The Sixth Commandment

by Lawrence Sanders

  “Speculation?” he asked carefully.

  “Just speculation,” I assured him.

  “I’d say the possibility exists.”

  “Possibility?” I repeated. “Would you go so far as to say ‘probability’?”

  “All right,” he said resignedly. “Since we’re talking in theoretical terms, I’m willing to say it’s probable the host human will develop cancer.”

  “One final question,” I said. “We have been talking about injecting a healthy human host with cancerous cells from a live but diseased human donor. You’ve said it’s probable the host would develop cancer. Does the same hold true of abnormal cells that have been cultivated in vitro?”

  “Good God!” he burst out again. “What kind of a nightmare are you talking about?”

  I wouldn’t let him off the hook. “Would it be possible to infect a healthy human being with cancerous cells that have been grown in vitro?”

  “Yes, goddammit,” he said furiously, “it would be possible.”

  “In fact—probable?” I asked softly. “That you could infect a healthy human being with cancerous cells grown in a lab?”

  “Yes,” he said, in such a low voice that I could hardly hear him. “Probable.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Blomberg,” I said, hung up gently and wondered if I had spoiled his weekend. The hell with him. Mine was already shot.

  I drove the rest of the way into Coburn, reflecting that now I knew it could be done, what Mary Thorndecker feared. But why? Why? As Blomberg had said, who would want to do a thing like that? For what reason?

  The Grand Prix was waiting for me in the parking lot of the Coburn Inn. Not only had it been equipped with new radials, but the car had been washed and waxed. I walked around it, kicking the tires with delight. But gently! Then I transferred my new purchases from the pickup to the trunk of the Pontiac.

  In the lobby, a tall, skinny gink with “Mike’s Service Station” stitched on the back of his coveralls was leaning over the cigar counter, inspecting Millie Goodfellow’s cleavage with a glazed stare. He had a droopy nose and looked like a pointer on scent. Any minute I expected him to raise a paw and freeze.

  I interrupted their tête-à-tête—and guessing the subject of their conversation, that’s the only phrase for it. I asked the garageman about the bill for the tires and wax job. He said Betty Hanrahan had picked up the tab; I didn’t owe a cent. I handed him a ten for his trouble, and he looked at it.

  “Jesus, Mr. Todd,” he said, “Betty told me I wasn’t to take any money from you a-tall. She find out about this, she’ll bite my ass.”

  He and Millie laughed uproariously. At last—Coburn humor. The hell with the quality; people were laughing, and after the way I had spent the last two hours, that was enough for me.

  “I won’t tell Betty if you don’t,” I said. “Can you get her pickup back to the Red Dog?”

  “Sure,” he said happily. “No problem. Hey, Millie, I’m a rich man now. Buy you a drink tonight?”

  “I’ll be there,” she nodded. “For the ten, you can look but don’t touch.”

  He said something equally as inane, and they gassed awhile. It was that kind of raunchy sexual chivying you hear between a man and woman who have been friends a long time and know they’ll never go to bed together. I listened, smiling and nodding like an idiot.

  Because I can’t tell you how comforting it was. Their smutty jokes were so normal. There was nothing deep, devious, or depraved about it. It had nothing to do with cancerous cells and fluorescent tumors. No one dying in agony and pushed into frosted ground. That stupid conversation restored a kind of tranquility in me; that’s the only way I can describe it. I felt like an infantryman coming off the front line and being handed a fresh orange. Fondling it, smelling it, tasting it. Life.

  I waved goodby and went up to my room. I had an hour to kill before my meeting with Dr. Thorndecker. I didn’t want to eat or drink. I just wanted to flop on my bed, dressed and booted, and think about the man and wonder why he was doing what he was.

  I think that investigators work on the premise that most people act out of self-interest. The kicker is that a lot of us don’t know, or can’t see, our true self-interest. Case in point: my breaking up with Joan Powell. I thought I acted out of concern for my own well-being. All I got was a galloping attack of the guilts and a growing realization that I had tossed away a relationship that was holding me together.

