The Immortals Page 8

  You can’t fight organization. He and Barbara could never have escaped permanently and hidden forever. One day they would have been found, and then—the end for him—and for her, her destiny, however arrived at. She was too rare a thing ever to be a person, too valuable to be more than a possession. She was something to be used.

  Yes, Barbara had loved him; many women had loved him. But only because he had learned them, and played upon them, had wooed them skillfully and with eternal patience. Where had he gone wrong?

  The bolt whispered in the solid steel door, the only exit from the cell. Silently Sibert was on his feet, his body tense, prepared for anything. The door swung toward him.

  “Liz!”

  She stood in the doorway, her eyes fixed on his face. He was beside her in two strides.

  “I thought you were—Liz!” he said brokenly. “Am I glad to see you!”

  In her hand was a handgun. She held it out. He wrapped his hand around it and around her hand. She pulled her hand free.

  “Liz!” he said. “I don’t know what to—”

  “Don’t say it!” she said. “You’ve used me, just as you’ve used every other person you ever knew. You’re a cold-blooded snake and a killer. But I couldn’t let them kill you. From now on it’s up to you. Don’t ever let me see you again; I may kill you myself.”

  She turned and walked away swiftly. She didn’t look back.

  “Liz!” Sibert called after her in a whisper. “Where’s the girl?”

  Then she looked back at him, pointed a finger straight up, and was gone.

  Cautiously Sibert followed her along the dark corridor. By the time he reached a ramp leading up, even her footsteps were gone. Sibert eased up one ramp. The corridor above was empty. He climbed a second ramp, puzzled by the silence.

  In the second corridor a man was crumpled on the cold concrete floor. Sibert bent over him. He was breathing heavily; there wasn’t a mark on his face or head.

  Violently the corridor began to clang!

  Sibert straightened instantly and ran. A few paces along the corridor, beside a window looking into a room within, a second man was stretched on the floor. Sibert didn’t pause.

  At the first ramp he sprinted up again—directly into the midst of a handful of guards descending. They twisted the gun out of his hands. After a moment’s discussion, two of them took him to Locke.

  The office was thunder and lightning. Scenes flickered across one wall, revealing room after room of chaos and shouts of madly running men and women. Locke, spinning from desk to wall to phone, barked orders into the air. In the corner Mr. Tate huddled in his chair, his parchment eyelids closed over sunken eyes.

  With a final vicious gesture, Locke gripped his chair arm, and the wall went dark. With the lightning went the thunder. In the silence he groaned. “She’s gone.”

  “Gone?” Sibert echoed.

  “Where is she?” Locke snapped. “How did you do it?”

  “What makes you think I did it?”

  “Somehow you got out of your cell. Somehow you knocked out five guards and got the girl away. Why you stayed behind I don’t know, but you’d better start answering questions now.”

  Slowly Sibert shook his head. “It’s hard to find the hen that lays the golden eggs,” he said softly, “but it’s even harder to keep her.”

  “Take him to the interrogation room,” Locke ordered.

  The guards gripped his arms tighter. The thing in the corner rolled forward; its mouth opened.

  “Wait!” Locke said. The guards hesitated. “Mister Tate is right. You’re a stubborn man, Sibert, and you’re our only link to the girl. We’ll work with you. If necessary we’ll pay your price. Meanwhile you’ll be watched. You’ll have no chance to escape. One thing I want to know: who helped you?”

  “Isn’t there someone else missing?” Sibert asked quietly.

  “Sanders,” Locke growled. “It couldn’t be Sanders. He’s been here twenty years.”

  “Well?” Sibert said, shrugging. He would save Liz; she might come in handy once more. He had lost Barbara, but he had won a reprieve. It would last as long as the patience of men who are dying, day by day, and cannot face the night.

  They would not catch Barbara now. Not the girl who had snatched a mortally wounded man from among them and hidden him away and nursed him back to health, who had only been caught because that man had delivered her into their hands.

  She was wiser now. She would trust no one. It was a lesson immortals should learn early.

  Sometime soon, Sibert thought, he would have a chance for escape; he must be ready for it. He would play their game and wait and watch, and before they learned that he’d had nothing to do with Barbara’s escape, his chance would come.

  Afterward would not be pleasant. For as long as his furtive life should last, he would be a fugitive from powerful fear-driven men, and he would be driven himself to a fruitless search for a lost princess disguised as an ordinary mortal—who held a priceless gift he had thrown away.

  But he would not think of that now. His mouth twisted at the irony of the way things had worked out: The implausible story he had told Barbara had been true.

  Sanders! For twenty long years that colorless, nearly anonymous man had shuffled through dusty papers and waited for an opportunity that might never come. Twenty years! And Cartwright had disappeared twenty years ago. The coincidence was too striking to be accidental.

  He could not blame himself. Who would have dreamed that a man who might live forever would risk eternity for a child he had never seen?

  PART III

  ELIXIR

  The mouse lay dead upon the stainless-steel table, its dark, empty eyes staring out blindly at a world that for it and its siblings had been set about by bars into which nectar and ambrosia had fallen from the heavens and a hand had descended from time to time to lift and stroke and inject foreign substances. But in what significant way did that differ from the experience of the men and women who used it in their experiments?

