James Gunn: The Immortals

The transfusion would help. It would be temporary, but everything is, at best. In the end it is all a matter of time. Maybe it would revive Weaver enough to get some solid food down him. He might surprise them all and walk out of this hospital yet.

Pearce picked up the charts and reports and walked down the long, quiet corridor, rubbery underfoot, redolent of the perennial hospital odors: alcohol and anesthetic, fighting the ancient battle against bacteria and pain. He opened the door of the intensive care unit and walked into the coolness.

He nodded distantly to the nurse on duty in the room. She was not one of the hospital staff. She was one of the three full-time nurses hired for Weaver by Jansen.

Pearce picked up the clipboard at the foot of the bed and looked at it. No change. He studied the old man’s face. It looked more like death. His breathing was still stertorous; his discolored eyelids still veiled his sunken eyes.

What was he? Name him: Five Billion Dollars. He was Money. At this point in his life he served no useful function; he contributed nothing to society, nothing to the race. He had been too busy to marry, too dedicated to father. His occupation: accumulator. He accumulated money and power; he never had enough.

Pearce didn’t believe that a man with money was necessarily a villain. But anyone who made a billion dollars or a multiple of it was necessarily a large part predator and the rest magpie. Pearce knew why Jansen was worried. When Weaver died, Money died, Power died. Money and Power are not immune from death, and when they fall they carry empires with them.

Pearce looked down at Weaver, thinking these things, and it didn’t matter. He was still a person, still human, still alive. That meant he was worth saving. No other consideration was valid.

Three plastic bags hung from the IV pole—one held a five-percent solution of glucose for intravenous feeding, another held saltwater, the third held dark life fluid itself. Plastic T-joints reduced multiple plastic tubes into one that passed through an IV pump fastened to the pole and plugged into the nearest outlet. The plastic tube from the IV pump entered a catheter inserted into the antecubital vein swollen across the inside of the patient’s elbow.

“The blood bank didn’t have any packed RBCs in Oneg,” the nurse said. “We had to get whole blood.”

Pearce nodded and the nurse closed the clamp to the intravenous feeding and released the clamp closing the tube from the saline solution before doing the same for the bag of blood. There was a brief mixture of fluids, and then it was all blood, running slowly through the long, transparent tubing with its own in-line filter into the receptive vein, new blood bringing new life to the old, worn-out mechanism on the hard hospital bed.

New blood for old, Pearce thought. Money can buy anything. “A little faster.”

The nurse adjusted the pump. Occasionally the pump beeped a warning, and the nurse made further adjustments. In the bag the level of the life fluid dropped more swiftly.

Life. Dripping. Flowing. Making the old new.

The old man took a deep breath. The exhausted laboring of his chest grew easier. Pearce studied the old face, the beaklike nose, the thin, bloodless lips, looking cruel even in their pallor. New life, perhaps. But nothing can reverse the long erosion of the years. Bodies wear out. Nothing can make them new.

Drop by drop the blood flowed from the bag through the tubing into an old man’s veins. Someone had given it or sold it. Someone young and healthy, who could make more purple life stuff, saturated with healthy red cells, vigorous white scavengers, platelets, the multiple proteins; someone who could replace it all in less than ninety days.

Pearce thought about Richard Lower, the seventeenth-century English anatomist who performed the first transfusion, and the twentieth-century Viennese immunologist, Karl Landsteiner, who made transfusions safe when he discovered the incompatible blood groups among human beings.

Now here was this old man, who was getting the blood through the efforts of Lower and Landsteiner and some anonymous donor; this old man who needed it, who couldn’t make the red cells fast enough any longer, who couldn’t keep up with the rate he was losing them internally. What was dripping through the tubes was life, a gift of the young to the old, of the healthy to the sick.

The old man’s eyelids flickered.

When Pearce made his morning rounds, the old man was watching him with faded blue eyes. Pearce blinked once and automatically picked up the skin-and-bone wrist again. “Feeling better?”

He got his second shock. The old man nodded.

“Fine, Mister Weaver. We’ll get a little food down you, and in a little while you’ll be back at work.”

He glanced at the monitors on the wall and studied them more closely. Gently, a look of surprise on his face, he lowered the old arm down beside the thin, sheeted body.

He sat back thoughtfully beside the bed, ignoring the bustling nurse. Weaver was making a surprising rally for a man in as bad shape as he had been. The pulse was strong and steady. Blood pressure was up. Somehow the transfusion had triggered hidden stores of energy and resistance.

Weaver was fighting back.

Pearce felt a strange and unprofessional sense of elation.

The next day Pearce thought the eyes that watched him were not quite so faded. “Comfortable?” he asked. The old man nodded. His pulse was almost normal for a man of his age; his blood pressure was down; his oxygen level was up.

On the third day Weaver started talking.

The old man’s thready voice whispered disjointed and meaningless reminiscences. Pearce nodded as if he understood, and he nodded to himself, understanding the process that was reaching its conclusion. Arteriosclerosis had left its marks: chronic granular kidney, damage to the left ventricle of the heart, malfunction of the brain from a cerebral hemorrhage or two.

On the fourth day Weaver was sitting up in bed talking to the nurse in a cracked, sprightly voice. “Yessirree,” he said toothlessly. “That was the day I whopped ’em. Gave it to ’em good, I did. Let ’em have it right between the eyes. Always hated those kids. You must be the doctor,” he said suddenly, turning toward Pearce. “I like you. Gonna see that you get a big check. Take care of the people I like. Take care of those I don’t like, too.” He chuckled; it was an evil, childish sound.

“Don’t worry about that,” Pearce said gently, picking up Weaver’s wrist. “Concentrate on getting well.”

The old man nodded happily and stuck a finger in his mouth to rub his gums. “You’ll git paid,” he mumbled. “Don’t you worry about that.”

Pearce looked down at the wrist he was holding. It had filled out in a way for which he could remember no precedent. “What’s the matter with your gums?”

“Itch,” Weaver got out around his finger. “Like blazes.”

On the fifth day Weaver walked to the toilet.

On the sixth day he took a shower. When Pearce came in, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, dangling his feet. Weaver looked up quickly as Pearce entered, his eyes alert, no longer so sunken. His skin had acquired a subcutaneous glow of health. Like his wrist and arm, his face had filled out. Even his legs looked firmer, almost muscular.

He was taking the well-balanced hospital diet and turning it into flesh and fat and muscle. With his snowy hair he looked like an ad for everybody’s grandfather.

The next day his hair began to darken at the roots.

“How old are you, Mister Weaver?” Pearce asked.

“Eighty,” Weaver said proudly. “Eighty my last birthday, June 5. Born in Wyoming, boy, in a mountain cabin. Still bears around then. Many’s the time I seen ’em, out with my Pa. Wolves, too. Never gave us no trouble, though.”