Descent from Xanadu

by Harold Robbins

  Judd looked toward Hughes’ room. “Is he in there?”

  The man nodded.

  “I’d like to talk with him,” Judd said.

  “You can’t,” the man said. “He’s sick and he’s asleep.”

  “Wake him up,” Judd said.

  “I can’t,” he said. “He’s really out. I think he’s taken some pills.”

  “You lead us in there,” Judd said. “The lady with us is a doctor.”

  The man looked at Sofia for a moment, then looked down at the doctor’s bag in her hand. He got to his feet. Slowly they followed him into the room.

  The room was almost dark, the blackout drapes closely drawn. The only light in the room was a small night-light next to the bed table. The wall-to-wall carpet was carefully covered by Kleenexes neatly placed one next to the other. There was a stench in the air that even the air conditioning seemed unable to remove.

  “Open the drapes and the windows,” Judd said. “Let some of the stink out of here and get rid of the damn Kleenexes. They only add to the mess.”

  “Can’t!” the man said. “Everything has been sealed. Closed tight! And we are not allowed to pick up the Kleenexes. He believes that they are the only thing that keep the germs from him. Those are Mr. Hughes’ orders.”

  “Turn on some lights then,” Judd said.

  The man turned on a lamp near the door. Judd gazed at the man in the bed. He lay on his side, his face against a pillow. The eyes were closed, the breathing labored, through his open mouth. His face was unshaven; his hair lay in long gray strands, unkempt, reaching almost to his shoulders.

  Judd felt shocked disbelief. “Mr. Hughes,” he called gently.

  Hughes did not move.

  Judd called him again, more loudly.

  “He won’t answer,” his man said. “I told you, he’s sick. He’s been like that almost all week. We haven’t been able to give him anything to eat.”

  Judd gestured to Sofia. “Take a look at him.”

  Sofia went to the bed. She opened her bag and took out a stethoscope. She listened for a moment, then searched for his pulse. “He’s very weak,” she said.

  Judd watched her silently.

  She lifted the sheet and looked down at Hughes’ whole figure; she let the cover fall over him again. She leaned close to his face, lifting up one of his eyelids for a moment. Finally she straightened up. “This man should be taken to a hospital immediately.”

  “What’s the matter with him?” Judd asked.

  “I’m guessing,” she said, “but I think he’s beginning to show signs of uremic poisoning.”

  “How does something like that happen?” Judd asked.

  “Look,” she said.

  Judd followed beside her. She raised the cover. “Look,” she said. “He’s covered with needle marks. Also, look at his emaciated condition. He’s dehydrated. His bones are almost through his skin and there’s an unhealed scar on his head as if a tumor has accidentally been torn off.”

  “Is there anything you can do for him here and now?”

  Sofia shook her head. “Not without all the equipment we’d have in a hospital.”

  “A shot that could at least lessen his pain?” Judd asked.

  “I have the feeling that he’s already shot himself with enough pain killers,” she said. “Besides, looking at his eyes I’d say he’s more than slightly comatose.”

  Judd nodded, then turned to the Hughes man. He gestured to the next room. They followed the man out. “What the hell is going on here?” Judd asked.

  “I just take orders,” the man said. “And we’ve been ordered not to touch him until his own doctor comes back from the States tomorrow.”

  “Who gave those orders?”

  “The old man himself. Last week, just as he began getting sick. And no one—no one—countermands his orders.”

  Judd stared at him. “Isn’t there anyone who understands he’s no longer responsible for himself? Who can order the treatment he needs?”

  “Only his doctor,” the man said.

  “You have a telex,” Judd said crisply. “Get in touch with Hughes’ office. Someone there must have the responsibility.”

  “The telex is not connected.”

  “You have telephones.”

  “We have already called. That’s why his doctor’s coming back.”

  Judd looked at the man for a moment, then turned to the soldier. “Let’s leave,” he said.

  Sofia turned to Judd. “If we don’t help him—and quickly—he will die.”

