The Immortals

by James Gunn

  Pearce poured half the blood sample into a tube that he sealed and returned to his black bag. The other half he poured into a density gradient tube, diluted it with cesium chloride, and inserted it into the ultracentrifuge. He set the dial at 100 and turned it on. After a few minutes he turned off the machine and removed the test tube. He held the tube in the ultraviolet light case. DNA molecules were the heaviest part of the blood, and the bottom of the tube was the darkest. He poured the top ninety percent of the fluid into another tube that he put into his black bag.

  He should turn this process over to a laboratory that specialized in these procedures, he knew, but he could trust none of them. That wasn’t Van Cleve’s paranoia; it was simple realism. The price of liberty might be eternal vigilance, but the price of immortality was eternal suspicion.

  Tom Barnett came into the laboratory while he was cleaning and sterilizing the tubes, and Pearce told him the grant renewal application had been rejected. “We’re out of business, Tom,” he said. “You might as well use your remaining assistantship working on something that will have a payoff.”

  “What about you?” Barnett asked.

  “I’m going to keep tinkering,” Pearce said. “They’ll probably reclaim the space, and the live subjects probably are too expensive, but maybe I can hang on to the equipment. No use starting a new line of research at my age.”

  “I’d like to help,” Barnett said, “even if I can’t be paid.”

  “I couldn’t allow that. You’ve got a career ahead of you. Go on with you,” Pearce said roughly. “Get about it. I’ll give you glowing references as a clinician and a researcher.” Barnett left reluctantly, and Pearce returned to his labors.

  He removed from the refrigerator a flat silica gel in a sterile plastic wrapping, placed it between two electrical contacts that passed a current across the gel, and carefully poured what was left in the density gradient tube over the gel. A few minutes later he put the gel under the ultraviolet light and with a sterile, sharp-bladed knife scraped from the top of it the darkest rungs of the ladder. He put them into a receptor tube and removed the gel remnants through electrophoresis. What he had left, if he was lucky, was DNA.

  He put the rest of the gel into his black bag for later analysis of the remaining blood fractions, but for now he was going to focus on DNA. Whatever special properties were possessed by the Cartwright blood had to be traceable to the DNA and, what was even more important, reproduceable.

  Pearce put his DNA sample into an aluminum box stuffed with test tubes. He added some primer, polymerase, and nucleotides. The PCR machine would do the rest, applying heat to the DNA, breaking the bonds that hold the strands of the double helix together. When the temperature was reduced, the primers would attach themselves to either end of the strip. Polymerase, the magical substance, would trigger the formation of new DNA strands from the nucleotides. Then the process would begin over again, with the PCR machine raising the temperature to separate the strands of the DNA molecules that now had doubled in number.

  It was like a chain reaction, each raising and lowering of the temperature creating twice as many strands of DNA as had existed before. The process was exponential. That was why it was called a polymerase chain reaction. Within a few hours Pearce would have a billion copies, and a supply of DNA that he could separate into fragments with enzymes and then test each fragment on a separate sample of tissue cells.

  The process had just begun, but at least it had begun. He felt a curious sense of elation that he had not felt for more years than he could remember. It made him feel youthful again. He never felt truly old. He always felt forty inside, that age at which his internal calendar had stopped when the most important event of his life had happened, but his body was less flexible, his muscles didn’t recover as quickly from exertion, and he felt pains where once had been nothing but silky articulation. And yet he had the feeling that aging was a state of mind. If there was such a thing as psychosomatic illness, why couldn’t there be such a thing as psychosomatic wellness? It would bear thinking about.

  He had been so busy with his tasks that he was startled to turn around and find someone in the laboratory with him. It was the executive vice chancellor, Julia Hudson, and she was looking at him with an intensity that first startled and then alarmed him.

  * * *

  “How long have you been standing there?” Pearce asked.

  “Only a minute or two. Part of my tour of the Center, you know,” she said, answering a question he had not yet asked. “And I wanted to see the Project in action.” Her voice capitalized the Project, as if to concede it the importance that he himself would place on it. But he felt as if she were looking at the space occupied by the laboratory and the equipment it housed as assets to be used for better purposes.

  “This is where it happens,” he said. “Or doesn’t happen. The search for the elixir vitae, the rejuvenation factor.”

  “I hate to see you wasting your time searching for a substance that doesn’t exist.”

  “And the Center’s funds?”

  She nodded acknowledgment. “That’s part of my job, to weigh priorities against resources. The issue is immortality, and nobody lives forever.”

  “Except the Cartwrights.”

  “That’s mythology, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.”

  “I have good reason to believe it isn’t,” Pearce said. “In fact I once was in possession of some of that magical Cartwright blood.”

  She looked surprised, perhaps even astonished. She was an attractive woman, Pearce had time to think—and even to surprise himself with the thought—with dark lustrous hair, blue eyes, a shapely face, and lips that many young men must have longed to stop with theirs.

  “So that’s why you have been so persistent,” she said. “You’re the doctor who treated Leroy Weaver.”

