The Immortality Factor

by Ben Bova

  Darrell clicked on the ceiling lights. We all blinked like kids at the end of a movie.

  “By god, you’ve done it,” Lowenstein said, genuinely impressed.

  “We’ve started on it,” I said. “We’re a long way from anything useful in the clinical sense. There are a lot of problems still to be solved.”

  “I think it’s wonderful,” Tabatha said. “How soon can I get a new heart?”

  I thought of the masses of tumors already clogging 3C278’s thorax and gave Tabatha a patient smile. “It’s going to take a while longer, I’m afraid. Maybe quite a while longer.”

  JULIA

  There was a side to Arthur that I didn’t like at all. He was strong, self-reliant, and utterly capable—most of the time. In American parlance, he was a “take charge” kind of person. But when he couldn’t have his way he dashed off and sulked like a little boy.

  He ran away from me when I broke the news to him that I had fallen in love with Jesse. And he ran away again after their mother’s funeral service, when I tried to heal the breach that I had caused between them. I suppose I can’t really blame him. In his own way, Arthur was just as vulnerable as Jesse. It’s just that usually he didn’t show any chinks in his armor at all. Completely unlike Jesse, who was always wearing his heart on his sleeve. Jesse was impulsive, and you could always see what he was thinking just by looking at his face. Arthur was much stronger, self-contained. But when he hit an obstacle he couldn’t climb over, he ran away from it.

  For weeks I agonized over Arthur. I had hurt him terribly, I knew, and just when that wound seemed to be healing my miscarriage drove him even further away from Jesse and me.

  “Don’t worry about Arby,” Jesse told me. “He’s like a cat. He always lands on his feet.”

  “I’ve seen cats mashed flat by lorries, you know,” I said.

  Jesse gave me a slightly hurt look. “You’re thinking more about him these days than you are about me, you know that?”

  We happened to be in bed at that moment. “Really, darling,” I said, “you are a spoiled little boy, aren’t you? Both of you, actually.”

  Jesse smiled at me, took my hand in his, and slid it down the length of his torso. “Does that feel like a spoiled little boy?” he asked.

  “Well, it’s not little.”

  “And it’s not spoiled.”

  “But it’s definitely male.”

  After more than a year of marriage and all we had been through, I still had to reassure Jesse that he was the center of my universe. The reassurance was great fun, actually.

  Jesse insisted that I take a full physical examination shortly after I came home from hospital. He was concerned that perhaps some exotic infection was lingering in my system and this had caused the miscarriage. I spent several days at the medical center, allowing Jesse’s best people to stick me with needles, probe, tap, palpate, and otherwise investigate every pore of my body. I came out of it with flying colors.

  “My god,” said Jesse, reading through their reports over dinner at our flat, “you’re as healthy as a horse.”

  “Then why did I have the miscarriage?” I wondered aloud.

  He shrugged. “It happens. Even to healthy women. For no apparent reason.”

  “But would it happen again?”

  “There’s no reason to expect it to.”

  “There was no reason to expect it the first time,” I said.

  He leaned across our tiny dinner table and kissed me gently. “First pregnancies are always the toughest. You’ll see, the next one will go fine.”

  I certainly hoped he was right. It was clear from the expression on his face that he was as worried about it as I was, but he didn’t want to alarm me.

  Still, as the weeks wore into months I found myself worrying not about having a baby, but about Arthur. Should I try to call him? Or perhaps drive up to his laboratory and drop in unannounced? Neither, I decided. I would write instead. His birthday was coming up, and instead of a silly commercial card I would write a long and heartfelt letter.

  Which I did. I told him how terrible I felt and how wrong it was for him and Jesse to remain separated. I told him how much we both missed him, and how unhappy Jesse was over their falling-out. That was a bit of a stretch, I’m afraid; actually Jesse seemed to have dropped Arthur out of his mind altogether. At the very end of my letter I invited Arthur to have dinner with us on his birthday.

