by Scott Britz
She had looked down on that. It never occurred to her that maybe Hank had a wisdom that she lacked, and that that was what had attracted her to him in the first place. Not the Gary Cooper looks, not the paper on viral recombination, but balance. A knowledge of what really counted in life.
What kept things going as long as they did was Daddy. Daddy had been like the strong force of the nucleus that keeps all the protons and neutrons from flying apart. He liked Hank and gave him a job at the institute. He refereed their marital spats. While Daddy lived, Cricket didn’t think about the problems in her marriage because Daddy always knew how to smooth things over. It was as though Daddy were more than a man, something like Odin or Zeus—at least until a heart attack at his desk proved he was a man after all. When he died, the hole he left behind was enormous. Cricket threw herself even deeper into her work, with predictable results. She became less and less of a wife and mother, until Hank had enough of it and pulled the plug. She accepted the divorce without demur.
A creak of oaken boards. Cricket turned to see a teenage girl in a sleeveless, green top, dark jeans and sandals staring at her from the middle of the staircase. The girl’s straight blond hair had been pinned back to keep it off a square of gauze taped to her forehead.
“Dad, why is she here?” asked the girl with a voice as frightened as it was defiant.
Cricket tried to smile. “You know why. I’ve been sending you e-mails every other day for the past six weeks.”
“I don’t read them.”
“Nor do you answer long-distance cell phone calls, apparently. Well—you’re coming home, sweetie.”
“I am home.”
“Look, Emmy, we need to give this a shot. Both of us. I’m . . . I’m worried about you. You have no idea how scared I was when I heard you got hurt—”
Emmy glared. “You can’t be serious! There’s no way I’m going with you.”
“You know that it was just a voluntary arrangement between your dad and me for you to go on staying here. I was traveling too much back then. But we’re now returning to the original custody agreement.”
“You can’t!” Emmy screamed.
Cricket cued Hank with a nod.
Hank bowed his head. “She can, hon.”
Cricket turned away and rested her free hand on the mantel of the fireplace, leaving Emmy’s death stare to deflect harmlessly from her shoulder blades. A bad start. Why can’t there be an easy way to do this? She groped in her mind for gentler words, but was afraid to let her self-doubts show. She had plenty of them. “Why don’t you get your things together, sweetie?” she said, sipping her coffee with her face to the wall.
“What—you mean now?”
“Yes, now. Read my last e-mail. We have seats on a seven-thirty flight out of Logan.”
“You can’t be serious! I have a life here. I have friends. I’m on the swim team. I’m gonna play Ariel in Footloose this fall.” Emmy shook her little, pink fists. “You can’t just yank me away like . . . like . . . like the fucking bitch you are.”
Cricket yawned. “A very tired fucking bitch.” She turned toward Hank and nodded toward the sofa. “Would you mind if I cleaned up a bit and stretched out for a few minutes while she packs?”
“Why don’t you use my bed?”
“Sofa’s fine.”
The staircase shook as Emmy stormed back to her bedroom.
Hank waited till she was gone, then lowered his voice. “Are you really taking her back with you? To Atlanta?”
“Yes.”
“But your fieldwork—”
“Done with it.” So sharply did she reply that she felt compelled to soften her answer with a shrug. There were things she didn’t want to have to explain.
“Are you kidding?”
“I guess I’ve had one of those epiphanies. Some things are more important than getting one more paper in Nature.”
Hank smirked. “Now there’s a new Cricket.”
“Don’t patronize me, Hank. I’ve been a crappy mother all these years and I don’t need you to point it out. This is my last chance with Emmy. She’s practically a woman now, and there’re so many things I’ve screwed up with her that she has every right to hate me. But the fact is, she’s really not doing well, is she? You told me so yourself. She’s practically flunking out of school. She drinks. She sneaks out at night. She needs a mother. Even a flawed one will do. Because, fair or not, there are levels on which I can communicate with her and you can’t. Just by virtue of estrogen.”
“Can’t you let her finish out the summer? She has a job.”
“I’ve always been a believer in letting the ax fall quickly. Besides, you have troubles of your own—don’t you?”
That cut off debate. She got up and went into the small half bath beside the kitchen. When she came out, the door to the old guest room was open, and she could see that Hank had turned it into an office, cramming it with the desktop computers and optical storage drives he used for his statistical research, and lining the walls with bookshelves that sagged under piles of Proceedings, printouts, research-symposium notes, and randomly shuffled journals. In the far corner, on a window ledge, she spied an empty bottle of Old Grand-Dad.
“Working on anything interesting?” Her question was a simple pleasantry, almost automatic among scientists.
“A dead end.”
“Oh?” The story of Hank in a nutshell. Bright beginning, dead end.
“Not scientifically. Politically.”
“How so?”
Hank started to answer her, then caught himself. “I’ve been warned not to talk about it. Strictly warned.”
“By whom?”
“Ahh, Cricket . . .” Leaning with one arm against the kitchen divider, Hank smiled and softened his voice to change the subject. “I’ll bet you can’t remember when you last had anything to eat. God knows the planes don’t feed you anymore.”