  Judd looked at her. His eyes were cold blue ice. “That’s not my responsibility.”

  “But he’s a human being,” she said.

  “Fuck him! It’s his own choice,” Judd said coldly. “There’s nothing he can do for me and nothing I can do for him.”

  “Is that your only rule of measurement?”

  “Do you know any better?” he replied sarcastically. “If I hadn’t paid for those fucking hotels in Yugoslavia, do you think they’d even allow you to go out of the country with me?”

  She stared at him for a moment and walked from the room. He turned to Hughes’ man and placed ten one-thousand-dollar bills on the table before him. “This is to help you to forget you saw us.”

  The man picked the money up and placed it in his pocket. “Forget who?”

  ***

  They were in the air two hours on the flight returning to Florida when Sofia came up the staircase to his lounge. “May I speak with you for a moment?”

  “Of course,” he said. He handed a telex to her. “The whole thing was an unnecessary exercise. We’ve just learned from Stryker that they’ve accepted our proposal.”

  She put down the telex without reading it. “I apologize,” she said. “I know it’s none of my business, but the man is going to die.”

  “I didn’t need you to tell me. I have eyes.”

  “But why did a man who had everything in the world for the asking want to live like that?” she asked. “Alone. Sealed in a vacuum bubble out of all contact with reality?”

  “Maybe he thought that that way he would live forever,” Judd said, then he was silent for a moment. “Or maybe he really wanted to die—and didn’t have the guts to do it…”

  15

  The building was of green mirrored glass, reflecting the bright Florida sunshine. Its one-storied flat roof was completely hidden by the giant Florida cypress trees from the Crane Medical Center one block away. Next to the glass emerald doors was a small brass plate:

  CRANE RESEARCH

  NUCLEAR MEDICINE

  PRIVATE

  Two armed and uniformed security guards stood outside the locked doors like robots, with identical green-mirrored sunglasses hiding their eyes.

  Doc Sawyer parked his convertible in the driveway and ran up the steps to the building entrance. He nodded to the security guards as he pressed his palm to the photo-sensitive identity plate. His name in L.E.D. letters rose over the plate and the doors silently slid open for him.

  The main floor was completely empty except for another security guard seated behind a desk between the two banks of elevators. The guard looked up at him. “Dr. Zabiski said she will meet you at the fourth level, sir,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Doc answered, opening the elevator doors. They quickly closed behind him and he pressed for level 4. Slowly the elevator descended. He looked at the indicator lights. This time the numbers for the floor did not indicate floors ascending. They ran from M, for main floor top, to 9, for the bottom subterranean level. The entire building was constructed underground.

  He came out of the elevator. He nodded again at the ever-present security guard and hurried down the corridor to Dr. Zabiski’s office. He opened the door without knocking. Dr. Zabiski was seated behind her desk. “I came as soon as I got your call,” he said anxiously. “Is there anything wrong?”

  “Nothing is wrong,” the tiny woman said reassuringly. “We’ve moved him to an intensive care unit. I thoug
ht you’d like to be here when we wake him.”

  He let out a sigh of relief and sank into a chair opposite hers. “Jesus,” he said, pulling a pack of cigarettes from his jacket. His hands still trembled as he lit the cigarette. “This is crazy,” he said, pulling the smoke deep into his lungs. “I’m beginning to believe more than ever during the last three years that we’ve all become Frankensteins.”

  “All doctors are Frankenstein at heart.” She smiled slowly. “Is there a one of us who doesn’t dream of playing God?”

  “I suppose,” Sawyer said. He drew again from his cigarette. “But we all know who God is, don’t we?”

  She laughed. But there was no humor in the tawny, catlike eyes. “Judd Crane?”

  He laughed, also without humor. “He has to be God. I don’t know anyone else who can afford it.”

  She was silent for a moment, then nodded. “You’re probably right,” she said. “When he first told me twenty, then fifty million dollars, I didn’t believe him. I didn’t think there was that much money in the world. Then I looked into his eyes. And I believed. Not in the money, but the man. He means to bring all the knowledge in the world to bear upon his own dream: Immortality.”