  The laboratory was shiny and sterile and neat, windowless and isolated. It was not the movie laboratory of test tubes and smoking retorts and laddering electricity. This was a biological laboratory in a modern hospital, and it was fashioned from glass and stainless steel. Here and there pieces of equipment rested on scrubbed tables: microscopes and autoclaves and centrifuges, refrigerators and petri dishes and computers, all carefully cleaned each morning and evening with antiseptic solutions. Ultraviolet fluorescent bulbs added their invisible radiation, and the single entrance was an airlock with negative pressure.

  In the midst of the latest symbols of contemporary science, Dr. Russell Pearce looked like an anomaly—aging, contaminated with various kinds of microorganisms, rumpled, and dejected. His latest effort to synthesize the elixir vitae had failed. At first the synthetic blood protein had seemed promising; some of the mice to whom test substances had been administered had grown more active and the ones who sickened or aged were discovered to have received double-blind placebos. But now the proof of failure lay in front of him, a mouse dead of senescence, whose numbered tag matched a number assigned to those that had received what Pearce had hoped would be the elixir. The mouse was, in fact, the last of the group that had been administered the latest cure-all, the miracle fluid that would heal the sick, restore the elderly, and extend the life span indefinitely.

  Pearce sighed, entered the results in his computer, and stared at the inscrutable screen as blindly as the mouse in front of him. It was a long road he had started down fifty years before, when an unemployed wanderer had sold 500 ccs of his blood and that magic red fluid had rejuvenated an aging billionaire. But the restoration was only temporary, lasting as long as the gamma globulins had conferred their immunities, thirty to forty days. For fifty years now Pearce had been searching for the secret to immortality, just as, he was sure, aging men of wealth and power had been searching for Marshall Cartwright and his children.

  * * *

  The
executive vice chancellor’s office occupied a prime corner location of the Medical Center. Windows on both sides admitted the autumn sunlight and a view to the south and west toward the green suburbs, not north and east toward the carcinogenic inner city. The room looked like a seventeenth-century English library with pale wood shelves and a massive desk, and, in fact, had been purchased in entirety from a British estate, dismantled, and rebuilt in this upstart midwestern city. It was the tribute youthful vigor pays to decadent tradition.

  The vice chancellor seemed young and inexperienced, obviously uncomfortable talking to Pearce and what had to be communicated to him, but Pearce waited with the patience of his years. Then she swung her chair away from the windows and said, “How long have you been working at this Ponce de León project?”

  “Fifty years,” Pearce said.

  “Isn’t that a bit long to pursue a will-o’-the-wisp?”

  “It’s one of the two basic dreams of humanity: unlimited wealth and immortality.”

  “Even Ponce de León finally gave up.”

  “He was killed by Indians before he had the chance.”

  “The transmutation of base metals into gold and the concoction of the elixir of life,” she said. Her smooth forehead furrowed. “But the alchemists abandoned their futile quests when the physical sciences proved their impossibility.”

  “Not exactly,” Pearce said. “The alchemists transmuted themselves into chemists and physicists, and they learned that you can change base metals into gold, but it costs too much. And some of the alchemists became biologists, and they learned that the lifespan can be extended, but unless you reduce the birthrate, you get overpopulation, pollution, starvation, and disease.”

  “You have an interest in the history of medicine, as well,” she said. Clearly there was something on her mind other than simply getting acquainted with the faculty. “I understand now why you’re the senior geriatrician on the staff.” She looked down at the folder open on her desk. “Indeed, the senior physician at the Medical Center.”

  Pearce smiled ruefully. “The trick of being senior is to outlast everybody else. I used to be a young geriatrician. Now I’m a subject for my own specialty.”

  “That’s why it’s so difficult to tell you what I’ve got to say.” Color rose in her cheeks. “You’re a legend. You’ve done so much for this hospital, both in the classroom and the hospital.”

  Pearce waited, although it was clear what she had on her mind. He wasn’t going to make it any easier.

  She looked embarrassed. “The funds for your research have not been renewed.”

  “The National Research Institute has decided to discontinue its funding?”

  She nodded. “What is the National Research Institute, by the way? It’s new to me.”

  “In spite of the ‘National’ in its name, it is a private philanthropy that sponsors research into the causes and treatments for aging. I don’t know much more than that. They came to me, many years ago, and my only contact with them has been my annual report and request for renewal. The Institute has always seemed eager to receive the report, and up to now to renew the grant.”

  “No longer, apparently. We received the termination letter today.”

  Pearce looked thoughtful. “And the last experiment ended in failure yesterday. That’s odd.”

  “What’s odd?”

  “The coincidence. It’s been my experience that most coincidences are not coincidences at all.”

  “And most so-called conspiracies turn out to be coincidences,” she said.

  Pearce laughed. “True, and no doubt this is one of them.”

  “In any case, the termination came at the customary time, in response to our application.”

  “What reason did they give?”

  “No reason. They just didn’t renew. Maybe you can get results in the few months that are left on the grant. Or maybe you can persuade the Institute to renew.”

