The Immortals

by James Gunn

  “Sure. We all are.” Pearce smiled grimly. “Our business is to postpone it as long as we can.”

  A few moments later, when Pearce opened the door and stepped into the hall, Dr. Easter was talking earnestly to a tall, blond, broad-shouldered man in an expensively cut business suit. The man was about Easter’s age, somewhere between forty-five and fifty. The face was strange: It didn’t match the body. There was a thin, predatory look to its slate-gray eyes.

  The man’s name was Carl Jansen. He was personal secretary to the old man who was dying inside the room. Dr. Easter performed the introductions, and the men shook hands. Pearce reflected that the term personal secretary might cover a multitude of duties.

  “Doctor Pearce, I’ll only ask you one question,” Jansen said in a voice as flat and cold as his eyes. “Is Mister Weaver going to die?”

  “Of course he is,” Pearce answered. “None of us escapes. If you mean is he going to die within the next few days, I’d say yes—if I had to answer yes or no.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” Jansen asked. His tone sounded suspicious, but that was true of everything he said.

  “He’s outlived his body. Like a machine, it’s worn out, falling to pieces, one part failing after another.”

  “His father lived to be ninety-one, his mother ninety-six.”

  Pearce looked at Jansen steadily, unblinking. “They didn’t accumulate several billion dollars. We live in an age that has almost conquered disease, but its pace has inflicted a price. The stress and strain of modern life tear us apart. Every billion Weaver made cost him five years of living.”

  “What are you going to do—just let him die?”

  Pearce’s eyes were just as cold as Jansen’s. “As soon as possible we’ll give him a transfusion. Does he have any relatives, close friends?”

  “There’s no one closer than me.”

  “We’ll need two pints of blood for every pint we give Weaver. Arrange it.”

  “Mister Weaver will pay for whatever he uses.”

  “He’ll replace it if possible. That’s the hospital rule.”

  Jansen’s eyes dropped. “There’ll be plenty of volunteers from the office.”

  When Pearce was beyond the range of his low, penetrating voice, Jansen said, “Can’t we get somebody else? I don’t like him.”

  “That’s because he’s harder than you are,” Easter said. “He’d be a good match for the old man when he was in his prime.”

  “He’s too young.”

  “That’s why he’s good. The best geriatrician in the Middle West. He can be detached, objective. All doctors need a touch of ruthlessness. Pearce needs more than most; he loses every patient sooner or later. He’s got it.” Easter looked at Jansen and smiled ruthfully. “When men reach our age, they start getting soft. They start getting subjective about death.”

  * * *

  The requisition for one unit of blood arrived at the blood bank. The hospital routine began. A laboratory technician, crisp in a starched white uniform, came from the blood bank on the basement floor. From one of the old man’s ropy veins she drew five cubic centimeters of blood, almost purple inside the slim barrel of the syringe.

  The old man didn’t stir. In the silence his breathing was a raucous noise.

  Back at the workbench, she dabbed three blood samples onto two glass slides, one divided into sections marked A and B. She slipped the slides onto a light-box with a translucent glass top; to one sample she added a drop of clear serum from a green bottle marked “Anti-A” in a commercial rack. “Anti-B” came from a brown bottle; “Anti-Rho” from a clear one. She rocked the box back and forth on its pivots. Sixty seconds later the red cells of the samples marked A and B were still evenly suspended. In the third sample the cells had clumped together visibly.

  She entered the results on her computer: patient’s name, date, room, doctor. . . . Type: O. Rh: neg.

  She pushed another key. A list of blood available wrote itself across the screen, grouped by types. The technician opened the right-hand door of the refrigerator and inspected the labels of the plastic bags on the second shelf from the top. She selected one and put samples of the donor’s and patient’s blood into two small test tubes.

  A drop of donor’s serum in a sample of the patient’s blood provided the major crossmatch: the red cells did not clump, and even under the microscope, after centrifuging, the cells were perfect, even, suspended circles. A drop or two of the patient’s serum in a sample of the donor’s blood and the minor crossmatch was done.

