The Immortality Factor

by Ben Bova

  He flashed his boyish grin. “I’ll be part of it—through La Guardia.”

  “Don’t you want a consulting contract of your own?”

  He flicked another glance at Julia, who remained absolutely silent.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, Arby. We could sure use the money, but if I sign a consulting agreement, then I’d be committed to spending a certain number of hours on the program and I don’t think I want to be tied down like that.”

  “The agreement could leave the amount of time entirely up to your discretion,” I said, starting to feel impatient with his reluctance. I thought I knew what was bothering him, but he wasn’t going to come out and admit it.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Jesse said. “The amount of time I spend on the project would be up to my discretion. Sure. And you’d be breathing down my neck every minute of the day.”

  He just did not want to work for me. Not even as an independent consultant. That was the trouble.

  Julia said softly, “If you make a contract with La Guardia, Arthur, you get the entire medical team, including Jesse. I’m sure he’ll become fully involved in your program once the medical center is a part of it.”

  I looked into those steady brown eyes of hers. “I thought that a consulting arrangement with Jess would be good for you two financially.”

  “We’re all right financially,” Jesse said.

  “We’re fine,” Julia added.

  My stubborn idiot of a brother didn’t want to feel beholden to me, especially in front of his wife. I heard Momma’s voice telling me, Watch out for your brother, Arthur. You’re the practical one; Jesse’s a dreamer.

  But how can I watch out for him if he won’t let me? I wondered.

  “All right,” I said, admitting defeat. “We can work out a contract for La Guardia Medical Center to work in partnership with Grenford Laboratory.”

  Jesse smiled as if he’d won some kind of a victory.

  “Lovely,” said Julia.

  THE TRIAL :

  DAY TWO, MORNING

  Graves banged his gavel and called for order. Slowly the hearing room quieted down. Jesse watched his brother sit back down in his front-row seat, his face still flushed with anger.

  Rosen seemed totally unperturbed by Arthur’s outburst. He sat immobile, hands pressed together before his face, waiting for the buzz of conversations to subside.

  At last the chamber was still. Without getting up from his chair at the end of the judges’ desks, Rosen asked Jesse:

  “Dr. Marshak, you say that you did not actively engage in the research going on at Grenford Labs on organ regeneration.”

  “That’s right,” Jesse replied. “There was some talk about my consulting with the Grenford Lab, but nothing came of it.”

  “Why not?”

  Jesse flicked a glance back at his brother, then took a deep breath. “A lot of reasons,” he said. “I was extremely busy at the hospital and the medical center. Grenford had its own research team working; they had started up while I was in Africa and they seemed to be barreling right along. They didn’t really need me, and—frankly—I got the strong impression that they considered me an outsider. You know, the boss’s brother.”

  A few titters from the audience. Graves looked up and frowned.

  “Did you have any misgivings about the direction the research was taking?” Rosen asked.

  Jesse hesitated a moment, then answered, “No. In all honesty, I didn’t think much about that until some time later. No, I was just busy in my own sphere. I figured if my brother needed my help or my opinions, he’d ask me.”

  “You and your brother—Dr. Arthur Marshak—were still on good relations then?”

  “Oh, sure. I didn’t see much of him, but there was no falling-out between us. Not until later.”

  ARTHUR

  I had never been to Las Vegas before. The city is tawdry, a triumph of greed over common sense. The casino hotels, each more garish than the last, look impermanent, as if they’re actually movie sets, painted fronts with nothing behind them. I’m not religious, but I thought of how the old Hebrew prophets must have felt about Sodom and Gomorrah.

  Yet the conference organizers had set the annual genetic engineering conference here. Cutting-edge science among the slot machines. Some two thousand scientists in with all the gamblers. I shook my head as I stood in line to register at the hotel. Last year the conference had been in San Francisco. A reasonable choice. Next year it would be San Antonio.