  Pearce smiled. “After fifty years? Well, I can understand their impatience. Thanks, anyway, Vice Chancellor.”

  “Please call me Julia,” she said. “And you forgot a third basic dream of humanity.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Love,” she said and color rose in her cheeks. She colored beautifully. It was a trait that might yet interfere with her administrative duties.

  “The alchemists left that to the magicians,” Pearce said. “Maybe because it wasn’t basic. Or maybe they thought they could buy love with unlimited wealth.”

  “Or the promise of immortality,” she added.

  He got up to leave, but she stopped him at the door.

  “Fifty years,” she said. “You must be—”

  “Ninety,” he said.

  “You don’t look more than fifty,” she said. “If I didn’t know better, I might suspect that you have found the elixir and kept it to yourself.”

  “Good genes,” he said, “and the power of positive thinking.”

  And then, as the solid wooden door closed behind him, he stood in the hall, with its special hospital odor that spoke to him of the practice of medicine more than the stethoscope and the scalpel themselves, and wondered what he was going to do now.

  * * *

  He was late for his hospital rounds, but the summons from Julia Hudson had been urgent. Now he wondered about the hurry to inform him of termination and why it had come through the executive vice chancellor, in person, rather than through customary channels. Maybe, after all these years, the regents were trying to get him to resign, which might explain why Hudson hadn’t offered to finance his research out of the Center’s own funds. Or maybe Hudson had wanted to break the bad news in person, to soften the blow, and he was being paranoid again.

  But that was soon driven from his mind by the patients waiting for him in room after room of the hospital wing devoted to geriatrics. As the population had aged, the wing had grown until now it occupied an area as large as that of the next two specialties combined.

  His group of senior medical students had preceded him, but his resident physician and research assistant, Tom Barnett, was perfectly capable of supervising them and of replacing him, as, Pearce was sure, Barnett hoped someday to do. One problem with longevity, particularly longevity in career or profession, was the difficulty of the young in getting on: The road ahead was clogged with slow or stalled vehicles. Death was evolution’s way of improving the species, and if death is delayed, the basic processes of life are frustrated.

  As one of the roadblocks on the highway of progress, Pearce felt a bit ashamed of the way he clung to his practice and his research. But he had never married, his work gave meaning to life, and he didn’t feel ninety years old. In fact, inside he felt about the same age as when he had stared down at a rejuvenated Leroy Weaver. He was as good as any physician on the staff, he knew—indeed, with the accumulated clinical experience of more than fifty years, he felt he was a good deal better. And his skills in the laboratory were superior to what they had been when he was forty and had been driven there by the miracle of Marshall Cartwright.

  Now as he went from room to room and bed to bed, taking a hand here, feeling a brow there, checking a chart, speaking a cheerful greeting, asking an interested question by name, saying goodbye with feeling, he noted the ages of his patients. There were fewer sixty- or seventy-year-olds among them than there once had been when he was first starting his practice. Now most were in their eighties or nineties and a number of them into their hundreds.

  People were living longer, but the diseases and systemic failures they avoided in earlier life left them prey to the degenerative diseases and cancers of old age. You avoid heart failure, and you live long enough to have a cancer metastasize from your prostate; you keep your kidneys and liver working properly, and your brain finally succumbs to stroke or Alzheimer’s disease. And the costs of treating the diseases of old age were far greater than the quick and easy deaths of youth or middle years. Even if one included the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome rel
ated diseases. Small wonder the social costs of medical care had soared until today only those were treated who could afford to pay, and the rest were left to their traditional resources: nostrums and faith healers and the few clinics that hospitals such as this one kept open to the public. Mostly to the old to use as clinical material for finding cures to the diseases of old age. Someday, Pearce thought, the few who could afford the best of care would become totally dependent upon it, and medicine would turn for its source of vaccines and antibodies and even antibiotics to those who had been denied the benefits of modern medicine.

  Pearce could foresee a time when medicine would become a kind of contemporary religion where the common people came to worship, and physicians, indistinguishable from witch doctors shaking their rattles over their patients to drive out demons, would become the priests of a new mythology. Their altar would be an operating table, and their communion, a vitamin tablet and an oral antibiotic.

  Pearce caught up with his group of students before the end of rounds. The group had grown larger over the years, to match the growth in the geriatrics wing. Geriatrics was a growth industry, and medical students alert to the latest trends invested their time and hopes in an appropriate specialty. Pearce wondered if it had been different when he had made his own choice so many years before, but it was so long ago that his younger self was like a stranger and he could not remember.

  He waited at the back of the group, unnoticed, while Barnett had each of them, in turn, prod the patient, poor Mr. Sam Aikens with his chronic nephritis, and jabbed at the physicians-to-be with hard questions, as if trying to trick them into a faulty answer that would allow him to display his erudition and wit, and demonstrate to everyone the necessity of study and of being right. It was one way of teaching, and he had been subjected to that in his medical school days, as well as the three-days-on and three-days-off ordeal of residency, but it wasn’t his way. A ready answer was not always a right answer, and being quick was often inferior to being thorough.