The Sixth Commandment

by Lawrence Sanders

  I figured him for a good second-level man: plenty of brains, but without the energy, ambition, and obsessive drive to make it to the top level. His attitude toward Thorndecker seemed ambivalent; I couldn’t figure it. But he seemed enthusiastic enough about his work and the Crittenden Research Laboratory.

  He made his phone call and was unlocking the back door when suddenly, on impulse, I asked him, “Are you married, Dr. Draper?”

  His reaction reminded me of that analyzing computer I had just seen. Lights flashing, bubbles bubbling, bleeps bleeping; I could almost see him computing, wondering how his answer might affect a grant from the Bingham Foundation to the Crittenden Research Laboratory. Finally …

  “Why no,” he said. “I’m not.”

  “I’m not either,” I said, hoping it might make him feel better. He might even get to like me, and start calling me Sam, or Happy Boy, like one of his experimental animals in that room of the doomed I had just seen.

  Turned out into the cold, I trudged determinedly up the steps, back to Crittenden Hall. But then I realized how pleasant it was to be alone, even for a moment or two. It seemed to me I had been accompanied almost every minute I had been on the grounds. And it was possible I had been under observation for the few seconds I had been alone when Nurse Beecham went to fetch Dr. Draper.

  I shook my head. Those paranoiac twinges again. But, looking around at the ruined day, the decayed fields of Crittenden, I figured they came with the territory.

  A little, snub-nosed nurse’s aide had the back door of Crittenden Hall open for me when I arrived. She escorted me down the corridor and delivered me to the white-jacketed goon in the entrance hall. He told me Dr. Thorndecker was awaiting me in his second-floor study, and waved me up the wide staircase. I went about halfway up, raised my eyes, and saw an aproned maid waiting for me on the second-floor landing. I glanced down to see the goon still watching me from the main floor entrance hall.

  Then I was certain; it wasn’t paranoia at all. They were keeping me in sight. Every minute. They didn’t want me wandering around by myself. Who knew what closed door I might open?

  Dr. Thorndecker’s study was a rumpled warehouse of a room. It looked like an attic for furniture that wasn’t good enough for the other rooms in Crittenden Hall, but was too good to give to the Salvation Army. No two chairs, styles, or colors matched. The desk was a scarred and battered rolltop. The lamps had silk shades with beaded fringe. The couch was one big, lumpy stain, and books and periodicals were stacked higgledy-piggledy on the floor. Some of the stacks had collapsed; there were puddles of magazines, scientific papers, spiral-bound notebooks. I had to step over them to get in.

  Thorndecker made no apology for this mess, for which I admired him. He got me seated in a cretonne-covered armchair that had stuffing coming out one arm. I wriggled around cautiously until I could sit comfortably without being goosed by a loose spring. The doctor slumped in a swivel chair swung around from his desk.

  “Your wife decorate this room?” I asked politely.

  He laughed. “To tell you the truth, I like it just the way it is. It’s my own private place. A hideaway. No one ever comes in here except the cleaning woman.”

  “Once every five years?” I suggested. “Whether it needs it or not?”

  He laughed again. He seemed to enjoy my chivying. He had whipped off his glasses the moment I entered, but not before I had noted they made him look older. Not older than his 54 years, but just as old. He certainly looked younger without them.

  The tanned complexion helped. Perfect teeth that I guessed were capped, not store-bought. Thick billows of dark hair; not a smidgen of gray. No jowls. No sagging of neck flesh. The skin was ruddy and tight, eyes clear and alert. He moved lithely, with an energetic bounce. If he had told me he was 40 years old, I might have thought he was shaving five years. But 54? Imfuckingpossible.

  The clothes helped. Beige doeskin slacks, sports jacket of yummy tweed, open-collar shirt with a paisley ascot. Glittering, tasseled moccasins on his small feet. A very spiffy gentleman. When he spoke in that rich, fruity baritone, I could understand how he could woo whiz-kids away from drug cartels at half the salary. He had charm, and even the realization that it was contrived was no defense against it.