  It was all so damned inconvenient! The hotel was miles away from the conference center. To attend the conference sessions, you had to ride on a chartered bus that trundled along the tasteless flamboyance of the Strip, stopping at each of those monuments to cupidity before finally arriving at the vast and crowded conference center, baking in the desert sun. Beyond the center were tract after tract of cookie-cutter housing developments, far out into the brown dusty waste of the desert.

  Once inside the conference center, though, things started looking better, even though the place was air-conditioned cold enough to freeze glycol. I met men and women I hadn’t seen since the last annual conference. Luncheon dates were made. I scouted out the bar; many of the attending scientists spent more time there than in the sessions listening to the presentations. There’s more science going on in the bars and hotel suites than in the sessions at conferences like this. The papers presented at the official presentations addressed what had been accomplished in the past, even if it was the very recent past. The excited, intense conversations going on at the bars, in the suites, in the hotel corridors—they dealt with what was going on now: what’s new, what ideas were percolating, which directions research was taking.

  Of course, there was a lot of job-hopping going on, too. And some industrial espionage, I suppose. Lots of information flying around. I had instructed my people to stay strictly silent about the regeneration work. Too early to say anything; too important to tip off any possible competition.

  Within a few minutes of stepping off the confounded bus, I had forgotten the inconveniences of the conference arrangements and was deep in conversation with my peers. I try to be a good listener, and this year my objective was to find out if anyone else was working on organ regeneration. I resolved to do what Polonius advised: give every man my ear, but few my voice.

  The only session I attended the first day was the one in which one of my young researchers was giving a paper on cancer inhibitors. I sat in the front row, beaming encouragement at my offspring as the youngster delivered his first paper before a national conference.

  I was climbing aboard the bus at the end of that opening day when I recognized Patricia Hayward’s red hair and long legs on the top step ahead of me. I followed her to one of the last rows in the bus, glad that she picked a seat that had no other occupant.

  “Mind if I sit with you?”

  She did not seem surprised as she looked up at me and smiled. “Dr. Marshak. Hello.”

  I sat beside her. “How’ve you been?”

  “Pretty busy. And you?”

  “Pretty busy.”

  The bus huffed and lurched and we were on our way back to the center of town. I realized that I hadn’t seen Pat for months, not since that dinner with Jess and Julia before the two of them went off to Africa.

  “I didn’t know you were attending the conference,” I said.

  Patricia tapped a fingernail against the plastic badge pinned to her blouse. “I’m on assignment for Discover magazine.”

  “Something specific? Or just covering the conference as a whole?” Suddenly I realized that she knew about our regeneration work. As a consultant to Omnitech she must have signed a nondisclosure agreement, of course, but still I felt uneasy about her being here among so many potential competitors.

  I tried to keep the worry off my face as we chatted until the bus stopped at Pat’s hotel: one of the more modest emporiums along the Strip. On impulse, I got up and followed her out onto the hot, sun-baked s
treet.

  “Are you staying here, too?” Pat asked.

  “No. I’m farther up the street, at the Bellagio.”

  “Wow,” Pat kidded. “The big time.”

  “Do you have any plans for dinner?” I asked her.

  “Actually, I do. I’m interviewing three women: a staff researcher at La Roche Laboratories, a professor of molecular genetics from the University of Texas, and a graduate student from Caltech.”

  I felt disappointed. “Sounds like a full evening.”

  “I’m free tomorrow night.”

  That old familiar thrill of excitement surged through me. I had to remind myself that this was business and nothing more. “All right. Fine. Tomorrow at . . .”

  “Seven? Eight?”

  “Make it eight.”

  “Eight o’clock, then,” she said.

  “I’ll meet you here. In the lobby.”

  “Fine.”

  I watched her disappear into the hotel’s smoked-glass lobby. Then I turned and decided to walk through the late desert afternoon back to my hotel instead of waiting for the next bus. For some reason I found myself whistling an old Beatles tune as I walked along the avenue: “Let It Be.”