  On the label she wrote:

  FOR

  LEROY WEAVER 9–4

  ICU DR. PEARCE

  She telephoned the nurse in charge that the blood was ready when needed. The nurse came for the blood in a few minutes. She and the lab tech checked the name of the recipient, the blood type, and the identifying numbers of the blood unit and initialed the tag that hung from the bag. The lab tech stripped one copy for her file, and the nurse carried the bag away. At the nurses’ station she removed another copy and filed it in a drawer. Then, with a second nurse, she went to ICU and attached a copy of the tag to the patient’s chart before both reviewed the doctor’s orders and the patient’s identity, and compared the numbers on the patient’s identification bracelet with those on the unit of blood and on the tag.

  Dr. Pearce studied the charts labeled “Leroy Weaver.” He picked up the report from the hematology laboratory. Red cell count: 2,360,000/cmm. Anemia, all right. Worse than he’d even suspected. That duodenal ulcer was losing a lot of blood.

  The transfusion would help. It would be temporary, but everything is, at best. In the end it is all a matter of time. Maybe it would revive Weaver enough to get some solid food down him. He might surprise them all and walk out of this hospital yet.

  Pearce picked up the charts and reports and walked down the long, quiet corridor, rubbery underfoot, redolent of the perennial hospital odors: alcohol and anesthetic, fighting the ancient battle against bacteria and pain. He opened the door of the intensive care unit and walked into the coolness.

  He nodded distantly to the nurse on duty in the room. She was not one of the hospital staff. She was one of the three full-time nurses hired for Weaver by Jansen.

  Pearce picked up the clipboard at the foot of the bed and looked at it. No change. He studied the old man’s face. It looked more like death. His breathing was still stertorous; his discolored eyelids still veiled his sunken eyes.

  What was he? Name him: Five Billion Dollars. He was Money. At this point in his life he served no useful function; he contributed nothing to society, nothing to the race. He had been too busy to marry, too dedicated to father. His occupation: accumulator. He accumulated money and power; he never had enough.

  Pearce didn’t believe that a man with money was necessarily a villain. But anyone who made a billion dollars or a multiple of it was necessarily a large part predator and the rest magpie. Pearce knew why Jansen was worried. When Weaver died, Money died, Power died. Money and Power are not immune from death, and when they fall they carry empires with them.

  Pearce looked down at Weaver, thinking these things, and it didn’t matter. He was still a person, still human, still alive. That meant he was worth saving. No other consideration was valid.

  * * *

  Three plastic bags hung from the IV pole—one held a five-percent solution of glucose for intravenous feeding, another held saltwater, the third held dark life fluid itself. Plastic T-joints reduced multiple plastic tubes into one that passed through an IV pump fastened to the pole and plugged into the nearest outlet. The plastic tube from the IV pump entered a catheter inserted into the antecubital vein swollen across the inside of the patient’s elbow.

  “The blood bank didn’t have any packed RBCs in Oneg,” the nurse said. “We had to get whole blood.”

  Pearce nodded and the nurse closed the clamp to the intravenous feeding and released the clamp closing the tube from the saline solution before doing the same for
the bag of blood. There was a brief mixture of fluids, and then it was all blood, running slowly through the long, transparent tubing with its own in-line filter into the receptive vein, new blood bringing new life to the old, worn-out mechanism on the hard hospital bed.

  New blood for old, Pearce thought. Money can buy anything. “A little faster.”

  The nurse adjusted the pump. Occasionally the pump beeped a warning, and the nurse made further adjustments. In the bag the level of the life fluid dropped more swiftly.

  Life. Dripping. Flowing. Making the old new.

  The old man took a deep breath. The exhausted laboring of his chest grew easier. Pearce studied the old face, the beaklike nose, the thin, bloodless lips, looking cruel even in their pallor. New life, perhaps. But nothing can reverse the long erosion of the years. Bodies wear out. Nothing can make them new.

  Drop by drop the blood flowed from the bag through the tubing into an old man’s veins. Someone had given it or sold it. Someone young and healthy, who could make more purple life stuff, saturated with healthy red cells, vigorous white scavengers, platelets, the multiple proteins; someone who could replace it all in less than ninety days.

