The Immortals Page 12

  “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.

  Someone buzzed at the door for admission, and Pearce went to the intercom.

  “It’s me, Julia,” a voice said. “Are you all right?”

  Pearce w
ent into the airlock to admit her, hoping she was alone but knowing that it didn’t matter: He could not exclude the world. She was alone, and she took hold of his arm in reassurance as she entered. “Sure,” he said.

  “So much has happened.”

  “My grant has been renewed,” Pearce said. “It seems the executive director of the National Research Institute has checked in as a patient.” Did he detect a flicker of awareness? “But I think it’s time Tom Barnett moved on. He’s capable enough to handle his own operation. Do you think you can find him another position?”

  They had moved into the laboratory and stood in front of his experiment in apoptosis. “I’ll do better than that,” Hudson said. “I’ll recommend him to a friend in Chicago, who’s looking for a senior geriatrician.”

  “I’ll need a new assistant,” Pearce said. “Would you like to apply?”

  She looked at him as if he had made a declaration of love. “I’d have to give up what little free time I have, like reading and maybe some social obligations, but I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.”

  “I was hoping you’d give up administration,” he said.

  “Not yet,” she said. “Maybe in a couple of years.”

  “I want you to see this,” he said, opening the lid of his experiment. All the cell cultures were dead except for two.

  “Success already?” she said.

  “It’s a beginning,” he said, and put his arm around her shoulder. But it was more than a beginning. It was the beginning of the end. The long search was almost over, and he knew he would discover what the alchemists had searched for all their lives: the secret of immortality. But he would not give it to the world until Locke was dead; no doubt he would be replaced by someone just as determined and just as ruthless, but he would not have Locke’s combination of qualities or experience.

  Julia put her arm around his waist, and they stood looking down at the immortal cells. He felt like the hero of an interplanetary romance.

  And yet he knew that it would take a long time before he was confident that Julia herself was not one of Locke’s agents, as Barnett had turned out to be. He could love her, and he would have to trust her, but he might never be sure.

  Maybe that was the human condition.

  PART IV

  MEDIC

  He woke to pain. It was a sharp, stabbing sensation in the pit of his stomach. It pulled his knees up toward his chest and contorted his gaunt, yellowed face with an involuntary grimace that creased the skin along familiar lines, like parchment folded and refolded.

  The pain stabbed again. He grunted; his body jerked. Slowly it ebbed, flood waters retreating, leaving its detritus of tormented nerve endings like a reminder of return. “Coke!” shouted the man on the twenty-ninth floor.

  The word echoed around the big room, bounced off the tall ceiling and the wood-paneled walls. There was no answer. “Coke!” he screamed. “COKE!”

  Footsteps pattered distantly, clapped against marble floors, muffled themselves in carpeting. They stopped beside the broad, silken bed. “Yes, Boss?” Even the voice cringed. Cringing made the man even shorter. The little eyes wavering on the monkey face refused to focus.

  The sick man writhed on the bed. “The medicine!”

  Coke snatched up the brown bottle from the gray metal nightstand and shook out three pills into a trembling hand. One of them dropped on the floor and he retrieved it. He held them out, and the sick man grabbed them greedily, popped them into his mouth. Into his hand Coke put a glass of water he had poured from a silver pitcher. The sick man drank, his Adam’s apple jerking convulsively.

  In a few minutes the sick man was sitting up. He hugged his knees to his chest and breathed in exhausted pantings. “I’m sick, Coke,” he moaned. “I’ve got to have a doctor. I’m going to die, Coke.” Terror was in his voice. “Call the doctor!”

  “I can’t,” Coke squeaked. “Don’t you remember?”

  The sick man frowned as if he were trying to understand, and then his face writhed and his left hand swung out viciously. It caught Coke across the mouth and hurled him into the corner. He crouched there, one hand pressed to his bleeding lips, watching the sick man with a rodent’s wary eyes.

  “Be here!” the sick man snarled. “Don’t make me call you!” He forgot Coke. His head dropped. He hammered futilely against the bed with a knotted fist. “Damn!” he moaned.

  In that position he sat, as if graven, for minutes. Coke huddled in the corner, unmoving, watchful. At last the sick man straightened, threw back the heavy comforter, and stood up. He walked painfully to the curtained windows. As he walked he whimpered. “I’m sick. I’m going to die.”