  Before mailing the letter, though, I showed it to Jesse. He came home close to midnight that night, bone-tired. Perhaps I should have waited until morning, but I was too excited by the prospect of setting everything right between them to think of that.

  Jesse sat down wearily in the easy chair in the living room and I handed him my letter.

  “What do you think of this?” I asked.

  He frowned when he saw it was addressed to Arthur, and muttered something about my terrible handwriting as he started scanning the letter. I sat on the sofa and watched his face: it went from unease to displeasure to outright anger. He crumpled up the sheet of paper in his fist and threw it across the room.

  I was shocked.

  “You’re not going to beg my brother’s forgiveness, goddammit! He’s the one who ought to be asking you to forgive him, for god’s sake.”

  “I wasn’t begging—”

  “The hell you weren’t!” He shot up to his feet, strode across the living room, and picked up the crumpled letter. “This goes straight into the trash.”

  I followed him into the kitchen. “Don’t you want to be reconciled with Arthur?”

  “Sure. When he’s ready to admit he’s been a pigheaded jerk. Not before. I won’t have you crawling to him. Never!”

  His anger stunned me. Until that moment I had never realized that Jesse was just as furious with his brother as Arthur was with us.

  THE TRIAL:

  DAY TWO, AFTERNOON

  Jesse could hear, behind him, the stirring of the people who packed the hearing chamber. All the TV cameras were focused squarely on him now.

  Rosen asked again, “You don’t think that organ regeneration will work on human subjects?”

  “No, I do not,” said Jesse. He expected Arthur to object, but nothing happened. He shot a swift glance at his brother. Arby’s face looked ominously dark, furious; he was obviously struggling to hold himself in check.

  “What leads you to that conclusion?” Rosen asked.

  “The fact that there are undesirable side effects from the procedure.”

  “Undesirable side effects?”

  “Yes.”

  “Such as?”

  Jesse took a longer look at Arthur. Strangely, Arby’s expression seemed slightly more at ease. He looked more as if he were genuinely intrigued by what Jesse was saying, rather than angry about it. The same old Arby, Jesse thought; he covers up his emotions right away, never lets his feelings show. Not for long, anyway.

  “Such as?” Rosen prompted again.

  Turning his full attention back to the examiner, Jesse said, “The growth inducers used to initiate the regeneration tend to also cause unwanted growth of other cells.”

  “Other cells?”

  “Yes. In the reports that Grenford Laboratory has offered as evidence there’s clear indication that regeneration attempts have led to tumor growths in the test animals.”

  “Tumors?” Rosen asked, as if this were all new to him. “Malignant tumors?”

  He wants me to say “cancer,” Jesse knew. I wonder how long I can go along this line without using the word. “Some of them become malignant,” he said. “Apparently the peptides used to initiate regeneration can trigger the protooncogenes in the nearby cells, as well.”

  “And that leads to cancer?”

  The crowd gave a little collective gasp. There! Jesse thought. The C-word is out in the open.

  “It certainly does lead to cancer,” he said.

  “And for that reason you are against any attempt to conduct human trials of organ regeneration?” Ros
en asked.

  “Yes, that’s right.” Jesse shifted uneasily in his chair, then went on, “Now, understand that the tumors aren’t always cancerous. Most of them are benign.”

  “But all of the regeneration trials have led to the growth of unwanted tumors, have they not?”

  “Yes, I believe so.”

  “Objection!”

  Jesse turned in his chair and saw that Arthur was on his feet again. He looked calm and in control of himself, but Jesse knew what ferment must be seething below his brother’s facade.

  “Dr. Marshak,” said Graves, the chief judge.

  Almost smiling, Arthur took a few steps from his place in the front row toward the witness chair where his brother sat.

  “Have you read all the reports we offered in testimony?” he asked Jesse.

  Rosen got to his feet and came around the table. “This is not the proper time for cross-examining the witness.”

