The Immortals (15 page)

He slowed his pace and opened the door normally. Residents were running up and down the corridor in various states of undress, shouting questions and getting no answers. Tom Barnett was waiting outside the door.

“Quick, Russ,” he said, “let's get out of here!”

Pearce turned to double-lock the door before he turned back to Barnett. “What are you doing here, Tom?”

“Concern for you, Russ.”

“You live on the other side of the compound.”

“I was up early and heard the alarm. I thought you might sleep through it.”

“Old men sleep lightly, Tom,” Pearce said. “Let's go.”

“What about the laboratory?” Barnett asked.

Pearce shrugged. “It will have to take care of itself.”

As they turned toward the distant exit, Julia Hudson was coming toward them, relief on her face. “Doctor Barnett, isn't it? Russ, I was worried.” She was fully dressed but without makeup. Even so, Pearce thought she was a remarkably attractive woman.

“Up early, too?” he asked.

“Paperwork,” she said wryly, and then, “I'm not much of a sleeper.”

As they moved toward the exit to the outside, following the other residents, who now had decided that their lives were more important then their belongings, Pearce asked Hudson, “What's the alarm?”

“Fire,” she said. “Two. One in the basement. One in a janitor's closet on the top floor. Like the compound, the hospital is being evacuated as a precaution.”

“Two fires? That sounds like arson.”

They emerged into the open air of the parking lot. It was filled not only with residents but with nurses and interns tending patients in wheelchairs and gurneys.

“That's what I think.”

“One in the basement?”

“Near your laboratory. But don't worry. It's under control.”

“Why would someone want to burn a hospital?” Barnett asked.

“Why, indeed?” Pearce said.

“A disgruntled employee?” Hudson suggested.

“An unhappy patient?” Barnett added.

“Or one who's mentally disturbed?”

“Or someone denied care?” Pearce said ironically. “Two at the same time?”

The distance between the fires rendered improbable the thesis that one person might have set both, and the possibility of two unrelated people acting simultaneously was even more unlikely. They all saw that.

“Not only arson,” Pearce said, “but conspiracy. But why? Maybe as a warning that the hospital is vulnerable. Maybe as a ploy to empty the buildings so that rooms can be searched, perhaps valuables stolen.”

“We'd better get back inside,” Hudson said.

Pearce glanced around the disheveled parking lot and its disheveled inhabitants. “I think you're right.”

But before he could get back to his apartment door, he was stopped by a large male nurse. Pearce couldn't remember seeing him around the hospital, but something about him seemed vaguely familiar. “Doctor Pearce, there's an emergency in your wing.”

Pearce waited for Barnett to volunteer to take care of it, but Barnett said nothing. “I'll follow you,” Pearce said, and had time only to notice, as he passed his apartment on the way to the elevator, that the door seemed untouched.

*  *  *

The nurse preceded him, glancing back occasionally to see if Pearce was following. He wore green scrubs that left his biceps bulging incongruously below the short sleeves. When they arrived at one of the private rooms, the nurse stepped aside and stood with his back to the door as Pearce entered.

A man in a wheelchair sat on the far side of the room, looking out at the smoggy inner city. He turned as Pearce entered. He looked bulky and malformed under his robe. Pearce looked at his face. The man was old, perhaps well past the century mark, and his face, that once might have been round and full, was little more than skin stretched over the prominent bones of his face. But now that the subcutaneous fat had been skimmed away by time, the strength of the man was revealed in the set of the jaw and the fierceness of the eyes. Among the wrinkles around his eyes were the faint reminders of old scars; a long one ran down his right cheek to the point of the jaw. His nose had been broken once or twice.

“You don't remember me, Doctor Pearce?” the man said.

Something stirred in Pearce's mind, a vision of a sign on a glass door panel, a man in a cocoa-colored tropical suit, and later the same face bearded and battered. “Locke,” Pearce said. “Jason Locke, the private investigator I hired to find Marshall Cartwright.”