That smile, again. That wicked, goddamned Gary Cooper smile. Cricket chuckled—the first time in many days. “You know me. My body makes food from sunlight. But I could stand a bite—maybe after I shut my eyes for a few minutes.”
“I can whip up something before the big demo.”
“You mean before we leave for the airport. Emmy and I have a plane to catch.”
“You have plenty of time. You don’t want to miss this.”
“I don’t see what the big deal is.”
“Big deal?” Hank looked incredulous. “At noon today, your uncle Charles—”
“Please don’t call him that. You know we’re not related—and I’m not a little girl anymore.”
“Dr. Gifford, then. He’s making some kind of earth-shattering announcement. More than an announcement. A demonstration. It’s proof that the Methuselah Vector works. There are unbelievable rumors going around, Cricket. They say he’s had a test subject under wraps for months. I know people have accused me of not being a team player on this project, but from everything I’ve heard, it’s going to be spectacular.”
“Emmy is all I care about.”
“This is the real thing, Cricket. Immortality.”
“Not everyone wants to live forever, Hank. For some of us, what makes life bearable is knowing it’ll never overstay its welcome.”
“Your dad would have wanted you to see it.”
There it was again. That damned trump card. “I don’t know. I don’t know, Hank.” She chopped the air with her hands, as if warding off an invisible net closing in on her.
But what if Hank was right? Charles could be arrogant. Obsessive-compulsive, too. But he was damned smart and one hell of a scientist. He would never make a claim he couldn’t prove. Would she ever be able to live with herself knowing she had turned her back on the discovery of the century?
Plus, she did owe it to Daddy. If Charles had really gotten aetatin to work, she had an
obligation to be there for him, to make sure that his share in the discovery was remembered.
She sat down on the sofa and let herself topple to the side, with her face against the armrest. “I’m just so tired,” she mumbled. “Let me shake some of this jet lag. Then . . . we’ll talk immortality. Later . . .”
She fell asleep the instant her eyelids closed.
Four
YOU CAN’T GO IN THERE, MR. Niedermann,” said the prim, gray-haired woman at the desk. “Dr. Gifford is in a meeting.”
Niedermann was in no mood to wait. An hour from now news of the Methuselah Vector would hit the world and the value of Eden Pharmaceuticals would shoot sky-high. So he simply barged through the heavy walnut door to the inner office. In his arms he clutched a pair of manila folders, one slender and the other bulging with legal-size papers.
In his book-lined office, Gifford looked up from behind a seven-foot-wide mahogany desk, his hands poised in midair, his gesture interrupted in midsentence. “I’m sorry, Dr. Gifford,” huffed the secretary, who came running after Niedermann. “I told him you were busy.”
“It’s all right, Mrs. Walls. We were just wrapping up.” As Gifford spoke, a slim, balding man in a black turtleneck peered around the edge of a high-backed leather chair in front of the desk. “Jack,” said Gifford, beckoning toward Niedermann, “I’d like you to meet Lou Alberts, the science editor for the New York Times.”
Niedermann shook hands, then drew up a smaller chair from beside the window and set the two file folders on the floor.
The editor tapped the stylus of an electronic notepad on the arm of his chair. “Just one last question, Dr. Gifford. How does the Methuselah Vector compare to, say, resveratrol, or any of the current antiaging drugs?”
“Like a jet airplane to a kid’s birthday balloon! The Vector is resveratrol’s great-great-granddaddy. It controls the sirtuin genes, heat shock proteins, superoxide dismutase, DNA repair genes, telomerase, a hundred things we don’t even know the names of yet. The Vector expresses the master gene. Everything else is downstream from it.
“Now, mind you, I’ve been taking resveratrol myself for a number of years. Nearly everyone researching this field has either been drinking a lot of red wine or taking resveratrol. I’ve taken vitamin E and chondroitin, too. All this stuff was good when there was nothing else. But now we have the real thing.”
Gifford stood up, cuing Alberts to offer his hand over the blotter. Hannibal, lying in a patch of sunlight below the window, lifted his massive gray head for a moment, pricked his black ears, and then went back to sleep.
“Thanks for your time, Dr. Gifford.” Alberts slipped his notepad into its leather case and exited smoothly.
“I liked this one,” said Gifford to Niedermann after the door had shut. “He knew what a transactivating domain was. I didn’t have to explain telomeres or DNA regulation by methylation like he was a freshman biology student. The one from the Wall Street Journal was sharp, too.”
Gifford resettled himself behind his desk and fell to studying a sheaf of papers. They were multicolored tracings of DNA sequence data—red, green, yellow, and blue—that were used to guarantee the purity of each batch of the Methuselah Vector in the production lab.
“What happened to those special guests of yours?” asked Gifford without looking up.
“I left them in the lounge of Grainger House. Buffet brunch and a fully stocked bar.” Niedermann couldn’t resist a smile. There were a few other treats, too, tailored to their special needs. Mancus, for example. OxyContin addict. That’s where research came in. The first rule of handling people was to know more about them than they knew themselves.
Gifford frowned. “What’s with all these Hollywood and Washington types, anyway? I didn’t see any doctors on your list. Shouldn’t you have invited the surgeon general?”