  Arthur ignored the examiner. “Well, have you?” he asked.

  Jesse looked from Arthur to Rosen to the judges. Graves’s face was twisted into a worried scowl.

  “Dr. Marshak,” he said to Arthur, pointing with his gavel, “you said you have an objection and I am willing to listen to it. But you may not cross-examine the witness at this time.”

  A grimace of anger flashed across Arthur’s face but he quickly suppressed it. “I do have an objection,” he said to Graves.

  “Well, what is it?”

  Looking down at his brother for a moment, Arthur said, “The witness is basing his testimony only on the earliest reports of our animal trials. The later reports show quite clearly that we’ve been able to control the tumor growth to a considerable extent.”

  He’s calling me a liar, Jesse realized. Or an incompetent boob.

  “I read all the reports,” he snapped, staring straight at his brother.

  “Then why don’t you admit that we’ve solved the tumor problem?”

  “Because you haven’t!”

  “That’s just not true,” Arthur insisted.

  Graves banged his gavel on the desktop. “Quiet! Both of you!”

  Arthur stood facing his brother, fists on his hips. Jesse could feel his insides boiling. It took an effort to keep himself from yelling back at his brother.

  “Dr. Marshak,” said Graves to Arthur, “you have made your objection and it will be duly noted in the record of these proceedings. Now kindly sit down and let us go on. You’ll get your chance at cross-examination later.”

  Arthur went back to the front bench and sat. Rosen returned to his seat. Jesse thought of two prizefighters going back to their corners at the end of a round. He turned back to face the judges and saw that Senator Kindelberger was grinning at him.

  JESSE

  There was no way that I was going to work with Arby or any of his people, not after the way he blew up over Julia’s miscarriage. He had even snapped at Julia at Ma’s funeral service, for god’s sake. So the hell with him. No sense even thinking about La Guardia and Grenford working together. That was finished before it ever started. Arthur’s the big-shot executive with his own laboratory and a whole staff of sycophants kowtowing to him all the time. Let him go tinker with nerve regrowth or organ regeneration. See how far he gets.

  I had more important things to attend to.

  Like every hospital in the world, Mendelssohn always needed more money. We were even more in the red than most because the hospital is right on the border of the worst ghetto in the city and we had this constant tidal wave of welfare and charity cases. Poverty is ugly. Poverty is kids with sores on their skin and lice in their hair. Crack babies. AIDS babies. And violence. When I worked the emergency room I bet I saw more gunshot wounds than the medics with the First Cavalry.

  That’s why it seemed to be a perverse sort of godsend when Reverend Roy Averill Simmonds, one of those television evangelists, was rolled off an ambulance into the emergency room that Friday night.

  It’d been months since I’d seen Arby. Julia was completely recovered from the miscarriage and back at work at British Airways. In fact, she was off in London the night Reverend Simmonds was brought in.

  He was only a small-time evangelist in those days; you could see him on cable TV late at night. He had come to New York as part of a summertime revival bash at Yankee Stadium, where he had to share the pulpit—or whatever they used—with half a dozen other Bible-thumpers. Even at that they only half-filled the stadium. But it was still the most excitement the Bronx had seen all summer, what with the Yanks doing so miserably.

  I was down in the cafeteria, grabbing a quick cup of coffee after being on duty for several hours. I made it a point of honor to do my share of the ER duty. Nobody on the hospital staff got special privileges, starting with me.

  One of the Hispanic orderlies came barreling through the empty cafeteria, breathless.

  “Quick, they need you!”

  “What is it?” I asked, gulping down the last of the coffee.

  “A very important man. He’s been wounded.”

  “Who?”

  “Some priest. Not a priest, a minister. He’s on TV all the time.”

  At that point, I had no idea who Reverend Simmonds was or that he’d been working the crowd at the stadium. I tossed my Styrofoam cup into the waste bin and hurried toward the elevators, thinking that we had an assassination attempt on our hands. Urban violence had found another victim. Or maybe terrorism.