  The next day I was really busy, going to meetings and attending sessions and pumping colleagues for information all afternoon. But despite spending hours at the conference center’s bar (drinking fruit juice, mostly), that evening I arrived precisely on time at Pat’s hotel. The lobby was crowded, bustling. Slot machines lined every wall, and through a wide archway I could see the casino, filled with intense men and women grimly having the fun of gambling their money away. It made me shake my head. It was mathematically certain that the longer you gambled, the more you lost. If the house didn’t have the odds stacked in its favor, gambling casinos would have gone extinct sometime in the fifth dynasty of ancient Egypt.

  Yet the lure was undeniable. Even some of the scientists attending the conference hit the gaming tables, each of them convinced that he had finally figured out a mathematical way to beat the odds.

  Turning, I spotted Patricia making her way through the crowd toward me, looking both elegant and casual in a cool white silk long-sleeved blouse and burgundy tapestry vest that accentuated her lean, trim figure. Dark slacks hid her legs, which was a shame, but still she looked great. I felt overdressed in a business suit and tie; this was the Wild West, after all.

  We went by taxi to a tiny restaurant in a crumbling old adobe house out in the desert, highly recommended by the concierge at my hotel. Probably owned by a relative of hers, I thought. The house looked as if it had been built in Kit Carson’s day and left to bake in the sun since then. To my pleasant surprise, though, the place was more than decent. Quiet, small, almost intimate, almost empty. The restaurant was set up in what must have originally been the house’s dining room. A small round fireplace in one corner; cracked smoke-darkened beams supported the ceiling. There was only one other couple in the tile-floored dining room: a rather stout woman working on a slice of chocolate cake and coffee while her gray-haired husband scrutinized the bill.

  The specialty of the house was barbecued ribs. The host was the only waiter, and the restaurant’s owner: a rangy, leather-faced old-timer who personally tied huge napkins around our necks, but only after I had stuffed my tie in my jacket pocket and then taken off the jacket and draped it on the back of my wobbly wooden chair.

  The ribs came, steaming, with corn on the cob, french fries, and a family bowl of coleslaw. And a pitcher of foaming beer.

  “My cholesterol fix for the year,” I muttered as we dug into the ribs.

  “Cholesterol doesn’t count when you’re having fun,” Pat said. “I did an interview with a Nobel Prize winner who told me that.”

  “Did he?”

  “Something close to it,” she admitted with a laugh.

  We had the place to ourselves after the older couple left. Our host busied himself feeding sticks into the fireplace. Pat and I chatted about the conference.

  “You know,” I said as casually as I could, “we’re not mentioning a word about our regeneration work. Not a peep.”

  She looked up from the ribs. “Is that why you asked me out? For a security check?”

  “Why, no, not at all.”

  The fine line of her jaw was set stubbornly. “You told me back in your laboratory that the work was confidential. I don’t blab proprietary information to strangers, Arthur. I don’t sell information, either, if that’s what’s bothering you.”

  She was angry with me. I tried to apologize, and as I did so I started to think that my concerns over her reliability had been only a part of my reason for asking her to dinner. A minor part. She was really an elegant-looking young woman. Even angry as she was, with those green eyes snapping at me, she was gorgeous.

  When forced into a corner, try telling the truth. So I said, “Pat, the security business was just an excuse to myself so I could work up the courage to ask you to dinner.”

  “Work up the courage?” That seemed to surprise her. “Come on, now.”

  “You’re very lovely, and much younger than I. You must have had a dozen invitations to dinner. And then some.”

  A smile was trying to work through her anger. “And you’re a very powerful, very successful man. You could have your pick of the women at this conference.”

  “I did,” I said. “I picked you.”

  “Because you were worried about my keeping your secrets.”

  “If that had been the only reason I would’ve talked to you on the street in front of your hotel yesterday when we got off the bus.”

  She thought that over for a few moments. “All right,” she said at last. “I’ll take you at your word. The business part of this dinner is over. Let’s forget it and be sociable.”