  What was Telford Gordon Thorndecker’s self-interest—or what did he think it was? Not merely avarice, since Mary had said the lab didn’t profit from the deaths of many of the victims. Then it had to be some kind of human experimentation that might result in professional glory. A different kind of greed.

  I tried that on for motive. Mary had reported that Dr. Draper had said Thorndecker was a genius on the verge of a great discovery. Thorndecker himself had admitted to me that human immortality was his true goal. So far the glory theory made sense. Until I asked myself why he was injecting cancer-free patients with abnormal cells. Then the whole thing fell apart. The only fame you achieve by that is on the wall of a post office.

  The man was such a fucking enigma to me. Inspired scientist. Paterfamilias. Skilled business administrator. Handsome. Charming. Energetic. And remote. Not only from me, I was convinced, but from wife, children, friends, staff, Coburn, the world. Either he had something everyone else was lacking, or he lacked something everyone else had. Or perhaps both.

  Have you ever seen one of those intricately carved balls of ivory turned out by Oriental craftsmen? It only takes about ten years to make. The artist starts with a solid sphere of polished ivory. The outer shell is carved with fanciful open designs, and within a smaller sphere is cut free to revolve easily. That second ball is also carved with a complex open design, and a third smaller ball cut free to revolve. And so on. Until, at the center, is a ball no larger than a pea, also intricately incised. Spheres within spheres. Designs within designs. Worlds within worlds. The carving so marvelously complicated that it’s almost impossible to make out the inscription on that pea in the center.

  That was Dr. Telford Gordon Thorndecker.

  Who had carved him?

  But all that was purple thinking, ripe fancy. When I came back to earth, all I saw was a big man standing in the shadows, watching his young wife’s bangled ankle flashing in the back of a cop’s cruiser. And the man’s face showing no defeat.

  An hour later I was on my way out to Crittenden again. The only pleasure I had in going was being behind the wheel of the Grand Prix. After bruising my kidneys in Betty Hanrahan’s junk heap, the Pontiac’s ride felt like a wallow in a feather bed. I took it up to seventy for a minute or two, just to remind myself what was under the hood. The car even smelled good to me. More important, the heater worked.

  I had no trouble at the gate. The guard came out of his hut when I gave the horn a little beep. Apparently he recognized the car; he didn’t ask for identification. I watched his routine carefully. He had a single key attached by a chain to a length of wood. He opened the tumbler lock. The gates swung inward. After I drove through, I glanced in my rearview mirror. He swung the gates back into place, locked up, went back into his hut. He was a slow-moving older man wearing a pea jacket. No gun that I could see. But of course it could have been under the jacket or in the hut.

  I didn’t like the idea of those iron gates opening inward. I would have preferred they swung outward, in case I had to bust through in a hasty exit. But you can’t have everything. Some days you can’t have anything.

  The gate guard must have called, because when I got to the front door of the Crittenden Research Laboratory, Dr. Kenneth Draper was waiting for me. He looked like a stunned survivor. He was staring at me, but I wasn’t sure he saw me.

  “Dr. Draper,” I said, “you all right?”

  He came out of his trance with a slight shake of his head, like someone trying to banish an ugly dream. Then he gave me a glassy smile and held out his hand.
/>   He was wearing a white laboratory coat. There were dark brown stains down the front. I didn’t even want to wonder about those. His hand, when I clasped it, was cold, damp, boneless. I think he tried to press my fingers, but there was no strength in him. His face was white as chalk, and as dusty. When he led me inside, his walk was stumbling and uncertain. I thought the man was close to collapse. I didn’t think he’d suddenly fall over, but I had an awful vision of him going down slowly, melting, joints loose and limbs rubber. Then he’d end up sitting on the floor, knees drawn up, head down on his folded arms, and weeping softly.

  But he made it up to the second floor, painfully, dragging himself hand over hand on the banister. I asked him if many staff were working on Saturday. I asked him if his research assistants worked through the weekend. I asked him if lab employees worked only daylight hours, or was there a night shift. I don’t think he heard a word I said. I know he didn’t answer.

