The Immortals Read online

  Children’s mercy, Pearce thought. He hoped they got it, but he knew that this was a world that had little mercy except for those it favored, and they lived outside the inner city and had few children.

  On the second floor was a room that Pearce recognized. He had never been there, but the layout was unmistakable. It was an operating room, no matter what uses had intervened. Glareless lights once had turned this room into day. Dials and gauges had lined the walls. Bottles of oxygen and anesthetic had been nearby. Tables and autoclaves for instruments. A T-bar for infusions. And a stainless steel operating table in the center.

  Now it was lit by candles. It held only battered, old furniture pushed against the walls and in the middle a narrow bed. On the bed, propped up with ragged pillows, was Marilyn Van Cleve. She had her eyes closed but turned as Pearce entered with the old man and gave them a half-smile that turned into a grimace as a contraction seized her body. “You came,” she whispered.

  “I said I would,” he answered.

  “Not everybody keeps promises.”

  “I’ve always kept mine. When did the contractions start? How far apart are they?”

  “Almost twenty-four hours ago,” she said, panting. “They were ten minutes apart twelve hours ago, about an hour ago they were five minutes apart, and now they’re down to two. I—just—can’t—squeeze—him—out. I think it’s time to help him get born.”

  Pearce nodded. “Get some boiling water,” he told the old man who waited by the door.

  “Too long,” she said.

  “At least,” he said, “get me some soap and water to wash my hands.”

  While he waited for the old man, he folded back Van Cleve’s long dress to just beneath her breasts and placed his hands on her belly to feel the contractions. “It’s been a long time,” he said. “I hope it hasn’t been too long. And these operating conditions—they’re beyond contamination.”

  “You can’t hurt a Cartwright,” she said.

  “You’d better be right.”

  When the old man returned with a bucket of dirty water and a thin bar of soap, streaked with dark veins, Pearce shrugged and washed as thoroughly as he could. “I need more light,” he said, and the old man brought two kerosene lamps that he placed on either side of the bed at Van Cleve’s hips.

  From the second bag Pearce removed a large plastic bag and from his black bag a bottle of alcohol with which he swabbed his hands and Van Cleve’s belly before wiping it a second time with iodine. He pulled on a pair of clear plastic gloves that shrank to fit his hands and picked up an instrument that looked like a fat stainless-steel pen.

  “I could give you a shot for the pain,” he said, “but I’m not an anesthesiologist, and I don’t know the effect on the baby.”

  “Go ahead,” she said. “Knowing that injuries aren’t fatal helps control the pain.” And she did not make a sound as the laser made a vertical cut through her belly and into the womb.

  He worked quickly, as if he knew what he was doing, and when the cutting was done reached his hands into her body and lifted out the baby, trailing its umbilical cord. The baby began to cry, loudly.

  He looked up at Van Cleve. She was still conscious, though clearly in pain. “You have a son,” he said. “I’m no expert, but he looks as big and healthy as any baby I’ve seen. I’d say ten or eleven pounds. No wonder you had trouble.”

  She laughed. “Give him to me.” She held out her arms.

  “Just a moment.” He tied off the cord close to the baby’s navel and again a few centimeters away before he cut it. “I need a blanket or a sheet or something,” he said.

  “Never mind that,” she said.

  He placed the screaming baby in her arms. Its body left reddish smears on her gown, but she didn’t notice. Instead she looked down at the small face that immediately quieted and began looking up at her and then around the room.

  Pearce breathed deeply. Obstetricians were at the right end, the satisfying end, of the life process. Maybe he had made a mistake going into geriatrics.

  He removed the placenta from the womb, along with the trailing umbilical cord to which it was attached at one end, and dropped them into the plastic bag. He adjusted the switch on his laser scalpel and sealed the cuts in Van Cleve’s uterus and belly. They closed neatly, and he hoped there was no infection. But Cartwrights had to be resistant to almost every microorganism, and he thought, as he worked, that he could detect signs of healing even before the laser touched the wounds. He bandaged the incision and pulled down her gown as far as it would go.

  Finished, he pressed the cuff of the gloves on each hand, and they peeled away. Once more he washed his hands in the bucket before returning his instruments and bottles to his black bag. Into the other bag he put the bag holding the umbilical cord and placenta. Stem cells, he said to himself. When he was finished, he looked up at Van Cleve once more. She had placed the baby to her breast; it was trying to suckle.

  “Thank you, Doctor,” she said. “Mother was right.”

  “I wish I could do something more,” he said. “It isn’t going to be easy for you, with recent surgery and a new baby. But from now on I bring only danger of discovery.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be able to move on in a day, and for now I’m among good people.” She looked over at the doorway, where men and women had crowded to see what was going on. “When you don’t have anything, you can let yourself care about others, because no one can use your kindness against you.”

  As Pearce watched, three men pushed their way through the throng into the room. One had a small, ragged blanket that he placed over the baby, the second, a shabby baby carrier that he put at Van Cleve’s side, and the third, a shriveled orange that he gave to Van Cleve’s free hand.

