James Gunn - The Immortals

“Where is he?” Weaver asked.

“It won’t work, Weaver,” Pearce said, his voice rising. “I’ll tell you why it won’t work. Because you would kill him. You think you wouldn’t, but you’d kill him as certainly as you’re a member of the human race. You’d bleed him to death, or you’d kill him just because you couldn’t stand having something immortal around. You or some other warped specimen of humanity. You’d kill him, or he’d get killed in the riots of those who were denied life. One way or another he’d be tossed to the wolves of death. What people can’t have they destroy.”

“Where is he?” Weaver repeated.

“It won’t work for a final reason.” Pearce’s voice dropped as if it had found a note of pity. “But I won’t tell you that. I’ll let you find out for yourself.”

“Where is he?” Weaver insisted softly.

“I don’t know. You won’t believe that. But I don’t know. I didn’t want to know. I’ll confess to this much: I told him the truth about himself, and I gave him some money, and I told him to leave town, to change his name, hide—anything, but not be found; to be fertile, to populate the earth…”

“I don’t believe you. You’ve got him hidden away for yourself. You wouldn’t give him a thousand dollars for nothing.”

“You know the amount?” Pearce asked.

Weaver’s lip curled. “I know every deposit you’ve made in the last five years, and every withdrawal. You’re small, Pearce, and you’re cheap, and I’m going to break you.”

Pearce smiled, unworried. “No, you’re not. You don’t dare use violence, because I just might know where Cartwright is hiding. Then you’d lose everything. And you won’t try anything else because if you do I’ll release the article I’ve written about Cartwright—I’ll send you a copy—and then the fat would really be in the fire. If everybody knew about Cartwright, you wouldn’t have a chance to control it, even if you could find him. You’re big and powerful, but there are people in this world and groups and nations that could swallow you and never notice.”

Weaver rose from the chair and said, “You wouldn’t do that. Then there would be thousands of people looking for Cartwright, not just one.” He turned at the door and said, calmly, “But you’re right—I couldn’t take the chance. I’ll be seeing you again.”

“That’s right,” Pearce agreed and thought, I’ve been no help to you, because you won’t ever believe that I haven’t got a string tied to Cartwright.

But you’re not the one I pity.

Two days after that meeting came the news of Weaver’s marriage with a twenty-five-year-old girl from the country club district, a Patricia Warren. It was the weekend sensation—wealth and beauty, age and youth.

Pearce studied the girl’s picture in the Sunday paper and told himself that surely she had got what she wanted. And Weaver—Pearce knew him well enough to know that he had got what he wanted. Weaver’s heir would already be assured. Otherwise, Weaver would never risk himself and his empire in a woman’s hands. Tests were reliable even as early as this.

The fourth week since the transfusion passed uneventfully, and the fifth week was only distinguished by a summons from Jansen, which Pearce ignored. The beginning of the sixth week brought a frantic call from Dr. Easter. Pearce refused to go to Weaver’s newly purchased mansion.

A screaming ambulance brought Weaver to the hospital, clearing the streets ahead of it with its siren and its flashing red light, dodging through the traffic with its precious cargo: money in the flesh.

Pearce stood beside the hard hospital bed, checking the pulse in the bony wrist, and stared down at the emaciated body. It made no impression in the bed. In the silence the harsh unevenness of the old man’s breathing was loud. The only movement was the spasmodic rise and fall of the sheet that covered the old body.

He was living—barely. He had used up his allotted three-score years and ten and a bit more. It wasn’t merely that he was dying. Everyone is. With him it was imminent. The pulse was feeble. The gift of youth had been taken away. Within the space of a few days Weaver had been drained of color, drained of fifty years of life.

He was an old man, dying. His face was yellowish over grayish blue, the color of death. It was bony, the wrinkled skin pulled back like a mask for the skull. Once he might have been handsome. Now his eyes were sunken, the closed eyelids dark over them; his lips were a dark line, and his nose was a thin, arching beak.

This time, Pearce thought distantly, there would be no reprieve.

“I don’t understand,” Dr. Easter muttered. “I thought he’d been given another fifty years—”

“That was his conclusion,” Pearce said. “It was more like forty days. Thirty to forty days—that’s how long the gamma globulin remains in the bloodstream. It was only a passive immunity. The only person with any lasting immunity to death is Cartwright, and the only ones he can give it to are his children.”

Easter looked around to see if the nurse was listening and whispered. “Couldn’t we handle this better? Chance needs a little help sometimes. With semen banks and artificial insemination we could change the makeup of the human race in a couple of generations—”

“If we weren’t all wiped out first,” Pearce said and turned away.

He waited, his eyes closed, listening to the harshness of Weaver’s breathing, thinking of the tragedy of life and death—the being born and the dying, entwined, all one, and here was Weaver who had run out of life, and there was his child who would not be born for months yet. It was a continuity, a balance—a life for life, and it had kept humanity stable for millions of years.

And yet—immortality? What might it mean?

He thought of Cartwright, the immortal, the hunted man. While men remembered, they would never let him rest, and if he got tired of hiding and running, he was doomed. The search would go on and on—crippled a little, fortunately, now that Weaver had dropped away—and Cartwright, with his burden, would never be able to live like other men.

He thought of Cartwright, trying to adjust to immortality in the midst of death, and he thought that immortality—the greatest gift, surely, that a man could receive—demanded payment in kind, like everything else. For immortality, you must surrender the right to live.

You’re the one I pity, Cartwright.

“Transfusion, Doctor Pearce?” the nurse repeated.

“Yes,” he said. “Might as well.” He looked down at Weaver once more. “Type and crossmatch two units of blood and administer one unit when available. We know his type already—O negative.”

The search had been organized to last a hundred years. Half of that period was already gone, and the search was no nearer success than when it had started. Only the ultimate desperation can keep hope alive without periodic transfusions of results.

The National Research Institute was unique. It had no customers and no product. Its annual statement was printed all in red. And yet the tight-lipped donors made their contributions regularly and without complaint. Whenever one of them died, his estate was inherited by the Institute.

The purpose of the Institute was learning, but not education. It had an omnivorous appetite for information of all kinds, particularly old information recorded on paper or the newer kind coded into on or off electronic markers: vital statistics, newspaper accounts, hospital records, field reports… A Potomac of data flowed through the gray, bombproof, block-square building near Washington, D.C., reduced to innocuous signals from which computers would make esoteric comparisons or draw undecipherable conclusions.