  So I looked around, peeked into the big laboratories. There were a few people at the workbenches, a few peering through microscopes. But not more than a half-dozen. The entire building had the tired silence of a Saturday afternoon, everything winding down and ready to end.

  Draper led me to the frosted glass door of one of the small private labs. He knocked. No answer. He knocked again, louder this time, and called, “Dr. Thorndecker. Mr. Todd is here.” Still no reply.

  “Maybe he fell asleep,” I said, as cheerfully as I could. “Or stepped out.”

  “No, no,” Dr. Draper said. “He’s in there. But he’s very, uh, busy, and sometimes he … Dr. Thorndecker! Mr. Todd is here.”

  No one answered from inside the room. It was getting embarrassing, and just a little spooky. We could see lights burning through the frosted glass door, and I thought I heard the sounds of small movements.

  Finally Draper hiked the skirt of his lab coat, fished in his pants pocket, and came out with a ring of keys which he promptly dropped on the floor. He stooped awkwardly, recovered them, and pawed them nervously, trying to find the one he wanted. He unlocked the door, pushed it open cautiously, peeked in. My view was blocked.

  “Wait here,” Draper said. “Please. Just for a moment.”

  He slipped in, closed the door behind him. I was left standing alone in the corridor. I didn’t know what was going on. I couldn’t even guess. I didn’t think about it.

  Draper came out in a minute. He gave me a ghastly smile.

  “Dr. Thorndecker will see you now,” he said.

  He brushed closely past me. I caught an odor coming from him, and wondered if it was possible to smell of guilt.

  The laboratory was small, with minimal equipment: a blackboard, workbench, a fine compound microscope, stacks of books and papers, a slide projector and screen, a TV monitor.

  Dr. Telford Gordon Thorndecker was seated in a metal swivel chair behind a steel desk. He didn’t rise when I entered, nor did he smile or offer to shake hands. He was wearing a laboratory coat like Draper’s, but his was starched and spotless. In addition, he was wearing white cloth gloves with long, elasticized gauntlets that came to his elbows.

  I did not think the man looked well. His face was pallid, but with circles of hectic flush high on his cheeks, and lips almost a rosy red. I think what startled me most was that his head was covered with a circular white cloth cap, similar to the type worn by surgeons. But the cap did not cover his temples, and it was apparent that Thorndecker was losing his hair in patches; the sideburns I remembered as full and glossy were almost totally gone.

  But that resonant baritone voice still had its familiar boom.

  “What is of paramount importance,” he said sternly, “is the keeping of careful, accurate, and detailed records. That is what I have been doing: bringing my journal up to the present, to this very minute.”

  “Yes,” I said. “May I sit down, Dr. Thorndecker?”

  He gestured toward the book in which he had been writing. It was a handsome volume bound in buckram.

  “More than two hundred of these,” he said. “Covering every facet of my professional career from the day I entered medical school.”

  I slid quietly into the tubular chair alongside his desk. He was looking down at the journal, and I couldn’t see his eyes. But his voice was steady, and his hands weren’t trembling.

  “Dr. Thorndecker,” I said, “I have a few questions concerning your work here at the research lab.”

  “Two hundred personal diaries,” he mused. “A lifetime. I remember a professor—who was he?—telling us how important it was to keep precise notes. So that if something should happen, an accident, the work could be continued. Nothing would be lost.”

  Then he raised his eyes to look at me. I saw nothing unusual in the pupils but it seemed to me the whites were clouded, with a slight bluish cast, like spoiled milk.

  “Mr. Todd,” he said, “I appreciate your coming by. I regret I have not been able to spend more time with you during your visit, but I have been very involved with projects here at the lab. Plus the day-to-day routine of Crittenden Hall, of course.”

  “Dr. Thorndecker, when I spoke to you on the phone this morning, you seemed excited about a potential breakthrough in your work, a development of considerable importance.”

  He continued to stare at me. His face was totally without expression.

  “A temporary setback,” he said. “These things happen. Anyone in scientific research learns to live with disappointment. But we are moving in the right direction; I am convinced of that. So we will pick ourselves up and try a new approach, a different approach. I have several ideas. They are all here.” He tapped the open pages of his journal. “Everything is here.”