  Pearce thought about Richard Lower, the seventeenth-century English anatomist who performed the first transfusion, and the twentieth-century Viennese immunologist, Karl Landsteiner, who made transfusions safe when he discovered the incompatible blood groups among human beings.

  Now here was this old man, who was getting the blood through the efforts of Lower and Landsteiner and some anonymous donor; this old man who needed it, who couldn’t make the red cells fast enough any longer, who couldn’t keep up with the rate he was losing them internally. What was dripping through the tubes was life, a gift of the young to the old, of the healthy to the sick.

  The old man’s eyelids flickered.

  * * *

  When Pearce made his morning rounds, the old man was watching him with faded blue eyes. Pearce blinked once and automatically picked up the skin-and-bone wrist again. “Feeling better?”

  He got his second shock. The old man nodded.

  “Fine, Mister Weaver. We’ll get a little food down you, and in a little while you’ll be back at work.”

  He glanced at the monitors on the wall and studied them more closely. Gently, a look of surprise on his face, he lowered the old arm down beside the thin, sheeted body.

  He sat back thoughtfully beside the bed, ignoring the bustling nurse. Weaver was making a surprising rally for a man in as bad shape as he had been. The pulse was strong and steady. Blood pressure was up. Somehow the transfusion had triggered hidden stores of energy and resistance.

  Weaver was fighting back.

  Pearce felt a strange and unprofessional sense of elation.

  The next day Pearce thought the eyes that watched him were not quite so faded. “Comfortable?” he asked. The old man nodded. His pulse was almost normal for a man of his age; his blood pressure was down; his oxygen level was up.

  On the third day Weaver started talking.

  The old man’s thready voice whispered disjointed and meaningless reminiscences. Pearce nodded as if he understood, and he nodded to himself, understanding the process that was reaching its conclusion. Arteriosclerosis had left its marks: chronic granular kidney, damage to the left ventricle of the heart, malfunction of the brain from a cerebral hemorrhage or two.

  On the fourth day Weaver was sitting up in bed talking to the nurse in a cracked, sprightly voice. “Yessirree,” he said toothlessly. “That was the day I whopped ’em. Gave it to ’em good, I did. Let ’em have it right between the eyes. Always hated those kids. You must be the doctor,” he said suddenly, turning toward Pearce. “I like you. Gonna see that you get a big check. Take care of the people I like. Take care of those I don’t like, too.” He chuckled; it was an evil, childish sound.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Pearce said gently, picking up Weaver’s wrist. “Concentrate on getting well.”

  The old man nodded happily and stuck a finger in his mouth to rub his gums. “You’ll git paid,” he mumbled. “Don’t you worry about that.”

  Pearce looked down at the wrist he was holding. It had filled out in a way for which he could remember no precedent. “What’s the matter with your gums?”

  “Itch,” Weaver got out around his finger. “Like blazes.”

  On the fifth day Weaver walked to the toilet.

  On the sixth day he took a shower. When Pearce came in, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, dangling his feet. Weaver looked up quickly as Pearce entered, his eyes alert, no longer so sunken. His skin had acquired a subcutaneous glow of health. Like his wrist and arm, his face had filled out. Even his legs looked firmer, almost muscular.

  He was taking the well-balanced hospital diet and turning it into flesh and fat and muscle. With his snowy hair he looked like an ad for everybody’s grandfather.

  The next day his hair began to darken at the roots.

  “How old are you, Mister Weaver?” Pearce asked.

  “Eighty,” Weaver said proudly. “Eighty my last birthday, June 5. Born in Wyoming, boy, in a mountain cabin. Still bears around then. Many’s the time I seen ’em, out with my Pa. Wolves, too. Never gave us no trouble, though.”

  “What color was your hair?”

  “Color of a raven’s wing. Had the blackest, shiniest hair in the county. Gals used to beg to run their fingers through it.” He chuckled reminiscently. “Used to let ’em. A passel of black-headed kids in Washakie County before I left.”

  He stuck his finger in his mouth and massaged his gums ecstatically.