  He put out the cigarette. “And your dream?” he asked, watching the cigarette smolder in the ashtray on her desk.

  “I’d like to be a part of his dream,” she said. But he caught a tinge of sadness in her voice. “I don’t know. I really don’t know. Is his dream within our power to achieve? Perhaps knowledge and science are not enough.” Their eyes met across the desk. “We have to realize that like him, we are human, not Godlike.”

  He nodded slowly. “Dr. Zabiski, I’m beginning to think that I like you.”

  She smiled. “Thank you, Dr. Sawyer.” She changed the mood between them deliberately. “Let’s see how he’s doing.”

  He rose from his chair and stood next to her as she pressed keys on the computer on her desk. Numbers began flashing across the screen, yellow, red, blue, green, purple and white. “You’ll have to explain it all to me, Doctor,” he said. “I haven’t the coding.”

  “I’m sorry, I thought you’d been informed,” she said. “I’ll explain. It’s a simple color code with white being optimum or what we hope to achieve. The rest is normal, the other colors being percentages of normal. All vital signs and pathology are constantly monitored. At the moment, we are most concerned with his body temperature. Our target for this procedure is to stabilize his normal body temperature at 95.0 Fahrenheit. We must remember this is the third procedure he’s undergone in three years. The first two times we were able to bring down his temperature, first from 98.6 to 97.3, the second to 96.1. In each case we’ve maintained those temperatures steady for one whole year before the next procedure.”

  Sawyer looked down at her. “If I remember correctly, according to the survival tables you’ve shown me, maintaining body temperature at 95.0 should bring him a life expectancy of one hundred and fifty years.”

  “That’s correct,” she said. “But that’s not the only factor. Cellular implantation as well as placenta and Rumania procainum procedures should strengthen the vitality of his whole body so that another aging factor is significantly decelerated.” She looked up at him. “We have to understand that the body has to withstand the time factor placed on it.”

  He stood silent for a moment. “One hundred and fifty years,” he said softly. “That should be enough for anyone.”

  “Not for him,” she said. “He’s said immortality. We have four more temperature procedures planned over almost a five-year span. That should bring his body temperature to a fixed 87.8, the survival prediction of which should reach to two hundred and eighty years. But as I said, I don’t know. It’s all computer guesswork as of this minute.”

  “Shit!” he said. “I’m frightened.”

  She turned off the computer. “So am I.” She filled a glass with water from a thermos carafe on her desk. She sipped from her glass. “Playing with the hypothalamus, even with a nuclear laser to bring down his body temperature, gives us no guarantees. One microsecond can kill him.”

  He went back to his chair. “Maybe we can persuade him to stop after this.”

  “I’ve had that out with him before,” she said. “And I’ll try again, I assure you. But I know what he’ll say.”

  He met her eyes. “What?”

  “‘I can die in an accident anytime!’ he says. ‘I’d rather die going for broke.’” She pressed the computer keys again, then looked up at him. “We can go downstairs. We’ll be waking him in about fifteen minutes.”

  The elevator brought them down to the eighth level. The security guard nodded at them from behind his desk as they passed through the panel of glass doors into another corridor. This corridor turned at a right angle, hiding them from the guard’s eyes. Glass doors in front of them were lettered in silver glaze: monitor room.

  Dr. Zabiski pressed her palm to the identity plate. The doors opened and they passed into the room. Though he had seen it many times, the monitor room always seemed to Dr. Sawyer like a miniature of the NASA control room during space flights. They entered onto a small platform; three steps took them to the main floor, the walls of which were covered with computers, whirling tapes recording the information received on silver-gray screens. The far wall was all glass; beyond that wall was the intensive care unit in which Judd rested. In front of it sat three technicians, each with his own printout computer and screen, monitoring the patient’s every vital movement inside and outside his body.

