The Immortals Page 3

  “I’ve had mine and a bit more. Now I’m starting over at thirty. I’ve got forty or fifty to go. After that, what? Forty or fifty more?”

  “We all die,” Pearce said. “Nothing can stop that. Not one man born has not come to the grave at last. There’s a disease we contract at birth from which none of us recovers; it’s invariably fatal. Death.”

  “Suppose somebody develops a resistance to it?”

  “Don’t take what I said literally. I didn’t mean that death was a specific disease,” Pearce said. “We die in many ways: accident, infection—” And senescence, Pearce thought. For all we know, that’s a disease. It could be a disease. Etiology: Virus, unisolated, unsuspected, invades at birth or shortly thereafter—or maybe transmitted at conception.

  Incidence: Total.

  Symptoms: Slow degeneration of the physical entity, appearing shortly after maturity, increasing debility, failure of the circulatory system through arteriosclerosis and heart damage, decline in the immunity system, malfunction of sense and organs, loss of cellular regenerative ability, susceptibility to secondary invasions. . . .

  Prognosis: 100% fatal.

  “Everything dies,” Pearce went on without a pause. “Trees, planets, suns . . . it’s natural, inevitable. . . .” But it isn’t. Natural death is a relatively new thing. It appeared only when life became multicellular and complicated. Maybe it was the price for complexity, for the ability to think.

  Protozoa don’t die. Metazoa—sponges, flatworms, coelenterates—don’t die. Certain fish don’t die except through accident. “Voles are animals that never stop growing and never grow old.” Where did I read that? And even the tissues of the higher vertebrates are immortal under the right conditions.

  Carrel and Ebeling proved that. Give the cell enough of the right food, and it will never die. Cells from every part of the body have been kept alive indefinitely in vitro. Differentiation and specialization—that meant that any individual cell didn’t find the perfect conditions. Besides staying alive, it had duties to perform for the whole. A plausible explanation, but was it true? Wasn’t it just as plausible that the cell died because the circulatory system broke down?

  Let the circulatory system remain sound, regenerative, and efficient, and the rest of the body might well remain immortal.

  “When we say something’s natural, it means we’ve given up trying to understand it,” Weaver said. “You gave me a transfusion. Immunities can be transferred with the blood, Easter told me. Who donated that pint of blood?”

  Pearce sighed. “Donor records are confidential.”

  Weaver snorted derisively.

  * * *

  The blood bank was in the basement. Pearce led the way down busy, noisy corridors, cluttered with patients in wheelchairs waiting for X rays and other tests, and others on gurneys being maneuvered to labs or back to their rooms.

  “If you’re smart,” Jansen told him on the stairs, “you’ll cooperate with Mister Weaver. Do what he asks you. Tell him what he wants to know. You’ll get taken care of. If not—” Jansen smiled unpleasantly.

  Pearce laughed. “What can Weaver do to me?”

  “Don’t find out,” Jansen advised.

  The blood bank was clean and efficient and, for the moment, empty except for the phlebotomist. When Jansen asked for the information about Weaver’s transfusion, she keyed in Weaver’s name on her computer. “Weaver?” she said. “Here it is. On the fourth.” Her finger traveled across the screen. “O-neg.”

  Pearce said to the technician, “Have you had any donations from Mister Weaver’s office?”

  “None that have identified themselves.”

  “You’re just making difficulties,” Jansen said. “There’s no such rule about replacing blood, but don’t worry: You’ll get your blood tomorrow. Who was the donor?”

  “That information cannot be released,” the technician said.

  “We can get a court order here within two hours,” Jansen replied.

  “Go ahead,” Pearce said. “I’ll take responsibility.”

  The technician pressed another key and the array of data shifted on the computer screen. “Marshall Cartwright,” she said. “O-neg. Kline: Okay. Now I remember. That was the day after our television appeal. We ran low on O-neg, and our usual donor list was exhausted. The response was limited.”

  “Remember him?” asked Jansen.

