The Immortality Factor

by Ben Bova

  They’re not only out to discredit the scientific work, Arthur told himself. They’re out to get me, personally.

  Arthur looked at the jury as the chamber settled down for the day’s testimony. Graves had tried to make the jury as valid a cross section of working biologists as possible: someone from every major area in the field, someone from every section of the country, someone from every age group. Not an easy thing to do, with only twelve men and women to go with. Arthur had carefully read hundreds of curricula vitae before agreeing to these particular twelve.

  Then Kindelberger came in and sat alongside the trio of judges. Why? Arthur asked himself. Does he think that Phillips and his Nobel will bring out the reporters? It certainly didn’t look that way. There were only a handful of media people present.

  Rosen looked more somber than usual in a dark blue suit and matching tie. From his seat at the end of the judges’ table he riffled through some notes, then turned toward Graves and the others.

  “I regret to announce to the court that Professor Phillips will not be able to testify here today.”

  The audience stirred. Arthur felt a flash of angry disappointment.

  “Professor Phillips suffered a stroke at Gatwick Airport yesterday,” Rosen went on mournfully, “as he was waiting to board the plane that would bring him here. He is in the hospital, in critical condition.”

  The crowd sighed. Arthur felt sad for the old man, but his irritation remained.

  “In his place,” Rosen went on, “we were fortunate to obtain the gracious consent of the retired chairman of the molecular biology department of Columbia University, Professor Emeritus Wilson K. Potter.”

  Arthur spun around in his seat and saw Potter, a frail and ancient wisp of his former self, limping up the central aisle, leaning heavily on a cane. Two students were walking a few steps behind him. When Potter caught Arthur’s eye he smiled maliciously.

  PATRICIA HAYWARD

  The phone call from the new Omnitech PR director kind of surprised me. I mean, usually a new chief wants to bring her own people on board. I thought when the old guy retired I wouldn’t hear much from Omnitech anymore. That’s one of the hazards of the freelance business.

  But she called me and explained what was happening and I knew without her telling me that Arthur had asked for me personally. I told her I was awfully busy—which was a whopper of a lie—but that I’d try to sort things out and see if I couldn’t work her project in.

  “This would be a full-time job for the next several months,” she said. Her voice was kind of testy, like she was saying, Who the hell do you think you are to turn your nose up at an opportunity like this?

  “I understand that,” I said. “That’s why I want to make sure I can clear my calendar of all other commitments.”

  “I see.” Sniffy.

  “Can I phone you back first thing tomorrow?”

  “Certainly.” And she hung up.

  The only commitments on my calendar were attempts to find paying assignments. I had plenty of time to work on my novel, and it was actually starting to go somewhere, but that wasn’t bringing in any money. My piggy bank was dangerously low and my mother’s “career” as the neighborhood babysitter didn’t bring in enough money to pay for her vodka.

  Livvie was out at the supermarket just then, so I absentmindedly fed the cats and then wandered back to my room, where my computer screen still flickered with my deathless prose. Arthur had asked for me to come and work for him. Only a temporary job, to be sure, but even if it lasted only a couple of months the money would be more than I’d made all year so far. That was on the plus side. Then there was Arthur himself, maybe a negative. Not that I didn’t like him; I did. That was the problem. And he seemed to like me, at least we had a lovely night that time in Las Vegas. But–

  “It’s me!” Livvie shouted from the kitchen doorway. “I’m home.”

  I helped her tote the groceries in from the car and while we were putting them into the fridge and the cupboards I told her about the call from Omnitech.

  “Terrific!” Livvie said. “Snap it up.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe Arthur’s got more on his mind than public relations.”

  Livvie gave me a lascivious grin. “Whatever kind of relations he’s interested in, go for it.”

  “Mother!”

  She raised both hands. “Only kidding. But, well, you said he was cute and you liked him. Looks as if he likes you, too.”

  “That could be a problem,” I said.

  “Patricia,” she said, “there are times when you absolutely drive your poor old mother to drink.” And she headed straight for the vodka bottle on the countertop beside the toaster.

  I took the job, of course. Showed up two days later at the laboratory and was ushered straight into Arthur’s office. I wore a sea-green business suit with a tailored white blouse; no frills, no jewelry except a couple of rings. I was there to work, not to look alluring. Still, I didn’t want to look like a clod.

  Arthur seemed happy to see me, but he was all business. I listened carefully to his outline of the problem. It took him almost half an hour.

  “What we need is three things,” he finished, ticking points off on his fingers. “First, to keep scare stories out of the media. Second, to keep the reporters off the necks of my researchers and me. And third, to take the workload off Phyllis.”

  “And something else,” I added.

  “Oh?”

  “You don’t want to give the reporters the idea that you’re hiding something. Right? You want to appear to be open and aboveboard.”

  He thought about that a moment, nodded. “Yes, I suppose so. But I don’t want any screaming headlines about mutant monsters and that sort of stuff.”

  “Then the best way to handle it is to be right up-front with the reporters. You’re going to have to make yourself accessible to them. And some of the key players on your staff, too.”

