The Immortality Factor (50 page)

That was when I first mentioned children, while we were making slippery, slithery love on the big king-sized bed of our hotel suite.

“I want your baby,” I murmured to Bill while we lay side by side, spent and sweaty.

He didn't respond.

I turned to look squarely at him. “I mean it. I love you and I want to have your baby.”

Bill smiled gently at me. “I love you, too, Cassie.”

He didn't say a word about babies, but I thought that it didn't matter. He loved me and love means children, sooner or later.

We had our first argument two days later. Not an argument, really. A disagreement. A difference of opinion. But it hurt. While we were getting dressed for dinner he asked me if I was on the pill.

“No,” I said. I almost told him that it's not recommended for women with
a history of cancer, but I bit that back. I hadn't told him about the cancer and this wasn't the time to break that news to him.

“Are you using any protection at all?” he asked.

Pulling my dress on, I said vaguely, “Vaginal foam.”

He looked very serious, more serious than I'd ever seen him. “I mean, when you said you wanted to get pregnant—you didn't mean right now, did you?”

“Why not?” I don't know why I said that. It surprised me to hear myself.

“Because I'm not ready to have kids, that's why not,” he practically snapped at me.

“Men are never ready to have children, are they?” I snapped back.

He looked like he was ready to snarl. But instead he sat down on the edge of the bed and took a deep breath, a sigh, really. “I don't know,” he said. “All I know is that I'm not ready. Not yet.”

“But you will be someday?”

“I hope so,” he said, almost in a whisper.

I went around the bed to him and sat on his lap and put my arms around his neck and kissed him. “I'll wait for you,” I said. “It's all right, Bill, I'll wait until you're ready.”

He tried to smile. It came out as a grimace.

By the end of the week I stopped using the sunblock, figuring I had built up enough of a tan. Stupid of me. Must have been something in my subconscious mind. Naturally, I had a good case of sunburn by the time we drove back to Querétaro. Red as a lobster. Not a smart thing to do for a woman who's prone to cancer. But I wasn't being smart where Bill was concerned. I was in love. I wanted to have his children.

For several days I was miserable and feverish from the sunburn. Every square inch of my arms and legs and even my face puffed up. It was agony to be touched or to feel warmth. I stayed in the house with the shutters all pulled down, telling myself over and over again what an idiot I was. Bill stayed away all day long, and slept on the ratty old sofa in the living room until I was back to normal—except for the peeling. By the time all my burned skin had flaked off, I was almost as white as when I had started.

But who cared? We could make love again.

Bill came home a couple of nights later with an enormous straw hat for me. He put it on my head while I was making dinner at the stove and pulled its leather thong tight under my chin.

“You don't go out in the sun without this on your head,” he said, very serious. “I don't want you getting sick.”

I still hadn't told him about the cancer. They had frozen the latest spot and I had started taking the enzyme injections. Physician, heal thyself, I thought. The first few weeks' results looked good. I did all the testing myself, even
drawing my own blood. The enzyme was established in my cells. It ought to protect me against another outbreak.

So I decided that the time had come to be completely honest with Bill. I loved him and he loved me. I wanted his baby and I wasn't going to let cancer or anything else stop me. So over dinner that evening in our little candlelit dining room I finally told him.

“Cancer?” he said when I told him. “Jesus, that's a rough one.”

“I'll be all right, though,” I said with an assurance I didn't really feel. “I'm going to beat it.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I sure hope you do.”

I explained to him that I had inoculated myself with the enzyme I had developed.

“Is that smart?” he asked. “I mean, it's still an experimental drug, isn't it?”

“It's not a drug and it works. I've seen it working in the volunteers we've been inoculating. It's working in me.”

But even though Bill spoke all the right words, it was clear from the worried look on his face that he wasn't convinced. Not at all.

