James Gunn - The Immortals

“And your research, then—”

“Has been an effort to replicate the properties of Marshall Cartwright’s blood. I’ve always thought the rejuvenating factor must be associated with the gamma globulins, and I have been analyzing Cartwright’s DNA ever since, but I had so little to start with, and what I had was diluted and mixed with Weaver’s blood and the blood of my laboratory animals, and possibly corrupted, and DNA research then was relatively primitive and undiscriminating—”

“Then it is a will-o’-the-wisp.”

“The will-o’-the-wisp isn’t an illusion, you know. It’s swamp gas, methane, spontaneously ignited. It can be found and identified. This will-o’-the-wisp exists, and it, too, can be found and identified, and maybe synthesized.”

Her eyes were alive now with the zeal of the quest. “If only a Cartwright would reveal himself, allow himself to be studied. The synthesis could be accomplished in a matter of a few years.”

“Now you believe,” Pearce said. “But what you propose is impossible. How long do you think a Cartwright would last in a world increasingly obsessed with the fear of dying?”

“But if the elixir vitae were synthesized, the pressure would be off, the Cartwrights no longer would be the Holy Grail—”

“If—if—so many ifs. The only one certain is that if they don’t reveal themselves, they may survive and so may the human species. And therefore my research blunders on.”

Her gaze moved around the laboratory, with its gleaming surfaces and functional shapes, with an expression that resembled wistfulness. “I would like to help.”

“How?” he asked.

She raised a hand in supplication. “In person, I mean. Research is so neat, so definitive—so much better than the equivocal, messy business of administration. I always loved the laboratory, and I wish I could get back to it. Maybe I could steal a few minutes a day, just to lend a hand?”

“Of course,” he said, not committing himself to anything. It was a bit of a coincidence, he thought, that she had showed up just as he was working on the Van Cleve sample. “Any time.”

“Have you thought,” she asked, “that the rejuvenation factor might be related to the stem cells?”

He paused to reflect. “That’s a good idea. I’ll think about it. One thing I have begun to suspect over the years is that the phenomenon is more complex than I thought. The Cartwright mutation may combine several improvements, and the stem cells might be one of them.”

“Meanwhile,” she said, “I’ll see that you keep your laboratory and your equipment, even when the grant runs out. And minimal biological supplies if we can camouflage them as clinical. No salaries, I’m afraid,” she added apologetically.

“I’ll be grateful for whatever you can do,” he said and was musing about stem cells as she was turning toward the door. As soon as she was gone he changed the code on the entry panel and added the security that he had never before thought was necessary, his palm print.

The next few days he could steal only an hour or two away from his hospital rounds and teaching duties to check the results in the laboratory. He had nurtured human cell cultures and treated each with a different fragment of DNA that he had separated with enzymes. He had locked them into a machine that periodically washed away the waste by-products and added fresh nourishment.

Each time he entered the laboratory, however, he had the feeling that someone had been there in his absence. Everything was as he had left it, nothing ever was out of place, but he could not shake the conviction that, in spite of his precautions, someone had been in the room while he was gone, checking on the progress of his research. It was like the prickly sensation one gets at the back of the neck that says you are being watched even though you can’t ever catch anybody watching, as intangible and as inarguable.

Before he could take any additional precautions, or even think of any additional precautions he could take, he was summoned by Marilyn Van Cleve. Sam Aikens had died, and Pearce was wondering who Van Cleve could use as a conduit. It happened at his free clinic attached to the Center’s walls. It had an external entrance so that the security of the hospital compound would not be breached or its purity compromised. He was examining a wiry old man in dirty working clothes that once had been dark blue. The old man was coughing from emphysema, and Pearce smiled sadly at the package of cigarettes protruding from the old man’s shirt pocket even though he could not smoke while within the Center’s walls. Pearce heard unusual sounds from within the old man’s sunken chest. He frowned and moved his stethoscope to another spot to listen more intently. On the third try he realized the sounds were words: The old man had learned the trick of esophageal speech, when cancerous vocal cords had to be removed. Perhaps, he thought, the diagnosis was not emphysema but cancer. The old man had even learned how to whisper into his chest cavity.

It was then Pearce realized what the words were saying: “Marilyn needs you. I’ll be waiting across from the main gate at sunset. Come by foot.” And then, as soon as the examination was completed and the free sample of a bronchial inhaler was handed over, the old man rose from the examination table and left the room.

Pearce got through the rest of the day mechanically, unable to concentrate on the task at hand because of the possibilities that lay in front of him, half dread and apprehension, half anticipation. Finally, as the sun edged gold around a dark cloud on the horizon, he put his black bag and a second small bag into the front seat of his car and drove through the main gate, nodding to the guards as he passed through.

He pulled the car out of sight behind the ruins opposite the gate and looked around for the old man who whispered from his chest. The ruins of what seemed to be ancient restaurants and taverns for bored medical students were deserted. Pearce waited impatiently, not wanting to leave the safety of the car, not sure this wasn’t a trap or a diversion.

After ten or fifteen anxious minutes, something tapped on his window. Pearce turned, startled, but it was the old man. When Pearce rolled the window down, the old man forced words into speech like hoarse whispers, “I said ‘no car.’ ”

“How do you think I was going to leave the compound? On foot?” Pearce said. “Wouldn’t that attract suspicion?”

The old man shrugged, coughing. Pearce got out of the car with his bags, feeling a shiver of—what? Anticipation? Apprehension? He didn’t know which. Maybe both. Behind the remains of what was once a concrete-block trash enclosure stood an antique motorcycle. Pearce hadn’t seen anything like it for a quarter of a century. It seemed as big as a small horse, but it was old—dented and rusty and only the letters Ha and, widely separated, son appeared on the forward section. Pearce noted with a shiver of horror that the machine operated, if indeed it still worked, on gasoline with all its fumes and carcinogens.

The old man coughed and threw his leg over the saddle. He motioned for Pearce to put his bags in the containers fastened on each side of the rear wheel and to take the jump seat behind him.

“If you think I’m going to join you on this—this apparatus,” Pearce said, “you’re out of your mind.”

The old man motioned again, impatiently, and nodded at the top floors of the Center compound visible over the tops of the ruins. Pearce looked longingly at where his car was hidden, but he remembered the computerized map and telltales, and shrugged, stowed away his bags, and got behind the old man.

The old man kicked the machine into life. He was stronger than he had seemed in the clinic. Pearce thought of him as the old man, but he probably was two or three decades younger than Pearce himself. As the engine roared like a wounded animal, unmuted by a muffler, Pearce wondered what he was doing here in the gathering dark, committing himself to strangers on a quixotic mission that might end in disaster for everybody.