  He tugged on a thick, velvet cord; the curtains whispered apart. Sunlight flooded into the room, spilled over the sick man; it turned his scarlet pajamas into flame, his face into dough. “It’s a terrible thing,” said the sick man, “when a dying man can’t get a doctor. I need the elixir, Coke. I need treatment for this pain. I can’t stand it any longer.”

  Coke watched; his eyes never left the tall, thin man who stood in the sunlight and stared blindly out over the city. Coke took his hand away from his mouth; the back was smeared and red, and blood welled through three cuts in the lips.

  “Get me a doctor, Coke,” the sick man said. “I don’t care how you do it. Just get him.”

  Coke pulled his feet under him and scuttled out of the room. The sick man stared out of the window, not hearing.

  From here the ruins were not so apparent. The city looked almost as it had fifty years ago. But if a man looked closely, he could see the holes in the roofs, the places where the porcelain false fronts had fallen and the brick behind them had crumbled and toppled into the streets.

  Twelfth Street was blocked completely. Mounds of rubble made many other streets impassable. The hand of Time is not as swift as that of man, but it is inexorable.

  The distant, arrowing sweep of I-35 drew the eye like movement, bright through the drabness of decay. The Kansas Medical Center was out of sight behind the rising ground to the south, but the complex, walled entity on Missouri’s Hospital Hill was brilliant in the sunlight. It was an island rising out of a stinking sea, an enclave of life within the dying city.

  The sick man stared out the window at the first tendrils of smog thrusting up the streets from the river, climbing toward the twenty-block-square fortress on Hospital Hill. But they would never get that far.

  “Damn them!” the sick man whimpered. “Damn them!”

  * * *

  Flowers peered out the slit-windows of the one-man ambulance into the sooty night. The misting rain now was mixed with smog. The weather was a live thing against which the fog lamp struggled helplessly. It shifted constantly, there was no place to grab it, and the amber beam retreated in defeat, let itself be rolled back.

  Ever since Flowers had left the trafficway with its lights and its occasional patrols, he had been lost and uneasy. Even the trafficway wasn’t safe anymore. A twenty-millimeter shell caroming from the ambulance’s armored roof made a fearful din.

  Where had the police been then?

  The maps that listed Truman Road as “passable” were out of date. This had to be Truman Road; it was too wide to be anything else. But he had only a vague notion how far east he had come. On either side of the street was darkness; possibly it was a shade denser on the right.

  Unless that was a strip razed by wind, fire, or dynamite, it was a park. He visualized the city map. It was either the Parade or the Grove.

  Something exploded under the front wheel. The ambulance leaped, shuddering, into the air. It came down hard. Before the shocks absorbed it, the chauffeur lost control and the ambulance slewed toward the left.

  Flowers grabbed the emergency wheel and took over from the chauffeur, turning the ambulance in the direction of the skid. Like the muffled wail of a parturient woman came the sound of screaming tires.

  Lights loomed up unexpectedly, dim-red lanterns in the night, almost invisi
ble in the swirling smog. They would have been waist high to a man standing in the street. That meant there was something supporting them.

  Flowers twisted the wheel sharply to the right this time, clutched his seat with taut legs as the ambulance took the curb, fought the crazy tilt as it lit in mud and skidded again. It was a park, all right. He raced through it, fighting desperately for control, dodging trees and bent telephone poles with their tangles of old webs, until he jogged the ambulance back into the street. He was blocks past the beginning of madness. He pulled up.

  In the ambulance, balanced at the side of the road, Flowers sat and sweated. He rubbed the back of a hand across his forehead and fought the twitching nerves across his shoulders. Damn the city! he thought savagely. Damn the street department! Damn the resident who would send out a medic on a night like this.

  But it was nobody’s fault.

  The night traveler went at his own risk. There weren’t enough of them to waste scarce taxes on street repairs, and it was no trick to avoid the holes, ruts, and uprooted slabs of concrete by daylight.

  He thought back over the near accident. That hadn’t felt so much like a hole. It had felt more like a landmine. And those lanterns could have been sitting on a barricade that sheltered a band of hijackers.

  Flowers shivered and stepped on the accelerator and wished fervently that he were back at the Center, working out his shift in the antiseptic, bulletproof comfort of the emergency ward.

  The chauffeur seemed to have settled down again. As Flowers eased the ambulance back into the middle of the road, he relaxed his grip on the wheel.

  The smog shifted, and he saw the light. It glimmered far down the street like something lost in the night.

  Flowers turned off all illumination and coasted past the café. Inside was a waiter behind a long counter, and a single customer. Flowers swung the ambulance around the corner into a puddle of darkness.