The Immortals (31 page)

The sea of flesh surged with anger. “Perhaps there will be screams tonight. Yes. Leech! You—the obscenely old person with the boy. You are a healer.”

“So I have been called,” Pearce whispered.

“They say you work miracles. Well, I have a miracle for you to work.” Weaver scratched the back of one hand. “I itch. Doctors have found nothing wrong with me, and they have died. It drives me mad.”

“I cure by touch,” Pearce said. “Every person cures himself; I only help.”

“No man touches me,” Weaver said. “You will cure me by tonight. I will not hear of anything else. Otherwise I will be angry with you and the boy. Yes, I will be very angry with the boy if you do not succeed.”

“Tonight,” Pearce said, “I will work a miracle for you.”

Weaver smiled and reached for a feeding tube. His dark eyes glittered like black marbles in a huge dish of
custard. “Tonight, then!” The image vanished from the screen.

“A grub,” Harry whispered. “A giant white grub in the heart of a rose. Eating away at it, blind, selfish, and destructive.”

“I think of him,” Pearce said, “as a fetus who refuses to be born. Safe in the womb, he destroys the mother, not realizing that he is thereby destroying himself.” He turned slightly toward Christopher. “There is an eye?”

Christopher looked at the screen. “Every one.”

“Bugs.”

“All over.”

Pearce said, “We will have to take the chance that he will not audit the recordings, or that he can be distracted long enough to do what must be done.”

Harry looked at Marna and then at Pearce and Christopher. “What can we do?”

“You're willing?” Marna said. “To give up immortality? To risk everything?”

Harry grimaced. “What would I be losing? A world like this—”

“What is the situation?” Pearce whispered. “Where is Weaver?”

Marna shrugged helplessly. “I don't know. My mother and grandmother never knew. He sends the elevator. There are no stairs, no other exits. And the elevators are controlled from a console beside his bed. There are thousands of switches. They also control the rest of the building, the lights, water, air, heat, and food supplies. He can release toxic or anesthetic gases or napalm. He can set
off charges not only here but in Topeka and Kansas City, or send rockets to attack other areas. There's no way to reach him.”

“You will reach him,” Pearce whispered.

Marna's eyes lighted up. “If there were some weapon I could take . . . But there's an inspection in the elevator—magnetic and fluoroscopic detectors.”

“Even if you could smuggle in a knife, say,” Harry said, frowning, “it would be almost impossible to hit a vital organ. And even though he isn't able to move his body, his arms must be fantastically strong.”

“There is, perhaps, one way,” Pearce said. “If we can find a piece of paper, Christopher will write it out for you.”

*  *  *

The bride waited near the elevator doors. She was dressed in white satin and old lace. The lace was pulled up over the bride's head for a veil. In front of the living-room screen, in a brown velour Grand Rapids overstuffed chair, sat Pearce. At his feet, leaning against his bony knee, was Christopher.

The screen flickered, and Weaver was there, grinning his divine-idiot's grin. “You're impatient, Marna. It pleases me to see you so eager to rush into the arms of your bridegroom. The wedding carriage arrives.”

The doors of the elevator sighed open. The bride stepped into the car. As the doors began to close, Pearce got to his feet, pushing Christopher gently to one side, and said, “You seek immortality, Weaver, and you think you have found it. But what you have is only a living death.
I am going to show you the only real immortality. . . .”

The car dropped. It plummeted to the tune of the wedding march from Lohengrin. Detectors probed at the bride and found only cloth. The elevator began to slow. After it came to a full stop, the doors remained closed for a moment, and then, squeaking, they opened.

The stench of decay flowed into the car. For a moment the bride recoiled, and then she stepped forward out of the car. The room had once been a marvelous mechanism: a stainless-steel womb. Not much bigger than the giant pneumatic mattress that occupied the center, the room was completely automatic. Temperature regulators kept it at blood heat. Food came directly from the processing rooms through the tubes without human aid. Sprays had been installed for perfumed water to sweep dirt and refuse to collectors around the edge of the room that would dispose of it. An overhead spray washed the creature who occupied the mattress. Around the edges of the mattress, like a great circular organ with ten thousand keys, was a complex control console. Directly over the mattress, on the ceiling, was a view screen.

Some years before, apparently, a water pipe had broken, through some shift in the earth, after a small leak or a hard freeze had made the rock swell. The cleansing sprays no longer worked, and the occupant of the room either was afraid to have intruders trace the trouble, or he no longer cared.

The floor was littered with decaying food, with food containers and wrappers, with waste matter. As the bride
stepped into the room, a multitude of cockroaches scattered. Mice scampered into hiding places.

The bride pulled the long white-satin skirt up above her hips. She unwound a thin, nylon cord from her waist. A loop was fastened into the end. She shook it out until it hung free.