  “All that has been expunged from the record and is best forgotten,” Pearce said. “You can imagine what my life would be like, and how much work I would get done, if it were general knowledge.”

  “And your research, then—”

  “Has been an effort to replicate the properties of Marshall Cartwright’s blood. I’ve always thought the rejuvenating factor must be associated with the gamma globulins, and I have been analyzing Cartwright’s DNA ever since, but I had so little to start with, and what I had was diluted and mixed with Weaver’s blood and the blood of my laboratory animals, and possibly corrupted, and DNA research then was relatively primitive and undiscriminating—”

  “Then it is a will-o’-the-wisp.”

  “The will-o’-the-wisp isn’t an illusion, you know. It’s swamp gas, methane, spontaneously ignited. It can be found and identified. This will-o’-the-wisp exists, and it, too, can be found and identified, and maybe synthesized.”

  Her eyes were alive now with the zeal of the quest. “If only a Cartwright would reveal himself, allow himself to be studied. The synthesis could be accomplished in a matter of a few years.”

  “Now you believe,” Pearce said. “But what you propose is impossible. How long do you think a Cartwright would last in a world increasingly obsessed with the fear of dying?”

  “But if the elixir vitae were synthesized, the pressure would be off, the Cartwrights no longer would be the Holy Grail—”

  “If—if—so many ifs. The only one certain is that if they don’t reveal themselves, they may survive and so may the human species. And therefore my research blunders on.”

  Her gaze moved around the laboratory, with its gleaming surfaces and functional shapes, with an expression that resembled wistfulness. “I would like to help.”

  “How?” he asked.

  She raised a hand in supplication. “In person, I mean. Research is so neat, so definitive—so much better than the equivocal, messy business of administration. I always loved the laboratory, and I wish I could get back to it. Maybe I could steal a few minutes a day, just to lend a hand?”

  “Of course,” he said, not committing himself to
anything. It was a bit of a coincidence, he thought, that she had showed up just as he was working on the Van Cleve sample. “Any time.”

  “Have you thought,” she asked, “that the rejuvenation factor might be related to the stem cells?”

  He paused to reflect. “That’s a good idea. I’ll think about it. One thing I have begun to suspect over the years is that the phenomenon is more complex than I thought. The Cartwright mutation may combine several improvements, and the stem cells might be one of them.”

  “Meanwhile,” she said, “I’ll see that you keep your laboratory and your equipment, even when the grant runs out. And minimal biological supplies if we can camouflage them as clinical. No salaries, I’m afraid,” she added apologetically.

  “I’ll be grateful for whatever you can do,” he said and was musing about stem cells as she was turning toward the door. As soon as she was gone he changed the code on the entry panel and added the security that he had never before thought was necessary, his palm print.

  * * *

  The next few days he could steal only an hour or two away from his hospital rounds and teaching duties to check the results in the laboratory. He had nurtured human cell cultures and treated each with a different fragment of DNA that he had separated with enzymes. He had locked them into a machine that periodically washed away the waste by-products and added fresh nourishment.

  Each time he entered the laboratory, however, he had the feeling that someone had been there in his absence. Everything was as he had left it, nothing ever was out of place, but he could not shake the conviction that, in spite of his precautions, someone had been in the room while he was gone, checking on the progress of his research. It was like the prickly sensation one gets at the back of the neck that says you are being watched even though you can’t ever catch anybody watching, as intangible and as inarguable.

  Before he could take any additional precautions, or even think of any additional precautions he could take, he was summoned by Marilyn Van Cleve. Sam Aikens had died, and Pearce was wondering who Van Cleve could use as a conduit. It happened at his free clinic attached to the Center’s walls. It had an external entrance so that the security of the hospital compound would not be breached or its purity compromised. He was examining a wiry old man in dirty working clothes that once had been dark blue. The old man was coughing from emphysema, and Pearce smiled sadly at the package of cigarettes protruding from the old man’s shirt pocket even though he could not smoke while within the Center’s walls. Pearce heard unusual sounds from within the old man’s sunken chest. He frowned and moved his stethoscope to another spot to listen more intently. On the third try he realized the sounds were words: The old man had learned the trick of esophageal speech, when cancerous vocal cords had to be removed. Perhaps, he thought, the diagnosis was not emphysema but cancer. The old man had even learned how to whisper into his chest cavity.

  It was then Pearce realized what the words were saying: “Marilyn needs you. I’ll be waiting across from the main gate at sunset. Come by foot.” And then, as soon as the examination was completed and the free sample of a bronchial inhaler was handed over, the old man rose from the examination table and left the room.

  Pearce got through the rest of the day mechanically, unable to concentrate on the task at hand because of the possibilities that lay in front of him, half dread and apprehension, half anticipation. Finally, as the sun edged gold around a dark cloud on the horizon, he put his black bag and a second small bag into the front seat of his car and drove through the main gate, nodding to the guards as he passed through.

  He pulled the car out of sight behind the ruins opposite the gate and looked around for the old man who whispered from his chest. The ruins of what seemed to be ancient restaurants and taverns for bored medical students were deserted. Pearce waited impatiently, not wanting to leave the safety of the car, not sure this wasn’t a trap or a diversion.