  She frowned and turned her head away to stare out the window. “That was the third. We have more than twenty donors a day. And that was over a week ago.”

  “Think!” Jansen demanded.

  “I am thinking,” she snapped. “What do you want to know?”

  “What he looked like. What he said. His address.”

  “Was there something wrong with the blood?”

  Pearce grinned suddenly. “ ‘Contrariwise,’ said Tweedledee.”

  A brief smile slipped across the technician’s face. “We don’t get many complaints like that. I can give you his address easy enough.” She punched some keys on her computer. “Funny. He sold his blood once, but he didn’t want to do it again.

  “Cartwright. Marshall Cartwright. Abbot Hotel. No phone listed.”

  “Abbot,” Jansen said thoughtfully. “Sounds like a flop joint. Does that bring anything back?” he asked the technician insistently. “He didn’t want his name on the donor’s list.”

  Slowly, regretfully, she shook her head. “What’s all this about anyway? Weaver? Isn’t that the rich old guy up in 305 who made such a miraculous recovery?”

  “Right,” Jansen said, brushing the question away. “We’ll want copies of the computer entries.”

  “You can have the computer entries as soon as the technician can have them run off,” Pearce cut in.

  “In the next hour,” Jansen said.

  “In the next hour,” Pearce agreed.

  “That’s all, then,” Jansen said. “If you remember anything, get in touch with Mister Weaver or me, Carl Jansen. There’ll be something in it for you.”

  Something in it, something in it, Pearce thought. The slogan of a class. “What’s in it for the human race? Never mind. You got what you came for.”

  “I always do,” Jansen said brutally. “Mister Weaver and I—we always get what we come for. Remember that!”

  Pearce remembered while the young-old man named Leroy Weaver grew a handsome set of teeth, as white as his hair was black, and directed the course of his commercial empire from the hospital room, chafed at Pearce’s delay in giving him the answer to his question, at the continual demands for blood samples, at his own enforced idleness, and slyly pinched the nurses during the day. Pearce did not inquire into what happened at night.

  Before the week was over, Weaver had discharged himself from the hospital and Pearce had located a private detective.

  The black paint on the frosted glass of the door read:

  JASON LOCKE

  Private Investigations

  But Locke wasn’t Pearce’s preconception of a private eye. He wasn’t tough—not on the outside. The hardness was inside, and he didn’t let it show.

  Locke was middle-aged, graying, his face firm and tanned, a big man dressed in a well-draped tropical suit in light cocoa; he looked like a successful executive. But business wasn’t that good: The office was shabby, the furniture was little better, and there was no secretary or receptionist.

  He was just the man Pearce wanted.

  He listened to Pearce and watched him with dark, steady eyes.

  “I want you to find a man,” Pearce said. “Marshall Cartwright. Last address: Abbot Hotel.”

  “Why?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “I have a license to keep—and a desire to keep out of jail.”

  “There’s nothing illegal about it,” Pearce said, “but there might be danger. I won’t lie to you; it’s a medical problem I can’t explain. It’s important to me that you find Cartwright. It’s important to him—it might mean his life. It
might even be important to the world. The danger lies in the fact that other people are looking for him; if they spot you they might get rough. I want you to find Cartwright before they do.”

  “Who is ‘they’?”

  Pearce shrugged. “Pinkerton, Burns, International—I don’t know. One of the big firms, probably. Maybe a private outfit.”

  “Is that why you don’t go to them?”

  “One reason. I won’t conceal anything, though. The man hiring them is Leroy Weaver.”

  Locke looked interested. “I heard the old boy was back on the prowl. Have you got any pictures, descriptions, anything to help me spot this man Cartwright?”

  Pearce looked down at his hands. “Nothing except the name. He’s a young man. He sold a pint of blood on the third. He refused to have his name added to our professional donor’s file. He gave his address then as the Abbot.”

  “I know it,” Locke said. “A fly trap on Ninth. That means he’s left town, I’d say.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “That’s why he sold the blood. To get out of town. He wasn’t interested in selling it again; he wasn’t going to be around. And anyone who would stay at a place like the Abbot wouldn’t toss away a chance at some regular, effortless money.”

