James Gunn: The Immortals

“What color was your hair?”

“Color of a raven’s wing. Had the blackest, shiniest hair in the county. Gals used to beg to run their fingers through it.” He chuckled reminiscently. “Used to let ’em. A passel of black-headed kids in Washakie County before I left.”

He stuck his finger in his mouth and massaged his gums ecstatically.

“Still itch?” Pearce asked.

“Like a Wyoming chigger.” He chuckled again. “You know what’s wrong with me, boy? In my second childhood. That’s what. I’m cutting teeth.”

During the second week Weaver was removed from intensive care to a private suite and his mind turned to business, deserting the long-ago past. A telephone was installed beside his bed, and he spent half his waking time in short, clipped conversations about incomprehensible deals and manipulations. The other half was devoted to Jansen, who was so conveniently on hand whenever Weaver called for him that Pearce thought he must have appropriated a hospital room.

Weaver was picking up the scepter of empire.

While his mind roamed restlessly over possessions and ways of keeping and augmenting them, his body repaired itself like a self-servicing machine. His first tooth came through—a canine. After that they appeared rapidly. His hair darkened almost perceptibly; and when a barber came in to trim it, Weaver had him remove all the white, leaving him with a crewcut as dark as he had described. His face filled out, the wrinkles smoothing themselves like a ruffled lake when the wind has gentled. His body became muscular and vigorous; the veins retreated under the skin to become gray traceries. Even his eyes darkened to a fiery blue.

The lab tests were additional proof of what Pearce had begun to suspect. Arteriosclerosis had never thickened those veins; or else, somehow, the damage of plaque buildup had been repaired. The kidneys functioned perfectly. The heart was as strong and efficient a pump as it had ever been. There was no evidence of a cerebral hemorrhage.

By the end of that week Weaver looked like a man of thirty, and his body provided physical evidence of a man in his early, vigorous years of maturity.

“Carl,” Weaver was saying as Pearce entered the room, “I want a woman.”

“Any particular woman?” Jansen answered, shrugging.

“You don’t understand,” Weaver said with the impatience he reserved for those immediately dependent on his whims. “I want one to marry. I made a mistake before; I’m not going to repeat it. A man in my position needs an heir. I’m going to have one. Yes, Carl—and you can hide that look of incredulity a little better—at my age!” He swung around quickly toward Pearce. “That’s right, isn’t it, Doctor?”

Pearce shrugged. “There’s no physical reason you can’t father a child.”

“Get this, Carl. I’m as strong and as smart as I ever was, maybe stronger and smarter. Some people are going to learn that very soon. I’ve been given a second chance, haven’t I, Doctor?”

“You might call it that. What are you going to do with it?”

“I’m going to do better. Better than I did before. This time I’m not going to make any mistakes. And you, Doctor, do you know what you’re going to do?”

“I’m going to do what I’ve always done: my job, as best I can.”

Weaver’s eyes twisted to Pearce’s face. “You think I’m just talking. Don’t make that mistake. You’re going to find out why.”

“Why?”

“Why I’ve recovered like I have. Don’t try to kid me. You’ve never seen anything like it. I’m not eighty years old anymore. My body isn’t. My mind isn’t. Why?”

“What’s your guess?”

“I never guess. I know. I get the facts from those who have them, and then I decide. That’s what I want from you—the facts. I’ve been rejuvenated.”

“You’ve been talking to Doctor Easter.”

“Of course. He’s my personal physician. That’s where I start.”

“But you never got that language from him. He’d never commit himself to a word like rejuvenation.”

Weaver glowered at Pearce from under dark eyebrows. “What was done to me?”

“What does it matter? If you’ve been ‘rejuvenated,’ that should be enough for any man.”

“When Mister Weaver asks a question,” Jansen interjected icily, “Mister Weaver wants an answer.”

Weaver brushed him aside. “Doctor Pearce doesn’t frighten. But Doctor Pearce is a reasonable man. He believes in facts. He lives by logic, like me. Understand me, Doctor! I may be thirty now, but I will be eighty again. Before then I want to know how to be thirty once more.”

“Ah.” Pearce sighed. “You’re not talking about rejuvenation now. You’re talking about immortality.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not for humans. The body wears out. Three-score years and ten. That—roughly—is what we’re allotted. After that we start falling apart.”

“I’ve had mine and a bit more. Now I’m starting over at thirty. I’ve got forty or fifty to go. After that, what? Forty or fifty more?”

“We all die,” Pearce said. “Nothing can stop that. Not one man born has not come to the grave at last. There’s a disease we contract at birth from which none of us recovers; it’s invariably fatal. Death.”

“Suppose somebody develops a resistance to it?”

“Don’t take what I said literally. I didn’t mean that death was a specific disease,” Pearce said. “We die in many ways: accident, infection—” And senescence, Pearce thought. For all we know, that’s a disease. It could be a disease. Etiology: Virus, unisolated, unsuspected, invades at birth or shortly thereafter — or maybe transmitted at conception.

Incidence: Total.

Symptoms: Slow degeneration of the physical entity, appearing shortly after maturity, increasing debility, failure of the circulatory system through arteriosclerosis and heart damage, decline in the immunity system, malfunction of sense and organs, loss of cellular regenerative ability, susceptibility to secondary invasions. …

Prognosis: 100% fatal.

“Everything dies,” Pearce went on without a pause. “Trees, planets, suns… it’s natural, inevitable…” But it isn’t. Natural death is a relatively new thing. It appeared only when life became multicellular and complicated. Maybe it was the price for complexity, for the ability to think.

Protozoa don’t die. Metazoa—sponges, flatworms, coelenterates—don’t die. Certain fish don’t die except through accident. “Voles are animals that never stop growing and never grow old.” Where did I read that? And even the tissues of the higher vertebrates are immortal under the right conditions.

Carrel and Ebeling proved that. Give the cell enough of the right food, and it will never die. Cells from every part of the body have been kept alive indefinitely in vitro. Differentiation and specialization—that meant that any individual cell didn’t find the perfect conditions. Besides staying alive, it had duties to perform for the whole. A plausible explanation, but was it true? Wasn’t it just as plausible that the cell died because the circulatory system broke down?

Let the circulatory system remain sound, regenerative, and efficient, and the rest of the body might well remain immortal.

“When we say something’s natural, it means we’ve given up trying to understand it,” Weaver said. “You gave me a transfusion. Immunities can be transferred with the blood, Easter told me. Who donated that pint of blood?”

Pearce sighed. “Donor records are confidential.”

Weaver snorted derisively.

The blood bank was in the basement. Pearce led the way down busy, noisy corridors, cluttered with patients in wheelchairs waiting for X rays and other tests, and others on gurneys being maneuvered to labs or back to their rooms.