At work, I was watching for any possible side effects on our volunteers. So far the only noticeable quirk was that almost all those who received the real inoculations reported a sharp increase in their appetites. But they didn't seem to gain any weight. I noted it in my reports, guessing that the enzyme had some weird reaction on the subject's metabolic rate. It didn't seem to affect me that way, but maybe it was too early for the effect to show up in me.

It was in the middle of my series of inoculations that Bill told me he was thinking of returning to Los Angeles. We had just finished supper and were sitting on the sofa with a pair of half-empty wine glasses on the coffee table in front of us.

“I've gotten as much done here as I could,” he said. “But I can't write here. It just isn't working.”

The fear that I should have felt in the gynecologist's office I felt now, clutching at my heart.

“You're going to leave?”

“Yeah. Got to.”

“Can't you write your script here?”

He shrugged. “I've tried, Cassie. It just isn't working out for me.”

“What isn't? The script, or me?”

“You could come with me,” he said.

“To Los Angeles? And what about my work here? What about my career back East?”

“I've got work to do, too, Cass.”

I don't remember exactly what we said to each other after that. It's all pretty much of a jumble. I know I cried and Bill got more and more upset.

“But I love you!” I recall saying that, more than once.

He must have told me that he loved me, too. I'm sure he did. But the more we talked, the angrier he became. I knew he was really scared, frightened for me, frightened about cancer, about having children, about making a commitment. But it came out as anger, hot boiling rage. At me.

“I want to have a baby,” I kept sobbing. “Your baby.”

His face got so distorted with fury that I hardly recognized him. “I don't want a baby! I don't want any of this!”

“Any of what?” I pleaded.

“You! Dammit, I love you, but you're turning me inside out! I can't write, I can't even think straight anymore. I've got to get away. I've got to get free.”

“But if you love me—”

He pushed his face so close to mine we were practically touching. “I can't have you hanging around my neck! I can't deal with it! With cancer and babies and the whole friggin' mess! I'm not going to let you tear my life apart!”

I sank back in the lumpy sofa, crying so hard that I couldn't see anything at all. Just the imprint of his red, twisted face burned into my retinas like the afterimage of the sun.

Then I heard the door slam and, outside, the MG cough to life. He roared away, out of my life. I had nothing left, nothing except my work. Nothing except what's inside me, the cancer and the antibodies, the good and the bad, the hope and the knowledge that there isn't a man in the entire universe who can be trusted.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P
otter had come prepared. He had two assistants with him, graduate students. Young men, both of them; one black and one Oriental. Politically correct, even in retirement, Arthur grumbled to himself. The black student ran the old-fashioned overhead projector while the Oriental one sat beside Potter and turned the pages of his printed testimony, much as a concert pianist has someone turning the pages of the music.

His paper's a pile of crap, Arthur told himself. It's all based on statistics that make no sense. Arthur began to mentally assemble his cross-examination. Isn't it true, he saw himself asking Potter, that mathematicians in the past “proved” that bumblebees can't fly? That a heavier-than-air machine could never lift itself off the ground? That AIDS was going to kill half the human race in the next ten years?

Arthur began to smile to himself. Cross-examining Potter was going to be fun, a real pleasure. But then an inner voice warned, Don't dump on him too hard. Don't make him look like an object of sympathy. Make it cool and
correct. Stick to the facts of his own presentation. I've got to read his paper before I face him. It was pretty shifty of Rosen to pull him out of his hat.

I'll get a copy of Potter's idiotic paper and read it thoroughly tonight, Arthur said to himself.

It took Potter only a few minutes to read the abstract of his paper to the jury. The slides he showed were all statistical graphs, Arthur saw. All nonsense, as far as he was concerned. The jury looked almost embarrassed; the judges uncomfortable. Arthur was surprised that Senator Kindelberger willingly sat through the entire presentation.

Once the old man had finished, Graves thanked him, then asked, “Will you be able to appear tomorrow morning for cross-examination, Professor? If not we can have the cross-examination now.”

