The Immortality Factor (46 page)

His hand stopped just over the intercom button.

All of a sudden I felt flustered. “I—I just wanted to thank you for getting me this assignment. I appreciate it.”

He broke into one of those killer smiles of his. “I've got to admit, Pat, that you're the only person I could think of who has some experience in this area.”

I smiled back and said something brilliant like, “Oh, sure,” but inwardly I kicked myself for allowing girlish fantasies to seep into my brain. He had hired me because he didn't know anybody else, not because he had any ideas of romance. This is going to be strictly business, I told myself, and don't think for a minute that it's anything else.

As Phyllis showed me down the hall to the office I was going to use, I kept telling myself, Strictly business. Strictly business. It'll be better that way. Nothing but grief when you try to mix business and personal relationships. You've gone that route before and look what it's got you: nothing but grief.

 

I
t was like doing a high-wire act. I had to convince the reporters that what Arthur and his people were doing was earthshaking, but not scary. Revolutionary, but not harmful. It'll save your life someday, but don't get upset about the changes it's going to cause.

We hit on an angle of approach right away. I juggled all the incoming requests for interviews and pictures and set up times for the reporters to see Arthur. They could interview him in his office and then take a walk through the working labs. We carefully set up an itinerary that took them through some
impressive-looking labs with lots of glittering glassware and bubbling chemicals. Showed them lab rats and the minihogs and monkeys that Arthur's people were now using for experiments. And Max. The chimp was the star of our show. Camera crews spent more time on Max's antics than they did with Arthur or any of the scientific backgrounds.

We never let them see blood. We never let them close to any of the real working labs. And we
never,
ever mentioned stem cells or cloning. Not that we didn't get questions about them, but we tiptoed away from those subjects, telling anyone who asked that we don't need stem cells and we certainly don't clone cells. Not anymore, anyway. Some of the reporters smelled our evasions, some tried to dig up details that they could blow up into a big controversy. But most of them simply took what we said at face value and went away disappointed that they couldn't find any monsters or welfare mothers selling their fetuses.

I heard complaints, secondhand, that some of the lab people were upset about having a section of the building roped off for the media. They started to call it “Glamour Alley.” But they cooperated, grudgingly. That was fine with me as long as they didn't contradict our party line.

The big problem, of course, was the tabloids. Whether print or TV, they all had the same goggle-eyed goal in mind: show us the monsters. Show us how you kill unborn babies for their stem cells. Send in the clones. Here we were telling them that this research would someday help people to live forever and all they wanted was mutants and mad scientists. What they got was truculent minihogs and jabbering macaques and Max doing acrobatics in the trees out back. And Arthur, smiling patiently, the cool and confident silver fox telling each one of those nasty little bastards that sooner or later they're going to need a new heart, new liver, new legs.

Of course, we got some blatantly faked stories in the tabloid press about Frankenstein experiments on people and kids with two hearts—and even two heads—but they didn't seem to do much damage. I mean, the people who read those crap sheets aren't the movers and shakers of our society.

It was the so-called legitimate reporters that gave us the most trouble. The kind that can take a story about genetically enhanced food crops and write:
High-tech tomatoes. Mysterious milk. Super-squash. Are we supposed to eat this stuff? Or is it going to eat us?

They were out for what Linda Ellerbee used to call “anxiety news.” If they had been around when the Salk polio vaccine first appeared, they would've written sob stories about the poor guys who build iron lungs being thrown out of work.

They looked legit. They came from the big, authoritative news services and networks. But they were looking for bad news. They didn't trust science or scientists, probably because they'd been trained to look for the gloom and doom in every story.

A few of the jerks got confused about how regentide works and wrote that we were using fetal tissue. We weren't, of course. Regentide makes the cells it affects regress until they behave like stem cells, but we didn't use fetuses any more than we used hacksaws. Still, the fetal tissue story got all the antiabortion fanatics stirred up, but good. We had to spend a lot of time and effort doing damage control on the fetal tissue nonsense.

The reporters insisted on “balance.” They would interview Arthur and then go running to Joshua Ransom for a counterpoint. It was all I could do to keep Arthur from refusing to see any more reporters, once he found his own quotes (somewhat garbled) side by side with Ransom's.

“That man's not a scientist!” Arthur growled. “He hasn't the faintest idea of what he's talking about!”

But Ransom could make headlines, and that's what the reporters wanted. It wasn't enough that Arthur promised them new hearts and spleens and whatever else they needed. Ransom warned of “man-made mutations” and “laboratory-built supermen.”

And Reverend Simmonds kept up his drumbeat about atheistic scientists doing the devil's work. I had hoped that the more he yammered on that theme the less impact it would have. He'd get to be old news. I not-so-subtly hinted to a few key reporters that the reverend's problem was really anti-Semitism. Like Hitler, he didn't like “Jewish science.” That backfired. Started a flurry of stories about Jews in science and anti-Semitism in general, but didn't take an ounce of pressure off us.

The most difficult reporters to handle were the smarter ones who weren't looking for scare stories but knew enough to ask about the side effects of the regeneration work and the long-term implications of helping people to live twice their normal life spans or more.

Arthur handled them pretty well. Gave them the official tour through Glamour Alley, brought them back to his office, and charmed them into thinking he was being completely open with them. I was always by his side during these sessions. It was an education for me.

“What's a normal life span?” he asked a gray-haired reporter from the
New York Times
. “The Bible's three score and ten? The actuarial averages that the insurance companies use? The official age of retirement at the
Times
?”

The reporter laughed at that one.

“Our generation lives twice as long as the average person did around the turn of the twentieth century,” Arthur said. “Does that mean we're not supposed to live longer?”