  * * *

  Pearce had the old man stop a block from his car. All the way he could feel the old man’s body racked with coughs, worse now in the night air and without the adrenaline of the original wild trip. But the old man had brushed aside any suggestions for treatment and offers of help, and Pearce trudged wearily toward the car as the old man roared away.

  He had triggered the front door of the car when he was twenty paces away, but as he was stooping to get in, he felt his arms grabbed from behind.

  “Easy,” a man’s voice said.

  A light was splashed in Pearce’s eyes.

  He struggled, futilely. The arms holding him were strong. “I’m Doctor Pearce. This is my car.”

  “That’s what they all say.”

  “Russell,” Julia Hudson said. “We were worried when we found your car abandoned.”

  “Julia,” Pearce said. “Tell this thug I’m who I say I am.”

  “Let him go,” Hudson said. The hand released him and the light turned toward her. She was standing at the front of the car looking young and concerned. “The guard noticed your car identifier not moving, thought you might be in trouble, and notified me. What happened? We thought you were kidnapped, or worse.”

  Pearce had had lots of time on the ride back to think of an explanation if his car had been found. “I had a house call nearby, and when my car malfunctioned I decided to walk.”

  “A house call?” Hudson said incredulously.

  “Difficult as that may sound,” Pearce said, “I do make house calls. Ask Tom Barnett.”

  “Oh, I believe you,” Hudson said. “It’s just that I can’t understand it, and I can’t let you continue. It’s too dangerous.”

  Pearce shrugged. “Can we go now?” He put his bags in the backseat of the car. “I’ve got some laboratory work yet to do.”

  Hudson got into the other front seat. “Take my car back,” she said to the guard. She turned to Pearce. “I’d like to see how you’re doing.”

  “It’s pretty late,” he said.

  “I’m used to working late,” she said, and he could think of no other excuses.

  As they made their way through the night-stilled corridors toward the laboratory, he thought that surely she
must be able to smell the blood on him or the odor of harsh soap or disinfectant, but she gave no sign. “I’ve been thinking about your suggestion,” he said, “about the stem cells. An improvement in them must be involved in the Cartwright mutation.”

  She nodded. “They would produce more red blood cells, more platelets, more white cells for the Cartwrights themselves, and when transfused, for the ailing or aging recipient.”

  “Of course,” he said. “I don’t know why I never thought of that.”

  “Sometimes the original workers are too close to the problem to consider alternatives,” she said. “And you might think about the primordial chordamesoderm.”

  “PC?”

  “It causes formation of all the organs in the body before it turns off after the embryo has developed. But what if it were capable of being turned on again, by some feedback mechanism, to repair a damaged organ or stimulate the development of a new one—a new liver, a new kidney, a new heart, even new arteries—from surrounding tissue?”

  They had reached the laboratory, and he put his hand casually on the palm plate as he punched in the code. He didn’t want Hudson to know that he was taking extra precautions. He raised the lid on his cell experiment and showed her his samples. “What I’m checking for is whether some portion of the DNA sample I’m working with might delay or eliminate apoptosis.”

  “Apoptosis?” she said. “It’s been a long time since medical school.”

  “Not as long as it has been for me,” he said. They both laughed and their eyes met. Pearce had the peculiar sensation that he was attracted to a woman who was young enough to be his granddaughter, perhaps even his great-granddaughter. And not only that, she might be one of those sent to watch him. He went on hastily. “But I have the advantage of studying up for my research.

  “Apoptosis is the unexplained phenomenon by which cells die. Given sufficient substrate and their by-products washed away, cells will survive approximately forty-five cycles, so it may not be a matter simply of inadequate circulation leading to insufficient food or a buildup of waste or free radicals. It may be a built-in termination, a death sentence that must be canceled.”

  “And has anything happened here?” she asked, looking back at the experiment in the machine before them.

  He closed the lid. “Too soon to tell,” he said. “In any case, it’s probably just a practice run for the rare possibility that I might come into some authentic Cartwright blood.”

  She put a hand on his arm. “Take care of yourself, Russell,” she said.

  “Russ,” he said. “You, too.”

  After she had gone, he went back to the experiment. He thought he could tell that all but two of the cultures had already started to die. Two. One of them might be an illusion, but two might mean that more than one segment of Van Cleve’s DNA was involved.

  He returned to his apartment with his second bag and hung the placenta by clamps from a shelf of the refrigerator. He cut the umbilical cord just above the place he had tied it off so that both drained into a stainless-steel pan. For the first time in years, he went to bed happy.

  * * *

  He awoke to panic. Alarm bells rang and somewhere a siren screamed. Pearce rolled over and checked the time—5:38—and fumbled into his pants and shirt and white hospital jacket. He stuck his feet sockless into shoes and moved toward the door before he remembered the priceless treasure in his refrigerator and the experiment progressing in his laboratory, and it all seemed too much of a coincidence.

  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 bear
ded 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.”