The Immortals

by James Gunn

  Mr. Aikens was a charity case. Barnett would have treated a paying customer more gently.

  Barnett was quick, but his quickness had produced no better results in the elixir synthesis than Pearce’s thoroughness. Of course, he thought ruefully, there is little discrimination between failures.

  “I’ll take over, Doctor Barnett,” he said, making his way to the front of the group. He felt the students’ relief and sensed the reluctance with which Barnett surrendered his place. He would have to do something for Barnett, he told himself, as he told the students about Mr. Aikens and his life and his family situation, and asked the patient to describe his symptoms. He asked each of them, in turn, to hold Mr. Aikens’s wrist and feel his pulse, a function measured better by instruments and recorded on a panel behind the patient’s bed, along with other vital signs. And he asked them to feel Mr. Aikens’s back gently, to sense his pain, and to try to get inside Mr. Aikens’s illness.

  “All these devices,” he said, sweeping his hand around the room, “are wonderful, but they cannot replace the physician’s inner sense and a caring—one might almost say, a curing—touch.”

  The students reacted differently as they were dismissed for the day, some of them relieved to discover that the practice of medicine had not yet been mechanized, others, uneasy in human relationships, resentful that this old doctor was asking them to do more than memorize the names of the body parts and the various ailments to which they were prone. But Barnett was gone before Pearce could tell him about the outcome of the grant application. When he got back to his office, he opened the piece of paper that Mr. Aikens had slipped into his hand when Pearce had held it.

  “I need you,” the note read. “Come to 3416 East 10th tonight and ask for Marilyn. Destroy this note. We’re both in danger.”

  * * *

  The address was in an area that once had been middle class but had been sliding down the income slope ever since. The neighborhood was poor, but the people within it were not yet hopeless. It lay outside the inner city, but the inner city was metastasizing toward it, and Pearce had been forced to cross oncological arms after leaving the comparative safety of the interstate. He had kept the bulletproof windows of his armored car rolled up and a prayer on his lips to Hephaestus, the god of craftsmen, that his engine had been well and truly made.

  The house stood among narrow, two-story residences on narrow lots. Once, no doubt, they had been single-family homes, but now, Pearce suspected, they were carved up into single rooms for multiple families. The computer map had got him this far, but Pearce could not have deduced which house was his destination had he not been able to determine from an old street sign that this was Tenth Street and from an intact house number that he was in the 3400 block. The house just to the west had a 4 and a 1 hanging awry beside it from the edge of the front porch roof, and the one in front of Pearce, a 6. Behind it, in the dusk, loomed the blank wall of a structure built of concrete blocks, either a small factory or a large garage. Beside the house was a lot piled with old iron pipes and littered with rusting construction equipment, and the remains of a small drilling derrick.

  What once had been a small front yard had been paved for parking, but the only other vehicle was a rusted hulk from which the wheels had been removed. Pearce would have preferred to pull his car around to the back and out of sight, but the lot was too narrow for a driveway and he had to trust his vehicle to luck and its own defenses.

  He stepped out cautiously, his black bag in his hand, wondering why he was responding to this anonymous cry for help. It might well be a trap. Physicians had been abducted before by gangs desperate for medical treatment, or for their instruments and drugs. But seldom had a plan been laid to lure a physician into danger, and he did not think Aikens would join any such attempt.

  He moved carefully up squeaking wooden stairs, shining a light onto a porch with boards missing like a ghetto-dweller’s teeth. The front door was unlocked, and when Pearce pushed it open, he noticed that the frame had been splintered, not once but many times, until, no doubt, the residents had surrendered to the inevitable.

  The hall was dark. Above, Pearce’s light revealed an empty socket; if a bulb had been available, and the electricity had not been cut off long ago, it would have been stolen. Stairs led up from the hall to a landing and a door and then turned to ascend toward a mysterious second floor. To his right was an archway, perhaps to the building’s one-time living room, but the arch had been closed by plywood covered with graffiti. The plywood had been painted and repainted in a futile effort to maintain a minimal level of self-respect, but the graffiti showed through like palimpsests of earlier civilizations.

