The Immortals

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  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Preface

  Epigraph

  Part I: New Blood

  Part II: Donor

  Part III: Elixir

  Part IV: Medic

  Part V: Immortal

  INTRODUCTION

  James Gunn’s The Immortals is elegant, innovative—and chilling. Gunn’s take on immortality is simple enough, yet mythic—it’s all in the blood.

  More blood.

  Mutated blood.

  With the right blood, you can live forever . . .

  A man is born who is resistant to the disease of aging, and anyone with enough money on this Earth wants to know where he is, where his children are . . .

  Because they could be tickets to immortality. Rich old men hankering for life everlasting. For the blood is the life . . .

  I don’t know about you, but all that scares the bejesus out of me. We’ve seen it before, of course; it’s now the core of one of the great themes of imaginative literature, the vampire. One difference here is that it is not the upper class monster who conveys an unwanted deathlessness on a hapless commoner, but the hapless and elusive commoner who carries the highly desired trait.

  James Gunn does it as straight science fiction, with a strong scientific underpinning. Very convincing. Clinical, medical noir. They should film it in black and white.

  And that makes The Immortals a classic.

  —Greg Bear

  PREFACE

  THE IMMORTALS

  Story ideas come at unexpected times and develop in unexpected ways, and sometimes have lives of their own.

  The idea for The Immortals came to me during my second stint as a full-time writer. The first was a twelve-month period back in 1948–49 after I had given up the idea of becoming a playwright and then of becoming a radio writer. I sold several stories (the first ten under the pseudonym of Edwin James) but not enough to live on and decided to return to the University of Kansas to get a master’s degree in English. Two years later I took a job as an editor for Western Printing & Lithographing Company of Racine, Wisconsin. It published paperback books and Disney comics for Dell and Little Golden Books for Simon and Schuster. I was supposed to create a science-fiction line. But when I attended my first World Science Fiction Convention (and my first convention of any kind) in Chicago in 1952 and learned from my agent, Frederik Pohl, that he had sold four stories for me, I decided to return to full-time writing.

  Halfway through that period of about two and a half years, I came up with the idea for The Immortals. Science fiction’s appeal is its sense of wonder, its series of “what-ifs?” One day I began wondering about how humanity might actually achieve immortality. Those ideas are starting points, they develop into stories through research. Some creatures, I found, never die from natural causes. Another source suggested that people age because our circulatory system is inefficient; it doesn’t provide food for the cells when they need it, or remove the by-products of oxidation. What would happen if someone were born with a better circulatory system? And what if that improvement were capable of being transmitted to someone else through a blood transfusion? And what if the rejuvenating power might reside in a blood protein like the gamma globulins that provide passive immunity against infection when they are injected into other people (such as pregnant women, so that they don’t catch German measles)? Then the rejuvenation itself might be only temporary, lasting only about thirty to forty-five days, like the passive immunity conferred by gamma globulins. Those were the what-ifs that set off a process of story creation.

  I sat down and wrote “New Blood,” which my agent sent to John Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction. It was published in the November 1955 issue. By then I had finished the second story in the series “Donor.” Campbell wasn’t interested in more stories about immortal blood, so I sold it to Startling Stories; it was scheduled for publication in the winter issue of 1955—but the fall issue was the last (Startling Stories wasn’t the only magazine I helped kill). I resold it to Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, where it appeared in the November 1960 issue.

  By the time “New Blood” was published, I had moved my family from Kansas City back to Lawrence, Kansas, and had been asked to teach a couple of sections of English composition at the University of Kansas. Before the semester was over, I was invited to become managing editor of the University’s Alumni Magazine. I made a deal with the university to work only three weeks a month during the summers so I could use the fourth for writing. During the first summer I wrote “Medic,” which Bob Mills published in the July 1957 issue of Venture Science Fiction as “Not So Great an Enemy.” The second summer I wrote “The Immortals,” which Fred Pohl published in Star Science Fiction #4 in 1958.

  By that time, Bantam Books had launched its science fiction line. I had already sold them Station in Space and The Joy Makers. The third book Dick Roberts accepted was The Immortals. It was published in 1962.

  On the other side of the continent, Robert Specht, an aspiring screenwriter, was working in the Los Angeles office of Bantam Books. Each month a stack of paperback books arrived from the East Coast; one month Specht picked The Immortals to take home with him and, he later told me, decided immediately that he wanted to make it into a movie.

  Four years later he was story editor for Everett Chambers on the Peyton Place television series, and he persuaded Chambers to go in with him to obtain the film and television rights to The Immortals. They contacted my agent, who by then was Harry Altshuler (Fred Pohl had gone out of the agenting business). We agreed upon a two-year option with modest payments every six months. I got three checks but the fourth never came. I wrote Bob Specht, who said that Chambers had dropped out, that he had tried the novel on every producer, director, and major actor in Hollywood without success, but that some new possibilities had opened up. We agreed upon a new contract that—to everyone’s surprise—actually developed into a film.

