The Immortality Factor

by Ben Bova

  “Then why are you against the research, Dr. Marshak?” Kindelberger asked again, with some irritation in his voice. “We’ve got to know.”

  Jesse took a deep breath, put the coffee mug back on the Lucite tray. Simmonds was eying him from beneath his shaggy brows. Ransom looked suspicious. Kindelberger was frowning impatiently. Even the normally placid Faber looked curious.

  “My personal opinion,” he said at last, “is that Arthur’s got to be stopped.”

  “Why?” Kindelberger demanded.

  “Because of the tremendous risks involved with this work.”

  “Risks?” echoed Simmonds.

  “Arthur thinks he’s got the tumor problem licked, but I’m not convinced of that. And then—”

  “Tumor problem?” Kindelberger asked. “You mean it gives you cancer, don’t you? That’s what you said at the trial yesterday.”

  Jesse answered, “In some cases the tumors have been malignant. They’ve been able to suppress them to some extent, but I don’t think they’ve really solved the problem yet. The peptides they’re using to initiate regrowth also stimulate tumor growth in just about all the experimental animals they’ve used.”

  “Cancer,” Ransom said, as if he had invented the word.

  “They think they can beat that problem,” Jesse said. “I’m not so sure.”

  Ransom smiled. “Cancer is a scary word. We can use it like a club.”

  Kindelberger shot him an accusing stare. “Oh, yeah? Then why isn’t yesterday’s testimony on the front pages this morning?”

  “Because the trial is being covered by science reporters,” Ransom responded immediately, “not the first-team newshounds.”

  “It’s buried on page sixteen of the Post,” Kindelberger grumbled. “And the wire services barely mentioned it. None of the stories even say I was there.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Ransom assured him. “When we want to make front-page news out of this, we’ll have the material.” He turned his cold gray eyes to Jesse. “Won’t we?”

  “What do you mean?” Simmonds asked.

  “It’s simple,” Ransom said. Then he took a sip of his fruit juice, forcing them all to wait for his next words.

  He put the glass down on the senator’s desk, then resumed. “We stop treating this as a science story and turn it into a story about human conflict. Brother against brother.”

  Jesse started to object, but Ransom went on, “We can also go another route. The senator, here, calls for an investigation of this regeneration work. Gets his committee to look into the cancer-causing angle. That’ll get headlines, believe me.”

  “There are other aspects to this,” Jesse said.

  “Cloning stem cells,” Simmonds murmured darkly.

  “But the threat of cancer is our ultimate weapon,” Ransom said, a nervous smile twitching the corners of his mouth. “We can use that one word to drown out everything else.”

  “That’s not fair,” Jesse said.

  “All’s fair in love and politics,” said Kindelberger.

  Faber spoke up. “Could we get you to testify in the trial, Mr. Ransom?”

  His face clouded. “No, they won’t let me. I don’t have the scientific credentials to suit them, so they won’t let me appear.” Turning back to the senator, “But I could testify to a Senate committee, couldn’t I?”

  Simmonds saw the distress in Jesse’s face. “There’s something else bothering you, isn’t there? Something you haven’t mentioned to us.”

  Despite himself, Jesse nodded.

  “You broke with your brother more than a year ago, didn’t you?” Simmonds said. “Before this cancer thing came out. Why? What’s your real reason for being against him?”

  Because he blamed me for Julia’s miscarriage, Jesse thought. Because he hates me for taking Julia from him.

  But aloud he answered, “This regeneration process, even when it works, is only going to be available to the very rich. It’ll cost millions.”

  “We’ve got health plans for the poor,” Kindelberger pointed out.

  “I work with the poor,” Jesse snapped. “I see what your health plans do. You allow this into your health plan and it’ll go bankrupt inside of a year.”

  Kindelberger stared at him.