  In the middle of the plywood was a hinged panel that served as a door. No name or number on it—anyone who had reason to be there knew who lived within, and anyone else had no good reason to be there. Except himself, he thought, and knocked.

  “Come in,” a woman’s voice said.

  He pushed open the panel to find himself blinded by a flashlight. He had a feeling there was a weapon behind it. “Marilyn?” he asked.

  The light went out. “You’re Doctor Pearce?”

  “Yes.” Several moments passed before his eyesight returned.

  “I’m Marilyn Van Cleve, and I need your help.”

  He could see now. An oil lamp on an old card table illuminated a woman seated beside it in a large, shabby recliner. She had a flashlight in her lap and an old-fashioned revolver on the table beside the lamp. She was an attractive woman with brown hair cut short and large brown eyes that looked at him warily but unafraid. Her most attractive feature, however, was her health; in the midst of a sea of sickness, she glowed with a well being that made her seem lit from within.

  At first glance Pearce thought perhaps she was in her early twenties, but then he looked again at her eyes; they had seen a great deal of human joy and sadness and suffering.

  “What kind of help?” he asked.

  “You’d better come in and lock the door. It won’t hold anybody out, but it would give me time to get my defenses ready,” she said calmly.

  “Who are you expecting?” he asked.

  “You and whoever may be following you.”

  “No one is following me,” Pearce said impatiently. “I ask you once more, what kind of help?”

  “I’m pregnant,” she said. She stood up. She was a sturdy woman of medium height, and she was, indeed, pregnant, perhaps eight months along or more, Pearce guessed.

  He half-turned toward the door. “I’m not an obstetrician. I have delivered only one baby in the last sixty years. What you need is a midwife.”

  “This is going to be a difficult delivery. I’m going to need more help than a midwife can provide.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know,” she said.

  “Then you belong in a hospital. Even if you can’t afford it, there is a clinic for indigents. Medical students need the practice.”

  “They’d draw blood,” she said simply.

  “They’d do some routine tests, typing in case of the need for transfusions, checking for drugs, diseases, anemia—but that’s all to the good.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “That’s why I need you.”

  He shook his head wearily. “It’s been a long day. If you can’t use a midwife and you can’t go to the hospital, then I can’t be of any help to you.”

  “Don’t you understand?” she asked. “I’m a Cartwright.”

  * * *

  Pearce’s mind slowed, waiting for the implications of Van Cleve’s statement to seep through the walls he had built around the image of Marshall Cartwright. After fifty years of searching, he had found his Holy Grail. But she was also in terrible danger—and so was he.

  “Clearly you can’t go to a hospital,” he said. “Even if I were to admit you myself, I couldn’t deliver your baby without attracting attention, and attention could be fatal. But why do you think the delivery will be difficult?”

  “Cartwrigh
t women mature late. I’m fifty years old—”

  “The first generation,” he said. Cartwright had wasted no time putting into action Pearce’s admonition to be fruitful and multiply.

  She nodded. “But menopause may have no meaning for us. That remains to be seen. Our organs are tough, however, and the mouth of the uterus may not expand sufficiently to allow the baby to be born. Although I never get sick and injuries heal quickly, and the baby will be the same, it can strangle or suffocate. A Caeserian may be necessary.”

  Pearce looked around the room. It was not dirty. It had been swept, perhaps even scrubbed, but grime was embedded in the painted walls and the wooden floor and the ancient furniture so deeply that mere soap and water could never reach it. “Not exactly the most sanitary of conditions.”

  “Not here,” she said. “The time is not yet right.”

  “How far along are you?”

  “Nine months.” She held up a hand. “But Cartwright babies take a week longer. I got that from my mother. She died when I was only five years old. She never really got over the trauma of my birth. But she told me about my father—a wandering man, she called him, who loved her, she said, but could not stop to take care of her, or me. So I’ve been on my own since then, and I’ve done all right, in spite of the knowledge that I had to hide who I was, that people were searching for me. But then—” with a hint of bitterness—“women have always had to hide their superiority from men.”

