The Immortals

by James Gunn

  Pearce looked at Weaver and then at Jansen. “I wonder. Do you have any friends—or only hirelings?” He turned his gaze back to Weaver. “You don’t look well. I’d like you to come back to the hospital for a checkup—”

  “I’m feeling fine, I said.” Weaver’s voice lifted a little before it dropped back to a conversational tone. “We wanted to have a little talk—about cooperation.”

  Pearce looked at Jansen. “Funny—I don’t feel very talkative. I’ve had a hard day.”

  Weaver’s eyes didn’t leave Pearce’s face. “Get out, Carl,” he said calmly.

  “But, Mister Weaver—” Jansen began, his gray eyes tightening.

  “Get out, Carl,” Weaver repeated. “Wait for me in the car.”

  After Jansen was gone, Pearce sank down in the armchair facing Weaver. He let his gaze drift around the room, lingering on the polished darkness of the music center and the slightly lighter wood of the desk in the corner. “Did you find anything?” he asked.

  “Not what we were looking for,” Weaver replied.

  “What was that?”

  “Cartwright’s location.”

  “What makes you think I’d know anything about that?”

  Weaver clasped his hands lightly in his lap. “Can’t we work together?”

  “Certainly. What would you like to know—about your health?”

  “What did you do with those samples of blood you took from me? You must have taken back that pint I got.”

  “Almost. Part of it we separated. Got the plasma. Separated the gamma globulin from it with zinc. Used it on various animals.”

  “And what did you find out?”

  “The immunity is in the gamma globulin. It would be, of course. That’s the immunity factor. You should see my old rat. As frisky as the youngest rat in the lab.”

  “So it’s part of me, too?” Weaver asked.

  Pearce shook his head slowly. “That’s just the original globulins diluted in your blood.”

  “Then to live forever I would have to have periodic transfusions?”

  “If it’s possible to live forever,” Pearce said, shrugging.

  “It is. You know that. There’s at least one person who’s going to live forever—Cartwright. Unless something happens to him. That would be a tragedy, wouldn’t it? In spite of all precautions, accidents happen. People get murdered. Can you imagine some careless kid spilling that golden blood into a filthy gutter? Some jealous woman putting a knife in that priceless body?”

  “What do you want, Weaver?” Pearce asked evenly. “You’ve got your reprieve from death. What more can you ask?”

  “Another. And another. Without end. Why should some nobody get it by accident? What good will it do him? Or the world? He needs to be protected—and used. Properly handled, he could be worth—well, whatever men will pay for life. I’d pay a million a year—more if I had to. Other men would pay the same. We’d save the best men in the world, those who have demonstrated their ability by becoming wealthy. Oh, yes. Scientists, too—we’d select some of those. People who haven’t gone into business—leaders, statesmen . . .”

  “What about Cartwright?”

  “What about him?” Weaver blinked as if recalled from a lovely dream. “Do you think anyone who ever lived would have a better life, would be better protected, more pampered? Why, he wouldn’t have to ask for a thing! No one would dare say no to him for fear he might kill himself. He’d be the hen that lays the golden eggs.”

  “He’d have everything but freedom.”

  “A much overrated commodity.”

  “The one immortal man in the world.”

  “That’s just it,” Weaver said, leaning forward. “Instead of only one, there would be many.”

  Pearce shook his head from side to side as if he had not heard. “A chance meeting of genes—a slight alteration by cosmic ray or something even more subtle and accidental—and immortality is created. Some immunity to death—some means of keeping the circulatory system young, resistant, rejuvenated. ‘Man is as old as his arteries,’ Cazali said. Take care of your arteries, and they will keep your cells immortal.”

  “Tell me, man! Tell me where Cartwright is before all that is lost forever.” Weaver leaned farther forward, as if he could transmit his urgency.

  “A man who knows he’s got a thousand years to live is going to be pretty darned careful,” Pearce said.

  “That’s just it,” Weaver said, his eyes narrowing. “He doesn’t know. If he’d known, he’d never have sold his blood.” His face changed subtly. “Or does he know—now?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Didn’t you tell him?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t you? Don’t you remember going to the Abbot Hotel on the evening of the ninth, of asking for Cartwright, of talking to him? You should. The clerk identified your picture. And that night Cartwright left.”

  Pearce remembered the Abbot Hotel all right, the narrow, dark lobby, grimy, infested with flies and roaches. He had thought of cholera and bubonic plague as he crossed it. He remembered Cartwright, too—that fabulous creature, looking seedy and quite ordinary, who had listened, though, and believed and taken the money and gone . . .

  “I don’t believe it,” Pearce said.