  Arthur shook his head stubbornly. “I don’t want them bothering my researchers. I’ll talk to them all they want, but they’ve got to leave my staff people alone.”

  “I’m not sure that’s going to work,” I said.

  “That’s what I want.”

  No sense arguing with the boss the first day on the job. “Okay, we can try it that way and see how it works.”

  “Good.” He reached for the intercom on his desk. “Phyllis has set up an office for you just down the hall.”

  “Wait,” I said.

  His hand stopped just over the intercom button.

  All of a sudden I felt flustered. “I—I just wanted to thank you for getting me this assignment. I appreciate it.”

  He broke into one of those killer smiles of his. “I’ve got to admit, Pat, that you’re the only person I could think of who has some experience in this area.”

  I smiled back and said something brilliant like, “Oh, sure,” but inwardly I kicked myself for allowing girlish fantasies to seep into my brain. He had hired me because he didn’t know anybody else, not because he had any ideas of romance. This is going to be strictly business, I told myself, and don’t think for a minute that it’s anything else.

  As Phyllis showed me down the hall to the office I was going to use, I kept telling myself, Strictly business. Strictly business. It’ll be better that way. Nothing but grief when you try to mix business and personal relationships. You’ve gone that route before and look what it’s got you: nothing but grief.

  It was like doing a high-wire act. I had to convince the reporters that what Arthur and his people were doing was earthshaking, but not scary. Revolutionary, but not harmful. It’ll save your life someday, but don’t get upset about the changes it’s going to cause.

  We hit on an angle of approach right away. I juggled all the incoming requests for interviews and pictures and set up times for the reporters to see Arthur. They could interview him in his office and then take a walk through the working labs. We carefully set up an itinerary that took them through s
ome impressive-looking labs with lots of glittering glassware and bubbling chemicals. Showed them lab rats and the minihogs and monkeys that Arthur’s people were now using for experiments. And Max. The chimp was the star of our show. Camera crews spent more time on Max’s antics than they did with Arthur or any of the scientific backgrounds.

  We never let them see blood. We never let them close to any of the real working labs. And we never, ever mentioned stem cells or cloning. Not that we didn’t get questions about them, but we tiptoed away from those subjects, telling anyone who asked that we don’t need stem cells and we certainly don’t clone cells. Not anymore, anyway. Some of the reporters smelled our evasions, some tried to dig up details that they could blow up into a big controversy. But most of them simply took what we said at face value and went away disappointed that they couldn’t find any monsters or welfare mothers selling their fetuses.

  I heard complaints, secondhand, that some of the lab people were upset about having a section of the building roped off for the media. They started to call it “Glamour Alley.” But they cooperated, grudgingly. That was fine with me as long as they didn’t contradict our party line.

  The big problem, of course, was the tabloids. Whether print or TV, they all had the same goggle-eyed goal in mind: show us the monsters. Show us how you kill unborn babies for their stem cells. Send in the clones. Here we were telling them that this research would someday help people to live forever and all they wanted was mutants and mad scientists. What they got was truculent minihogs and jabbering macaques and Max doing acrobatics in the trees out back. And Arthur, smiling patiently, the cool and confident silver fox telling each one of those nasty little bastards that sooner or later they’re going to need a new heart, new liver, new legs.

  Of course, we got some blatantly faked stories in the tabloid press about Frankenstein experiments on people and kids with two hearts—and even two heads—but they didn’t seem to do much damage. I mean, the people who read those crap sheets aren’t the movers and shakers of our society.

  It was the so-called legitimate reporters that gave us the most trouble. The kind that can take a story about genetically enhanced food crops and write: High-tech tomatoes. Mysterious milk. Super-squash. Are we supposed to eat this stuff? Or is it going to eat us?

  They were out for what Linda Ellerbee used to call “anxiety news.” If they had been around when the Salk polio vaccine first appeared, they would’ve written sob stories about the poor guys who build iron lungs being thrown out of work.

  They looked legit. They came from the big, authoritative news services and networks. But they were looking for bad news. They didn’t trust science or scientists, probably because they’d been trained to look for the gloom and doom in every story.

  A few of the jerks got confused about how regentide works and wrote that we were using fetal tissue. We weren’t, of course. Regentide makes the cells it affects regress until they behave like stem cells, but we didn’t use fetuses any more than we used hacksaws. Still, the fetal tissue story got all the antiabortion fanatics stirred up, but good. We had to spend a lot of time and effort doing damage control on the fetal tissue nonsense.

  The reporters insisted on “balance.” They would interview Arthur and then go running to Joshua Ransom for a counterpoint. It was all I could do to keep Arthur from refusing to see any more reporters, once he found his own quotes (somewhat garbled) side by side with Ransom’s.

  “That man’s not a scientist!” Arthur growled. “He hasn’t the faintest idea of what he’s talking about!”

  But Ransom could make headlines, and that’s what the reporters wanted. It wasn’t enough that Arthur promised them new hearts and spleens and whatever else they needed. Ransom warned of “man-made mutations” and “laboratory-built supermen.”