  Suddenly I had a suspicion that not only the charm, but the man himself might be contrived. The artfully youthful look of bronzed skin, California whites, and hair unblemished by a speck of gray. That appearance might have been a perfectly natural bounty but was, more likely, the result of sunlamp, expensive dental work, facials, and hair dye. And those too-young clothes. I didn’t expect Dr. Telford Gordon Thorndecker to dress like a mortician, but I didn’t expect him to dress like a juvenile lead either.

  Supposing my suspicions correct, what could possibly be his motive? The first one that occurred to me—the only one that occurred to me—was that this Nobel winner, this gifted scientist, this genius was trying to keep himself attractive and exciting to his young wife. The pampered body was for her. The elegant duds were for her. Even this mess of a room was to prove to her that disorder didn’t faze him, that he was capable of whim and youthful nuttiness. He might be an amusing character, an original personality. But he was not a fuddy-duddy; he was not.

  Irrational? No, just human. I don’t mean my own suspicions; I mean Thorndecker’s conduct. I had seen how swiftly his vigorous exuberance collapsed the night before when his wife was not present. I began to feel sorry for the man, and like him more.

  He looked at me narrowly.

  “The animals shake you up?” he asked.

  “How did you know that?” I said.

  “They usually do. But it must be done.”

  “I know.”

  “I have some brandy here. Join me?”

  I nodded. He poured us small drinks from a bottle he took from a file drawer in his desk. He used plastic throwaway cups, and again made no apology or excuse. He took one of my cigarettes, and we lighted up.

  “I’d be interested in hearing your reactions, Mr. Todd,” he said. “On or off the record.”

  “Oh, on,” I said. “I won’t try to mislead you. I thought the nursing home a very efficient operation. Of course, it only has a peripheral bearing on your application, but it’s nice to know you run a clean, classy institution. Good food, good care, pleasant surroundings, sufficient staff, planned social activities and all that stuff.”

  “Yes,” he said, not changing expression, “all that stuff.”

  “From what I’ve read of our preliminary investigation reports, Crittenden Hall makes a modest profit. Which goes to the Crittenden Research Laboratory. Correct?”

  He gestured toward the stacks of papers on his desk.

  “Correct,” he said. “And that’s what I’ve been doing this afternoon, and why I couldn’t show you around personally; I’ve been shuffling papers: bills, checks, requisitions, budgets, vouchers, salaries, and so forth. We have an accountant, of course; he comes in once a month. But I do the day-to-day management. It’s my own fault; I could delegate the responsibility to Draper or Beecham—or hire a smart bookkeeper to do it. But I prefer doing it myself. I want to know where every penny comes from and where it goes. And you know, Mr. Todd, I hate it. Hate every minute of it. This paper shuffling, I mean. I’d much rather be in the lab with Dr. Draper and the others. Hard at work. The kind of work I enjoy.”

  It sounded swell: gifted scientist not interested in the vulgar details of making money, but only in pure research. For the benefit of mankind. What a cynical bastard I am! I said:

  “That’s a natural lead-in to my next question, Dr. Thorndecker. What kind of work? Everyone I saw in the lab seemed gung-ho and busy as hell. What’s going on? What are you doing in the lab? I mean right now. Not if you get the grant, but what’s going on now?”

  He leaned back in his swivel chair, clasped his hands behind his head. He stared at plaster peeling off the high ceiling. His face suddenly contorted in a quick grimace, a tic that lasted no m
ore than a second.

  “Know anything about science?” he said. “Human biology in particular? Cells?”

  “Some,” I said. “Not much. I read your application and the report by our research specialists. But I’m not a trained scientist.”

  “An informed layman?”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “Anything in the application or report you didn’t understand?”

  “I caught the gist of it. I gather you’re interested in why people get old.”

  His ceiling-aimed stare came slowly down. He looked directly into my eyes.

