The Immortality Factor (57 page)

But then I thought, would a trial like that really be fair? I mean, all the scientists will line up together like a battalion of Marines facing the enemy. Would they really bring out their doubts, really cross-examine one another? Not bloody likely, as Julia would say.

We swung off the Drive at long last and threaded through the streets leading to the hospital.

“I want you to come up to the lab,” Arthur said all of a sudden. Like he'd been thinking about it for a long time. “I want you to see how far we've gotten.”

“Arby, you don't need me—”

“No, I really want you to. If you're going to testify in the trial, at least you ought to see what we've been able to accomplish.”

“I'm not going to testify in any trial,” I insisted. “For one thing, I'm too damned busy to play games with you.”

“Games?” His face went red again.

“And for another,” I quickly added, “I'm not involved in this. There's no reason for you to call me to testify.”

“The other side will.”

“Other side?”

“This is going to be a real trial, Jess. An adversarial procedure. I want to get at the truth. I want people to feel that the decision of the science court is fair and impartial.”

“And favorable.”

“It will be,” he said, “if we stick to the scientific facts.”

“So you don't need me.”

“But the other side is going to ask you to testify.”

“What other side?”

“Our adversaries. Don't think that this is going to be a phony show-business operation. We're going to have to
prove
that our work is valid.”

“And who's going to be your adversary?”

He shrugged slightly. “I don't know yet. But there'll be one.”

And he expected me to be among them, that was clear.

“Will you come up to the lab and catch up on our progress?” Arby asked me. He was really sincere. He meant it.

“For god's sake, Arby, I'm so damned busy I don't know when I can take a piss, even.”

He put on that stubborn superior look of his. “You ought to come up and see what we're doing, Jess. See the real world.”

I almost laughed in his face. “The real world? Arby, you wouldn't recognize the real world if it sat on your chest.” I pointed to the pathetic people hanging out on the street corners. “
That's
the real world, Arby. Not your nice clean lab. The real world hurts! The real world is poor and sick and more than half crazy. You live in a goddamned ivory tower!”

His nostrils flared like a bull about to charge. But he calmed himself down right away. “Will you come up to the lab or not?” Tight as a WASP at a bar mitzvah.

The taxi pulled up in front of the hospital's main entrance.

“Okay,” I said. “I'll come up and look things over. Soon as I get a chance.” What sense was there in fighting with him?

He nodded, satisfied.

As I got out of the cab I hoped that at least I had gotten Arby off my back. For a while. But as I hustled up the steps to the entrance, chilled by the wind coming off the Hudson, I thought, Maybe somebody ought to organize a real adversarial position for this trial. It shouldn't be a walk-through for Arby and his Omnitech pals. We ought to take a really close look at what he's doing and see if it actually works the way it should.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I
was getting more and more nervous as we came closer to the opening of the trial.

Max appeared to be recuperating well enough, although the tumor problem still plagued us. I started to wonder if I shouldn't have someone else looking after the chimp instead of Cassie. As if she'd leave his side. But Cassie was looking worse each day. She had always seemed like a sad little waif, but now she looked bedraggled, sick, and weary. She insisted that the enzyme treatment had eliminated her cancer, yet she was losing weight and her eyes looked hollow and black-ringed from lack of sleep.

“I want you to go to the Lahey Clinic for a complete physical,” I told her.

She had refused even to come down to my office. I had to go back to Max's pen, back in the storage area where Cassie had set up an austere little cell for herself, next to the chimp's.

“I can't leave him,” she said. Her face was gaunt, cheeks hollow, eyes rimmed with red and pouched with dark circles.

Max was sitting quietly in a corner of the pen, behind the bulletproof glass, pushing a few alphabet blocks with his one hand. His left arm was unbandaged.
It had grown noticeably; you could see the tiny buds of fingers at the end of it, pink and new-looking. His eye was still bandaged, though.

“I'll arrange for the company helicopter to take you up and back. You'll be back the same day. You can have breakfast and dinner right here.”

She started to shake her head.

“Cassie, I'm not asking you. The subject is not open to discussion. Either you go or you're fired.”

Her eyes widened for a moment. Then she smiled weakly at me. “You fire me and I'll sue you for it.”

I smiled back. “Go ahead and sue. But you'll have to do it from outside the lab. You won't be allowed to see Max at all.”

“You wouldn't do that.”

“I want you to get a checkup, Cassie. I want you to take care of yourself as well as you take care of Max, here.”

Very reluctantly, she said, “Only one day?”

“One day. And afterward you've got to do what they tell you. I don't think you're eating right and I'm certain you're not sleeping well.”

Her smile came back. “Yes, Daddy Arthur.”

I got Phyllis to set it all up and before the end of the week the company chopper had landed in our parking lot and whisked Cassie off to Boston for the day. That gave Zack and his team a chance to examine Max thoroughly, without Cassie getting in their way.

“The eye isn't working out,” Zack told me gloomily that evening.

He and Darrell and Vince had gathered in my office.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

Zack shook his head. “I don't know. It's not regenerating. It's just a jumble of tumors in the socket. A real mess.”

Darrell said, “Maybe it was too much trauma for his body to handle at once. Maybe we should've done the arm first and then the eye.”

Zack nodded unhappily. Vince muttered, “Helluva time to think of that now.”

All three of them were down. I tried to bring the problem into perspective a little. “Well, the arm's coming along, isn't it?”

They agreed that it was.

“That's the important thing,” I said. “We just overreached ourselves with the eye.”

Darrell ran a hand across his long jaw. “I suppose it's not really that important. If we're aiming at rejuvenating people, that is. Old age doesn't affect the eyes in ways that can't be handled conventionally.”

