James Gunn - The Immortals

“Ben?” she said instantly.

For a moment her voice blunted the cold edge of his determination. It had been a long time since anyone had called him “Ben” like that. “Onto the cart. I’ve got your father. We’re going to make a break for it.”

“You’ll be ruined.”

“It was done for me,” he said. “Funny. You have an ideal—maybe it looks like your father—and you think it exists inside you like a marble statue in a hidden niche. And one day you look and it isn’t there anymore. You’re free.”

The cart was rolling toward the elevator. On the floor below he guided the cart into the EENT operating room. As it bumped gently against the cart on which Pearce was lying, Leah put out a hand, touched her father’s arm, and said, “Russ!”

“Leah!”

For a moment the exchange of names stabbed Flowers with jealousy; he felt left out, alone. “You were right,” Leah said, and she put out another hand to catch hold of Flowers and pull him close. “He is the man. Better even than we thought.”

“Find a great deal of happiness, children,” Pearce said.

Flowers chuckled. “I think you two planned the whole thing.”

Leah blushed slowly. She’s really beautiful, Flowers thought in sudden surprise. “No, we only hoped it,” she said.

Flowers injected the anesthetic, felt her fingers relax, droop away. Motionless, he stared at her face and then held up his hands in front of his eyes. They were trembling. He looked around at the gleaming whiteness of the walls, the delicate microsurgical tools, the suturing machine, the bandages, and he knew how easy it would be to slip, to make the fatal mistake.

“Courage, Medic,” said Pearce. His voice was getting stronger. “You’ve studied for seven years. You can do this simple thing.”

He took a deep breath. Yes, he could do it. And he went at it, as it should be done—with love.

“Medic Flowers,” said the hidden speaker in the ceiling, “report to the dormitory. Medic Flowers…”

They had discovered that Pearce was missing. The old man talked to him while his hands were busy and helped take his mind off the terrifying consequences. He told Flowers why he had walked out on his class thirty years before.

“It suddenly came to me—the similarity between medicine and religion. We fostered it with our tradition building, our indecipherable prescriptions, our ritual. Gradually the public had come to look upon us as miracle workers. The masses called the new medicines wonder drugs because they didn’t know how they worked. Religion and medicine—both owed their great periods to a pathological fear of death. Death is not so great an enemy.”

Flowers made depth readings of the cloudy corneas and set them into the microsurgical machine.

“Oh, the doctors weren’t to blame. We were a product of our society just as John Bone is a product of his. But we forgot an ancient wisdom which might have given us the strength to resist. ‘A sound mind in a sound body,’ the Greeks said. And even more important, ‘Nothing in excess.’ ”

Flowers positioned the laser scalpel over Leah’s right eye.

“Anything in excess will ruin this society or any other. Even the best of things—too much wealth, too much piety, too much health. We made a fetish of health, built it shrines in our medicine cabinets, built great temples for worship.”

The beam slipped into the eye without resistance, slicing away the cornea.

“The life span can be extended to a reasonable length without overburdening the society. Then we run into the law of diminishing returns, and it takes just as much again to push it a year further, and then six months, three months, a week, a day. There is no end, and our fear is such that no one can say, ‘Stop! We’re healthy enough.’ ”

The scalpel retracted and moved to the left eye.

“The lives we were saving were peripheral: the very young, the very old, and the constitutional inadequates. We repealed natural selection, saved the weak to reproduce themselves, and told ourselves that we were healthier. It was a kind of suicide. It was health out of bottles. When the bottles break, the society will die.”

Both corneas were gone. Flowers looked at his watch. It was taking too long. He turned to Pearce.

“No anesthetic,” Pearce said. As the microsurgical machine came over his face, he went on, “We called it humanitarian, but it was only another name for folly. Medicine became dependent upon the very thing it was destroying. Vast technologies were vital to its maintenance, but that level of civilization fostered its own diseases.”

The empty sockets were bandaged.

“We destroyed the cities with our doomsayings, and we amassed a disproportionate amount of capital with our tax exemptions, our subsidies, our research grants. Like religion again, in medieval Europe, when piety accumulated wealth exempt from levies.”

The corneas were in place.

“It couldn’t last in Europe, and it can’t last here. Henry the Eighth found an excuse to break with the Pope and appropriate the Church lands. In France it helped bring the Revolution. And thus this noble experiment will end. In ice or fire, by the degeneration of technology below the level necessary to sustain it, or by rebellion. And that’s why I went into the city.”

The suturing machine fused the edges of the cornea in a neat graft.

“That’s where the future will be made, where the people are surviving because they are strong. There we are learning new things—the paranormal methods of health that are not so new after all, but the age-old methods of healers. Their merit is that they do not require complexity and technology, but only a disciplined mind that can discipline the body. When the end comes, the fine spacious life in the country will end like the mayfly. The city will survive and grow again. Outside they will die of diseases their bodies have forgotten, of cancer they cannot resist, of a hundred different ailments, for which the medicine has been lost.”

As the bandages were fastened over Leah’s eyes, the speaker in the ceiling spoke again. “Emergency squads report to stations. Heavily armed forces are attacking St. Luke’s.”

The time for caution was past. Flowers taped together the cart legs and guided them across the hall into the elevator. They dropped to the subway level. Clumsily Flowers maneuvered the two carts across the approachway into one of the cars and swung himself aboard after them.

In seconds the garage would be swarming with the emergency squads.

Another speaker boomed: “Snipers on buildings along Main Street are shelling St. Luke’s with five-inch mortars. No casualties reported. Emergency squads, on the double.”

“Has it started already?” Pearce asked softly.

Unseen, Flowers smiled grimly.

As they reached the garage, men were racing past them. No one paid any attention to the medic guiding the two carts. Flowers stopped at the first unoccupied ambulance, opened the back, and lifted Leah’s unconscious body onto one of the stretchers. He lifted Pearce onto the other one. He slammed the door shut and ran around to the front.

Just as the engine caught, a startled medic raced up and pounded futilely against the door. Flowers pulled away from him in a burst of speed.

The ambulance was only one vehicle among many; they streamed from the Center, ambulances, half-tracks, tanks. At Southwest Trafficway, Flowers edged out of the stream and turned north. North into the city.

John Bone was waiting beside the garage door under City Hall. “Okay,” he told Coke, “you can call off the diversion now. Come on in,” he said to Flowers.

“Said the spider to the fly,” Flowers said, smiling. “No, thanks. You’ll get healed, and better than I can do. But not now.”