  “Exactly,” he said. “That’s it in a nutshell. Why do people get old? Why does the skin lose its elasticity at the age of thirty-five? Why, at a later age, do muscles grow slack and eyesight dim? Why does hearing fail? Why should a man’s cock shrink and his ass sink, or maybe shrivel up until there’s nothing there but a crack on a spotted board? Why do a woman’s breasts sag and wrinkle? Why does her pubic hair become sparse and scraggly? Why does a man go bald, a woman get puckered thighs? Why do lines appear? What happens to muscle tone and skin color? Did you know that some people actually shrink? They do, Mr. Todd, they shrink. Not only in body weight, but in their bone structure. Not to mention teeth falling out, a hawking of phlegm, an odor of the flesh like ash or loam, a tightening of the bowels.”

  “Jesus,” I gasped, “I can hardly wait. Could I have a little more brandy, please?”

  He laughed, and filled up my plastic cup. And his own, I noted. Once again I noted that sudden, brief twitching of his features. Almost a spasm of pain.

  “I’m not telling you anything you didn’t know,” he said. “You just don’t want to think about it. No one does. Mortality. A hard concept to grasp. Maybe even impossible. But the interesting thing about senescence, Mr. Todd, is that science was hardly aware of it as a biological phenomenon until the last—oh, let’s say fifty years. Back in the Middle Ages, if you lived to the ripe old age of thirty or forty, you were doing well. Oh sure, there were a few oldsters of fifty or sixty, but most humans died in childbirth or soon after. If they survived a few years, disease, accidents, pestilence, or wars took them off before they really achieved maturity. Now, quite suddenly, with the marvelous advances in medical science, public health, hygiene, improved diet, and so forth, we have more and more people living into their sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and no one thinks it remarkable. It isn’t. What is remarkable is that, in spite of medical care, diet, exercise, and sanitary toilets, very few humans make it to a hundred. Why is that, Mr. Todd?”

  “Have no idea.”

  “Sure you do,” he said gently. “They don’t necessarily sicken. They don’t get typhoid, the plague, smallpox, or TB. They just decay. They degenerate. The body not only stops growing, it simply stops. It’s not a sudden thing; in a healthy human it takes place over a period of thirty or forty years. But we can see it happening, all those awful things I mentioned to you, and there’s no way we can stop it. The human body declines. Heart, liver, stomach, bowels, brain, circulation, nervous system: all subject to degenerative disorders. The body begins to waste away. And if you study actuarial tables, you’ll see there’s a very definite mathematical progression. The likelihood of dying doubles every seven years after the age of thirty. How does that grab you? But it’s only been in the past fifty years that science has started asking Why? Why should the human body decay? Why should hair fall out and skin become shrunken and crepey? We’ve extended longevity, yes. Meaning most people live longer than they did in the Middle Ages. But now we find ourselves up against a barrier, a wall. Why don’t people live to be a hundred, two hundred, three hundred? We can’t figure it out. No matter how good our diet, how efficient our sewers, how pure our air, there seems to be something in the human body, in our species, Mr. Todd, that decrees: Thus far, but no farther. We just can’t seem to get beyond that one-hundred-year limit. Oh, maybe a few go a couple of years over, but generally a hundred years seems to be the limit for Homo sapiens. Why? Who or what set that limit? Is it something in us? Something in our physical makeup? Something that decrees the time for dying? What is it? What the hell is it? And that, Mr. Todd, is what those gung-ho, busy-as-hell young researchers you just saw in the Crittenden Research Laboratory are trying to find.”

  I must admit, he had me. He spoke with such earnestness, such fervor, leaning toward me with hands clasped, that I couldn’t take my eyes from him, couldn’t stop listening because I was afraid that in the next sentence he might reveal the miracle of creation, and if I wasn’t paying attention, I might miss it.

  When he paused, I sat back, took a deep breath, and drank half my brandy.

  I stared at him over the rim of my plastic cup. This time the contraction that wrenched his features was more violent than the two I had previously noted. This one not only twisted his face but wracked his body: he stiffened for an instant, then shuddered as his limbs relaxed. I don’t think he was aware that it was evident. When it passed, his expression was unchanged, and he made no reference to it.

  “Wow,” I said. “Heady stuff, even for an informed layman. And I don’t mean the brandy. Are you saying that the Biblical three-score-and-ten don’t necessarily have to be that? But could be more?”

  He looked at me strangely.