“The private eye you hired to make sure that Marshall Cartwright could not be found,” Locke said.

“And after all these years have you come to report success?” Pearce asked. “Have you found him?” The combination of Locke's age and determination made Pearce shiver inside, but he wasn't going to let Locke know.

“No,” Locke said, “and I've been looking ever since. I'm the executive director of the National Research Institute.”

“Ah,” Pearce said, as pieces fell into place.

“The organization that has been funding your research for the past fifty years, but, as you have deduced, its principal mission is to find Marshall Cartwright and his children. I didn't know the story until after Leroy Weaver's death, when his doctor, a man named Easter, and his private secretary, a man named Jansen, offered me the chance to work for them. It was my idea to recruit other people of wealth and declining years, and to organize the Institute along its present lines. Easter and Jansen are long gone, but the search continues.”

“You switched sides easily,” Pearce said.

“I was never on anybody's side. You hired me for your purposes, and I allowed myself to be hired by Jansen and Easter for mine. Besides, we're all in the Ponce de León business.”

“And has your search been successful?”

“No more than yours. We came close once,” Locke said, almost wistfully. “Had her in our hands. But she was spirited away, perhaps by Cartwright himself.”

“But you keep on.”

“Just as you do. People die easily, but hope dies hard. And old people hope until the end. Death has come to billions of people in the fifty years the Institute has been functioning, and to dozens of the Institute's board of directors, but their estates revert to the Institute and the search goes on. Actually, as time passes, the possibilities for success increase.”

“How so?” Pearce asked. “I'd think the trail would have gone cold long since.”

Locke laid his right hand out palm up, as if to reveal a gem of truth. “The more Cartwrights there are, the more
difficulties they have keeping hidden and the more chances we have to identify one. Sooner or later they will begin to pop up like corks in the ocean.”

Pearce remembered a woman and a baby in an abandoned operating room. “What brings you here?”

“You,” Locke said.

The bluntness took Pearce aback. “Me?”

“Your reputation as a geriatrician is international,” Locke said. “Even without the urban myth of Leroy Weaver's rejuvenation, you would be renowned as one of the magicians of senescence. I thought it was time for a checkup.”

“What seems to be the problem?”

“Old age,” Locke said. “I may look good for my years, outside of the nerve damage that keeps me in this wheelchair. I've had growth hormones and fish oil, vitamins and health foods. My arteries have been Roto-Rooted, and I've had a heart and lung transplant and two new kidneys. But I feel old.”

“Apoptosis,” Pearce said.

“What's that?”

“The cells themselves age and die after about forty-five divisions. Almost as if they have a counting mechanism.”

“Except for the Cartwrights.”

“And cancer cells. You want to be young again, like Leroy Weaver,” Pearce said. “But that happened only once. You are old. I'm old. It's not a bad thing to be.”

Locke's expression wore a steely rejection. “That was all right when there was no alternative. But now there's a
chance for immortality, and only a helpless fool would settle for anything less.”

“I guess that's what I am, then,” Pearce said.

“No, you're the most powerful man around,” Locke said, “and that's why we decided to renew your grant.”

“We?”

Locke smiled. “Me, then. I decided to renew your grant.”

“And why did you turn down the renewal in the first place?”

Locke studied Pearce as if gauging how open to be. “I wanted to see how you'd react.”

“You wanted me to make a personal appeal?”

“Maybe.”

“Be spurred to greater effort?”

“If that were possible. Time passes swiftly. Some of us are getting nervous.”

“And why did you set the fires this morning?”

Silence grew deep in the room before Locke said, “You know about that?”

“I don't believe in coincidences. It was a mistake to set two.”

Locke spread his hands helplessly. “Subordinates make mistakes. They don't make them twice.”

“But what were you after?”

“Proof. Evidence. Anything.” Locke bent his head forward to prop his chin on his fingers.

“Proof of what?”

“Of your Cartwright connections. Of your success with the
elixir vitae.”