“Doctors don’t make public opinion. As for the surgeon general—he’s forty-eight years old. He runs five miles a day and thinks he’ll live forever.”
“So you picked these people because they’re . . . old?”
“I picked them because they have power. Plus they’ll understand the urgency of the work we’re doing. At the end of the day, they’ll be motivated to help us.”
“I didn’t realize that we needed so much help.”
“That’s because you live in an ivory tower, Doctor. Trust me, this is how the world works.” Niedermann smiled impatiently. “So, about that other matter. The proxies—have you given them any thought?”
Gifford seemed not to hear him. “Jack, what was the problem with batch forty-six?” he blurted out. “The Vector yield was only seven hundred picograms. That’s less than one dose.”
Niedermann bit his lower lip. He had seen Gifford slip into his own train of thought like this before. He knew it was useless trying to dislodge him. It was an occupational disease of scientists. “They grow this stuff out of cultured cells,” he told Gifford a little gruffly. “It’s pretty tricky. The people in the lab say there wasn’t enough magnesium in the culture medium and the cells wouldn’t divide. It was just a glitch—but we caught it.”
“Not acceptable. This is what I get for letting your production engineers set up the reactors.”
“The other batch yields are on-target. We’ll just mix forty-six with one of the others.”
“No. Destroy it.”
“Are you serious? That’s nearly two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of product.”
“Everything has to be perfect, Jack. We’re creating history here. We have a responsibility—to the public, to ourselves. To mankind.”
Niedermann chuckled. All the colored sequence charts in the world wouldn’t put Gifford wise to what had really happened to batch 46. “You’re going to drive yourself crazy worrying like this. Why don’t you just relax for a few hours and enjoy the show.”
“You could be right. The stress . . . I haven’t slept in days. But I’m not tired. Really, I’m not.”
Niedermann noticed Gifford moving his pen over the sheets of DNA sequence printouts. When Niedermann looked more closely, he saw that the pages were covered with little black doodles. That was odd. Gifford was no doodler.
Gifford threw down his pen. “Have you talked to the people on the New York end? Phone lines and websites are up?”
“Up and ready. Radio City Music Hall is available, too, and our people have started planning decorations for it.”
“Radio City?” Gifford frowned. “I told you I wanted the ceremonies outside, in the Lower Plaza. I want that gilded statue of Prometheus framing the dais from every camera view. ‘Prometheus, teacher in every art, who brought the fire that hath proved to mortals a means to mighty ends.’ Do you not understand the symbolism?”
“We need Radio City in case it rains. There’s a sixty percent chance of—”
“Never mind the rain. Just ask your people to carry out their instructions.”
Niedermann laughed. He resented Gifford’s arrogance, but still needed to humor him. For now. “Relax. The plaza is ours. Radio City is just for backup.”
Gifford went back to looking at his DNA sequence charts.
“You haven’t answered my question about the proxies.”
“I have to think about it,” Gifford muttered.
“It’s in your interest, Charles.”
“How so?”
“When Phillip Eden signed the deal for the Methuselah Vector, he bought out your start-up company, Aeterna Enterprises, in exchange for thirty percent of the voting stock of Eden Pharmaceuticals. He made you an instant billionaire.”
“Yes. He was very generous.”
“No, he shortchanged you, if the truth be told. The Methuselah Vector is the most important drug in the history of mankind. You could have gotten a much better deal.”
Gifford shrugged. “Even if you’re right, so what? The contract’s b
een signed.”
“Contracts can be rewritten. What would you say to three billion dollars in construction capital for our joint venture with Acadia Springs? Plus five hundred million a year for research—for anything at all; you would have absolute discretion—guaranteed for ten years? This, of course, would be on top of the billion and a half we’ve already spent or committed to the Methuselah Vector itself. It would all be yours, free and clear. That, plus a permanent seat on the board of directors.”
“In exchange for . . .”
“A simple signature on the shareholder’s proxy form.”
Gifford smiled and sighed. “Ah, yes, the proxies.”
“All it does is transfer your voting rights at the next shareholders’ meeting of Eden Pharmaceuticals, Incorporated.”
“At which I shall wield thirty percent of the votes, if I understand correctly. Second only to Phillip Eden and the Eden family bloc.”
“Yes.”
Gifford leaned back in his chair. “And what do you intend to do with my proxy votes?”
“The company needs new leadership, Charles. The Methuselah Vector is a new drug for a new age. It begs for a CEO who isn’t afraid to go where no one’s gone before.”
Gifford smiled. “You?”
Niedermann stiffened. “After the ceremonies today, I intend to issue a call for an emergency meeting of the Eden stockholders. A coup d’état, if you will.”
“With only thirty percent of the votes?”
“There are others with a stake in the company who will join me.”
“I see. Might one perhaps find them gathered this very moment in the lounge of Grainger House?”
Niedermann smiled but said nothing.
Gifford drew his hands over his face and sighed. “Jack, you were the first person to recognize the unique promise of the Methuselah Vector. I acknowledge that. But Phillip Eden’s been very fair to me. I don’t see how I could double-cross him.”