  “That’s what I figured,” Pearce said. “Will you take the job?”

  Locke swung around in his swivel chair and stared out the window across the light standards, transformers, and overhead power lines of Twelfth Street. It was nothing to look at, but he seemed to draw a decision from it. “Two hundred fifty dollars a day and expenses,” he said, swinging back. “Fifty more if I have to go out of town.”

  That was the afternoon Pearce discovered he was being followed.

  He walked along the warm autumn streets, and the careless crowds, the hurrying, anonymous shoppers, passed on either side without a glance and came behind, and conviction walked with him. He moved through the air-conditioned stores, quickly or dawdling over a display of deodorants at a counter, casually glancing behind in a way calculated to conceal his unease, seeing nothing but sure that someone was watching.

  The symptoms were familiar. They were those of paranoia, of people in that wistful, tormented period of middle age when potential has turned to regret and one looks for someone or something to blame besides oneself. Pearce had never expected to share them: the sensitivity in the back of the neck and between the shoulder blades that made him want to shrug it away, the leg-tightening desire to hurry, to run, to dodge into a doorway, into an elevator. . . .

  Pearce nodded to himself and lingered. When he went to his car, he went slowly, talked to the parking lot attendant for a moment before he drove away, and drove straight home.

  He never did identify the man or men who shadowed him, then or later. The feeling lasted for weeks, so that when it finally vanished he felt strangely naked and alone.

  When he got to his apartment, the phone was ringing. That was not surprising. A doctor’s phone rings a dozen times as often as that of ordinary people.

  Dr. Easter was the caller. The essence of what he wanted to say was that Pearce should not be foolish; Pearce should cooperate with Mr. Weaver.

  “Of course I’m cooperating,” Pearce said. “I cooperate with all my patients.”

  “That isn’t what I meant,” Dr. Easter said. “Work with him, not against him. You’ll find it’s worth your while.”

  “It’s worth my while to practice medicine the best way I can,” Pearce said evenly. “Beyond that no one has a call on me, and no one ever will.”

  “Very fine sentiments,” Dr. Easter agreed pleasantly. “The question is: Will Mister Weaver think you are practicing medicine properly? That’s something to consider.”

  Pearce lowered the phone gently into the cradle, thinking about the practice of medicine, about being a doctor—and he knew he could never be happy at anything else. He turned over in his mind the subtle threat Easter had made; it could be done. The specter of malpractice was never completely absent, and a power alliance of money and respectability could come close to lifting a license, or at least of making practice too expensive. Malpractice insurance premiums were already steep—a number of his colleagues, particularly in obstetrics, had left their professions as a result, or practiced defensive medicine in a way that sent hospitalization and Medicare costs soaring—and a lawsuit, won or lost, might send his rates beyond his income.

  He considered Easter, and he knew that it was better to risk the title than to give away the reality.

  * * *

  The next week was a time of wondering and waiting, and of keeping busy—a problem a doctor seldom faces. It was a time of uneventful routine.

  Then everything happened at once.

  As he walked from his car toward the front door of the apartment house, a hand reached out of the shadows beside an ornamental evergreen and pulled him into the darkness.

  Before he could say anything or struggle, a hand was clamped tight over his mouth, and a voice whispered in his ear, “Quiet now! This is Locke. The private eye, remember?”

  Pearce nodded as well as he could. Slowly the hand relaxed. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Pearce made out Locke’s features. His face was heavily, darkly bearded, and something had happened to his nose. Locke had been in a brawl; the nose was broken, and the face was cut and bruised.

  “Never mind me,” Locke said huskily. “You should see the other guys.”

  As Pearce drew back a little, he could see that Locke was dressed in old clothes looking like hand-me-downs from the Salvation Army. “Sorry I got you into it,” he said.

  “Part of the job. Listen. I haven’t got long, and I want to give you my report.”