  “I should have known right away,” Weaver said, as if to himself. “You’re smart. You would have picked up on it right off, maybe as soon as I woke up, and you would have realized what it meant.”

  “Presuming I did. If I did all that you say, do you think it would have been easy for me? To you he’s money. What do you think he would have been to me? That fantastic laboratory, walking around! What wouldn’t I have given to study him! To find out how his body worked, to try to synthesize the substance. You have your drives, Weaver, but I have mine.”

  “Why not combine them, Pearce?”

  “They wouldn’t mix.”

  “Don’t get so holy, Pearce. Life isn’t holy.”

  “Life is what we make it,” Pearce said softly. “I won’t have a hand in what you’re planning.”

  Weaver got up quickly from his chair and took a step toward Pearce. “Some of you professional men get delusions of ethics,” he said in a kind of muted snarl. “Not many. A few. There’s nothing sacred about what you do. You’re just craftsmen, mechanics—you do a job—you get paid for it. There’s no reason to get religious about it.”

  “Don’t be absurd, Weaver. If you don’t feel religious about what you do, you shouldn’t be doing it. You feel religious about making money. That’s what’s sacred to you. Well, life is sacred to me. That’s what I deal in, all day long, every day. Death is an old enemy. I’ll fight him until the end.”

  Pearce propelled himself out of his chair. He stood close to Weaver, staring fiercely into the man’s eyes. “Understand this, Weaver. What you’re planning is impossible. What if we all could be rejuvenated? Do you have the slightest idea what would happen? Have you considered what it might do to civilization?

  “No, I can see you haven’t. Well, it would bring your society tumbling down around your pillars of gold. Civilization would shake itself to pieces like an unbalanced flywheel. Our culture is constructed on the assumption that we spend two decades growing and learning, a few more producing wealth and progeny, and a final decade or two decaying before we die.

  “Look back! See what research and medicine have done in the past century. They’ve added a few years—just a few—to the average lifespan, and our society is groaning at the readjustment. Think what forty years more would do! Think what would happen if we never died!

  “There’s only one way something like this can be absorbed into the race—gradually, so that society can adjust, unknowing, to this new thing inside it. All Cartwright’s children will inherit the mutation. They must. It must be dominant. And they will survive, because this has the greatest survival factor ever created.”

  “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.”

  PART II

  DONOR

  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.

  Possibly only one man in the Institute knew its function. The thousands of other employees, many of whom were not listed on the payroll, performed their duties blindly, accepted their generous salaries, and asked no questions. If they wished to keep their jobs, that is.

  The Institute survived on hope and thrived on death.

  * * *

  The main computer room was confusion that seemed to escape growing into chaos only by accident. Ma
il was opened, entered, stapled, and passed along assembly lines. Old newspapers were scanned by machines, key words identified by computers, and then checked, line by line, by human readers. Computer disks of all kinds were inserted into waiting receptacles and their information, like DNA, transformed into identical copies with new meaning. Copy boys raced along the aisles on roller skates. Clerks blue-penciled and clipped and commented to the computers. Operators punched electrons out of blank atoms. . . .

  Edwin Sibert threaded his way between the desks with a taut feeling of excitement, as if he were on his way to a rendezvous with the world’s most desirable woman. The copy room was old to him; he had spent six months there without learning anything. He didn’t glance at it as he climbed the steps behind the office set over the copy room like a guardroom over a prison yard.

  The outer office was lined with locked filing cabinets; their contents were meaningless. A colorless, elderly filing clerk puttered among the papers in one of them.

  “Hello, Sanders,” Sibert said carelessly.

  The desk by the door leading into the inner office was equipped with a switchboard, a scrambler, an automatic recorder, and a lovely dark-haired secretary. Her eyes had widened as Sibert entered.

  “Hello, Liz,” he said, his voice as effective as his appearance. “Locke in?” He moved past her to the door without waiting for an answer.

  “You can’t, Ed—” she began, springing to her feet, “Mister Locke will—”

  “—be very angry if he doesn’t get my news immediately,” Sibert finished. “I’ve found the key, Liz. Get it—Locke, key? A poor thing but mine own.” He drew skillful fingers along the smooth curve of her throat and jaw.

  She caught his hand, held it to her cheek for a moment. “Oh, Ed!” she said brokenly. “I’m—”

  “Be good, Liz,” he said cheerfully, his blue eyes smiling gently in his expressive face. “Maybe—a little later—who knows?”

  But there would be no “later”—they both knew that. He had wasted a month on her before he was sure she knew nothing. He pulled his hand free and opened the door and stepped into the inner office.