  “Think a minute,” said Jesse. “Sooner or later Arthur’s people will make the process work. They’ll be able to regrow organs in your body without the threat of cancer. Then what? How many poor people need new hearts? How many alcoholics do I see every week who’re dying of cirrhosis and need a new liver? Will your health plan be able to handle millions of regeneration cases each year? Each month? At a million bucks or so a shot?”

  “A million millions per month,” Faber mumbled.

  “That’s a trillion dollars,” said Jesse.

  “A trillion dollars?” Kindelberger gasped.

  “Each month,” Jesse said.

  “Impossible!”

  “The rich will do what they’ve always done,” Jesse said, surprised at the heat in his own voice. “They’ll buy their way into heaven. They’ll live for hundreds of years once they can regenerate their failing organs. But the poor will still die like flies.”

  The office fell absolutely silent for long, long moments.

  Finally Faber said softly, “Well, I don’t know about you guys, but my health insurance sure won’t cover anything that costs a million.”

  “It’s got to be stopped,” Simmonds said firmly. “It would be immoral to allow the rich to live longer and longer while the poor languish and die.”

  “You can’t stop it,” Jesse said. “Nobody can stop an idea.”

  “We can,” said Ransom. “You’ve just given us the ammunition to do it. We play the poor against the rich.” He laughed out loud. “By god, it’s beautiful!”

  Kindelberger leaned far back in his chair again and clasped his hands together, almost prayerfully. “If we can get the proper political support, we can outlaw it. We can make it illegal to use federal funds for such research. We can tie up the process in the FDA and the other regulatory agencies.”

  “I’ll sue Omnitech Corporation and Arthur Marshak, both,” said Ransom. “I’ll tie them up in the courts for years.”

  “So Arthur goes overseas,” Jesse countered. “Or some other scientists in foreign countries follow his lead.”

  “That’s why it’s so important,” Simmonds said, fists clenched on his lap, “to make certain that this trial finds the process scientifically wrong.”

  “The trial’s got to discredit the whole idea,” Ransom said. “Paint it so black that nobody overseas will touch it.”

  “But that means they’ll have to discredit Arthur,” said Jesse.

  Kindelberger nodded solemnly. “He’s got to be stopped.”

  “No,” said Reverend Simmonds. “He’s got to be destroyed.”

  Ransom nodded eagerly. “And I think I know how to start moving things in that direction.”

  ARTHUR

  The attack came a week after Reverend Simmonds’s big rally in Central Park. A Sunday night. I was at the laboratory when it happened. They were fanatics, absolutely crazy. I think they would have killed me, if they had the chance. I know I would have killed as many of them as I could have, if I’d had the chance.

  I’d been working all weekend on the idea of using Cassie Ianetta’s tumor-killer in combination with the regentide, so we could lick the tumor problem and go ahead with the regeneration experiments. Not that I did any real lab work; it had been years since I’d gotten my hands wet. But I was carefully sifting through the reports Cassie had been sending up from Mexico and using my desktop computer to compare her results with the kinds of tumors that the regentide triggered in lab rats and the minihogs we had just started using.

  Cassie’s reports were far behind the schedule we had set, but I figured that she was having problems in Mexico that we hadn’t anticipated. The results she had sent in looked good. Solid work. Encouraging. But something had slowed h
er down. I made a mental note to call her and see if there was anything I could do to help get her back on track.

  The idea of using her enzyme to suppress the tumors that the regentide caused looked promising to me, but I had to be careful not to let my enthusiasm carry me away. I had to be certain that it really would work against the tumors, and I wasn’t just convincing myself this was so because I wanted things to work out that way.

  I remember I was pretty pissed off with Jesse. He had fallen in line with that evangelist minister and told him enough about my work to get the preacher to rail against me at the big rally he held in Central Park the weekend before.

  I didn’t attend the rally, of course. I had work to do. I hardly even heard about it. I think it was Phyllis, my secretary, who showed me a full-page advertisement for the rally in Newsday or one of the other New York papers a few days before the event. Raising money for Jesse’s hospital was a good idea, I remember thinking. I wrote a check and sent it to the box number in the ad.

