nothing works directly. Enzymes telling other enzymes to stop repressing still other enzymes. Hell, when you stop to think that we're the results of an amoeba trying to reproduce itself, you realize what a haphazard set of mutations we really are.”

“And you're goin' to do better than that?” our host asked.

“Damned right,” I snapped. “We're going to improve the model—eventually. Right now we're just trying to figure out how to rebuild it, piece by piece.”

He shook his head. “I don't know. Sounds kinda scary to me.”

“It won't sound so scary when you need a new set of lungs.”

He looked startled. Then he took another long drag on his cigarette. “Hell, if you can grow me a new set of lungs I can stop feelin' guilty 'bout these coffin nails.”

We all laughed. Pat glanced at her wristwatch and suggested that we get back to town. Our host insisted on driving us, claiming there was little chance of getting a taxi at this time of night.

“Morning,” Pat corrected. “It's past midnight.”

“Even worse,” he said. “You folks don't mind ridin' in a pickup, do you?”

“Can you drive all the way into town without smoking?” Pat asked.

“For you, pretty lady, I'd drive all the way to Yuma without smokin'.”

The cold night air braced me, drove away the pleasant cobwebs that the mescal had spun in my brain. It was a gorgeous desert night, stars glittering like jewels in the sky, moonlight making the dry dusty landscape look silvery and romantic. I helped Pat into the cab of the battered pickup, then climbed in myself.

Even through the truck's smeared windshield the stars hung out there like friendly beacons.

“That's Deneb, in the tail of the Swan,” I said, pointing. “And there's Altair, in the Eagle.”

Sitting next to me, her shoulder pressing against mine, Pat asked, “And the bright red one, down near the horizon?”

I hesitated a moment, thinking. “Must be Mars.”

“Nope,” said our host. “That there's Antares, in the Scorpion.”

“By god, I think you're right,” I said.

“It must be fun to know all the stars,” Pat said.

“It's fun to know anything,” I told her. “That's why people do science, because it's the greatest thrill in the world to find something that no one has found before.”

I could sense Pat nodding in the darkness.

“We're hunters, basically,” I went on. “For millions of years our ancestors lived by hunting. Our bodies, our minds, even our societies are based on that heritage of hunting. That's why scientists are happy at their work. They're hunters. Out on the frontier, always moving into the unknown, always hunting.”

“And what are you hunting for?” Pat asked.

I heard myself chuckle. “Me? I don't hunt anymore. Too old. I'm a big chief now. I send out younger men and women to hunt.”

“Can you get the same kind of satisfaction out of that? The same thrill?”

I had to think awhile before answering. “No. That's gone. Now what I want to do is make an impact. I want to have an effect on our society. I want to change the world, Pat, change it for the better. That's my kick.”

“And recognition? Do you want that, too?”

“I don't want to be buried in an unmarked grave, if that's what you mean. But I'll never get a Nobel Prize,” I said, surprised at how much of the bitterness showed up in my voice. “I'll never even get recognition from the National Academy of Sciences. I'll just have to settle for money.”

“And power?” she asked.

I laughed. “No power. That's for the politicians and the captains of industry. All I'm looking for is the chance to change the world. I don't want to run it.”

“But you have to run a little piece of the world, don't you, to make the impact you want to make? You have to have the power to run your lab.”

“Yes, that's true. That's the one piece of the world that I have to run. It's a tiny piece, but I'll fight to keep control of it.”

Soon the lights of Las Vegas blotted out the stars. The Strip was just as crowded with traffic as it had been at noon, even more so. Pat directed our host to her hotel. I got out of the pickup with her.

“Thanks for the lift,” I said.

The grizzled old man grinned at us. “Hell, thank you for the most int'resting evening I've had since the hookers' convention two years ago.”

He drove off, laughing and lighting up a fresh cigarette.

The sidewalk was bustling with people. Standing there in front of the hotel, I asked Pat, “Can I buy you a nightcap?”

She seemed to think it over. Then, “I don't think so, Arthur. It's already pretty late.”

“There's nothing much happening tomorrow until my luncheon speech,” I said.

A faint smile touched the corners of her lips. “I think it's best that I go straight to bed. Sleep, I mean.”

I smiled back at her. “All I'm suggesting is a drink, Pat.”

“One thing leads to another, and if I have another drink I'm not sure where we'll go from there.”

