The First Immortal
James L. Halperin
In 1988, Benjamin Smith suffers a massive heart attack. But he will not die. A pioneering advocate of the infant science of cryonics, he has arranged to have his body frozen until the day when humanity will possess the knowledge, the technology, and the courage to revive him.
Yet when Ben resumes life after a frozen interval of eighty-three years, the world is altered beyond recognition. Thanks to cutting-edge science, eternal youth is universally available and the perfection of cloning gives humanity the godlike power to re-create living beings from a single cell. As Ben and his family are resurrected in the mid-twenty-first century, they experience a complex reunion that reaches through generations—and discover that the deepest ethical dilemmas of humankind remain their greatest challenge…
James L. Halperin
THE FIRST IMMORTAL
A Novel of the Future
To My Family
“There is but one evil, ignorance.”
—Socrates
“All that stand between us and eternal life are fear and gullibility: Dread of the unknown forges faith in the unknowable.”
—Benjamin Franklin Smith
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Observant second-time readers may recognize some changes in the text, and even a few new plot twists. All such revisions are part of an obsessive quest to make The First Immortal the most severely scrutinized—and therefore scientifically accurate—novel ever written on our potential for biological immortality. In the first hardcover edition, I offered a bounty to each reader who was first to point out any scientific or factual inaccuracies that I subsequently corrected. The bounty, a scarce Ivy Press first edition of The Truth Machine, my first novel, was enough to attract hundreds of submissions. Fortunately for me, most were duplicates, but I did wind up awarding about two dozen books. Still, I’m sure mistakes remain, so I now repeat the offer. Should you find any such errors, please e-mail me at [email protected], or write to me c/o Ballantine Books, 201 East 50th Street, New York, NY 10022, and include your mailing address.
And be sure to visit The First Immortal Web site at www.firstimmortal.com to post your comments about this book and the topics and philosophies it examines. I intend to read every comment, and will continue to post responses.
—JLH, 6/15/98
PROLOGUE
June 2, 1988
Echoes tumbled through the ambulance. Squeals, rattles, and torsion-bar sways came at him in waves, magnified and ominous. The attendants standing over him seemed blurry, even extraneous. What mattered was the beeping monitor and all-too-familiar stench of emergency medicine. And every single sensation blended with the mundane smell of the rain-soaked streets beneath him.
Benjamin Franklin Smith, my great-grandfather, knew he was about to die.
The morning had delivered Ben’s third heart attack in six years-worse than either of its predecessors. This time his chest felt vise-tight, more constricted than he’d imagined possible. His oxygen-starved muscles sagged like spent rubber, so weak he could barely feel them twitch, while a cold Novocain-like river prickled his left arm from shoulder blade to fingertips: numb but so heavy.
Oh, Christ! he thought, remembering his first symptoms on that flight to Phoenix in 1982. He should have known better. If he hadn’t stayed on the damn airplane, they could’ve given him treatment; minimized the damage.
Now he was dying. Him, of all people. Ben snorted. Absent his pain and fear, it might have been a laugh. Well, why in hell not him? He was sixty-three years old.
God, just sixty-three? Is that all I get? Please, Jesus, spare me this. Not yet…
Two ambulance attendants wheeled Ben through the hospital emergency entrance, past check-in and dozens of less critical cases, sprinting straight for intensive care. All ignored them except one nurse who, recognizing the too-familiar patient, merely gaped. One of the attendants whispered to her, “Looks like myocardial infarction. Probably massive.”
Still half conscious, Ben wondered if they realized he could hear them, or if they cared. He wondered whether these professionals tasted the same empathy for him that he had so often experienced with his own dying patients.
He also questioned his rationality.
His preparations over the previous half decade had included an oath to himself that he would betray no ambivalence about the unusual instructions he’d left. This despite understanding that his chances of staving off death remained slight.
And that if he succeeded, he might end up envying the dead.
Before surrendering consciousness, Dr. Benjamin Smith managed to whisper: “Call Toby Fiske.” These words would set in motion all his plans—irrevocably changing the nature of his death.
Then, as the rush of unreality gathered speed and his awareness faded, his subconscious mind began to play back the most important moments of life, as if by giving these experiences a new orderliness, he might somehow absolve himself of, or at least comprehend, his mistakes.
Images assaulted him of his parents, his children, and the first time he ever made love to his wife Marge. She was just a teenager then. How fiery and resilient she was. They were. Then he remembered sitting at her bedside when she was dying. For six weeks he had fed and bathed her, consoled her with stories and recollections, held her hand, and watched helplessly as the cancer consumed her body and mind.
Now would he finally rejoin her?
Ben Smith also knew the world would keep turning without him. So at the end of things, he pleaded to his God, praying that once he was dead, his only son might finally forgive him.
My great-grandfather was an only child. And despite his birth into near-poverty, his genetics and early environment favored him with certain critical advantages. But timing was not among these: He was born in 1925.
His attempt to become immortal is a tale of character, luck, and daring. Benjamin Franklin Smith’s story might have befallen any person of his time—that era when death seemed inevitable to every human being on earth. Inevitable, and drawing ever closer.