Weaver, she saw, was watching the overhead screen with almost hypnotic concentration. Pearce was saying, “Aging is not a physical disease; it is mental. The mind grows tired and lets the body die. Only half the Cartwrights' immunity to death lies in their blood; the other half is their unflagging will to live.

“You are one hundred fifty-three years old. I tended your father, who died before you were born. I gave him, unwittingly, a transfusion of Marshall Cartwright's blood.”

Weaver whispered, “But that would make you—” His voice was thin and high; it was not godlike at all. It was ridiculous coming from that vast mass of flesh.

“Almost two hundred years old,” Pearce said. His voice was stronger, richer, deeper—no longer a whisper. “Without even a transfusion of Cartwright blood, even an injection of the
elixir vitae.
The effective mind can achieve conscious control of the autonomic nervous system, of the very cells that make up the bloodstream and the body.”

The bride craned her neck to see the screen on the ceiling. Pearce looked different. He was taller. His legs were straight and muscular. His shoulders were broader. As the bride watched, muscle and flesh and fat built up
beneath his skin, firming it, smoothing out wrinkles. The facial bones receded beneath young flesh and skin. Silky white hair thickened and grew darker.

“You wonder why I stayed old,” Pearce said, and his voice was resonant and powerful. “It is something one does not use for oneself. It comes through giving, not taking.”

His sunken eyelids grew full, paled, opened. And Pearce looked out at Weaver, tall, strong, and straight—no more than thirty, surely. There was power latent in that face—power leashed, under control. Weaver recoiled from it.

Then, onto the screen, walked Marna.

Weaver's eyes bulged. His head swiveled toward the bride. Harry tossed off the veil and swung the looped cord lightly between two fingers. The importance of his next move was terrifying. The first throw had to be accurate, because he might never have a chance for another. His surgeon's fingers were deft, but he had never thrown a lariat. Christopher had described how he should do it, but there had been no chance to practice.

And if he were dragged within reach of those doughy arms, a hug would smother him. And in that startled moment, Weaver's head lifted with surprise and his hand stabbed toward the console. Harry flipped the cord. The loop dropped over Weaver's head and tightened around his neck.

Quickly Harry wrapped the cord several times around his waist and pulled it tight with his right hand. Weaver jerked against it, tightening it further. The thin cord disappeared
into the neck's soft flesh. Weaver's stubby fingers clawed at it, tearing the skin, as his body thrashed on the mattress.

He had, Harry thought crazily, an Immortal at the end of his fishing line—a great white whale struggling to free itself so that it could live forever, smacking the pneumatic waves with fierce lunges and savage tugs. It seemed as unreal as a nightmare.

Weaver, by some titanic effort, had turned over. He had his hands around the cord now. He rose onto soft, flowing knees and pulled at the cord, dragging Harry forward toward the mattress. Weaver's eyes were beginning to bulge out of his pudding-face.

Harry dug his heels into the floor. Weaver came up, like a whale leaping its vast bulk incredibly out of the water, and stood, shapeless and monstrous, his face purpling. Then, deep inside, the heart gave up, and the body sagged. It flowed like a melting wax image back to the mattress on which it had spent almost three-quarters of a century.

Harry dazedly unwrapped the cord from his hand and waist. It had cut deep into the skin; blood welled out. He didn't feel anything as he dropped the cord. He shut his eyes and shuddered.

After a period of time that he never remembered, he heard someone calling him. “Harry!” It was Marna's voice. “Are you all right? Harry, please!”

He took a deep breath. “Yes. Yes, I'm all right.”

“Go to the console,” said the young man who had been Pearce. “You'll have to find the right controls, but
they should be marked. And then we've got to get out of here ourselves. Marshall Cartwright is outside, and I think he's getting impatient.”

Harry nodded, but still he waited. It would take a strong man to go out into a world where immortality was a fact rather than a dream. He would have to live with it and its problems. And they would be greater than anything he had imagined.

He moved forward to begin the search.

An
Original
Publication of Pocket Books

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2004 by James Gunn

“New Blood” was published originally in
Astounding Science Fiction,
October 1955, copyright 1955 by Street & Smith, Inc., copyright renewed by James E. Gunn, 1983.

“Donor” was published originally in
Fantastic Stories of Imagination,
November 1960, copyright 1960 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Co., copyright renewed by James E. Gunn, 1988.

“Elixir” was published by
Analog,
May 2004, copyright 2004 by James Gunn.

“Medic” was published originally under the title “Not So Great an Enemy” in
Venture,
July 1957, copyright 1957 by Mercury Press, Inc., copyright renewed by James E. Gunn, 1985.

“Immortal” was published originally in
Star Science Fiction #4,
copyright 1958 by Ballantine Books, Inc.

The Immortal
was published originally by Bantam Books, copyright 1962 by James Gunn, copyright renewed 1990 by James Gunn.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN: 0-671-53486-6

ISBN: 978-1501-11023-8 (ebook)

First Pocket Books trade paperback edition September 2004

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