James Gunn - The Immortals

Afterward would not be pleasant. For as long as his furtive life should last, he would be a fugitive from powerful fear-driven men, and he would be driven himself to a fruitless search for a lost princess disguised as an ordinary mortal—who held a priceless gift he had thrown away.

But he would not think of that now. His mouth twisted at the irony of the way things had worked out: The implausible story he had told Barbara had been true.

Sanders! For twenty long years that colorless, nearly anonymous man had shuffled through dusty papers and waited for an opportunity that might never come. Twenty years! And Cartwright had disappeared twenty years ago. The coincidence was too striking to be accidental.

He could not blame himself. Who would have dreamed that a man who might live forever would risk eternity for a child he had never seen?

The mouse lay dead upon the stainless-steel table, its dark, empty eyes staring out blindly at a world that for it and its siblings had been set about by bars into which nectar and ambrosia had fallen from the heavens and a hand had descended from time to time to lift and stroke and inject foreign substances. But in what significant way did that differ from the experience of the men and women who used it in their experiments?

The laboratory was shiny and sterile and neat, windowless and isolated. It was not the movie laboratory of test tubes and smoking retorts and laddering electricity. This was a biological laboratory in a modern hospital, and it was fashioned from glass and stainless steel. Here and there pieces of equipment rested on scrubbed tables: microscopes and autoclaves and centrifuges, refrigerators and petri dishes and computers, all carefully cleaned each morning and evening with antiseptic solutions. Ultraviolet fluorescent bulbs added their invisible radiation, and the single entrance was an airlock with negative pressure.

In the midst of the latest symbols of contemporary science, Dr. Russell Pearce looked like an anomaly—aging, contaminated with various kinds of microorganisms, rumpled, and dejected. His latest effort to synthesize the elixir vitae had failed. At first the synthetic blood protein had seemed promising; some of the mice to whom test substances had been administered had grown more active and the ones who sickened or aged were discovered to have received double-blind placebos. But now the proof of failure lay in front of him, a mouse dead of senescence, whose numbered tag matched a number assigned to those that had received what Pearce had hoped would be the elixir. The mouse was, in fact, the last of the group that had been administered the latest cure-all, the miracle fluid that would heal the sick, restore the elderly, and extend the life span indefinitely.

Pearce sighed, entered the results in his computer, and stared at the inscrutable screen as blindly as the mouse in front of him. It was a long road he had started down fifty years before, when an unemployed wanderer had sold 500 ccs of his blood and that magic red fluid had rejuvenated an aging billionaire. But the restoration was only temporary, lasting as long as the gamma globulins had conferred their immunities, thirty to forty days. For fifty years now Pearce had been searching for the secret to immortality, just as, he was sure, aging men of wealth and power had been searching for Marshall Cartwright and his children.

The executive vice chancellor’s office occupied a prime corner location of the Medical Center. Windows on both sides admitted the autumn sunlight and a view to the south and west toward the green suburbs, not north and east toward the carcinogenic inner city. The room looked like a seventeenth-century English library with pale wood shelves and a massive desk, and, in fact, had been purchased in entirety from a British estate, dismantled, and rebuilt in this upstart midwestern city. It was the tribute youthful vigor pays to decadent tradition.

The vice chancellor seemed young and inexperienced, obviously uncomfortable talking to Pearce and what had to be communicated to him, but Pearce waited with the patience of his years. Then she swung her chair away from the windows and said, “How long have you been working at this Ponce de León project?”

“Fifty years,” Pearce said.

“Isn’t that a bit long to pursue a will-o’-the-wisp?”

“It’s one of the two basic dreams of humanity: unlimited wealth and immortality.”

“Even Ponce de León finally gave up.”

“He was killed by Indians before he had the chance.”

“The transmutation of base metals into gold and the concoction of the elixir of life,” she said. Her smooth forehead furrowed. “But the alchemists abandoned their futile quests when the physical sciences proved their impossibility.”

“Not exactly,” Pearce said. “The alchemists transmuted themselves into chemists and physicists, and they learned that you can change base metals into gold, but it costs too much. And some of the alchemists became biologists, and they learned that the lifespan can be extended, but unless you reduce the birthrate, you get overpopulation, pollution, starvation, and disease.”

“You have an interest in the history of medicine, as well,” she said. Clearly there was something on her mind other than simply getting acquainted with the faculty. “I understand now why you’re the senior geriatrician on the staff.” She looked down at the folder open on her desk. “Indeed, the senior physician at the Medical Center.”

Pearce smiled ruefully. “The trick of being senior is to outlast everybody else. I used to be a young geriatrician. Now I’m a subject for my own specialty.”

“That’s why it’s so difficult to tell you what I’ve got to say.” Color rose in her cheeks. “You’re a legend. You’ve done so much for this hospital, both in the classroom and the hospital.”

Pearce waited, although it was clear what she had on her mind. He wasn’t going to make it any easier.

She looked embarrassed. “The funds for your research have not been renewed.”

“The National Research Institute has decided to discontinue its funding?”

She nodded. “What is the National Research Institute, by the way? It’s new to me.”

“In spite of the ‘National’ in its name, it is a private philanthropy that sponsors research into the causes and treatments for aging. I don’t know much more than that. They came to me, many years ago, and my only contact with them has been my annual report and request for renewal. The Institute has always seemed eager to receive the report, and up to now to renew the grant.”

“No longer, apparently. We received the termination letter today.”

Pearce looked thoughtful. “And the last experiment ended in failure yesterday. That’s odd.”

“What’s odd?”

“The coincidence. It’s been my experience that most coincidences are not coincidences at all.”

“And most so-called conspiracies turn out to be coincidences,” she said.

Pearce laughed. “True, and no doubt this is one of them.”

“In any case, the termination came at the customary time, in response to our application.”

“What reason did they give?”

“No reason. They just didn’t renew. Maybe you can get results in the few months that are left on the grant. Or maybe you can persuade the Institute to renew.”

Pearce smiled. “After fifty years? Well, I can understand their impatience. Thanks, anyway, Vice Chancellor.”

“Please call me Julia,” she said. “And you forgot a third basic dream of humanity.”

“And what is that?”

“Love,” she said and color rose in her cheeks. She colored beautifully. It was a trait that might yet interfere with her administrative duties.