The Benjamin Smith Family Tree
1
THE FIRST IMMORTAL
January 14, 1925
My great-great-grandmother stared into a spiderweb crack spreading through the dilapidated ceiling paint, its latticed shape taunting her as if she were a fly ensnared in its grip. For several hours she’d been lying on their bed, shivering and convulsing, in that drab and tiny apartment. Now she felt a scream welling in her chest, like a tidal wave drawing mass from the shallows. Alice Smith was only twenty years old, but she knew something was deeply, perhaps mortally, wrong.
She shut her eyes, trying to focus on something, anything, other than the pain-fueled firestorm raging inside of her. But there was only the tortured stench of her own sweltering flesh. A single tear found its way into the corner of her mouth. It tasted of pain and fear, but she was surprised to discover another flavor within it: hope and a coming of new life.
Her husband, Samuel, entered her consciousness as if to provide an outlet; a cathartic conversion of pain to anger. Like Alice, the man was a second-generation American. He was a grocer by trade, and, also like herself, from Wakefield, Massachusetts. He had always been a hard worker and steadfast in his tenderness. But he was not there! She was in agony, while he was stacking cans of peaches!
Just when, she asked herself, had he judged his work more important than his wife? and soundlessly cursed him with words women of the year 1925 weren’t supposed to know.
Why did she need him there, anyway? To share her torment, or to seek the comfort of him? All Alice knew was that right then she hated and loved her husband in equal measure, and if this ordeal was to kill her, she needed to see his face
one last time.
To say goodbye.
No! she decided, as if her circumstance had been caused by nothing more than a failure of will. She had to raise and love this child. She would not allow herself to die.
Alice’s membrane had ruptured twenty-six hours ago, yet she had not given birth. She’d once read that in prolonged labor, omnipresent bacteria threatened to migrate inside, infecting both mother and child. Even the hunched and hoary midwife, though ignorant of the danger in scientific terms, seemed well aware of peril, per se; Alice could sense a fear of disaster in the woman’s every gesture.
Where in the hell was Sam?
Even in anguish, Alice understood this rage against her husband was misplaced. It had somehow become a societal expectation that women should bear children with stoic grace. And it was absurd. A student of history, she knew that anesthetics had been used for many surgeries since the 1850s, yet had found little acceptance in obstetrics, the pain of childbirth considered by doctors to be a duty women were somehow meant to endure.
Still, it could have been worse; Alice was equally aware that her odds had improved. A hundred years earlier, doctors would often go straight from performing autopsies to delivering babies, seldom even washing their hands. No wonder it had been common back then for men to lose several wives to complications of childbirth. At least now, sterilization was practiced with some modicum of care.
Her nineteen-year-old sister, Charlotte, and the midwife stood at Alice’s bedside. The older woman’s facial expression evinced kindly resignation, as if to say, It’s all we can do for you, dear, as she held a wet towel, sponging Alice’s forehead. Charlotte Franklin’s intelligent eyes and sanguine aspect seemed to magnify the midwife’s aura of incompetence.
“Just breathe through it,” said the midwife, who’d already told them that the suffering and peril of delivery were “natural,” God’s punishment for the sins of womankind. “It’s in our Lord’s hands now,” she added, as if these words held some sort of reassurance.
Alice felt her mind shove aside the hopeless bromide.
“You’ll be okay, Alice,” Charlotte whispered nervously, gently massaging her sister’s shoulders. “You’re doing fine.”
“Quick now, fetch the boiling water for the gloves,” the midwife ordered. “Won’t be much longer.”
Alice screamed again, and Sam burst into the room. The snowstorm dripped its offerings from his clothes onto the stained wooden floor. He shivered.
Thank God, Alice thought, her rage forgotten. Sam would see their child be born.
“Am I in time?” he asked stupidly.
His question went unanswered. “Head’s about through. Now push, girl!” the midwife shouted.
Alice pressed down. Slowly, painstakingly, Charlotte and the midwife managed to extract a perfect baby boy.
Though bleeding heavily, Alice rallied a wan smile of optimism and hope, qualities she intended to convey to her son, assuming she survived.
Charlotte cut the cord. The midwife spanked the infant’s bottom. They washed him with warm water. He wailed, but soon rested contentedly in his mother’s arms. His father gently stroked his back. The caresses, tentative at first, easily progressed in loving confidence.
“Benjamin Franklin Smith,” Sam declared, as if in the ritual of naming, his wife’s pain might be banished to memory.
The next few days would be difficult. Having barely survived the ordeal, Alice sustained a dangerous postpartum infection of the uterus and tubes. Her fever would reach 105 degrees, often consigning her to the mad hands of delirium. She’d live through the illness, but not without loss: She would never bear another child.
August 15, 1929
Oh! Ah! The next flash card displayed a tug wearing an impish grin and belching smoke from its only funnel. As Ben saw it, he felt his cheeks puff into a smile. His first impulse was to reach for the drawing; get a good close look at the happy work boat. But doing that would be bad. Might ruin the game.
B-O-A-T, yes, yes, yes! He could see the letters forming in his mind’s eye and was delighted. The mental picture of the vessel and the alphabetic characters defining it jumped from his cerebrum into his eyes and mouth.