  “Still itch?” Pearce asked.

  “Like a Wyoming chigger.” He chuckled again. “You know what’s wrong with me, boy? In my second childhood. That’s what. I’m cutting teeth.”

  * * *

  During the second week Weaver was removed from intensive care to a private suite and his mind turned to business, deserting the long-ago past. A telephone was installed beside his bed, and he spent half his waking time in short, clipped conversations about incomprehensible deals and manipulations. The other half was devoted to Jansen, who was so conveniently on hand whenever Weaver called for him that Pearce thought he must have appropriated a hospital room.

  Weaver was picking up the scepter of empire.

  While his mind roamed restlessly over possessions and ways of keeping and augmenting them, his body repaired itself like a self-servicing machine. His first tooth came through—a canine. After that they appeared rapidly. His hair darkened almost perceptibly; and when a barber came in to trim it, Weaver had him remove all the white, leaving him with a crewcut as dark as he had described. His face filled out, the wrinkles smoothing themselves like a ruffled lake when the wind has gentled. His body became muscular and vigorous; the veins retreated under the skin to become gray traceries. Even his eyes darkened to a fiery blue.

  The lab tests were additional proof of what Pearce had begun to suspect. Arteriosclerosis had never thickened those veins; or else, somehow, the damage of plaque buildup had been repaired. The kidneys functioned perfectly. The heart was as strong and efficient a pump as it had ever been. There was no evidence of a cerebral hemorrhage.

  By the end of that week Weaver looked like a man of thirty, and his body provided physical evidence of a man in his early, vigorous years of maturity.

  “Carl,” Weaver was saying as Pearce entered the room, “I want a woman.”

  “Any particular woman?” Jansen answered, shrugging.

  “You don’t understand,” Weaver said with the impatience he reserved for those immediately dependent on his whims. “I want one to marry. I made a mistake before; I’m not going to repeat it. A man in my position needs an heir. I’m going to have one. Yes, Carl—and you can hide that look of incredulity a little better—at my age!” He swung around quickly toward Pearce. “That’s right, isn’t it, Doctor?”

  Pearce shrugged. “There’s no physical reason you can’t father a child.
”

  “Get this, Carl. I’m as strong and as smart as I ever was, maybe stronger and smarter. Some people are going to learn that very soon. I’ve been given a second chance, haven’t I, Doctor?”

  “You might call it that. What are you going to do with it?”

  “I’m going to do better. Better than I did before. This time I’m not going to make any mistakes. And you, Doctor, do you know what you’re going to do?”

  “I’m going to do what I’ve always done: my job, as best I can.”

  Weaver’s eyes twisted to Pearce’s face. “You think I’m just talking. Don’t make that mistake. You’re going to find out why.”

  “Why?”

  “Why I’ve recovered like I have. Don’t try to kid me. You’ve never seen anything like it. I’m not eighty years old anymore. My body isn’t. My mind isn’t. Why?”

  “What’s your guess?”

  “I never guess. I know. I get the facts from those who have them, and then I decide. That’s what I want from you—the facts. I’ve been rejuvenated.”

  “You’ve been talking to Doctor Easter.”

  “Of course. He’s my personal physician. That’s where I start.”

  “But you never got that language from him. He’d never commit himself to a word like rejuvenation.”

  Weaver glowered at Pearce from under dark eyebrows. “What was done to me?”

  “What does it matter? If you’ve been ‘rejuvenated,’ that should be enough for any man.”

  “When Mister Weaver asks a question,” Jansen interjected icily, “Mister Weaver wants an answer.”

  Weaver brushed him aside. “Doctor Pearce doesn’t frighten. But Doctor Pearce is a reasonable man. He believes in facts. He lives by logic, like me. Understand me, Doctor! I may be thirty now, but I will be eighty again. Before then I want to know how to be thirty once more.”

  “Ah.” Pearce sighed. “You’re not talking about rejuvenation now. You’re talking about immortality.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not for humans. The body wears out. Three-score years and ten. That—roughly—is what we’re allotted. After that we start falling apart.”