The Immortals (23 page)

Flowers had finally found his way to the back of the statue and learned—in time—that half an ideal is worse than none at all.
Father,
he thought,
you never got there. I'm sorry, Father.

He turned and walked out of the room. There was a phone in the courthouse lobby. He called his number and waited and then spoke briefly and urgently into the pickup. While the chauffeur guided the ambulance back toward the Medical Center, he fished around in the black bag for a couple of amphetamine pills and ate them like candy.

But his feeling of exhilaration and purpose began minutes before the stimulant hit him. It was all very well to be an integral part of a great social and ethical complex, but occasionally a man had to do his own thinking. And then, of course, the great social and ethical complex had to watch out for itself.

He wasn't even disturbed to discover that he was being followed. He shook off the distant white jacket in the subway.

“Look,” he said to the pharmacist on duty, “it must get pretty boring here at night. Don't you ever get an overwhelming yen for a cup of coffee?”

“I sure do.”

“Go ahead,” Flowers said. “I'll watch the pharmacy.”

The pharmacist hesitated, torn between duty and desire. The decision to go resulted from a reluctance to appear timid before the medic.

As soon as he was gone, Flowers went straight through the pharmacy to the vault. The heavy door was ajar.
In the farthest corner was a modest cardboard carton. Its contents had been estimated, conservatively, as worth $10,000,000. Flowers pocketed an ampule, hesitated, and removed the eleven others from their cotton nests—suddenly doubtful that the hospital should be trusted with them. . . .

“Thanks for the break,” said the pharmacist gratefully a few minutes later.

Flowers waved carelessly as he left. “Any time.”

At the barred door of Experimental Ward, the guard stopped him. “I don't see your name here anywhere,” he growled, his finger moving down the duty list.

“No wonder,” Flowers said, pointing his own finger. “They misspelled it. Powers instead of Flowers.”

It worked. Inside he walked quickly past the blood bank with its rows of living factories, the organ bank with its surgery and automatic heart machines. . . . The part of the experimental rooms devoted to geriatrics was at the very end.

Dr. Pearce made scarcely a dent in the firm hospital mattress. Flowers shook him, but the smudged eyelids wouldn't open. He filled a hypodermic from the ampule in his jacket pocket and injected it into a vein.

Flowers waited anxiously in the near darkness. Finally Dr. Pearce's eyelids flickered. “Doctor Pearce,” he whispered, “this is the medic. Remember?” Pearce nodded, barely perceptibly. “I'm going to try to get you out of here, you and Leah. She's here, too. Will you help?”

Pearce nodded again, stronger this time. Flowers brought the long cart beside the bed and lifted Pearce's
bone-light body onto it. He pulled a sheet up over Pearce's face. “Here we go.”

He engaged the clutch and guided the cart back the way he had come, past the rooms with their burdens of human tragedy, through the door, past the startled guard. The guard acted as if he were going to say something, but he waited too long.

When they were entering the elevator, Pearce whispered in a dust-dry voice, “What was the shot, Medic?”

“Elixir vitae.
Isn't that justice?”

“Justice is hard to recognize when we see it so seldom.”

“When did you have your last shot?”

“Thirty years ago.”

So,
Flowers thought,
I was wrong about that, too.
It wasn't the elixir keeping the old man alive. “You said you'd give Leah your eyes. Did you mean it?”

“Of course. Can you do it?”

The years had desiccated the body, but they hadn't dimmed the mind, Flowers thought. Pearce had realized instantly what Flowers meant. “I don't know,” he admitted. “It's a chance. I'll have to do it all alone in haste. I could give her some from the bank, but she would hate it. With yours it would be different.”

“A gift of love,” Pearce whispered. “It can never be refused. It enriches him who gives and him who receives. That is how it should be done always, with love. Don't tell her. Afterward she'll understand, how it made me happy to give her what I could not give her as a father—the world of light. . . .”

*  *  *

The duty office was vacant. Flowers ran his finger down the room list until he found Leah's name. He found another cart, ran it silently into the room, and stopped beside the bed. “Leah?”