The reporter said, “How will it affect Social Security if everybody lives to be two hundred?”

Arthur gave an elaborate shrug. “That's for the politicians to decide. And the people. I'll vote on the issue when it comes up.”

“Isn't that a rather blasé attitude?”

Arthur leaned forward across his desk and clasped his hands together. “Listen. Let me explain to you the way the world works.”

“I'd love to know.” The reporter's smile was only slightly cynical.

“Scientists discover something new,” Arthur said. “Atomic power, for instance. Or antibiotics. Lasers, computers, anything you can think of. It's new, a new capability. It allows you to do things you couldn't do before.”

“Very well,” said the reporter.

“Then engineers take this discovery out of the laboratory and make something useful out of it. A product, a tool, a weapon, a medical treatment.”

“I see.”

“Then businesspeople start to make money from it.” I had never seen Arthur so intent. He looked like a priest reciting his liturgy. “Some people start to get rich from it. Others pay money to get it and complain that the price is too high and the sellers are making unreasonable profits. Commentators start to worry about how this is affecting our lives and our society. Philosophers hold debates on the ethics and morality of it. Lawyers sue people about it. And finally—absolutely last in the chain—politicians start to pass laws about it.”

“And put a tax on it,” the reporter added.

Arthur broke into a hearty laugh. “And put a tax on it! Yes, you're right,” he agreed.

“So you seem to be saying that it's not your business how your work affects Social Security or any other aspect of our lives.”

“It's not my business
as a scientist,
” Arthur answered immediately. “As a citizen, of course, I'll be just as concerned as anyone else. More so, I think, because I understand what's involved.”

“Better than the average citizen?”

With a wave of his hand, Arthur replied, “That depends on how well you do your job. You're in the business of informing the public. They'll only know as much as you tell them.”

“If that.”

Arthur pointed to one of the mottos on his wall: Jefferson's
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

“Point taken,” said the reporter. “You might also be interested to know that Jefferson once said that if he had to choose between newspapers and no government, or government and no newspapers, he'd take the former.”

“Because the latter is a prelude either to a tragedy or a farce,” Arthur added.

By the time the reporter left Arthur's office they were practically soul mates. The story that appeared in the
Times
the following Sunday was thoughtful and thought-provoking. A good, clean job with no hatchet work. Only a
couple of references to “Joshua Ransom, the self-appointed public watchdog of science.”

“Ask the
Times
if we can make copies of it and use it as a backgrounder,” Arthur told me.

“They'll offer to sell you copies,” I said.

“Good. Do it.”

But despite all our efforts the basic story refused to die down. Simmonds—or whoever handled his publicity—was damned ingenious. He found a new way to get himself in the headlines and us in hot water at least once a week. The TV shows started calling for interviews with Arthur:
Meet the Press
and all those self-important Washington panel discussion shows.
Newsweek
did a cover story entitled
Biotechnology: Cure or Curse?
The phone kept jangling.

I had to go into Arthur's office and admit defeat.

“We haven't smothered the story,” I told him. “It just won't die. If anything, it's getting bigger.”

He didn't seem too concerned. “We're holding our own. I haven't seen any really bad horror stories in the responsible press lately. The TV interviews have been generally harmless.”

Arthur came across terrific on television. Between his distinguished silver hair and his sexy smile, he looked great. And he was unflappable. I thought he'd be able to handle even
60 Minutes
if they came knocking at the door.

I took the padded chair at the side of his desk; it was closer to him, and the desk wasn't between us.

“I had thought,” I confessed, “that by now we'd have soft-pedaled everything enough so that the media would have lost interest in the story. But it just seems to be rolling along with no end in sight.”

“I'm not surprised,” Arthur said. “This is a big story, no matter which way you look at it. We're offering the first step to immortality, Pat. What do you expect the media to do, forget about it?”

The truth was, I dreaded the moment when some news media heavy hitter took it into his or her head to crucify Arthur. So far they had all been easy on him, treating this more as a science story than as a blockbuster. But just let one of those egomaniacs understand that they could zoom their ratings by doing a story on cruelty to animals or tampering with human lives, and we'd be off to the races.

What I feared most was that Simmonds would challenge Arthur to a public debate. I knew that would be a circus, if Arthur accepted. And if he refused, it could be even worse.

“Maybe you ought to hire a first-class PR firm to handle this,” I blurted. “Maybe I'm just out of my depth.”

My own words surprised me. I hadn't really intended to say that. What the hell's going on inside my head? I asked myself. Do you really want to run away and hide?

He looked surprised, too. “You want to leave?”

I didn't, not really. But I was getting scared. Scared that this was getting too big for me. Scared that in the end Arthur would get terribly hurt and it'd be my fault.

“Don't go,” he said before I could answer. “I need you. I think we work well together, don't you?”

My mind was racing, jumbling all sorts of thoughts together in a crazy hodgepodge. The money was good. And regular. But what if I screwed up and Arthur got blasted by the media? I was still hoping that he might ask me to dinner or invite me to a party he had to attend or fly me off to Samarkand. I was being stupid, I told myself. His affair with Nancy Dubois had ended, that much I knew from the gossip at the corporate office. But as far as I could tell, Arthur didn't get himself entangled with any of the women at the lab. Too smart for that. From what I had heard, Nancy was still steaming over him. He wouldn't want to get involved with me, I knew. He had hired me for business reasons only. Stop being a silly fool.

“If you need more help we can get you an assistant,” Arthur offered. “Even if we hired a PR firm I'd like you to stay and be my liaison with them. I need you, Pat.”

“Okay,” I heard myself say. “I'll stay.” And my stupid heart fluttered inside me.