  “It can wait. Come on up. Let me take a look at that face. You can send me a written re—”

  “Nothing doing,” Locke said heavily. “I’m not signing my name to anything. Too dangerous. From now on I’m going to keep my nose clean. I did all right for a few days. Then they caught up with me. Well, they’re sorry, too. You wanta hear it?”

  Pearce nodded.

  For a while Locke had thought he might get somewhere. He had registered at the Abbot, got friendly with the room clerk, and finally asked about his friend, Cartwright, who had flopped there a couple of weeks earlier. The clerk was willing enough to talk. Trouble was, he didn’t know much, and what little he knew he wouldn’t have told to a stranger. Guests at the Abbot were likely to be persecuted by police and collection agents, and the clerk had suspicions that every questioner was from the health department.

  Cartwright had paid his bill and left suddenly, no forwarding address given. They hadn’t heard from him since, but people had been asking about him. “In trouble, eh?” the clerk asked wisely. Locke nodded gravely.

  The clerk leaned closer. “I had a hunch, though, that Cartwright was heading for Des Moines. Something he said—don’t remember what now.”

  Locke took off for Des Moines with a sample of Cartwright’s handwriting from the Abbot register. He canvassed the Des Moines hotels, rooming houses, motels. Finally, at a first-class hotel, he noticed the name “Marshall Carter.”

  Cartwright had left the Abbot on the ninth. Carter had checked into the Des Moines hotel on the tenth. The handwritings seemed similar.

  Locke caught up with Carter in St. Louis. He turned out to be a middle-aged salesman of photographic equipment who hadn’t been near Kansas City in a year.

  End of the trail.

  “Can anyone else find him?” Pearce asked.

  “Not if he doesn’t want to be found,” Locke said. “A nationwide search—an advertising campaign—they’d help. But if he’s changed his name and doesn’t go signing his new one to a lot of things that might fall into an agency’s hands, nobody is going to find him. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

  Pearce looked at him steadily, not saying anything.

  “He’s got no record,” Locke went on. “That helps. Got a name check on him from the
bigger police departments and the FBI. No go. No record, no fingerprints. Not under that name.”

  “How’d you get hurt?” Pearce asked, after a moment.

  “They were waiting for me outside my office when I got back. Two of ’em. Good, too. But not good enough. ‘Lay off!’ they said. Okay. I’m not stupid. I’m laying off, but I wanted to finish the job first.”

  Pearce nodded slowly. “I’m satisfied. Send me a bill.”

  “Bill, nothing!” Locke growled. “Five thousand is the price. Put the cash in an envelope, take it out a little at a time to avoid notice, and mail it to my office—no checks. I should charge you more for using me as a stakeout, but maybe you had your reasons. Watch your step, Doc!”

  He was gone then, slipping away through the shadows so quickly and silently that Pearce started to speak before he realized that the detective was not beside him. Pearce stared after him for a long, speculative moment before he turned and opened the front door.

  Going up in the elevator, he was thoughtful. In front of his apartment door, he fumbled the key out absently and inserted it in the lock. When the key wouldn’t turn, he took it out to check on it. It took a moment for the realization to sink in that the door was already unlocked. Pearce turned the knob and gave the door a little push. It swung inward quietly. The light from the hall streamed over his shoulder, but it only lapped a little way into the dark room. He peered into it for a moment, hunching his shoulders as if that might help.

  “Come in, Doctor Pearce,” someone said softly.

  The lights went on.

  Pearce blinked once. “Good evening, Mister Weaver. And you, Jansen. How are you?”

  “Fine, Doctor,” Weaver said. “Just fine.”

  He didn’t look fine, Pearce thought. He looked older, haggard, tired. Was he worried? Weaver was sitting in Pearce’s favorite chair, a dark-green leather armchair beside the fireplace. Jansen was standing beside the wall switch. “You’ve made yourself right at home, I see.”

  Weaver chuckled. “We told the manager we were friends of yours, and of course he didn’t doubt us. Solid citizens like us, we don’t lie. But then, we are friends, aren’t we?”