“Ben?” she said instantly.

For a moment her voice blunted the cold edge of his determination. It had been a long time since anyone had called him “Ben” like that. “Onto the cart. I've got your father. We're going to make a break for it.”

“You'll be ruined.”

“It was done for me,” he said. “Funny. You have an ideal—maybe it looks like your father—and you think it exists inside you like a marble statue in a hidden niche. And one day you look and it isn't there anymore. You're free.”

The cart was rolling toward the elevator. On the floor below he guided the cart into the EENT operating room. As it bumped gently against the cart on which Pearce was lying, Leah put out a hand, touched her father's arm, and said, “Russ!”

“Leah!”

For a moment the exchange of names stabbed Flowers with jealousy; he felt left out, alone. “You were right,” Leah said, and she put out another hand to catch hold of Flowers and pull him close. “He is the man. Better even than we thought.”

“Find a great deal of happiness, children,” Pearce said.

Flowers chuckled. “I think you two planned the whole thing.”

Leah blushed slowly.
She's really beautiful,
Flowers thought in sudden surprise. “No, we only hoped it,” she said.

Flowers injected the anesthetic, felt her fingers relax, droop away. Motionless, he stared at her face and then held up his hands in front of his eyes. They were trembling. He looked around at the gleaming whiteness of the walls, the delicate microsurgical tools, the suturing machine, the bandages, and he knew how easy it would be to slip, to make the fatal mistake.

“Courage, Medic,” said Pearce. His voice was getting stronger. “You've studied for seven years. You can do this simple thing.”

He took a deep breath. Yes, he could do it. And he went at it, as it should be done—with love.

“Medic Flowers,” said the hidden speaker in the ceiling, “report to the dormitory. Medic Flowers . . .”

They had discovered that Pearce was missing. The old man talked to him while his hands were busy and helped take his mind off the terrifying consequences. He told Flowers why he had walked out on his class thirty years before.

“It suddenly came to me—the similarity between medicine and religion. We fostered it with our tradition building, our indecipherable prescriptions, our ritual. Gradually the public had come to look upon us as miracle workers. The masses called the new medicines wonder drugs because they didn't know how they worked. Religion and medicine—both owed their great periods to a pathological fear of death. Death is not so great an enemy.”

Flowers made depth readings of the cloudy corneas and set them into the microsurgical machine.

“Oh, the doctors weren't to blame. We were a product of our society just as John Bone is a product of his. But we forgot an ancient wisdom which might have given us the strength to resist. ‘A sound mind in a sound body,' the Greeks said. And even more important, ‘Nothing in excess.' ”

Flowers positioned the laser scalpel over Leah's right eye.

“Anything in excess will ruin this society or any other. Even the best of things—too much wealth, too much piety, too much health. We made a fetish of health, built it shrines in our medicine cabinets, built great temples for worship.”

The beam slipped into the eye without resistance, slicing away the cornea.

“The life span can be extended to a reasonable length without overburdening the society. Then we run into the law of diminishing returns, and it takes just as much again to push it a year further, and then six months, three months, a week, a day. There is no end, and our fear is such that no one can say, ‘Stop! We're healthy enough.' ”

The scalpel retracted and moved to the left eye.

“The lives we were saving were peripheral: the very young, the very old, and the constitutional inadequates. We repealed natural selection, saved the weak to reproduce themselves, and told ourselves that we were healthier. It was a kind of suicide. It was health out of bottles. When the bottles break, the society will die.”

Both corneas were gone. Flowers looked at his watch. It was taking too long. He turned to Pearce.

“No anesthetic,” Pearce said. As the microsurgical machine came over his face, he went on, “We called it humanitarian, but it was only another name for folly. Medicine became dependent upon the very thing it was destroying. Vast technologies were vital to its maintenance, but that level of civilization fostered its own diseases.”

The empty sockets were bandaged.

“We destroyed the cities with our doomsayings, and we amassed a disproportionate amount of capital with our tax exemptions, our subsidies, our research grants. Like religion again, in medieval Europe, when piety accumulated wealth exempt from levies.”