  Just like that? I wondered. Can she just drop it and change her mood so easily? Or is it all an act?

  I decided to follow her lead. Truce. I asked politely, “How are your ribs?”

  “Fine,” she said. Then she grinned. “I assume you mean these here on my plate.”

  I had to laugh. It felt as if a dark storm cloud had passed and the sun was shining again.

  “Do you know that for thousands of years the most learned men in Europe actually thought that men had one less rib than women because the Bible said God took a rib from Adam’s side to create Eve?”

  Soon we were talking and bantering as if the storm cloud had never been there. Our host brought a second pitcher of beer and once we had finished with the ribs he brought us bowls of water and a dish of lemons for us to wash our hands.

  “Don’t hold with them wet paper things they got all wrapped up in tinfoil,” he told us in a gravelly voice. “Got all kindsa chemicals in ’em, I bet.”

  We used the finger bowls and dried our hands on the cloth towels he provided. I was talking to Pat about molecular genetics when our host came to our table with a trio of shot glasses in one hand and a bottle of mescal in the other.

  “Can’t sell this stuff to you, my license is only for beer and wine,” he explained. “So I’ll have to give it to you free.”

  And he pulled out a chair and joined us, uninvited. Pat wrinkled her nose as he lit up a cigarette, but said nothing. I went back to talking about molecular genetics. The fire burned low, the mescal warmed the three of us. I realized I was talking nonstop, but Pat looked intrigued, our host spellbound.

  After a while, though, the grizzled old man said, “Yeah, but what you’re doin’ is kinda like tryin’ to play God, isn’t it?”

  I had heard that line a thousand times before. From professors of philosophy. From news reporters. From doctors of divinity. From worried, frightened parents.

  I leaned back on my creaking chair, the mescal making me feel expansive. “God’s a lazy engineer,” I said. “We can do better.”

  “What do you mean?” Pat asked.

  Waving at the cigarette smoke, I explained, “The human body is a slipshod design. It’s th
e result of an accumulation of accidents and adaptations. That’s why it doesn’t work as well as it should.”

  “Works pretty well for me,” the host said, stubbing out his cigarette in one of the dishes as he gave Pat a sly wink.

  “It’s falling apart,” I said. “Your body is, mine is, even this lovely woman’s is. Little by little, but sooner or later something major breaks down and you die.”

  “Well, that’s natural, ain’t it?”

  Gesturing to the ceiling, I asked, “Is this house natural? Are the clothes we wear natural? The whole history of the human race is to improve on nature, to do better for ourselves.”

  “Have we really improved things for ourselves?” Pat asked quietly.

  “Do you want to drop dead of exhaustion and malnutrition at thirty? Or be clawed down by a leopard because you can’t outrun it and don’t have any tools to protect yourself?”

  “But we still die,” said the host. “We live our three score and ten and then return to the dust from which we were made.”

  “Three score and ten,” I muttered. “Despite all the advances we’ve made in medicine and sanitation and nutrition, the human body still seems to wear out around then. On the average.”

  I caught the look in Pat’s eye, then added, “Until now.”

  “Until now?” the old man echoed.

  Maybe the mescal was making me too relaxed. But what the hell, I thought, this old guy isn’t an industrial spy. And besides, I felt like showing off a little for Pat.

  “What would you say if I told you we’ll be able to replace the parts of your body that wear out with new ones?”

  “Like puttin’ a new carburetor in a truck’s engine?”

  “Better than that,” I said, waggling one finger in front of his face. “It will be like growing a new carburetor in the truck’s engine, and letting the old one fade away.”

  Our host shook a fresh cigarette from his pack. “That—that’d be some-thin’.”

  “You’re damned right,” I said.

  Pat leaned closer to me and asked, “What you said earlier, about the human body being a slipshod design. I’ve always thought it’s a marvel of intricate workings. At least, that’s what I’ve always been told.”