“What makes you think that I could make connections where you could not?”

“They might contact you; they wouldn't trust me.”

“There's no reason for them to contact me. In fact, there is every reason they shouldn't, just as they shouldn't contact each other. All they need is freedom and the opportunity to be fruitful and multiply and make the species immortal; sentimentality is their enemy.”

“I'm not interested in the immortality of the species, nor is any of my board of directors. The world ends when we do.”

Pearce went on as if he could eliminate Locke and his board of directors by ignoring them. “And they don't know anything about you. I didn't.”

“There's a mythology that encompasses us both.”

“As for the
elixir vitae,”
Pearce said, “it is more complicated than I thought, not only the gamma globulins but the stem cells and maybe primordial chordamesoderm. But why would you think I had been successful?”

“There's your appearance, for one thing,” Locke said. “You're not much younger than I am, but you could pass for fifty, say—no more than sixty anyway.”

Pearce looked at Locke. “You're the second person who has told me that. I'm beginning to believe it myself. But it's all due to choosing long-lived parents, clean living, and a positive attitude.”

Locke shrugged. “There's intuition as well: When you've been in the ‘needle in a haystack' business as long as I have, you get a sense for these things.”

“You also get paranoid,” Pearce said.

Now it was Locke's turn to look at Pearce.

Pearce turned toward the door and saw the outline of the big male nurse against the corridor wall. In that moment it transformed itself into the image of a large shadowy figure looming over him out of the darkness, holding a club. He remembered a laser that lit up the night, and he understood. The nurse was not a nurse but a bodyguard, and he performed other services as well, perhaps even setting fires.

Pearce turned back to Locke. “No doubt you hoped I would hurry to my laboratory to rescue my samples,” he said, “but I'm afraid there's nothing there to rescue. Or to search my apartment for notes. But I don't keep them there, as Tom Barnett no doubt told you.”

“Who?” Locke asked.

“But I'll accept you as a patient, if you're still serious about that, because I'm a physician and that's what I do. And I will accept your grant to perform my research, if you're still serious about that, because I need it and the work is important.”

Locke stood up, revealing what had been malformed about his figure. Through the part in the gown Pearce could see a metal framework that supported Locke's body from his shoulders to his ankles and no doubt turned Locke's nerve impulses into movement. Locke moved toward Pearce. Pearce kept himself from recoiling as Locke grasped his wrist in fingers like steel. No nerve damage here, or perhaps the external skeleton dived into Locke's hands to become bone and sinew. Herod had turned himself into Frankenstein's monster.

“I will fund your research,” Locke said, “because I think you may be the only one who can do it. I believe you have Cartwright connections because that's what I would do if I were in your place. And when you have the elixir, you will turn it over to me.”

“I will publish the results like any scientist.”

“You will submit them,” Locke said. “They will not be published.”

“You're overconfident.”

“Just realistic. I know my powers. And I know what would happen to the world if the elixir became public knowledge. There would be murders, riots, wars—and later on there would be the insoluble problems of overpopulation or a dropping birthrate and stagnation. But you will do the research because you are the kind of person you are, and you will give it to me because I am the kind of person I am.”

Pearce pried Locke's hand from his wrist, one finger at a time. “I'm not your creature,” he said. “But we understand each other. I will synthesize the elixir with the hope of getting it free from you somehow and getting it to the people who can use it more wisely than you or I. And if I fail at that and it becomes yours to do with as you wish, I won't despair. It will take the pressure off the Cartwrights, and gradually, no matter what you do, the secret will leak out and it will become the property of all humanity.”

Pearce turned and walked through the door past the threatening bodyguard and through the familiar corridors and down the elevators until he found himself once more in
the clean, cool purity of his laboratory, his refuge from the aggravations and petty concerns of the outside world. Now he knew that his apprehensions about someone's presence while he was gone had been mere paranoia. If Locke had known he had samples of Cartwright blood, he would never have let him go without confiscating them.