  He followed the little woman to the glass wall and he looked with her into the room. Judd was sleeping, his completely nude body covered with wireless electrodes which sent information to the computers. The only tubes attached to him were on temple-spectacles bringing a flow of oxygen to his nostrils.

  Dr. Zabiski turned to the monitors while Sawyer still watched Judd. He thought he detected a moment’s stirring. The movement became more pronounced. Unconsciously Judd was experiencing an erection.

  Sawyer turned to the little woman. “He must be having good dreams,” he smiled. “He’s getting himself a hard-on all by himself.”

  Zabiski straightened up and looked at Judd. A sudden shadow of concern crossed her face. “I don’t like it,” she said. “This is much too soon.” She bent to the first technician. “Give me a reading on the EEG and call the neurologist here immediately. Also call Dr. Ablon, the cardiologist.”

  The second technician called to her. “Dr. Zabiski, we have a reading that his temperature is going up. It’s just gone up half a point to 95.5. No, it’s 95.6 now,” she amended quickly.

  “I want a blood chemistry reading and a go-through reading of all the vital signs,” Zabiski ordered quickly, her gaze going over the shoulder of the first technician. She watched lines wiggle across the computer screen. She looked up at Sawyer. “He’s dreaming all right,” she said. “There is definite but slight hyperactive movement in the alpha sector.”

  “What do you think is happening?” Sawyer asked.

  Zabiski looked at him. “I don’t know yet. But I can make a guess.” She did not, however, offer it to him.

  Sawyer gazed at her steadily, waiting.

  “I have a feeling that the hypothalamus is rejecting all the procedures and returning to normal functioning,” she said finally.

  “Will that be of any danger to him?” Sawyer asked.

  “I don’t think so,” she said, reading down the screen. “Vital signs are all okay. Blood chemistry shows no abnormality or infection.” She picked up the telephone and called the anesthesiologist in another room. “Keep the patient under a little longer. We have a few things to check out before we bring him up.”

  “Where the hell is Sofia?” Sawyer asked. “Shouldn’t she be here?”

  “I gave her a few days off,” Zabiski said. “After working almost three years without any time off, I thought she could use it. Especially since she volunteered to be the control. After the last group of
experiments she was tired.”

  “Did the experiment succeed?” he asked.

  Zabiski looked at him. “If you mean did she become pregnant?” She answered herself, “Yes.”

  “Where did she go?” he asked.

  “Mexico,” she answered. “Sofia has been curious about Mexico since that time she went to Acapulco.”

  Sawyer was silent, thinking. Mexico was a curious choice for Sofia. If it was sun she was looking for, there was enough here in Boca Raton. Maybe she had another reason. He decided to tell Merlin to have Security check into her trip.

  16

  Judd pressed the button at the side of his bed, raised the head of it to a sitting position and picked up the telephone. Merlin answered at once. “What’s happening?” he asked.

  “We had two frantic telephone calls from the inauguration committee. Reagan wants to include us in his personal party.”

  “That’s next week, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell them I’ll be honored to be there. Also that I will make my own arrangements for travel and lodging.” He glanced up at the clock on the wall. “What else?”

  “The Finance Secretary of Brazil wants to fix a meeting to discuss whether or not you’re participating with them on Ludwig’s project down there. There are persistent rumors that D.K. wants out.”

  Judd thought for a moment. “Let’s find out more about it first. Tell them we’ll arrange something with him as soon as I can schedule Brazil. But make sure that he understands we plan only a discussion. We’re not yet interested in the project.”

  “Yes, sir,” Merlin said. “The government’s approved our proposed merger of the South and Western Savings and Loan Association into Crane Financial Services. That brings us one hundred and fifteen bank branches and a billion in assets that we can transfer to net worth. It means eight hundred million can be turned into cash within thirty days, if we want, sir.”

  “Good,” Judd said. “Any answer yet from our proposal to the Mexican government? The peso is worth shit and unless they guarantee to build a laboratory and factory for thirty million dollars for Crane Pharmaceuticals, we will not begin production in Mexico.”