  ABC had decided that it would make its own television films rather than renting them from Hollywood and use them on what it called the ABC-TV Movie of the Week. Suddenly TV scripts were in demand, and Bob Specht sold Paramount on The Immortals. It was filmed in the spring of 1969 as The Immortal, featuring Christopher George, Barry Sullivan, Ralph Bellamy, Carol Lynley, and Jessica Walter, directed by Joseph Sargent, and broadcast the following September. It was scheduled to be the first film in the new ABC series, but at the last moment was edged out by Seven in Darkness with Milton Berle.

  Apparently the film rated well (“It ranked fourth in the eighty-city Nielsens,” Bob told me later), although, to be sure, the film had changed the focus from the social change created by the reality of immortality for a few to a chase story in which Christopher George was pursued by rich and powerful aging people lusting for his blood. ABC decided to commission an hour-long series, also called The Immortal, for the following year. Only Christopher George was carried over from the film (Bob Specht didn’t even get considered for story editor), and ABC decided to play the series for adventure instead of science fiction. But I won’t go into that.

  During the interim Bob Specht called and said that ABC wanted a novelization of the screenplay to promote the series. I was offered one-third of the royalties and said, “Go ahead.” At the last minute I was phoned by Bantam to say that it couldn’t find a writer to do the novelization, so I wrote it myself. It may have been the only time that the autho
r of a novel wrote the novelization of the script (our director of Special Collections called it “cruel and unusual punishment”). My consolation is that it was easy money: I wrote it in six days so that it could be published before the series started in September 1970.

  Flash forward about twenty-five years. Some interesting things happened in the interim: Bantam Books reprinted the novel in 1968 and Pocket Books in 1979, and it got translated into Italian, Japanese, German, Portuguese, and French, and reprinted in Great Britain. But then, in the mid-1990s I got a telephone call from a woman who said she was calling from Disney Pictures and was looking for the person who owned the feature film rights to The Immortals. “You’ve found him,” I said. Back in 1968, Paramount, when it took over the contract from Bob Specht, had elected to buy only the television rights, not the more costly feature-film rights.

  That began a series of Hollywood experiences (which Vonda N. McIntyre has characterized as “hysterical enthusiasm followed by total silence”). Touchstone Pictures, a Disney subsidiary, was interested in making a feature film (“we see it as a major motion picture with a major star and a major director such as Sidney Pollack or James Cameron,” the Touchstone president told me, when I visited him with my agent, Dorris Halsey). But whoever at Disney was enthusiastic about the project got fired, and Disney did not renew the option. Before the Disney option had expired, however, another producer was already pursuing the rights (tipped off, we heard, by a screenwriter who had been asked by Touchstone to offer a “take” on the film), and he took over the feature-film rights on the same terms. But then he, too, did not renew the option. A third and then a fourth producer took options and were unsuccessful. Now the novel is once more under option, to Warner Bros.

  During all this film hope and hype, I resold the reprint rights to Pocket Books and, at the editor’s request, updated some of the material and added a new 20,000-word section in the middle. The Touchstone president had commented (perceptively, I thought) that it was really the doctor’s story, so I filled in a middle section about Dr. Russell Pearce’s search for the elixir vitae.

  People have not yet discovered immortality, although a recent article in The New York Times speculated that by 2,200 people may be living for six hundred years. But until then our only immortality may lie in progeny and books.

  James Gunn

  Lawrence, Kansas

  TO RICHARD

  Light breaks where no sun shines;

  Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart

  Push in their tides.

  Light breaks where no sun shines

  And death shall have no dominion.

  —DYLAN THOMAS

  PART I

  NEW BLOOD

  The young man was stretched out flat in a reclining hospital chair, his bare left arm muscular and brown on the table beside him. The wide, flat band of the sphygmomanometer was tight around his bicep, and the inside of his elbow, where the veins were blue traceries, had been swabbed with alcohol and betadine.

  His eyes followed the quick efficiency of the phlebotomist. Her movements were as crisp as her white uniform.

  She opened the left-hand door of the big refrigerator and from the second shelf removed a double plastic bag connected by plastic tubing. There was a hole at the bottom for hanging the bags from an IV pole. The plastic bag was empty, flat, and wrinkled. A syringe needle on a length of clear, plastic tubing was attached.

  The technician removed the protective plastic cap from the needle and stretched out the tubing. She inspected the donor’s inside arm where it had been sterilized and deadened with lidocaine. The vein was big and soft, and she slipped the needle into it with practiced skill. Dark red blood raced through the tube and into one of the plastic bags. Slowly a pool gathered at the bottom and the wrinkles began to smooth.

  The technician stripped a printed label with the date and a number from a sheet of nonstick paper and pressed it on the plastic bag. At the bottom she put her initials.

  “Keep making a fist,” she said, glancing at the bag.

  When the bag was full, she closed a clamp on the tube and removed the needle from the donor’s arm, replacing it with a cotton ball and a plastic bandage.

