James Gunn - The Immortals

Bone’s face wrinkled angrily. “By whom?”

“These,” Flowers said, waving his hand toward the back of the ambulance.

“An old man? A blind girl?”

“A blind old man, and a girl who might see. Yes. They can do more for you than I can. We’ll get along, Bone.”

Bone grimaced. “Yes. Yes, I suppose we will.”

Leah was stirring. Flowers reached back and put a hand on her forehead. She grew quiet. He turned back to Bone and stripped off his white jacket and tossed it to the political boss of the city. “Here, maybe this will do you some good. You can have the ambulance, too, when it’s taken us home.”

Home. He smiled. He had thrown in his lot with the city. He had even forgotten his filters. There was brutality in the city, but you could tame it, put its misdirected vitality to use. But the only thing to do with an ideal that has outworn its necessity is to turn your back on it, to leave it behind.

People can’t be divided into two groups: There aren’t people, and people in white jackets. A doctor is only a man with special skills. But a healer is something more than a man. They would make the beginning, the old man, and the blind girl who might see, and the medic who had found a new ideal. “I spent seven years learning to be a doctor,” Flowers said. “I guess I can spend seven years more learning how to heal.”

The clinic was deserted.

Harry Elliott smothered a yawn as he walked slowly toward the draped operating table under the cold, glareless light at the back of the big room tiled in antiseptic white and flooded with invisible, germ-killing ultraviolet. He lit the candelabra of Bunsen burners standing on each side of the table and turned on the ventilators under the mural of Immortality slaying Death with a syringe. The air, straight from the Medical Center, was pure, disease-free, and aromatic with the hospital incense of anesthetic and alcohol.

Science, surgery, and salvation—the clinic had something for everybody.

It was going to be another ordinary day, Harry decided. Soon would come the shrill cacophony of six o’clock, and the factories would release their daily human floods into the worn channels between the high walls. For an hour or two, then, he would be busy.

But it was a good shift. He was busy only between six and curfew. Other times he could sneak a view of the Geriatrics Journal or flip a few reels of text over the inner surface of his glasses. He didn’t need them for seeing—if he had he would have used contact lenses—but they were handy for viewing and they made a man look professional and older.

At twenty-four that was important to Harry…

Sunday was bad. But then Sunday was a bad day for everybody.

He would be glad when it was over. One more week and he would be back on duty inside. Six more months and he would have his residency requirements completed. As soon as he passed his boards—it was unthinkable that he would not pass—there would be no more clinics.

It was all very well to administer to the masses—that was what the oath of Hippocrates was about, partly—but a doctor had to be practical. There just wasn’t enough medical care to go around. Curing an ear infection here, a case of gonorrhea there, was like pouring antibiotics into the river. The results were unnoticeable.

With those who had a chance at immortality, it was different. Saving a life meant something. It might even mean a reprieve for himself, when he needed it. And reprieves had been stretched into immortality.

The prognosis, though, was unfavorable. A man’s best hope was to make something of himself worth saving. Then immortality would be voted him by a grateful electorate. That was why Harry had decided to specialize in geriatrics. Later, when he had more leisure and laboratory facilities, he would concentrate on the synthesis of the elixir vitae. Success would mean immortality not only for himself but for everybody. Even if he did not succeed within a lifetime, if his research was promising, there would be reprieves.

But it was the synthesis that was important. The world could not continue to depend upon the Cartwrights. They were too selfish. They preferred to hide their own accidental immortality rather than contribute harmless amounts of blood at regular intervals. If Fordyce’s statistical analysis of Locke’s investigations was correct, there were enough Cartwrights alive to grant immortality to 50,000 mortals—and that number would increase geometrically as more Cartwrights were born. One day a baby would inherit life as its birthright, not death.

If the Cartwrights were not so selfish… As it was, there had been only enough of them discovered to provide immortality for a hundred to two hundred persons; nobody knew exactly how many. And the tame Cartwrights were so infertile that their numbers increased very slowly. They could contribute only a limited quantity of the precious blood. From this could be extracted only a small amount of the gamma globulin that carried the immunity factor. Even at closely calculated minimal dosages, the shots could not be stretched beyond a small group of essential persons, because the immunity to death was passive. It was good for no more than thirty to forty days.

But once the blood protein was synthesized…

Harry had an idea of how it might be done—by taking apart the normal gamma globulin molecule and then putting it back together again, DNA fragment by fragment. With radiation and the new quick freeze, absolute, he could do it. Once he got his hands on a research grant and laboratory facilities…

He walked slowly toward the street entrance, past the consultation rooms with their diagnostic couches on both sides of the long clinic hallway. He paused between the giant Aesculapian staffs that supported the lintel of the doorway, just before he reached the moving curtain of air that kept out the heat of summer, the cold of winter, and the dust and disease of the city. At this stage in his career, it was folly to think of research grants. They were for older, proven researchers, not for callow residents, nor even eager young specialists.

The clinic was built out from the Medical Center wall. Opposite was the high wall of a factory that made armored cars for export to the suburbs. That’s where the Center got its ambulances. A little farther along the Medical Center wall was a second smaller outbuilding. On its roof was a neon sign: BLOOD BOUGHT HERE. Beside its door would be another, smaller sign: WE ARE NOW PAYING $50 A PINT.

In a few minutes the blood-tank technicians would be busy inserting needles into scarred antecubital veins as the laborers were set free by the quitting whistles. They would pour through the laboratory, spending their life resources prodigally, coming back, many of them, to give another pint before two weeks had elapsed, much less two months. No use trying to keep track of them. They would do anything: trade identity cards, scuff up their inner arms so that the previous needle hole would not show, swear that the scars were from antibiotic shots…

And then they would gulp down their orange juice—some of the children did it mostly for that because they had never tasted orange juice before—grab their fifty dollars and head for the nearest shover of illicit antibiotics and nostrums. Or they would give it to some neighborhood leech for rubbing salve on some senile invalid or for chanting runes over some dying infant.

Well, they were essential. He had to remember that. They were a great pool of immunities. They had been exposed to all the diseases bred of poverty, ignorance, and filth from which the squires had been protected. The squires needed the citizens’ gamma globulins, their antigens. The squires needed the serums manufactured in citizen bodies, the vaccines prepared from their reactions.