The governor had not received a shipment for four weeks. The squires were getting desperate.
The mansion was a fortress. Its outer walls were five-foot-thick pre-stressed concrete faced with five-inch armor plate. A moat surrounded the walls; it was stocked with piranha.
An inner wall rose above the outside one. The paved, unencumbered area between the two could be flooded with napalm. Inside the wall were hidden guided missile nests,
The mansion rose, ziggurat fashion, in terraced steps. On each rooftop was a hydroponic farm. At the summit of the buildings was a glass penthouse; the noon sun turned it into silver. On a mast towering above, a radar dish rotated.
Like an iceberg, most of the mansion was beneath the surface. It dived through limestone and granite almost a mile deep. The building was almost a living creature; automatic mechanisms controlled it, brought in air, heated and cooled it, fed it, watered it, watched for enemies and killed them if they got too close. . . .
It could be run by a single hand. At the moment it was.
There was no entrance to the place. Harry stood in front of the walls and waved his jacket. “Ahoy, the mansion! A message for the governor from the Medical Center. Ahoy, the mansion!”
“Down!” Christopher shouted.
An angry bee buzzed past Harry’s ear and then a whole flight of them. Harry fell to the ground and rolled. In a little while the bees stopped.
“Are you hurt?” Marna asked quickly.
Harry lifted his face out of the dust. “Poor shots,” he said grimly. “Where did they come from?”
“One of the villas,” Christopher said, pointing at the scattered dwellings at the foot of the hill.
“The bounty wouldn’t even keep them in ammunition,*’ Harry said.
In a giant, godlike voice, the mansion said, “Who comes with a message for me?”
Harry shouted from his prone position, “Dr. Harry Elliott I have with me the governor’s daughter, Marna, and a leech. We’re under fire from one of the villas.”
The mansion was silent. Slowly then a section of the inside wall swung open. Something flashed into the sunlight, spurting flame from its tail. It darted downward. A moment later a villa lifted into the air and fell back, a mass of rubble.
Over the outer wall came a crane arm. From it dangled a large metal car. When it reached the ground a door opened.
“Come into my presence,” the mansion said.
The car was dusty. So was the penthouse where they were deposited. The vast swimming pool was dry; the cabanas were rotten; the flowers and hushes and palm trees were dead.
In the mirror-covered central column, a door gaped at them like a dark mouth. “Enter,” said the door.
The elevator descended deep into the ground. Harry’s stomach surged uneasily; he thought the car would never stop, but eventually the doors opened. Beyond was a spacious living room. It was decorated in shades of brown. One entire wall was a vision screen.
Marna ran out of the car. “Mother!” she shouted. “Grandmother!” She raced through the apartment. Harry followed her more slowly.
There were six bedrooms opening off a long hall. At the end of it was a nursery. On the other side of the living room were a dining room and a kitchen. Every room had a wall-wide vision screen. Every room was empty.
“Mother?” Marna said.
The dining room screen flickered. Across the giant screen flowed the giant image of a creature who lolled on pneumatic cushions. It was a thing incredibly fat, a sea of flesh rippling and surging. Although it was naked, its sex was a mystery. Its breasts were great-pillows of fat, but there was a sprinkling of hair between them. Its face, moon though it was, was small on the fantastic body; in it eyes were stuck like raisins.
It drew sustenance out of a tube; then, as it saw them, it pushed the tube away with one balloonlike hand. It giggled. The giggle was godlike.
“Hello, Marna,” it said in the mansion’s voice. “Looking for somebody? Your mother and your grandmother thwarted me, you know. Sterile creatures! I connected them directly to the blood bank; now there will be no delay about blood.”
“You’ll kill them!” Marna gasped.
“Cartwrights? Silly girl! Besides, this is our bridal night, and we would not want them around, would we, Marna?”
Marna shrank back into the living room, but the creature looked at her from that screen, too. It turned its raisin eyes toward Harry. “You are the doctor with the message. Tell me.”
Harry frowned. “You—are Governor Weaver?”
“In the flesh, boy.” The creature chuckled. It made waves of fat surge across his body and back again.
Harry took a deep breath. “The shipment was hijacked. It will be a week before another shipment is ready.”
Weaver frowned and reached a stubby finger toward something beyond the camera’s range. “There!” He looked back at Harry and smiled the smile of an idiot. “I just blew up Dean Mock’s office. He was inside it at the time. It’s justice, though. He’s been sneaking shots of elixir for twenty years.”
“Elixir? But-!” The information about Mock was too unreal to be meaningful; Harry didn’t believe it. It was the mention of elixir that shocked him.
Weaver’s mouth made an “O” of sympathy. “I’ve shocked you. They tell you the elixir has not been synthesized. It was. Some one hundred years ago by a doctor named Russell Pearce. You were planning on synthesizing it, perhaps, and thereby winning yourself immortality as a reward. No—I’m not telepathic. Fifty out of every one hundred doctors dream that dream. I’ll tell you, Doctor. I am the electorate. I decide who shall be immortal, and it pleases me to be arbitrary. Gods are always arbitrary. That is what makes them gods. I could give you immortality. I will; I will. Serve me well, Doctor, and when you begin to age, I will make you young again. I could make you dean of the Med Center. Would you like that?”