  And Reverend Simmonds kept up his drumbeat about atheistic scientists doing the devil’s work. I had hoped that the more he yammered on that theme the less impact it would have. He’d get to be old news. I not-so-subtly hinted to a few key reporters that the reverend’s problem was really anti-Semitism. Like Hitler, he didn’t like “Jewish science.” That backfired. Started a flurry of stories about Jews in science and anti-Semitism in general, but didn’t take an ounce of pressure off us.

  The most difficult reporters to handle were the smarter ones who weren’t looking for scare stories but knew enough to ask about the side effects of the regeneration work and the long-term implications of helping people to live twice their normal life spans or more.

  Arthur handled them pretty well. Gave them the official tour through Glamour Alley, brought them back to his office, and charmed them into thinking he was being completely open with them. I was always by his side during these sessions. It was an education for me.

  “What’s a normal life span?” he asked a gray-haired reporter from the New York Times. “The Bible’s three score and ten? The actuarial averages that the insurance companies use? The official age of retirement at the Times?”

  The reporter laughed at that one.

  “Our generation lives twice as long as the average person did around the turn of the twentieth century,” Arthur said. “Does that mean we’re not supposed to live longer?”

  The reporter said, “How will it affect Social Security if everybody lives to be two hundred?”

  Arthur gave an elaborate shrug. “That’s for the politicians to decide. And the people. I’ll vote on the issue when it comes up.”

  “Isn’t that a rather blasé attitude?”

  Arthur leaned forward across his desk and clasped his hands together. “Listen. Let me explain to you the way the world works.”

  “I’d love to know.” The reporter’s smile was only slightly cynical.

  “Scientists discover something new,” Arthur said. “Atomic power, for instance. Or antibiotics. Lasers, computers, anything you can think of. It’s new, a new capability. It allows you to do things you couldn’t do before.”

  “Very well,” said the reporter.

  “Then engineers take this discovery out of the laboratory and make something useful out of it. A product, a tool, a weapon, a medical treatment.”

  “I see.”

  “Then businesspeople start to make money from it.” I had never seen Arthur so intent. He looked like a priest reciting his liturgy. “Some people start to get rich from it. Others pay money to get it and complain that the price is too high and the sellers are making unreasonable profits. Commentators start to worry about how this is affecting our lives and our society. Philosophers hold debates on the ethics and morality of it. Lawyers sue people about it. And finally—absolutely last in the chain—politicians start to pass laws about it.”

  “And put a tax on it,” the reporter added.

  Arthur broke into a hearty laugh. “And put a tax on it! Yes, you’re right,” he agreed.

  “So you seem to be saying that it’s not your business how your work affects Social Security or any other aspect of our lives.”

  “It’s not my business as a scientist,” Arthur answered immediately. “As a citizen, of course, I’ll be just as concerned as anyone else. More so, I think, because I understand what’s involved.”

  “Better than the average citizen?”

  With a wave of his hand, Arthur replied, “That depends on how well you do your job. You’re in the business of informing the public. They’ll only know as much as you tell them.”

  “If that.”

  Arthur pointed to one of the mottos on his wall: Jefferson’s If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

  “Point taken,” said the reporter. “You might also be interested to know that Jefferson once said that if he had to choose between newspapers and no government, or government and no newspapers, he’d take the former.”

  “Because the latter is a prelude either to a tragedy or a farce,” Arthur added.

  By the time the reporter left Arthur’s office the
y were practically soul mates. The story that appeared in the Times the following Sunday was thoughtful and thought-provoking. A good, clean job with no hatchet work. Only a couple of references to “Joshua Ransom, the self-appointed public watchdog of science.”

  “Ask the Times if we can make copies of it and use it as a backgrounder,” Arthur told me.

  “They’ll offer to sell you copies,” I said.

  “Good. Do it.”

  But despite all our efforts the basic story refused to die down. Simmonds—or whoever handled his publicity—was damned ingenious. He found a new way to get himself in the headlines and us in hot water at least once a week. The TV shows started calling for interviews with Arthur: Meet the Press and all those self-important Washington panel discussion shows. Newsweek did a cover story entitled Biotechnology: Cure or Curse? The phone kept jangling.

  I had to go into Arthur’s office and admit defeat.

  “We haven’t smothered the story,” I told him. “It just won’t die. If anything, it’s getting bigger.”

  He didn’t seem too concerned. “We’re holding our own. I haven’t seen any really bad horror stories in the responsible press lately. The TV interviews have been generally harmless.”

  Arthur came across terrific on television. Between his distinguished silver hair and his sexy smile, he looked great. And he was unflappable. I thought he’d be able to handle even 60 Minutes if they came knocking at the door.

  I took the padded chair at the side of his desk; it was closer to him, and the desk wasn’t between us.

  “I had thought,” I confessed, “that by now we’d have soft-pedaled everything enough so that the media would have lost interest in the story. But it just seems to be rolling along with no end in sight.”