  “Keep that on for an hour or so,” she said.

  She drained the blood in the tubing into test tubes, sealed them, and applied smaller labels on them from the same preprinted sheet of paper before she placed them on a rack in the refrigerator.

  The tubing and needle were carefully discarded in a waste disposal canister with a plastic lining.

  “The typing will be done at the center,” the technician said. “If you’re really O-neg, you might make a bit of money from time to time. That’s the only kind that we have to buy when we can’t get enough donations.”

  The donor’s youthful lips twisted at the corners.

  “I’ll need your name and address for the records,” the technician said briskly, turning to the computer on her desk and typing a number into it. After the young man had given it and she had typed it in, she said, “We can have you notified when the results come back. The lab checks for AIDS, hepatitis, venereal and other blood-carried diseases. All confidential, of course. If you like, we can put your name in our professional donor’s file.”

  Without hesitation the young man shook his head.

  The technician shrugged and handed him a slip of paper. “Thanks anyway. Stay seated in the waiting room for ten minutes. There’s some orange juice, coffee, and muffins that you can have while you wait. The paper is a voucher for fifty dollars. You can cash it at the cashier’s office—by the front door as you go out.”

  For a moment after the young man’s broad back had disappeared from the doorway, the technician stared after him. Then she shrugged again, turned, and put the unit of blood onto the refrigerator’s top left-hand shelf.

  A unit of whole blood—new life in a plastic bag for someone who might die without it. Within a few days the white cells will begin to die, the blood will decline in ability to clot. With the aid of refrigeration, the red cells will last—some of them—for three weeks. After that the blood will be sent to the separator for the plasma, if it has not already been separated for packed red blood cells, or sold to a commercial company for separation of some of the plasma’s more than seventy proteins, the serum albumin, the gamma globulins. . . .

  A unit of blood—market price: $50. After the required tests, it will be moved to the second shelf from the top, right-hand side of the refrigerator, with the other units of O-type blood. But this blood was special. It had everything other blood had, and something extra that made it unique. There had never been any blood quite like it.

  Fifty dollars? How much is life worth?

  * * *

  The old man was eighty years old. His body was limp on the hard hospital bed. The air-conditioning was so muffled that the harsh unevenness of his breathing was loud. The only movement in the intensive care unit was the spasmodic rise and fall of the sheet that covered the old body.

  He was living—barely. He had used up his allotted three-score years and ten, and then some. It wasn’t merely that he was dying—everyone is. With him, it was imminent.

  Dr. Russell Pearce held one bony wrist in his firm, young right hand and looked at the monitors checking blood pressure, heart function, pulse, oxygen level. . . . Pearce’s face was serious, his dark eyes steady, his pale skin well molded over strong bones.

  The old man’s face was yellow over a grayish blue, the color of death. The wrinkled skin was pulled back like a mask for the skull. Once he might have been handsome; now his eyes were sunken, the closed eyelids dark over them, his mouth was a dark line, and his nose was a thin, arching beak.

  There is a kinship in old age, just as there is a kinship in infancy. Between the two, men differ, but at the extremes they are much the same.

  Pearce had seen old men in the nursing units, Medicaid patients most of them, picked up on the North Side when they didn’t wake up in their cardboard
boxes or Dumpsters, filthy, alcohol or drug addicts many of them. The only differences with this man were a little care and a few billion dollars. Where this man’s hair was groomed and snow-white, the other’s was yellowish-gray, long, scraggly on seamed, thin necks. Where this man’s skin was scrubbed and immaculate, the other’s had dirt in the wrinkles, sores in the crevices.

  Gently Pearce laid the arm down beside the body and slowly stripped back the sheet. The differences were minor. In dying, people are much the same. Once this old man had been tall, strong, vital. Now the thin body was emaciated; the rib cage struggled through the skin, fluttered. The old veins stood out, knotted, ropy, blue, varicose, on the sticklike legs.

  “Pneumonia?” Dr. Easter asked with professional interest. He was an older man, his hair gray at the temples, his appearance distinguished, calm.

  “Not yet. Malnutrition. You’d think he’d eat more, get better care. Money is supposed to take care of itself.”

  “It doesn’t follow. As his personal physician, I’ve learned that you don’t order around a billion dollars.”

  “Anemia,” Pearce went on. “Bleeding from a duodenal ulcer, I’d guess. We could operate, but I’m not sure he’d survive. Pulse weak, rapid. Blood pressure low. Arteriosclerosis and all the damage that entails.”

  Beside him a nurse made marks on a chart. Her face was smooth and young; the skin glowed with health.

  “Let’s have a blood count,” Pearce said to her briskly. “Urinalysis. Type and cross-match two units of blood, packed RBCs if you can get them, and administer one unit when available.”

  “Transfusion?” Easter asked.

  “It may provide temporary help. If it helps enough, we’ll give him more, maybe strengthen him enough for the operation.”

  “But he’s dying.” It was almost a question.