Weaver frowned again. “But no—you would sneak elixir like Mock, and you would not send me the shipment when I need it for my squires.” He scratched between his breasts. “What will I do?” he wailed. “The loyal ones are dying off. I can’t give them their shots, and then their children are ambushing their parents. Whitey crept up on his father the other day; sold him to a junk collector. Old hands keep young hands away from the fire. But the old ones are dying off, and the young ones don’t need the elixir, not yet. They will, though. They’ll come to me on their knees, begging, and I’ll laugh at them and let them die. That’s what gods do, you know.”
Weaver scratched his wrist. “You’re still shocked about the elixir. You think we should make gallons of it, keep everybody young forever. Now think about itl We know that’s absurd, eh? There wouldn’t be enough of anything to go around. And what would be the value of immortality if everybody lived forever?” His voice changed suddenly, became businesslike. “Who hijacked the shipment? Was it this man?”
A picture flashed on the lower quarter of the screen.
“Yes,” Harry said. His brain was spinning. Illumination and immortality, all in one breath. It was coming too fast. He didn’t have time to react.
Weaver rubbed his doughy mouth. “Cartwright! How can he do it?” There was a note of godlike fear in the voice. “To risk—forever. He’s mad—that’s it, the man is mad. He wants to die.” The great mass of flesh shivered; the body rippled. “Let him try me. I’ll give him death.”
Cartwright, Harry thought. Weaver must mean Marshall Cartwright, the original Immortal. But why would Cartwright attack the convoy, risk—eternity? Because, perhaps, he had learned that eternity was worthless without courage, without honor, without love. By hijacking the elixir shipment he had dealt Weaver a deadly blow.
Weaver looked at Harry again and scratched his neck. “How did you get here, you four?”
“We walked,” Harry said tightly.
“Walked? Fantastic!”
“Ask a motel manager just this side of Kansas City or a pack of wolves that almost got away with Marna or a ghoul th
at paralyzed me. They’ll tell you we walked.”
Weaver scratched his mountainous belly. “Those wolf-packs. They can be a nuisance. They’re useful, though. They keep the countryside tidy. But if you were paralyzed, why is it you are here instead of waiting to be put to use on some organ bank slab?”
“The leech gave me a transfusion from Marna.” Too late Harry saw Marna motioning for him to be silent.
Weaver’s face clouded. “You’ve stolen my blood. Now I can’t bleed her for a month. I will have to punish you. Not now but later when I have thought of something fitting the crime.”
“A month is too soon,” Harry said. “No wonder the girl is pale if you bleed her every month. You’ll kill her.”
“But she’s a Cartwright,” Weaver said in astonishment, “and I need the blood.”
Harry’s lips tightened. He held up the bracelet on his wrist. “The key, sir?”
“Tell me,” Weaver said, scratching under one breast, “is Marna fertile?”
“No, sir.” Harry looked levelly into the eyes of the Governor of Kansas. “The key?”
“Oh, dear,” Weaver said. “I seem to have misplaced it. You’ll have to wear the bracelets yet a bit. Well, Marna. We will see how it goes tonight, eh, fertile or no? Find something suitable for a bridal night, will you? And let us not mar the occasion with weeping and moaning and screams of pain. Come reverently and filled with a great joy, as Mary came unto God.”
“If I have a child,” Marna said, her face white, “it will have to be a virgin birth.”
The sea of flesh surged with anger. “Perhaps there will be screams tonight. Yes. Leech! You—the obscenely old person with the boy. You are a healer.”
“So I have been called,” Pearce whispered.
“They say you work miracles. Well, I have a miracle for you to work.” Weaver scratched the back of one swollen hand. “I itch. Doctors have found nothing wrong with me, and they have died. It drives me mad.”
“I cure by touch,” Pearce said. “Every person cures himself; I only help.”
“No man touches me,” Weaver said. “You will cure me by tonight. I will not hear of anything else. Otherwise I will be angry with you and the boy. Yes, I will be very angry with the boy if you do not succeed.”
“Tonight,” Pearce said, “I will work a miracle for you.”
Weaver smiled and reached out for a feeding tube. His dark eyes glittered like black marbles in a huge dish of custard. “Tonight, then!” The image vanished from the screen.
“A grub,” Harry whispered. “A giant white grub in the heart of a rose. Eating away at it, blind, selfish, and destructive.”
“I think of him,” Pearce said, “as a fetus who refuses to be born. Safe in the womb, he destroys the mother, not realizing that he is thereby destroying himself.” He turned slightly toward Christopher. “There is an eye?”
Christopher looked at the screen. “Every one.”
“Bugs.”
“All over.”
Pearce said, “We will have to take the chance that he will not audit the recordings or that he can be distracted long enough to do what must be done.”