  That Sunday afternoon, though, Darrell Walters came sauntering into my office and plotzed himself in the chair in front of my desk.

  “We’re celebrities,” he said, grinning. Darrell’s got big, slightly protruding teeth. When he grins he looks more like a horse than usual.

  I saw that he held the first section of the morning’s Times in his hand. “Celebrities?” I asked.

  Darrell showed me the front-page photo of the mammoth crowd in Central Park. The story under it was mostly about the entertainment stars and other celebrities who had appeared at the rally.

  “Where does it mention us?” I asked.

  Darrell turned to a back page, where there was a little box off to one side headlined, Simmonds Blasts “Godless Scientists.” I scanned the story. It didn’t mention the lab by name, or me, for that matter, but it was clear who and what Simmonds was complaining about. And I knew, of course, who had told him about us: Jesse. It couldn’t have been anyone else.

  Darrell was still grinning. “How’s it feel to have the wrath of God called down on your head?”

  I felt disgusted. “Why would Jesse do something like that? He’s pandering to the wackos.”

  “Well,” Darrell said, pushing himself up from the chair, “I just thought you’d like to know how famous we’re getting.”

  “With the wrong people,” I groused.

  Darrell was chuckling as he walked out of my office. He left the newspaper on my desk.

  I didn’t think anything of it, except to feel pretty damned sore that Jesse would stoop to such tactics. Why? To raise money for his hospital? Or was he really so angry at me that he was trying to hurt me? What did I do to him to deserve that kind of treatment?

  I thought that maybe I should call him and thrash this out, face-to-face. But then I figured that if I called him while I was angry it’d just lead to another argument. Cool down first. Let it rest for a few days.

  A week passed.

  Maybe I don’t get into the labs and do any real work, but I was chewing into Cassie’s reports and Zack O’Neill’s latest analyses of the tumor problem so deeply that I forgot about dinner and just stayed there at my desk that Sunday evening. I got up a couple of times, once to the food dispensers for a granola bar and a cup of coffee (nowhere near as good as Phyllis’s) and once to the toilet.

  According to the police report, it was ten minutes before midnight when the attackers struck. They must have figured that on a Sunday night nobody would be at the lab except one or two security guards. Actually, we had two of the older men on duty, making their rounds, and one animal handler back in the pens: a grad student who worked the night shift so she could study in peace and quiet and attend her classes during the day.

  The first inkling I got that something was wrong was when I heard the chimps start to howl. All the way in my office I could hear them. It made me look up from my computer screen, not scared but certainly startled.

  My office door was open and so was the door to the corridor beyond the outer office. But still, what the hell could be going on at the animal pens to set the chimps off like that? It sounded as if the macaques were shrieking, too. I got up and headed for the rear of the building, feeling almost glad for an excuse to stretch my legs a little.

  No alarm bells were ringing. The normal lights were on, although most of the offices and labs were empty and dark. But as I went down the corridor, hurrying a little because the chimps and the monkeys were all screaming now, I saw light spilling out from Zack O’Neill’s lab. The place looked as if somebody’d set off a bomb in there. Shattered glassware all over the floor; all of Zack’s apparatus smashed to pieces. The rat pens were all open and none of the animals were in sight.

  Check that. I saw one of the lab rats scampering down the corridor. Like an idiot I chased after it.

  Back toward the animal pens I ran, and when I passed the computer center I saw three people in there. In ski masks.

  That’s when my heart clutched in my chest. We’re being raided! And if they trash the computer we’ll lose every goddamned bit of data we’ve got.

  They say heroism is a reflex action. I’m no hero, god knows, but I barreled in there yelling at the top of my voice, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  The three of them almost jumped out of their skins. I could see whites all around their eyes, through their damned ski masks.

  I’m not a big man, and I certainly didn’t have anything on me that could serve as a weapon. But neither did they, thank god. They hadn’t expected anyone to jump in on them.

  I grabbed a metal ruler that was on one of the console desks and held it like a one-foot-long sword. “Get out of here!” I yelled. “Now!”