“Cataracts can be taken care of surgically,” Zack said.

Vince added, “They use laser surgery to bring your vision back to twenty-twenty. Instead of eyeglasses.”

“Yeah, I see ads on TV for that,” said Darrell. “The important thing is regrowing internal organs, not eyeballs. We don't need eyeballs.”

“Limbs,” Vince said.

They were whistling past the graveyard, I knew. Convincing themselves that the failure with Max's eye wasn't crucial, wouldn't stop our progress.

“Maybe we should put his original eye back in,” Zack suggested. “Clean out the tumors before they get any worse and give him his eye back.”

Darrell raised his brows questioningly.

“Let's wait another week or so,” I said. “Give it a little more time.”

We might be able to replace Max's eye, but reconnecting it so that he could see was a different story. I thought about how the news reporters would react to a chimp with a regrown arm but a blind eye. Max's usefulness with the media was finished, I knew. But I didn't say anything to them. That wasn't their problem, it was mine.

And Pat Hayward's.

More and more I was having my discussions with Pat over dinner. There just didn't seem to be enough hours in the day to talk about PR problems, especially since I'd started shuttling down to Washington almost every week to set up the science court. So Pat and I usually met at the end of the day and drove out to one of the local restaurants. In our separate cars.

I explained about Max.

“You're right,” Pat said. “The media would go into a feeding frenzy once they found out that you had deliberately taken his eye and it won't grow back.”

“It will eventually,” I heard myself say. It sounded awfully defensive, as if I were trying to absolve myself.

“Really?”

“I think so. Once his arm is fully regrown I think we can go back and do the eye successfully.”

The restaurant was small and not terribly good. But it was quiet and nearly empty. We could sit at our table and talk without interruption; the owner and the two waiters knew how well I tipped and would have happily let us stay all night, if we wanted to. The owner had even bought a case of Tavel for me: “Dr. Marshak's special selection,” he called it.

Pat took a sip of the wine, then asked me, “What about the tumors? Cassie's afraid they're going to kill Max.”

That shocked me. “She told you that?”

“Yes.”

“When did you . . . ?”

Pat grinned at me. “Arthur, you're not my only source of information. If I'm going to be useful to you, I've got to know what's going on in the lab. I don't sit at my word processor all day. I go out and talk to people.”

I hadn't even thought about what Pat did when she wasn't in my sight.

“Do you have any idea of how tricky it's been to keep the reporters away from Max?”

“They want to see him?”

“Of course they do! They don't know about the surgery, they just remember that they got better footage out of Max than any of the humans they photographed.”

“And they still want to see him.”

“Whenever they come to the lab. They all ask to see Max. I tell them he's been quarantined; that seems to satisfy them.”

“Good,” I said, realizing for the first time that Pat had become invaluable to me. She was smart and resourceful. And loyal. That was important.

I must have been staring at her across the restaurant table. She was really good-looking, especially with the candle glow throwing highlights on her red hair.

Don't get involved with your employees, I warned myself.

She's only a consultant, I argued.

Same thing. You're her boss, her source of income. If she lets you come on to her, how do you know what her reasons are? If she doesn't, you're looking at a sexual harassment situation.

Well, I told myself, as soon as this trial is over I'm going to drop her as a consultant. Then we'll see what we've got going between us. If anything.

Pat seemed to understand what was running through my mind. Her smile seemed to turn a little sad.

“Arthur,” she said softly, “someday, when this is all over and I'm freelancing again, you'll have to come up to my house in Old Saybrook and meet my mother.”

“I'd like that,” I said.

“No, you wouldn't,” Pat answered, very seriously. “But she's the acid test. If you can stand her, then maybe there's a future to our relationship.”

How did we get on the subject of relationships? It must have been mental telepathy.

“For now, though,” Pat went on, “we ought to keep it strictly business.”

I realized it had been months since I'd gotten laid. But I nodded and said, “For now.”

And then we went back to the thorny problem of how we could use Max's arm to our benefit without showing his missing eye. We were forced to the decision that Max's days as a media darling were finished, unless and until we could regrow his eye.

I was less optimistic than I had let on with Pat. The tumors weren't succumbing to Cassie's enzyme treatment, they were getting into his brain. I was terribly afraid that they would kill Max even before his arm had completely regrown.

And what effect would that have on the trial?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I
t wasn't murder. It was a mercy killing. I mean, they let doctors get away with “assisted suicide,” so why shouldn't I put poor Max out of his misery?

The tumors were eating up his brain. Max didn't recognize me anymore. He just sat in his pen like a hopeless lump. He'd look at me with his one eye but he wouldn't show any sign of recognition.

I'd call to him and he wouldn't respond. I think he even forgot sign language, the tumors must've incapacitated that part of his brain.

And I couldn't go into his pen anymore. That was the worst shock of all. The night I came back from my visit to the Lahey Clinic up in Boston, I went straight to Max's room and opened the door in the Plexiglas wall and Max shrieked and ran away from me!

“It's me, Max,” I said, keeping my voice soft and soothing. “It's all right. See, it's Cassie.”

But Max cowered in the corner, covering his face with his one good arm.

“What did they do to you?” I asked him. He looked just the same as he had
that morning, when I'd left on the helicopter. But Zack and the rest of them had had Max all to themselves for the whole day.

“What did they do, Max?” I asked again, hunching down and sort of duck-walking to be near him.

Max flailed out with his one arm and knocked me over backward. Then he raced for the door in the Plexiglas wall. I had shut it, but hadn't bothered to lock it. Max knew how to use the door handle, but he fumbled with it and then gave up.