The Immortality Factor (36 page)

“That's what we promised him. Remember?”

“Sure, sure.” Zack's eyes shifted away from mine slightly and he asked, “What's wrong with showing him a rat with two hearts?”

“And a shitload of tumors,” Vince said.

“So what?”

Darrell shifted uneasily in his chair. “What are you proposing, Zack?”

Gesturing with one hand, Zack said, “I can produce a rat that's grown a new heart. It might not be fully functional, but we can show the CEO fluoroscope imagery in real time and he'll see two little hearts going pitty-pat.”

“And a shitload of tumors,” Andriotti repeated.

“Not if we use the right dye,” Zack countered.

“Now, wait a minute—” said Darrell.

But Zack didn't wait. “We can inject the dye into the bloodstream and stick the rat in the fluoroscope for a couple of minutes. The CEO will see two hearts and we turn off the scope before the dye gets to the tumors. Simple.”

“That's cheating,” Darrell said.

“It would be cheating if we tried to tell the scientific world that we had successfully generated a new heart in the animal with no harmful side effects,” Zack said.

“But it's not cheating if we let the CEO think that's what we've done?” Vince looked disgusted.

“We can tell him it's the first time we've done it and there's still a long way to go before we've got the procedure perfected.”

Darrell ran a finger across his long jawline. “In other words, we'd just be putting on a show to satisfy the management.”

“Right.”

All three of them turned to me. Vince was clearly unhappy with the idea; Darrell seemed almost amused at the thought of pulling one over on the top brass. Zack had already convinced himself that this was the way to go.

I let them sit there, waiting for my decision.

“All right,” I said at last. “We'll do it your way, Zack. But I'll tell Johnston
clearly that this is merely a demonstration, that there are still plenty of problems to be solved before we can even move to minihog experiments.”

“Clearly,” Vince emphasized.

“Clearly,” I affirmed.

Darrell chuckled. “You can be as clear as you want to, Arthur. All that Johnston's going to see is a rat that's grown an extra heart. All that he's going to think about is that we're on the right track to the biggest medical breakthrough in history.”

“Well, we are,” Zack said. “Aren't we?”

I had to admit that we were.

 

Z
ack was bold and ambitious, but he was no fool. He worked out the procedure and tried it on three rats in a row. They grew new hearts, and the new hearts even started to pump blood. But the tumors grew uncontrollably and each rat died within two days of the new heart's growing to full size.

Good enough.

I invited Johnston to the lab. He brought Sid Lowenstein and Tabatha Young with him.

We had set up Zack's lab for the demonstration. He had, as planned, reserved 3C278 for the starring role. The little ball of white fur nestled trustingly in the palm of Zack's hand as he showed it off. As usual, Johnston shied away from it. Sid looked as if we were asking him to eat broccoli. Tabatha cooed over the rat and stroked its back with one bony finger.

“This little follow was injected with the peptide sequence that we've developed specifically to initiate the growth of new heart cells,” Zack said as he placed the rat in a glass box and started walking back toward the fluoroscope apparatus.

We formed a little parade behind him: Johnston, Sid, Tabatha, Darrell, and me.

Talking to them all the time, Zack put the glass cage beside the fluoroscope screen and powered up the equipment. Then he took a hypodermic syringe from the table at his elbow.

“I have to inject our subject with a dye that will make his bloodstream visible in the fluoroscope,” he said. “It's a painless injection.”

“Painless to you, maybe,” Sid Lowenstein muttered. No one laughed.

“The injection includes a sedative,” Zach continued, “so the subject will be unconscious.”

I looked the other way while Zack injected the rat. Once the fur ball slipped into sleep he closed the glass lid and placed the cage behind the fluoroscope screen. Darrell turned off the room's lights.

“It will be easier to see the screen if the room's darkened,” I explained.

“I can see its bones!” Tabatha said.

“Look for the blood flow,” Zack said, pointing. “See, here's where I injected the dye. It'll be reaching his original heart in a few seconds.”

“Yeah, there's the heart,” Lowenstein said. “See it beating?”

“And here,” said Zack, “is the new heart.”

“It's beating, too!”

“Both of them!”

I was watching Johnston's face. In the greenish glow of the screen his skin looked eerie. But slowly a smile spread across his features.

“Look at that,” he said, in a near whisper that had more than a little awe in it.

“The test subject has grown a functional second heart,” Zack said crisply. “Just as we intended it to do.”

Darrell clicked on the ceiling lights. We all blinked like kids at the end of a movie.

“By god, you've done it,” Lowenstein said, genuinely impressed.

“We've started on it,” I said. “We're a long way from anything useful in the clinical sense. There are a lot of problems still to be solved.”

“I think it's wonderful,” Tabatha said. “How soon can I get a new heart?”

I thought of the masses of tumors already clogging 3C278's thorax and gave Tabatha a patient smile. “It's going to take a while longer, I'm afraid. Maybe quite a while longer.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
here was a side to Arthur that I didn't like at all. He was strong, self-reliant, and utterly capable—most of the time. In American parlance, he was a “take charge” kind of person. But when he couldn't have his way he dashed off and sulked like a little boy.

He ran away from me when I broke the news to him that I had fallen in love with Jesse. And he ran away again after their mother's funeral service, when I tried to heal the breach that I had caused between them. I suppose I can't really blame him. In his own way, Arthur was just as vulnerable as Jesse. It's just that usually he didn't show any chinks in his armor at all. Completely unlike Jesse, who was always wearing his heart on his sleeve. Jesse was impulsive, and you could always see what he was thinking just by looking at his face. Arthur was much stronger, self-contained. But when he hit an obstacle he couldn't climb over, he ran away from it.

For weeks I agonized over Arthur. I had hurt him terribly, I knew, and just when that wound seemed to be healing my miscarriage drove him even further away from Jesse and me.

