Gary Braver - Elixir

And everybody agreed.

Elixir.

"Elixir?"

"What do you think?"

"It's catchy."

It was the first time Wendy had visited the lab in years. Chris had brought her in to see the new facilities. Boxes of materials were stacked on the floor, but the structural work had been completed and equipment was functioning.

Wendy feigned interest as Chris showed her all the fancy instruments. In one room was his pride and joy, a mass spectrometer for determining chemical compositions and molecular weights. In another room, looking like something from a science fiction movie, sat the high resolution nuclear magnetometer. "Very nice," she said. "What does it do?"

"Tells us the number of atoms in the molecule, as well as their structural relations. Tabulone is very sophisticated-lots of interesting branches and bondings."

"Why's that important?"

"To help figure out the senescence problem. It's possible the flatness of the molecule lets it wedge itself between the coils of the DNA promoting mutagenesis. If that's the case, we may be able to alter the problem structure. Otherwise, no Elixir."

"But you don't even know if it works on humans."

"Except for Iwati."

She had almost forgotten. New Guinea juju was alive and well and living in twentieth-century Boston. "If he suddenly went off the stuff, would he age?"

"I really don't know. The next step is to see what happens to primates, which means determining dosages. They're just a few genetic steps up from mice, but my guess is that the stuff will prolong their lives, too."

Wendy was happy that Chris was finally out of the shadows and that his sideshow study was now a major scientific inquiry. She could also enjoy his excitement because he seemed like a different person, a great big, handsome, lovable kid. However, while she kept it to herself, all she saw on her tour was scientists producing false hopes of finding a cure for death itself. There were no magic cures, she told herself. People got sick and died. Like Ricky. It was an inevitability that Chris would not accept. A grand illusion. She just prayed that when that discovery hit home, he would not be crushed.

Chris led her to a computer station nearby where he tapped some keys and, like magic, the Elixir molecule appeared on the monitor in different colored balls. Slowly the figure rotated like a bubble dancer, turning itself around in 3-D to show off its endless cheeks.

She put her hands on his shoulders and peered at the monitor. "Pretty. So what do you do with it?"

"If you know binding sites, you can see how atoms fit together, then manipulate the geometry." He clipped off a hydrogen/oxygen stem and added a carbon-hydrogen cluster. "Now we have a different molecule with different properties."

"You're designing new matter."

"More like redesigning old."

"Improving on nature," she said.

He looked up at her with a blank face. "Wendy, you're not going to give me your Imperial Margarine lecture, are you?"

"Now that you mention it…" she joked.

The last stop was the monkeys. They were kept in rows of steel cages lined up along one long wall. Each contained a single rhesus. Wendy stopped at one cage tagged FRED and his birthdate, 3/13/65. He looked at her with quick anxious eyes. It was so unfair, she thought. In a few weeks his head would be in clamps, his body paralyzed, the skull cap removed, his brains exposed and sprouting electrodes to monitor his death. "Poor little guy."

"I know what you're thinking. But if it's any consolation, he may teach us how to prolong human life."

"I don't approve of that either."

"Not exactly a news flash," he chuckled. "But frankly, it appeals to me."

She knew what he was getting at. "Honey, you don't have Alzheimer's."

"You don't know that."

"Nor do you."

"Yeah, but sometimes I almost feel it coming. Yesterday I couldn't remember Stan's extension. There are days I'd call him half a dozen times. How could I forget?"

"That's natural. You're under a lot of stress."

"Then what about forgetting our anniversary last week? The first time in sixteen years that's happened. Or your birthday last year?"

"You're just preoccupied. Besides, Alzheimer's affects people in their sixties and seventies, not forties."

"That's not true, I checked. It could start in the late thirties even."

Wendy stared into Chris's two-tone eyes. As an old friend had once said, it was like two different faces superimposed. At the moment, he was at once the brilliant, cool-minded scientist and an irrational kid. "Chris, you're being ridiculous. You don't have Alzheimer's disease."

"Maybe not. But every instinct tells me it's in the cards. Whatever, the bottom line is that aging stinks. All that stuff about wisdom in the years is a lot of feel-good garbage."

Wendy watched Fred stir the wood chips with his fingers. She felt the tired old debate coming on but pushed it aside. "Just one question: Say it works, say you eliminate the senescence problem. How would people relate if some grew old while others didn't?"

"I haven't thought that far ahead."

"Maybe you should if the future's going to make sense."

Chris said nothing but handed Fred an orange wedge. It was his cue to change the subject.

"And what if it's so expensive only the rich can afford it?"

"That's what they said about penicillin and the polio vaccine, and they're available to everybody in the world today."

"And what about the population?"

"That can be worked out with proper regulations."

"Sure, maybe they can set up a Ministry of Birth."

"In spite of all the doomsday caveats, 1984 turned into 1985. And, by the way, I thought you said just one question."

Wendy was about to go on when movement inside made her suck in her breath.

"What the matter? What is it?" Chris asked.

Wendy smiled and took his hand and lay it on her belly to feel. "One future that's going to make sense."

It was another miserable night. Antoine had called from Puerto Rico to say that another $2.5 million was due July 1. Yes, the apricots had been destroyed in Reagan's fireblitz last year, but he wanted his money no matter what. And Quentin had no choice. But he would have to pay from his own pocket because financial restructuring over Elixir made it impossible to skim funds again. His net worth, some $2 million, was tied up in investments he couldn't touch without his wife finding out. And she was still fuming that he had nearly destroyed her father's name and business. His only option was secret bank loans.

What gave him night sweats was that this wouldn't be another wire transfer. The exchange would take place in person at the statue of George Washington in the Boston Garden at 2:30 on Friday the 1st-in unmarked hundred-dollar bills, twenty-five thousand of them.

"Chris, I think you better come in as soon as possible." It was Vartan Dolat, the molecular biologist Chris had hired from MIT. He was at the lab, and as usual he was exercising telephone caution. His voice was devoid of inflection.

But Chris's heart started to hammer. It was nine in the morning on his day off. "Do we have a problem?"

But Vartan deflected the question. "See you at ten."

Chris arrived and was met by Vartan outside the lab. "It's Jimbo."

"Is he okay?"

Vartan didn't answer but hustled him to the lab while Chris said a silent prayer that he wouldn't find Jimbo withered and dying.

Waiting for them were Stan Chow, Derek Wyman, and Betsy Watkins, a geneticist from Northeastern specializing in human aging. Chris could hear monkeys chattering, but Jimbo's cage was empty. Betsy opened the rear door to the large enclosed pen outside where the animals could move about in fresh air. Chris could see the nontoxic red J painted on his chest. "Is that him?"