“Where would you like to go?” A part of my mind realized how ridiculous it was to be attempting to seduce this attractive young woman on the crowded sidewalk in front of a garish hotel. But what the hell? You fight your battles where they happen to fall. That's how Napoleon got to Waterloo.

Pat's smile faded. “Arthur, you have quite a reputation, you know.”

“Me?”

“You. And Nancy Dubois, at the moment.”

That staggered me. “Well, that's not . . .” There was nothing I could say that wouldn't make me sound like an unfeeling bastard.

“Good night, Arthur,” said Pat, almost solemnly. “Thanks for a lovely evening.”

“Good night,” I replied lamely.

Pat turned abruptly and strode into the hotel. I watched her enter the lobby and head straight for the elevators. Then I started walking up the Strip to my own hotel, thinking, She knows about Nancy and me. Of course she knows. Pat's been around the corporate office long enough to hear the gossip. Nancy must be shooting off her mouth to the other women. I wonder if Lowenstein knows as much as she does.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Y
ou say there was a falling-out between you and your brother?” Rosen asked.

Jesse kept his eyes on the examiner, still sitting at the end of the desks facing him. “Yes,” he answered.

“What was the reason for this . . . falling-out?”

“A difference of opinion.”

“About the work on organ regeneration?”

“Yes.”

Rosen asked, “Could you be more specific about the cause of this difference of opinion?”

Jesse felt annoyed. He had gone over this with Rosen and the others a dozen times in the weeks leading up to the trial. Now the lawyer was acting as if he'd never heard it before. But that's the way they do things in a court of law, Jesse told himself. They've got this antiquated way of getting at the information they want you to say.

“Well, among other things, Arthur wanted to go into human trials right away,” he said patiently.

“And you did not?”

“I didn't think they had enough knowledge from the animal experiments to rush into human trials.”

“Butchers!” a man yelled from the back of the chamber. “Animals have feelings!”

Whipping around in his chair, Jesse saw a rake-thin elderly man shaking his fist in the air. “You've no right to hurt poor, defenseless animals!” he bellowed.

Graves banged his gavel and shouted, “Remove that man from this chamber!”

Two of the uniformed guards standing at the rear of the room moved in on the man, who glared at Graves but allowed himself to be hustled out into the corridor.

“I will not tolerate any more interruptions like this.” Graves almost snarled the words. “One more outburst and I'll clear this chamber entirely!”

The audience went very silent, just as Graves's lecture students used to hush when he fixed that baleful gaze of his upon them.

“Go ahead, Dr. Rosen,” Graves said.

Rosen nodded to the chief judge, then returned his somber gaze to Jesse.

“Your brother wanted to go ahead with human trials, but you felt the work was not yet sufficiently advanced for them?”

“That's right,” Jesse said.

“And just when did this difference of opinion first arise?”

Suddenly Jesse felt tongue-tied. There were so many ways to answer the question he couldn't decide which one to say. The winter of the big blizzard. The day our mother died. The day Julia lost the baby.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I
t had been snowing for more than six hours, with no end in sight. The city was already buried in drifts driven by the gale-force winds. Even the ambulances were having trouble getting through the foot-deep snow that covered most of the streets. The cold was numbing, killing.

We'll be getting frostbite cases down in the emergency room, I knew. Exposure and hypothermia. A lot of homeless people aren't going to make it through this night.

I was up in the women's ward, facing row upon row of beds occupied by the poor, the sick, the battered wives, the drug-addicted kids, the rape victims, the tuberculosis cases, the pneumonia and bronchitis and influenza cases, the pitiful helpless dregs who were prey to every predator, microbe or human, that stalked the deadly streets out there. The ward was jammed to overflowing; they had already started putting beds out in the corridors, and more were coming in as the ambulances and police cars struggled back through the howling blizzard. As I made my rounds through the ward, a flash of déjà vu hit me with almost overpowering force.

I saw myself back in Eritrea, facing that endless line of hopeless, helpless blacks staring at me out of eyes already dead, waiting for me to do something, accusing me. It's the same thing here, I realized, and the truth of it almost made my knees buckle.

It's endless! Day after day, night after night. The more we do for them, the more there is to do.

Yet they were there, waiting for me, moaning in their pain or staring with blank-eyed desperation at a future as bleak and pointless as the storm raging outside. What can I do? I asked myself. Over and over, as I made my way from bed to bed, I silently asked myself, What can I do? What can I do?

I was halfway through the ward when a nurse came hurrying after me, grim-faced, a cordless telephone in one hand.