The Oriental student sitting beside Potter had retrieved his cane, which Potter leaned on heavily as he pushed himself up out of the witness chair.

“I'll be back tomorrow,” he said. “You can depend on it.”

As Potter turned to leave, with his student aides at his elbows, there was a stir in the back of the chamber. Someone came in and remained standing at the double doors. People turned to see him and whispers started floating through the spectators.

Graves rapped his gavel sharply, then said, “At the request of Senator Kindelberger, we will allow a slight deviation from our regular schedule.”

Arthur glanced back at the little commotion, quickly dying away as Potter shuffled along the chamber's central aisle toward the doors to the corridor. Then he turned back to hear what Graves was saying.

“The senator has asked that we permit an interested citizen to read a statement to the court,” the chief judge said, looking less than pleased, “and we have decided to allow this unusual procedure as a courtesy to Senator Kindelberger.”

The man who had entered the chamber minutes before strode to the front and took the witness chair. Arthur recognized him: Joshua Ransom.

Arthur shot to his feet. “This man isn't a scientist! He can't make a valid statement to this court.”

Graves looked pained. Before he could say anything, Kindelberger leaned into the microphone in front of his seat and said, “Dr. Marshak, I'm asking that we listen to Mr. Ransom's very brief statement. Even though he is not a professional scientist I believe that what he has to say is of importance to these proceedings.”

Ransom sat hunched over in the witness chair, not looking at Arthur, but bent over his printed statement. Arthur realized he'd be handing out copies to all the reporters, if he hadn't done that already.

“Will I be allowed to cross-examine the witness?” Arthur asked.

“Mr. Ransom is not a witness,” Kindelberger said, “merely an interested citizen.”

Fuming inwardly, Arthur wondered what “interested citizen” they would call up next: Daffy Duck?

“I would still like the right to cross-examine him,” he insisted.

The ghost of a smile flickered on Graves's lips. He looked down at Ransom. “Will you be able to appear for cross-examination tomorrow, Mr. Ransom?”

Ransom blinked several times. “Um, no. I'm afraid I have commitments elsewhere already on my calendar.”

I'll bet you do, Arthur grumbled to himself. Aloud, he asked, “Well, then, may I cross-examine the wi—the interested citizen today, when he's finished reading his statement?”

Before Kindelberger could say anything, Graves nodded and replied, “I see nothing wrong with that. Do you, Senator?”

Ransom look startled. He began to shake his head negatively, but Kindelberger leaned back and shrugged. “Okay by me.”

Arthur sat down. Ransom glowered at him over his shoulder.

“You may read your statement, Mr. Ransom,” said Graves.

Ransom cleared his throat, pulled the slim microphone closer to his mouth, then began reading aloud:

“All concerned citizens protest the elitist procedure of this so-called court of science. Under the guise of impartial scientific judgment, a new and potentially devastating technical capability is being foisted on the American people and the world by a narrow group of self-serving white European-descent males.

“The ability to regrow human organs in vivo is the ability to create a super race. Just as the Nazis and other evil groups have attempted throughout history to impose a eugenic New Order on the human race, now we have a small band of elitist scientists proposing to do the same thing, cloaking their intentions with promises of helping the sick and impaired.”

He went on in that vein for nearly half an hour. Arthur listened with growing fury. Are they all against me? Jesse, Kindelberger, Potter, even Graves? Aren't any of them on my side?

He heard movement among the spectators behind him. Turning in his seat, he saw that more reporters were coming in. Sharks drawn to blood. Well, if it's blood they want, Arthur told himself, I'll give them blood. Ransom's.

He turned back to stare at Ransom, still reading from his text:

“In just the past twenty years, science has given us Alar to poison our fruit crops, electromagnetic fields leaking from high-voltage wires to give us cancer, the ozone hole to allow deadly ultraviolet radiation to kill us, and radon in our homes to attack our children with radioactivity. And that's merely the tip of the iceberg.”