  But when I started examining Reverend Simmonds, in a curtained-off corner of the emergency room, I saw that he had been neither shot nor stabbed. He was suffering from a concussion, a pretty bad scalp wound, and contusions along the side of his head and face.

  Two deathly pale young men had come in with the evangelist. They were standing at the foot of the gurney while I examined him, both of them sweating in dark suits with narrow ties.

  “What happened?” I asked as I watched the patient’s pupils. He was semiconscious, unfocused; a concussion, all right.

  “One of the light standards collapsed and fell onto the stage,” said the young man nearer me, in a hushed voice.

  “Right in the middle of his sermon,” said the other, also whispering.

  “Must’ve been pretty heavy,” I said, starting to clean the scalp wound. The patient winced and groaned.

  “It’s a miracle that it didn’t kill him.”

  I wisecracked, “Thank god he’s got a thick skull.”

  Neither of them so much as smiled.

  “Will he be all right?”

  “I think so.” I called out to the volunteer on station at the desk outside, “Schedule this one for X-ray. Skull, left cheekbone, and jaw.”

  “I think it was an assassination attempt,” one of the young men whispered.

  I looked up at him. He was entirely serious.

  “Who’d want to kill him?”

  “The forces of evil.”

  “Like who?” I asked.

  His eyes shifted around as if he were searching for demons in the air.

  “A man of God has many enemies,” the other one said.

  “Like who?” I asked again.

  “Those who serve the devil,” he whispered so low I could barely him.

  I almost laughed in his face. The forces of evil were most likely a couple of sloppy electricians who didn’t set up their stage lights properly. Instead of worrying about the devil, these guys ought to be more careful about who they hire, I thought. Probably nonunion workers.

  I bundled him off for X-ray, warning the orderly that this was a concussion case and he’d probably upchuck sooner or later. Then I quickly forgot about Reverend Simmonds. It was a busy Friday night. Early summer, not the muggy dog days yet, but the bars and street corners were producing a heavy stream of fights and slicings. Then an apartment block caught fire and we started getting burns and smoke-inhalation cases. Reverend Simmonds had it easy.

  It was Sunday before I saw him again. I was at my desk, wading through the eternal ocean
of paperwork, when two other aides—fresh-scrubbed young girls this time—pushed his wheelchair into the doorway of my office. The bandaging on his head made it look like he was wearing a white turban, almost. The swelling on his cheek had gone down, but that side of his face was still purple. He was dressed casually: light slacks, crisp white short-sleeved shirt, no tie.

  “You work on the Lord’s day,” said the reverend. I was surprised at the depth and power of his voice, especially since he was just a little guy. A bantamweight, really.

  “People get sick and injured on the Lord’s day,” I said. “Somebody’s got to take care of them.” I didn’t tell him that as far as I was concerned, the Sabbath had already passed.

  He gave me a penetrating look from under those graying shaggy eyebrows. “You’re the chief of internal medicine here, I understand.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Yet you were working in the emergency room Friday night.”

  “It was my turn. Every doctor on the staff takes his turn, that’s the way we do it here.”

  “That’s very unusual.”

  “So is getting bonked on the head by a light stand.”

  He threw his head back and laughed, which told me that he wasn’t in any real pain. “You see?” he said to the two silent girls behind him. “It’s just as I told you. It all has a meaning, a significance.”

  “What does?”

  Reverend Simmonds motioned for them to push his chair closer to my desk. There really wasn’t much room for him; my office is barely big enough for the desk and file cabinets.

  “There’s no such thing as a coincidence,” he said to me in that deep basso voice. “Everything happens according to God’s plan.”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything. My accident and the fact that you were in the emergency room—both part of God’s plan.”

  “So what’s God planning next?”

  He took my question as if I had really meant it. “I think the Lord is telling me that I should help your hospital. I think the Lord wants me to help the poor, downtrodden, hopeless people of the ghetto.”