  “What about your husband?”

  “Him?” She laughed. “He wasn’t what you would call a husband, but then I’ve never had good judgment where men were concerned. My mistake was allowing him to get me pregnant. He disappeared as soon as he found out.”

  “You never told him about your—special ability?”

  “To keep him young forever?” She smiled ruefully; even in rue her smile transformed her face into something approaching what Pearce would call beauty. “You think any man is worth keeping under those terms? Or maybe the habit of concealment ran too deep.” She shook her head. “No, I would never tell anybody.”

  “And you’ve existed like this?” He waved his hand at the room, implying in that gesture the house, the neighborhood and the neighbors, and all the dirt, disease, degradation, and deprivation that involved.

  “It’s not what you think,” she said. “There are good people here, maybe more than among the medically privileged. But I haven’t always been here, even though it is the best place to hide, here where anonymity is a way of life. Sometimes I’ve allowed myself to rise into the middle class, but I can’t remain anywhere very long or the chances of suspicion, or even detection, become too great.

  “The difficult part is knowing that I can help people who are sick or injured, and realizing that I can’t. The moment I let my sympathies take over, the stories will start, the scent will be picked up, and the chase will begin. Do you realize—?” She broke off, unable to continue.

  Pearce nodded slowly. “I’ve seen patients that I might be able to save if I used all the medical resources at my command, but I couldn’t because the antibiotics were scarce or prohibitively expensive, or because they would not stretch to all who needed them. Deciding who is to live and who is to die—that’s called triage.”

  “It’s even worse when you realize that you, yourself, are the fountain of youth.”

  “And how did you get my name?”

  “That’s part of the legend, too, part of my inheritance, like a fairy godmother I could call upon in extremity. ‘There’s Doctor Pearce,’ my mother said. ‘He’s the only one you can trust, but don’t call upon him unless you’re really in trouble.’ ” She laughed again, putting her hands on her swollen belly. “I guess that’s what I am—a woman in trouble.”

  He nodded. “It’s happened once before, and I tried to help then. I’ll help you, of course. But”—he hesitated—“could I take a sample of your blood? I’ve been trying to synthesize the Cartwright difference ever since I ran across your father, but the original samples ran out long ago and I’ve had to proceed on guesswork. A sample from you might give me the clue I need.”

  “Do you think that’s wise?”

  “To synthesize the elixir?”

  She nodded.

  “I’ve thought about it. Knowledge can be used for good or ill, but on the whole more knowledge is better than less. I’ll work it out, and then I’ll decide what to do with it.”

  “If the world lets you,” she said. “But I can’t very well ask your help and then deny your fee.” And as he got out his syringe and his bottle of alcohol and sponge, she added, “And what’s even more important, you can have the placenta and blood-filled umbilical cord when the baby is born.”

  He stopped in the midst of inserting the syringe. Of course. Aside from the genes themselves, the placenta and the cord were nourishing, maybe defining the baby. Who knew what magic they might contain?

  “But you must promise me not to trust anybody,” she said.

  “I have assistants,” he said.

  “Nobody.”

  He nodded and went about his task. When he was done and the sample was stored in the refrigerated section of his black bag, she said, “I’m going to leave by the back way.” She picked up her flashlight and her revolver. “Your pursuers will be here any moment.”

  She was more paranoid than he. “When do you want me to return?”

  She hesitated at a door set into another plywood wall in an archway at the back of the room. “I won’t be here. I’ll get word to you where and when. Be careful, Doctor Pearce. The world is more treacherous than even you suspect.” And she was gone.

  * * *

  The world had turned dark by the time Pearce emerged from the house. Night belonged to the citizens, hiding their blemishes, concealing their movements, masking their intentions. Pearce played his light around the porch, throughout the paved yard, and around his car. Everything seemed as empty and untouched as when he had arrived, but a feeling of danger jangled at his nerves. He shrugged his shoulders and essayed a chuckle. Van Cleve had infected him with her paranoia.