Harry looked at Marna and then at Pearce and Christopher. “What can we do?”
“You’re willing?” Marna said. “To give up immortality? To risk everything?”
Harry grimaced. “What would I be losing? A world like this?”
“What is the situation?” Pearce whispered. “Where is Weaver?”
Marna shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. My mother and grandmother never knew. He sends the elevator. There are no stairs, no other exits. And the elevators are controlled from a console beside his bed. There are thousands of switches. They also control the rest of the building, the lights, water, air, heat, and food supplies. He can release toxic or anesthetic gases or flaming gasoline. He can set off charges not only here but in Topeka and Kansas City or send rockets to attack other areas. There’s no way to reach him.”
“You will reach him,” Pearce whispered.
Marna’s eyes lighted up. “If there were some weapon I could take! But there’s an inspection in the elevator—magnetic and fluoroscopic detectors.”
“Even if you could smuggle in a knife, say,” Harry said, frowning, “it would be almost impossible to hit a vital organ. And even though he isn’t able to move his body, his arms must be fantastically strong.”
“There is, perhaps, one way,” Pearce said. “If we can find a piece of paper, Christopher will write it out for you.”
* * * *
The bride waited near the elevator doors, dressed in white satin and old lace. The lace was pulled up over the head for a veil. In front of the living room screen, in a brown velour grand rapids overstuffed chair, sat Pearce. At his feet, leaning against his bony knee, was Christopher.
The screen flickered, and Weaver was there, grinning his divine-idiot’s grin. “You’re impatient, Marna. It pleases me to see you so eager to rush into the arms of your bridegroom. The wedding carriage arrives.”
The doors of the elevator sighed open. The bride stepped into the car. As the doors began to close, Pearce got to his feet, pushing Christopher gently to one side, and said, “You seek immortality, Weaver, and you think you have found it. But what you have is only a living death. I am going to show you the only real immortality.”
The car dropped. It plummeted to the tune of the wedding march from Lohengrin. Detectors probed at the bride and found only cloth. The elevator began to slow. After it came to a full stop, the doors remained closed for a moment, and then, squeaking, they opened.
The stench of decay flowed into the car. For a moment the bride recoiled, and then she stepped forward out of the car. The room had once been a marvelous mechanism: a stainless steel womb. Not much bigger than the giant pneumatic mattress that occupied the center, the room was completely automatic. Temperature regulators kept it at blood heat. Food came directly from the processing rooms through the tubes without human aid. Daily sprays of water swept dirt and refuse to collectors around the edge of the room that disposed of it. An overhead spray washed the creature who occupied the mattress. Around the edges of the mattress like a great, circular organ with ten thousand keys was a complex control console. Directly over the mattress, on the ceiling, was a view screen.
Some years before, apparently, a water pipe had broken through some shift in the earth, a small leak that made the rock swell, or a hard freeze. The cleansing sprays no longer worked, and the occupant of the room was afraid to have intruders trace the trouble or he no longer cared.
The floor was littered with decaying food, with cans and wrappers, with waste matter. As the bride stepped into the room cockroaches rose in a cloud and scattered. Mice scampered into hiding places.
The bride pulled the long white satin skirt up above her hips. She unwound a thin, nylon cord from her waist. There was a loop fastened into the end. She shook it out until it hung free.
Then she looked to see what Weaver was doing. He was watching the overhead screen with almost hypnotic concentration. Pearce was talking. “Aging is not a physical disease; it is mental.. The mind grows tired and lets the body die. Only half the Cartwrights’ immunity to death lies in their blood; the other half is their unflagging will to live.
“You are one hundred and fifty-three years old. I tended your father, who died before you were born. I gave him, unwittingly, a transfusion of Marshall Cartwright’s golden blood.”
Weaver whispered, “But that would make you-” His voice was thin and high; it was not godlike at all. It was ridiculous coming from that vast mass of flesh.
“Almost two hundred years old,” Pearce said. His voice was stronger, richer, deeper, no longer a whisper. “Without ever a transfusion of Cartwright blood, ever an injection of the elixir vitae. The effective mind can achieve conscious control of the autonomic nervous system, of the very cells that make up the blood stream and the body.”
The bride craned her neck to see the scree
n on the ceiling. Pearce looked odd. He was taller. His legs were straight and muscular. His shoulders were broader. As the bride watched, muscle and fat built up beneath his skin, firming it, smoothing out wrinkles. His facial bones receded beneath young flesh and skin. Silky white hair thickened and grew darker.
“You wonder why I stayed old,” Pearce said, and his voice was resonant and powerful. “It is something one does not use for oneself. It comes through giving, not taking.”
His sunken eyelids puffed, paled, opened. And Pearce looked out at Weaver, tall, strong, and straight—no more than thirty, surely. There was power latent in that face— power leashed, gentled, under control. But Weaver recoiled from it
Then, onto the screen, walked Marna.
Star Science Fiction 4 - [Anthology] Page 17