“Don't worry about Arby,” Jesse told me. “He's like a cat. He always lands on his feet.”

“I've seen cats mashed flat by lorries, you know,” I said.

Jesse gave me a slightly hurt look. “You're thinking more about him these days than you are about me, you know that?”

We happened to be in bed at that moment. “Really, darling,” I said, “you
are
a spoiled little boy, aren't you? Both of you, actually.”

Jesse smiled at me, took my hand in his, and slid it down the length of his torso. “Does that feel like a spoiled little boy?” he asked.

“Well, it's not little.”

“And it's not spoiled.”

“But it's definitely male.”

After more than a year of marriage and all we had been through, I still had to reassure Jesse that he was the center of my universe. The reassurance was great fun, actually.

Jesse insisted that I take a full physical examination shortly after I came home from hospital. He was concerned that perhaps some exotic infection was lingering in my system and this had caused the miscarriage. I spent several days at the medical center, allowing Jesse's best people to stick me with needles, probe, tap, palpate, and otherwise investigate every pore of my body. I came out of it with flying colors.

“My god,” said Jesse, reading through their reports over dinner at our flat, “you're as healthy as a horse.”

“Then why did I have the miscarriage?” I wondered aloud.

He shrugged. “It happens. Even to healthy women. For no apparent reason.”

“But would it happen again?”

“There's no reason to expect it to.”

“There was no reason to expect it the first time,” I said.

He leaned across our tiny dinner table and kissed me gently. “First pregnancies are always the toughest. You'll see, the next one will go fine.”

I certainly hoped he was right. It was clear from the expression on his face that he was as worried about it as I was, but he didn't want to alarm me.

Still, as the weeks wore into months I found myself worrying not about having a baby, but about Arthur. Should I try to call him? Or perhaps drive up to his laboratory and drop in unannounced? Neither, I decided. I would write instead. His birthday was coming up, and instead of a silly commercial card I would write a long and heartfelt letter.

Which I did. I told him how terrible I felt and how wrong it was for him and Jesse to remain separated. I told him how much we both missed him, and how unhappy Jesse was over their falling-out. That was a bit of a stretch, I'm afraid; actually Jesse seemed to have dropped Arthur out of his mind altogether.
At the very end of my letter I invited Arthur to have dinner with us on his birthday.

Before mailing the letter, though, I showed it to Jesse. He came home close to midnight that night, bone-tired. Perhaps I should have waited until morning, but I was too excited by the prospect of setting everything right between them to think of that.

Jesse sat down wearily in the easy chair in the living room and I handed him my letter.

“What do you think of this?” I asked.

He frowned when he saw it was addressed to Arthur, and muttered something about my terrible handwriting as he started scanning the letter. I sat on the sofa and watched his face: it went from unease to displeasure to outright anger. He crumpled up the sheet of paper in his fist and threw it across the room.

I was shocked.

“You're not going to beg my brother's forgiveness, goddammit! He's the one who ought to be asking you to forgive him, for god's sake.”

“I wasn't begging—”

“The hell you weren't!” He shot up to his feet, strode across the living room, and picked up the crumpled letter. “This goes straight into the trash.”

I followed him into the kitchen. “Don't you want to be reconciled with Arthur?”

“Sure. When he's ready to admit he's been a pigheaded jerk. Not before. I won't have you crawling to him. Never!”

His anger stunned me. Until that moment I had never realized that Jesse was just as furious with his brother as Arthur was with us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

J
esse could hear, behind him, the stirring of the people who packed the hearing chamber. All the TV cameras were focused squarely on him now.

Rosen asked again, “You don't think that organ regeneration will work on human subjects?”

“No, I do not,” said Jesse. He expected Arthur to object, but nothing happened. He shot a swift glance at his brother. Arby's face looked ominously dark, furious; he was obviously struggling to hold himself in check.

“What leads you to that conclusion?” Rosen asked.

“The fact that there are undesirable side effects from the procedure.”

“Undesirable side effects?”

“Yes.”

“Such as?”

Jesse took a longer look at Arthur. Strangely, Arby's expression seemed slightly more at ease. He looked more as if he were genuinely intrigued by what Jesse was saying, rather than angry about it. The same old Arby, Jesse
thought; he covers up his emotions right away, never lets his feelings show. Not for long, anyway.

“Such as?” Rosen prompted again.

Turning his full attention back to the examiner, Jesse said, “The growth inducers used to initiate the regeneration tend to also cause unwanted growth of other cells.”

“Other cells?”

“Yes. In the reports that Grenford Laboratory has offered as evidence there's clear indication that regeneration attempts have led to tumor growths in the test animals.”

“Tumors?” Rosen asked, as if this were all new to him. “Malignant tumors?”

He wants me to say “cancer,” Jesse knew. I wonder how long I can go along this line without using the word. “Some of them become malignant,” he said. “Apparently the peptides used to initiate regeneration can trigger the protooncogenes in the nearby cells, as well.”

“And that leads to cancer?”

The crowd gave a little collective gasp. There! Jesse thought. The C-word is out in the open.

“It certainly does lead to cancer,” he said.

“And for that reason you are against any attempt to conduct human trials of organ regeneration?” Rosen asked.

“Yes, that's right.” Jesse shifted uneasily in his chair, then went on, “Now, understand that the tumors aren't always cancerous. Most of them are benign.”

“But all of the regeneration trials have led to the growth of unwanted tumors, have they not?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

“Objection!”

Jesse turned in his chair and saw that Arthur was on his feet again. He looked calm and in control of himself, but Jesse knew what ferment must be seething below his brother's facade.

“Dr. Marshak,” said Graves, the chief judge.

Almost smiling, Arthur took a few steps from his place in the front row toward the witness chair where his brother sat.