  “Does this concern the X Factor, Dr. Thorndecker? Isolating whatever it is in mammalian cells that causes aging and determines longevity?”

  “Aging …” he said.

  He swung slowly in his swivel chair and stared at the blackboard across the room. My eyes followed his gaze. The board had been recently erased. I could see, dimly, the ghost of a long algebraic equation and what appeared to be a few words in German.

  “Of course,” he said, “we begin dying at birth. A difficult concept to grasp perhaps, but physiologically sound. I always wanted to be a doctor. Always, for as long as I can remember. Not necessarily to help people. Individually, that is. But to spend my life in medical research. I have never regretted it. Never.”

  This was beginning to sound like a valedictory, if not a eulogy. I knew I was not going to get answers to specific questions from this obviously troubled man, so I thought it best to let him ramble.

  “Aging,” he was saying again. “Perhaps rather than study the nature of senescence, we should study the nature of youth. My wife is a very young woman.”

  I wondered if he would now mention what his wife had told him about my alleged advances. But he made no reference to it. Perhaps he was inured to his wife’s infidelities, real or fancied. Anyway, he kept staring at the erased blackboard.

  “Are you a religious man, Mr. Todd?”

  “No, sir. Not very.”

  “Nor I. But I do believe in the immortality of the human race.”

  “The race, Dr. Thorndecker? Not the individual?”

  But he wasn’t listening to me. Or if he was, he disregarded my question.

  “Sacrifices must be made,” he said quietly. “There can be no progress without pain.”

  He had me. I knew he was maundering, but the shields were coming down; he was revealing himself to me. I wanted to hear more of the aphorisms by which he lived.

  “Did I do wrong to dream?” he asked the air. “You must dare all.”

  I waited patiently, staring at him. I had an odd impression that the man had shrunk, become physically smaller. He was effectively concealed by the lab coat and long gloves, of course, but the shoulders seemed narrower, the torso less massive. The back was bowed; arms and legs thinner. Perhaps his movements gave the effect of shriveled senescence. They had slowed, stiff
ened. The exuberant energy, so evident at our first meeting, had vanished. Thorndecker appeared drained. All his life force had leaked out, leaving only a scaly husk and dry memories.

  He said nothing for several minutes. Finally I tried to provoke him …

  “I hope, Dr. Thorndecker, you have no more surprises for me. Like admitting your application to the Bingham Foundation was not as complete as it should have been. I haven’t yet decided what to do about that, but I wouldn’t care to discover we have been misled in other things as well.”

  Still he sat in silence, brooding. He looked down at his closed journal, touched the cover with his gloved fingertips.

  “I could never take direction,” he said. “Never work under another man’s command. They were so slow, so cautious. Plodders. They couldn’t fly. That’s the expression. None of them could fly. I had to be my own man, follow my instincts. What an age to live in. What an age!”

  “The past, sir?” I asked. “The present?”

  “The future!” he said, brightening for the first time since I had entered the room. “The next fifty years. Oh! Oh! It’s all opening up. We’re on the edge of so much. We are so close. You’ll see it all within fifty years. Human cloning. Gene splicing and complete manipulation of DNA. New species. Synthesis of human blood and all the enzymes. Solution of the brain’s mysteries, and mastery of immunology. And here, in my notebooks, the ultimate secret revealed, human life extended—”

  But as suddenly as he had become fervent, he dimmed again, seemed to dwindle, retreat, lose his glowing vision of tomorrow.

  “Youth,” he said, and his voice no longer boomed. “The beauty of youth. She made me so happy and so wretched. On our wedding night we … The body. The youthful human body. The design. The way it moves. Its gloss and sweet perfume. A man could spend his life in … The taste. Did you know, Draper, that a—”

  “Todd, sir,” I said. “Samuel Todd.”

  “A proved diagnostic technique,” he said. “Oh yes. Taste the skin. Acidity and—and—all that. So near. So close. Another year perhaps. Two, at most. And then …”