“Boat! B-O-A-T, boat!”
“Wonderful.” Alice grinned. Oh, he’s so special, she thought, even knowing that her excitement was exponentially enhanced because this delightful four-year-old was her own. Although they said John Stuart Mill could translate Cicero at this age…
She showed him the next card.
“Train,” he said, but did not attempt the spelling.
“I’m so proud of you!” she exclaimed, turning the card over. “That’s eighteen in a row. And you spelled half of them. Enough for today?”
“Just a few more, Mommy. Please?” Ben loved this time with his mother. Everything he said seemed to please her so.
“As many as you want, sweetheart.”
They still occupied the same tiny Wakefield apartment where Ben had been born, but much of the furniture was new. Colorful drapes now hung at their only window. Several Maxfield Parrish prints adorned the walls. Some new floor lamps were there to provide their place a bright, almost cheerful atmosphere. Sam’s career had begun to advance; he was now manager of the modest neighborhood grocery.
And like so many of his neighbors, he’d made a little money in the stock market.
It was almost seven P.M. Sam walked through the door, after another fourteen-hour day. He hid it well. Or perhaps seeing the two people he loved most in the world simply energized him; they were still sitting at the table, playing an addition and subtraction game Alice had invented for their boy.
He kissed Alice on her cheek. She returned his kisses on the mouth. Ben dashed to his father and hugged him. “Daddy, I missed you.”
“Missed you, too, buddy boy. Wanna go outside and play some ball?”
“Yeah!” Ben said excitedly, and raced in search of his mitt and ball. At his age he could barely throw the softball and had yet to catch it from more than five feet away, but he loved playing with his dad.
“Stock market went up again,” Sam said to Alice. “Few more runs like today’s and we can move out of here.”
“I’m perfectly happy where we are,” she said. “Long as I have my men.” She kissed Sam again. “Don’t you think it’s getting awfully high? Can’t go up forever.”
“Feels like it will. All my friends think so, too.”
“Sam,” Alice said in a voice that implied I’m just a woman, yet somehow commanded full attention, “have you ever seen a lightbulb just before it burns out?”
As Ben and Sam left the apartment, Sam shook his head and smiled in bemused amazement. He knew that this discussion with his very prudent wife was far from over, and the outcome inevitable: Tomorrow he would be selling their stocks.
Almost every evening after dinner, Charlotte Franklin would drop by to keep Alice company while Sam updated his inventory register in the kitchen. As usual, little Ben snuggled under his soft bed sheet, listening to their conversation in covert, fascinated silence.
“Mom’s just beside herself,” Charlotte whispered, “that I’m twenty-three and still not married.”
“She told you that?”
“Not in so many words. Just another of her you-never-know-how-things’ll-turn-out discourses. She, of course, always figured I’d have a brood by now, and you’d be the spinster schoolmarm.”
“So did I,” Alice laughed, “till I met Sam.”
“That’s what I told Mom: ‘Soon as I find a man like Sam Smith.’ Then she starts whimpering a little, y’know how she does it, and suddenly she’s talking about that winter… Lord, it’s been… ten years… when Sophie fell through the ice. Like maybe I’m s’posed to give her some grandchildren to replace our sister or something…”
“I’m sure that’s not how she meant it. And even if she did, Charlotte, it’s a longing, not a wish. They’re not the same, you know.”
“Maybe, but I shouldn
’t feel like I’m letting them down, should I? I mean, it’s my life. And it wasn’t my fault about—”
“Not at all,” Alice interrupted. “Not the least bit your fault. Goodness, Charlotte, you were thirteen; she was seventeen. How were you supposed to talk her out of anything? I’m just thankful you didn’t go skating with her. Might’ve been both of you they’d had to fish from that pond.”
“Maybe if I’d gone—”
“Hush,” Alice said, dismissing the notion. “I’ll never forget sneaking into our icehouse to look at her the day before the funeral. She looked so…”
“So alive. I remember.”
“Yes, alive,” Alice said. “It was as though a lightning bolt could’ve struck her, and she’d’ve…”
“Woke right up and started dancing?”
“Exactly.”
Ben’s eyes opened wide. He knew more time than usual would pass before sleep enfolded him tonight.
This conversation comprised the last words between his mother and his beloved Aunt Charlotte that Ben would ever hear. The next day, Charlotte felt too weak to come over, and soon Alice would begin spending evenings with her sister at their parents’ home. Less than a month later, Charlotte Franklin’s malady would be diagnosed as incurable, and six weeks after that she’d be dead from leukemia.
December 4, 1941
Ben Smith looked at the schoolroom clock, saw it was only 1:47 P.M., and smiled. Well, Mom, guess I nailed another one, he thought, as if she were in the room with him.
Although he’d skipped a grade, all his exams had so far been a cinch. It was not so much that knowledge adhered to him, though by and large it did; the fact was that work itself came naturally. When dealing with any task, he stepped wholly into the job. He became the goal. Be it physical labor or a complex algorithm, Ben saw, did, absorbed, and moved on.
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