  After ten or fifteen anxious minutes, something tapped on his window. Pearce turned, startled, but it was the old man. When Pearce rolled the window down, the old man forced words into speech like hoarse whispers, “I said ‘no car.’ ”

  “How do you think I was going to leave the compound? On foot?” Pearce said. “Wouldn’t that attract suspicion?”

  The old man shrugged, coughing. Pearce got out of the car with his bags, feeling a shiver of—what? Anticipation? Apprehension? He didn’t know which. Maybe both. Behind the remains of what was once a concrete-block trash enclosure stood an antique motorcycle. Pearce hadn’t seen anything like it for a quarter of a century. It seemed as big as a small horse, but it was old—dented and rusty and only the letters Ha and, widely separated, son appeared on the forward section. Pearce noted with a shiver of horror that the machine operated, if indeed it still worked, on gasoline with all its fumes and carcinogens.

  The old man coughed and threw his leg over the saddle. He motioned for Pearce to put his bags in the containers fastened on each side of the rear wheel and to take the jump seat behind him.

  “If you think I’m going to join you on this—this apparatus,” Pearce said, “you’re out of your mind.”

  The old man motioned again, impatiently, and nodded at the top floors of the Center compound visible over the tops of the ruins. Pearce looked longingly at where his car was hidden, but he remembered the computerized map and telltales, and shrugged, stowed away his bags, and got behind the old man.

  The old man kicked the machine into life. He was stronger than he had seemed in the clinic. Pearce thought of him as the old man, but he probably was two or three decades younger than Pearce himself. As the engine roared like a wounded animal, unmuted by a muffler, Pearce wondered what he was doing here in the gathering dark, committing himself to strangers on a quixotic mission that might end in disaster for everybody.

  Then the motorcycle lurched into motion, its roar modulating into a husky snarl, and Pearce had no more time for reflections on his folly. Instead he hung on to the old man’s emaciated waist as wind and dust tugged at his clothes and hair and beat into his face. The night was chilly, and the cold ate through his clothing and down to the bone. Now that they were traveling, the old man wasn’t coughing as much, as if the strength of the machine he rode seeped up into his body through some kind of sympathetic magic.

  The old man avoided all but short stretches of the trafficways and their patrols. Instead the motorcycle weaved through unlighted side streets, avoiding potholes and wreckage as if by instinct, skidding around corners, going over sidewalks and through yards to avoid barricades behind which lurked dangers that Pearce did not want to consider.

  The experience was far different from traveling the same distance by car. After his terror subsided to a constant fear punctuated by panic, Pearce began to feel the inner city as a place where people lived rather than a jungle to be flown over or passed through. Like a medieval leech drawing blood from a patient dying of anemia, the suburbs had drained wealth from the inner city, and what the suburbs had started the Medical Centers had completed, taking block after block of housing for their expansion, pricing their snake oils and nostrums beyond the reach of the people in whose midst they lived and thrived. And yet the citizens endured. In spite of everything, they endured.

  That was the strength of the people, he thought. They endured and they survived, and after all those who elevated themselves above their fellows had decayed from their excesses and destroyed themselves, the people remained. Pearce saw them now, looking out their windows into the uncertain night, standing on their porches to stare at the unaccustomed noise, in hovels falling apart around them, and realized their strength.

  Their lives were short and disease ridden—no better than the animals of the fields or the forests—which is why the Medical Centers remained in their midst, harvesting their antibodies and their antigens, their gamma globulins and their vaccines, even their organs. But they survived. They nourished each other between casual killings, they dreamed, they loved, they raised fami
lies, they got old too soon, and they died, often among friends, as opposed to the sterile dyings in the Medical Centers, no matter how long postponed, ignored by everyone except those paid to administer the medical last rites.

  By then they had nearly reached their destination as they crossed the divided thoroughfare of the Paseo and slowed on what Pearce glimpsed on a sagging street sign as INDEPE . . . VEN . . . The motorcycle veered off the poorly illuminated, four-lane street into a darker drive behind a dark building that hulked against the late evening sky like an abandoned warehouse. The old man who had ferried him here like some latter-day Charon cut off the engine and waited a moment in the sudden silence, testing the night for danger. Then, as if deciding for the moment that movement was safe, he removed the bags from the containers, handed them to Pearce, and motioned Pearce to follow.

  As they entered a dark door Pearce noticed a sign above it, still intact. It was like an omen: CHILDREN’S MERCY HOSPITAL, it read.

  * * *

  The building had been taken over by the homeless. The old hospital, once the new one had been built, had been used for a few years as offices for social welfare, then as an orphanage, and finally boarded up and forgotten. The poor had not forgotten. They had pried open doors and windows and made the building a warren for their fertility. Children played in the halls, barely lit by an occasional oil lantern, or stuck their heads out of doors to inspect the strangers passing by. Some came to tug at Pearce’s clothing or the bags in his hands until the old man shooed them aside. Sometimes an adult made an appearance, an unshaved face to glare at them or a curious woman with a toddler tugging at her leg.