  The biggest of the three said from behind his ski mask, “I’ll take care of him. You go ahead and dump the machine.”

  He was wearing a light windbreaker and dark slacks, together with the mask and gloves. Seemed pretty young to me, judging by his voice and his lightness on his feet. The other two were smaller, maybe women, for all I could tell.

  “Better go away, old man,” he said to me, coming straight at me.

  Fencing blades are three feet long, my ruler was only twelve inches. But I was boiling with anger. He came at me and I feinted at his extended hand. When he made a grab for the ruler I disengaged and slashed him across his face. He yowled and backed away. I smacked him again, then kicked him in the shin as hard as I could, and when he was off balance I jammed that metal ruler into his side hard enough to split his kidney, if only the ruler had a point.

  He forgot his two pals and stumbled for the door. I screamed at the other two, “Get out of here before I kill you!”

  They ran.

  I picked up the phone. It was still working so I punched 911 and told the surprised woman at the county police headquarters that Grenford Laboratory was being attacked by terrorists.

  “Is this some kind of joke?” she asked, half bored, half annoyed.

  “This is Dr. Arthur Marshak. I am director of Grenford Laboratory and a band of people in ski masks are wrecking the place. Call the state police at once. We’re under attack!”

  “Yessir,” she said. “Right away, sir.”

  I banged the phone down and wondered what I should do next. Suddenly I felt sort of ridiculous standing there with a ruler in my hand and my pulse throbbing so hard I could hear it in my ears. Should I remain here and guard the computer center? Or go out to the animal compound? The chimps and monkeys were still screeching madly and now I could hear the truculent squealing of the minihogs.

  The computer or the animals? I hesitated. The computer held all our data, all the information we had gleaned so painstakingly. But the animals were irreplaceable, too. In their genes and their proteins were the results of years of careful breeding and experiments.

  Max. I had promised Cassie I would look after Max. God knows what those bastards were doing out there in the animal pens. I bolted out of the computer center and ran toward the rear of the bui
lding, my ruler still firmly gripped in my hand.

  I saw one of our uniformed guards as I raced down the corridor. He was sprawled on the floor like a sack of laundry. I stopped and knelt over him. He was breathing and his eyes were open, but unfocused. Pupils so dilated I could barely see his irises. Drugged, somehow.

  The chimps and monkeys sounded as if a bloody war were going on outside. There were more than a dozen macaques in the cages, and four chimpanzees, three females and Max. They were making enough noise to wake Tarzan in Africa.

  I saw more lab rats scurrying frantically as I ran down the corridor. And I could hear the stubborn angry squealing of our minihogs over the hoots and shrieks of the monkeys and chimps.

  Pushing through the double doors into the animal compound, I saw a half dozen people, all in windbreakers and ski masks—except for one tousled blond youth who had a nasty gash on his cheek, just below his left eye.

  “That’s the sonofabitch who cut me,” he yelled, pointing at me. I photographed his face with my mind. I wanted to remember what he looked like so the police could identify him.

  Four of the youngsters were trying to push one of our minihogs into a van they had backed into the compound through the back gate, and the hog was resisting with all her stubborn strength. Inside the van, I saw our erstwhile caretaker wrestling with another hog. Her eye caught mine and she quickly looked away, but I recognized her easily enough. So that was how they’d gotten in. She was one of them, a plant, a spy in our midst.

  The only chimp I could see was Max, who was way up in the topmost crotch of the taller tree in the compound, howling and screaming like mad, his lips pulled back to show his fangs. He looked ferocious, but I realized he was only scared out of his wits. It was he who had been making most of the noise, all by himself, although the macaques were doing their part, too. I found out later that the three female chimps had been easily drugged by their caretaker and put into the van. Just as she had shot the security guard when he made his rounds back there. Max had been too smart to stay there and watch the others fall to her dart gun. He had scampered up the tree and set up the terrible din that had scared the macaques and alerted me.