  “You’re very quick,” he said. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. It doesn’t have to be three-score-and-ten. Not if we can find what determines that span. If we can isolate it, we can manipulate it. Then it could become five-score-and-ten, or ten-score-and-ten. Or more. Whatever we want.”

  I was staggered. Almost literally. If that spring-sprung armchair hadn’t clasped me close, I might have trembled. After reading his application, I had suspected Thorndecker wanted Bingham Foundation to finance a search for the Fountain of Youth. Everything I had seen of him up to that moment reinforced that suspicion. Older man-youthful wife. Cosseted body and the threads of a swinger. Contrived enthusiasm and the energy of a spark. It all made a kind of very human sense.

  But now, if I understood him, he wasn’t talking about the Fountain of Youth, of keeping smooth-skinned and romping all the days of our lives; he was talking about immortality—or something pretty close to it. I couldn’t believe it.

  “Dr. Thorndecker,” I said, “let me get this straight … Are you saying there is a factor in human biology, in our bodies, that causes aging? And that once this agent—let’s call it the X Factor—can be discovered and isolated, then the chances are that it can be manipulated, modified, changed—whatever—so that the natural span of a man’s years could be increased without limit?”

  He put his feet up on his desk. He sipped his brandy. Then he nodded.

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  I leaned back, lighted another cigarette, crossed my legs. I couldn’t look at him. I was afraid that if I did, and he said, “Now jump out of the window,” out I’d go.

  Because I can’t tell you how convincing the man was. It wasn’t only the manner: the passionate voice, the deep, unblinking gaze. But it was the impression of personal confession he gave, as if he were revealing the secret closest to his heart, a secret he had never revealed to anyone but me, because he knew I would understand and be sympathetic. It was as moving as a murmured, “I love you,” and could no more be withstood.

  “All right,” I said finally, “supposing—just supposing—I go along with your theory that there is something in human biology, in the human body, that determines our lifespan—it is just a theory, isn’t it?”

  “Of course. With some hard statistical evidence to back it up.”

  “Assuming I agree with you that we all have something inside us that dictates when the cock shrinks and the ass sinks, what is it? What is the X Factor?”

  “You read my application, and my professional record?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you must know that I believe the X Factor—as you call it—is to be found in the cell. The human cell.�
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  “Germ cells? Sex cells?”

  “No, we’re working with body cells. Heart, skin, lung.”

  “Why cells at all? Couldn’t the X Factor, the aging factor, be a genetic property?”

  He gave me a glassy smile.

  “You are an informed layman,” he said. “Yes, I admit many good men working in this field believe senescence has a genetic origin. That the lifespan of our species, of all species, is determined by a genetic clock.”

  “It makes sense,” I argued. “If my parents and grandparents live into their eighties and nineties, chances are pretty good that, barring a fatal accident or illness, I’ll live into my eighties or nineties, too. At least, the insurance companies are betting on it.”

  “You may,” he acknowledged. “And the geneticists make a great point of that. Perhaps the X Factor exists in DNA, and determines the lifespan of every human born. And perhaps the X Factor in DNA could be isolated. Then what?”

  I shook my head. “You’ve lost me. You speak of manipulating the X Factor in human cells, if and when it can be isolated. So …? Why couldn’t it be manipulated if found in the genetic code? I understand gene splicing is all the rage these days.”

  “Oh, it’s the rage,” he said, not laughing. “But recombination with what? If you isolated the senescence gene, what would you combine it with—the tortoise gene? They grow to a hundred and fifty, you know. As my son Edward might say, ‘Big deal!’ What I’m trying to say, Mr. Todd, is that, in this case, gene splicing does not offer anything but the possibility of extending the human lifespan by fifty years. I happen to believe that my cellular theory offers more than that. Much more. You ask if it’s a theory, I reply that it is. You ask if I have any proof that the cellular approach to senescence is viable, I reply that there is much proof that the X Factor exists in human cells, but it has not been isolated. As of this date. You ask if I have anything to go on, other than my own conviction, that the X Factor can be isolated and manipulated, and I must reply in all honesty: no, nothing but my own conviction.”