  And then, as he picked his way down the stairs and moved toward his car, something monstrous loomed up behind him, and he turned to splash his light upon a ragged, hulking, unshaven creature with a club in its hand raised to strike. It was so nightmarish, so traditional in its attitude, that he almost laughed.

  He didn’t get the chance. A voice from the street shouted, “Stay where you are! Don’t move!” But as Pearce turned toward the voice, the figure behind him twisted away. A laser beam hissed through the night, and a voice cried out, but when he turned back the creature was gone.

  “Who’s there?” he called out, although he thought he had recognized the voice.

  “Doctor Pearce,” a voice said as it moved toward him. “Are you all right?”

  When a figure came into the light, Pearce saw who it was. “Tom,” he said. “What are you doing here?” He thought briefly of Van Cleve’s confidence that he was being followed before he dismissed it. “Not that I’m not glad you showed up.”

  “I happened to be passing the monitoring station as I was leaving,” Tom Barnett said, “and your telltale showed your car in this dangerous part of town. I thought maybe you’d been hijacked or kidnapped, so I reported to the police and thought I’d better start immediately. But what are you doing here?”

  That was it, of course. The computerized map system automatically reported its location. No one needed to follow him. Even if he had thought of that and had believed the note’s warning of danger, how could he have made his way here on foot, and how could he have known it was wise to do so?

  “I’m one of the few remaining physicians who still make house calls,” Pearce said lightly. “A habit from the old days I find hard to break.” He thought quickly: Trust nobody, Van Cleve had insisted. “I got a message—someone just pushed it into my hand.” Might as well stick as closely to the truth as possible, he thought, and electronic messages left
trails that could be checked. “I thought it was somebody I ought to know, but by the time I got here I knew there was something wrong.”

  “You’ve got to stop this, Russ,” Barnett said. His voice was husky with concern. “You’re getting up in years, and you’re too valuable, and there may be people out to get you.”

  “Who could be out to get me?” Pearce scoffed. “But you’re right: These are dangerous times. You said the police have been called? We’d better cancel that alarm before we have to answer a lot of questions, and get back to the hospital compound before my attacker returns with his friends.”

  “You lead the way, and I’ll follow behind,” Barnett said.

  Pearce nodded and swung his bag with its priceless contents into the front seat beside him, where it wouldn’t be far from him, and pulled his car into the street where his headlights splashed across Barnett’s car. It was newer and more heavily armored than his, and Pearce wondered how Barnett could afford it on a resident’s salary. Perhaps he had inherited money or had his funds supplemented by his family, or a patron protecting his avenue of supply.

  They retraced Pearce’s route, but this time with the comfort of convoy and Barnett’s laser gun. As Pearce drove, he was swept by a wave of weariness. The day had been long and filled with energy-consuming events, and he felt every one of his ninety years. A great sense of relief washed over him when he pulled through the Medical Center’s guarded gates and into the living compound where nothing but an all-out attack by a fully equipped military unit could threaten him.

  And yet, as he said good night to Barnett and thanked him once more for saving him from robbery or even death, he could not help but wonder why the police had never arrived.

  * * *

  Early morning hospital corridors echo footsteps like late night sidewalks, and Pearce pushed away his uneasy feeling of being followed as he made his way to the laboratory with his tube of irreplaceable fluid still locked in his black bag. His sleep had been more than usually disturbed by the awakenings of the elderly, the swirling memories, the bladder pressures, the terminal insomnia, and at last he had surrendered to his impatience to be up and about his work. Soon the corridors would be thronging with breakfast wagons and hospital gurneys headed for morning tests and surgeries, nurses bustling about their innumerable tasks, and the hospital once more engaged in its epic struggle between sickness and good health, between death and life. But he reached the laboratory in the bowels of the basement without seeing more than a couple of night-shift nurses yawning at their stations.