James Gunn - The Immortals

They retraced Pearce’s route, but this time with the comfort of convoy and Barnett’s laser gun. As Pearce drove, he was swept by a wave of weariness. The day had been long and filled with energy-consuming events, and he felt every one of his ninety years. A great sense of relief washed over him when he pulled through the Medical Center’s guarded gates and into the living compound where nothing but an all-out attack by a fully equipped military unit could threaten him.

And yet, as he said good night to Barnett and thanked him once more for saving him from robbery or even death, he could not help but wonder why the police had never arrived.

Early morning hospital corridors echo footsteps like late night sidewalks, and Pearce pushed away his uneasy feeling of being followed as he made his way to the laboratory with his tube of irreplaceable fluid still locked in his black bag. His sleep had been more than usually disturbed by the awakenings of the elderly, the swirling memories, the bladder pressures, the terminal insomnia, and at last he had surrendered to his impatience to be up and about his work. Soon the corridors would be thronging with breakfast wagons and hospital gurneys headed for morning tests and surgeries, nurses bustling about their innumerable tasks, and the hospital once more engaged in its epic struggle between sickness and good health, between death and life. But he reached the laboratory in the bowels of the basement without seeing more than a couple of night-shift nurses yawning at their stations.

Pearce poured half the blood sample into a tube that he sealed and returned to his black bag. The other half he poured into a density gradient tube, diluted it with cesium chloride, and inserted it into the ultracentrifuge. He set the dial at 100 and turned it on. After a few minutes he turned off the machine and removed the test tube. He held the tube in the ultraviolet light case. DNA molecules were the heaviest part of the blood, and the bottom of the tube was the darkest. He poured the top ninety percent of the fluid into another tube that he put into his black bag.

He should turn this process over to a laboratory that specialized in these procedures, he knew, but he could trust none of them. That wasn’t Van Cleve’s paranoia; it was simple realism. The price of liberty might be eternal vigilance, but the price of immortality was eternal suspicion.

Tom Barnett came into the laboratory while he was cleaning and sterilizing the tubes, and Pearce told him the grant renewal application had been rejected. “We’re out of business, Tom,” he said. “You might as well use your remaining assistantship working on something that will have a payoff.”

“What about you?” Barnett asked.

“I’m going to keep tinkering,” Pearce said. “They’ll probably reclaim the space, and the live subjects probably are too expensive, but maybe I can hang on to the equipment. No use starting a new line of research at my age.”

“I’d like to help,” Barnett said, “even if I can’t be paid.”

“I couldn’t allow that. You’ve got a career ahead of you. Go on with you,” Pearce said roughly. “Get about it. I’ll give you glowing references as a clinician and a researcher.” Barnett left reluctantly, and Pearce returned to his labors.

He removed from the refrigerator a flat silica gel in a sterile plastic wrapping, placed it between two electrical contacts that passed a current across the gel, and carefully poured what was left in the density gradient tube over the gel. A few minutes later he put the gel under the ultraviolet light and with a sterile, sharp-bladed knife scraped from the top of it the darkest rungs of the ladder. He put them into a receptor tube and removed the gel remnants through electrophoresis. What he had left, if he was lucky, was DNA.

He put the rest of the gel into his black bag for later analysis of the remaining blood fractions, but for now he was going to focus on DNA. Whatever special properties were possessed by the Cartwright blood had to be traceable to the DNA and, what was even more important, reproduceable.

Pearce put his DNA sample into an aluminum box stuffed with test tubes. He added some primer, polymerase, and nucleotides. The PCR machine would do the rest, applying heat to the DNA, breaking the bonds that hold the strands of the double helix together. When the temperature was reduced, the primers would attach themselves to either end of the strip. Polymerase, the magical substance, would trigger the formation of new DNA strands from the nucleotides. Then the process would begin over again, with the PCR machine raising the temperature to separate the strands of the DNA molecules that now had doubled in number.

It was like a chain reaction, each raising and lowering of the temperature creating twice as many strands of DNA as had existed before. The process was exponential. That was why it was called a polymerase chain reaction. Within a few hours Pearce would have a billion copies, and a supply of DNA that he could separate into fragments with enzymes and then test each fragment on a separate sample of tissue cells.

The process had just begun, but at least it had begun. He felt a curious sense of elation that he had not felt for more years than he could remember. It made him feel youthful again. He never felt truly old. He always felt forty inside, that age at which his internal calendar had stopped when the most important event of his life had happened, but his body was less flexible, his muscles didn’t recover as quickly from exertion, and he felt pains where once had been nothing but silky articulation. And yet he had the feeling that aging was a state of mind. If there was such a thing as psychosomatic illness, why couldn’t there be such a thing as psychosomatic wellness? It would bear thinking about.

He had been so busy with his tasks that he was startled to turn around and find someone in the laboratory with him. It was the executive vice chancellor, Julia Hudson, and she was looking at him with an intensity that first startled and then alarmed him.

“How long have you been standing there?” Pearce asked.

“Only a minute or two. Part of my tour of the Center, you know,” she said, answering a question he had not yet asked. “And I wanted to see the Project in action.” Her voice capitalized the Project, as if to concede it the importance that he himself would place on it. But he felt as if she were looking at the space occupied by the laboratory and the equipment it housed as assets to be used for better purposes.

“This is where it happens,” he said. “Or doesn’t happen. The search for the elixir vitae, the rejuvenation factor.”

“I hate to see you wasting your time searching for a substance that doesn’t exist.”

“And the Center’s funds?”

She nodded acknowledgment. “That’s part of my job, to weigh priorities against resources. The issue is immortality, and nobody lives forever.”

“Except the Cartwrights.”

“That’s mythology, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.”

“I have good reason to believe it isn’t,” Pearce said. “In fact I once was in possession of some of that magical Cartwright blood.”

She looked surprised, perhaps even astonished. She was an attractive woman, Pearce had time to think—and even to surprise himself with the thought—with dark lustrous hair, blue eyes, a shapely face, and lips that many young men must have longed to stop with theirs.

“So that’s why you have been so persistent,” she said. “You’re the doctor who treated Leroy Weaver.”

“All that has been expunged from the record and is best forgotten,” Pearce said. “You can imagine what my life would be like, and how much work I would get done, if it were general knowledge.”