The corneas were in place.

“It couldn't last in Europe, and it can't last here. Henry the Eighth found an excuse to break with the Pope and appropriate the Church lands. In France it helped bring the Revolution. And thus this noble experiment will end. In ice or fire, by the degeneration of technology below the level necessary to sustain it, or by rebellion. And that's why I went into the city.”

The suturing machine fused the edges of the cornea in a neat graft.

“That's where the future will be made, where the people are surviving because they are strong. There we are learning new things—the paranormal methods of health that are not so new after all, but the age-old methods of healers. Their merit is that they do not require complexity
and technology, but only a disciplined mind that can discipline the body. When the end comes, the fine spacious life in the country will end like the mayfly. The city will survive and grow again. Outside they will die of diseases their bodies have forgotten, of cancer they cannot resist, of a hundred different ailments, for which the medicine has been lost.”

As the bandages were fastened over Leah's eyes, the speaker in the ceiling spoke again. “Emergency squads report to stations. Heavily armed forces are attacking St. Luke's.”

The time for caution was past. Flowers taped together the cart legs and guided them across the hall into the elevator. They dropped to the subway level. Clumsily Flowers maneuvered the two carts across the approachway into one of the cars and swung himself aboard after them.

In seconds the garage would be swarming with the emergency squads.

Another speaker boomed: “Snipers on buildings along Main Street are shelling St. Luke's with five-inch mortars. No casualties reported. Emergency squads, on the double.”

“Has it started already?” Pearce asked softly.

Unseen, Flowers smiled grimly.

As they reached the garage, men were racing past them. No one paid any attention to the medic guiding the two carts. Flowers stopped at the first unoccupied ambulance, opened the back, and lifted Leah's unconscious body onto one of the stretchers. He lifted Pearce onto the other one. He slammed the door shut and ran around to the front.

Just as the engine caught, a startled medic raced up and pounded futilely against the door. Flowers pulled away from him in a burst of speed.

The ambulance was only one vehicle among many; they streamed from the Center, ambulances, half-tracks, tanks. At Southwest Trafficway, Flowers edged out of the stream and turned north. North into the city.

John Bone was waiting beside the garage door under City Hall. “Okay,” he told Coke, “you can call off the diversion now. Come on in,” he said to Flowers.

“Said the spider to the fly,” Flowers said, smiling. “No, thanks. You'll get healed, and better than I can do. But not now.”

Bone's face wrinkled angrily. “By whom?”

“These,” Flowers said, waving his hand toward the back of the ambulance.

“An old man? A blind girl?”

“A blind old man, and a girl who might see. Yes. They can do more for you than I can. We'll get along, Bone.”

Bone grimaced. “Yes. Yes, I suppose we will.”

Leah was stirring. Flowers reached back and put a hand on her forehead. She grew quiet. He turned back to Bone and stripped off his white jacket and tossed it to the political boss of the city. “Here, maybe this will do you some good. You can have the ambulance, too, when it's taken us home.”

Home. He smiled. He had thrown in his lot with the city. He had even forgotten his filters. There was brutality in the city, but you could tame it, put its misdirected vitality to use. But the only thing to do with an ideal that
has outworn its necessity is to turn your back on it, to leave it behind.

People can't be divided into two groups: There aren't people, and people in white jackets. A doctor is only a man with special skills. But a healer is something more than a man. They would make the beginning, the old man, and the blind girl who might see, and the medic who had found a new ideal. “I spent seven years learning to be a doctor,” Flowers said. “I guess I can spend seven years more learning how to heal.”

T
he clinic was deserted.

Harry Elliott smothered a yawn as he walked slowly toward the draped operating table under the cold, glareless light at the back of the big room tiled in antiseptic white and flooded with invisible, germ-killing ultraviolet. He lit the candelabra of Bunsen burners standing on each side of the table and turned on the ventilators under the mural of Immortality slaying Death with a syringe. The air, straight from the Medical Center, was pure, disease-free, and aromatic with the hospital incense of anesthetic and alcohol.