Transhuman

by Ben Bova

  The phone clicked dead.

  * * *

  IT WAS SNOWING harder by the time they pulled onto the driveway of the Cherry Hill Inn and Suites motel. Luke asked the sleepy-eyed young woman behind the registration desk for two adjoining rooms and peeled off four fifty-dollar bills from the roll he had brought with him.

  Cash transaction, he told himself as he went back to the waiting van. No credit card needed, no way to trace us. The room clerk had asked for an ID, so Luke showed her his driver’s license. She peeked at it and that was that.

  He carried the sleeping Angela in his arms past the surprised-looking room clerk and into the elevator, with Tamara trudging behind him, dragging both roll-along suitcases.

  Once they had settled Angela in one of the double beds and wedged her IV bottle between the headboard and the wall, Luke turned to Tamara.

  “Okay. You sleep in the other bed, I’ll take the room next door.” Before she could reply, he asked, “Do you have any aspirin?”

  “What’s the matter?”

  Rubbing the small of his back with both hands, Luke said, “My back’s killing me. Goddamn arthritis. Carrying Angie.”

  “Osteoarthritis,” Tamara said.

  “Yeah. One of the benefits of old age. I need some aspirin.”

  “Ibuprofen’s better,” she said.

  “You have any?”

  “Downstairs, in the lobby. There’s a little store there. They’ll have it.”

  “I’ll go down and get a bottle.”

  She nodded, then asked, “What about dinner? I’m starved.”

  Stretching his back, Luke said, “After I’ve taken a couple pills I’ll go out and find someplace that serves takeout. What would you like?”

  “Anything. Meat. A salad, too.”

  “Wine?”

  She shook her head. “Soft drink.”

  Angela stirred. Luke sat on the edge of the bed and leaned over her.

  Forcing a smile, he said, “How’re you feeling, Angie?”

  She blinked several times, turned her head, saw Dr. Minteer standing behind her grandfather. “This is a different room.”

  Luke nodded. “We’re taking you to a place where you can be treated. In a week or so you’ll be feeling a lot better.”

  “I feel okay now, Grandpa. Just kinda hungry.”

  “I’ll get something for you to eat.”

  “Hamburger?”

  Luke glanced up at Tamara, who nodded, tight-lipped.

  “Okay, a nice juicy hamburger for my best girl.” But inwardly he wondered if Angela could handle it. Tamara okayed it, he thought. I guess her digestive system is working normally.

  Still, he wondered.

  Arlington, Massachusetts

  IT WAS SNOWING in Massachusetts, too. Snowing hard.

  “Where’s he taken her?” Lenore asked for the hundredth time. “What’s he doing to her?”

  She was sitting tensely on the steps leading down to the house’s basement, her husband sitting beside her. Agent Hightower stood between the thrumming heater and its fuel tank, his head nearly touching the pipes running along the ceiling, his beefy arms folded across his chest as he stolidly watched a flannel-shirted FBI technician connecting an electronics box to the telephone panel on the wall.

  “Where could he have taken Angie?” Lenore repeated.

  Turning toward her, Hightower said, “He’s probably heading for some medical facility where he can start the treatment he wants to give your daughter.”

  “Yeah,” said Del. “But where?”

  “That’s what we aim to find out. We’re contacting his colleagues, former students, people he worked with.”

  Del muttered, “Makes sense.”

  “We’re tracking that Dr. Minteer, too,” Hightower added. “It’s too much of a coincidence, her taking off at the same time.”

  “You think she’s with Angie?” Lenore asked, brightening a little.

  Ignoring the question, Hightower said, “If your father phones you, keep him on the line as long as possible. Our people in the van outside will trace the call.”

  “How long will that take?” Del asked.

  “A minute. Maybe less.”

  The technician straightened up. “Finished.”

  Del got to his feet and helped Lenore to stand. They all went upstairs into the living room.

  “Suppose he calls while we’re up in the bedroom?” Lenore asked.

  Hightower moved his head from side to side, once. “Doesn’t matter. Any phone in the house, we’ll pick it up out in the van.”

  “Good,” said Del.

  The phone rang, making them all flinch with surprise. All except Hightower.

  Del looked up at the agent, who held out a cautioning hand. The technician nodded as the phone rang a second time.

  “Okay,” Hightower said.

  Lenore went to the table at the end of the sofa and lifted the receiver with a trembling hand.

  “Norrie,” she heard. “It’s me, Dad.”

  Staring at Hightower with wide eyes, Lenore said shakily, “Dad! Where are you? How’s Angie?”

  “I just want you to know that Angie’s fine. She’s in good hands.”

  “Where are you, Dad? I want to come, I want to be with Angie.”

  A heartbeat’s hesitation. “Not now, honey. Not for a while. But she’s fine. We’re going to cure her.”

  “Where are you?” Lenore repeated.

  “I’ve got to go,” Luke said. “I’ll call you again, soon.”

  The line clicked dead.

  Hightower was already on his cell phone. He snapped it shut and slipped it back into his jacket pocket, his mouth curved downward.

  “Did you…?”

  “We got the area code as soon as you picked up your phone. He thinks he’s smart, keeping his call short, but all we need is for you to make the connection.”

  “Were is he, then?” Del asked.

  “He’s on the Jersey Turnpike, apparently heading south.”

  “Can you grab him?”

  Hightower went silent for a moment. Then he told them, “We’ve already got the New Jersey Highway Patrol heading for the place he called from. Of course, if he’s on the move they might not get there in time. It would help if we knew what kind of car he was driving.”

  “But you’ll get him.”

  “Sooner or later.”

  “Good.”

  “Will your people in the van stay all night?” Del asked.

  “Twenty-four-hour coverage,” said Hightower.

  “Through the snowstorm and all?”

  Hightower said flatly, “Neither snow nor rain nor dark of night…” And made one of his rare smiles. “We’ll get him, folks. Don’t you worry, we’ll get him.”

  * * *

  LUKE HUSTLED ACROSS the parking lot with a bag of takeout from the nearest fast-food joint. It was snowing harder than ever, and despite his lined windbreaker he felt cold to the bone.

  He hated the snow. Oh, sure, it looks pretty, that first snowfall of the year, he told himself. For ten minutes. After that it’s just a mess that screws up traffic and encourages skiers to go out and break their legs.

  The same young woman was behind the registration counter. He nodded to her as he hurried to the elevator.

  Angela nibbled on her thin hamburger while Tamara gobbled hers. Luke took a few bites and put his paper plate on the night table. He couldn’t eat; his stomach was in knots.

  I shouldn’t have phoned Norrie, he berated himself. That was stupid. Suppose the cops have bugged her phone? I didn’t stay on the line very long, but what if they traced the call? They might be on their way here right now. Calling from a fast-food joint next to the motel; that was smart, wasn’t it?

  But I had to call her. I had to tell her Angie’s okay. I couldn’t leave her totally in the dark.

  He saw that Angela had left half her burger and was drifting back to sleep. She looked terribly thin and pale.

  Suddenly she st
arted coughing. Tamara dropped her burger and reached for the child. As she lifted her to a sitting position, Angela spit up gooey chunks of burger and bread in a slimy green liquid.

  “Water,” Tamara snapped at Luke. He ran into the bathroom and fumbled with the plastic-wrapped paper cups on the sink. He could hear Angie gagging and moaning.

  By the time he came back into the bedroom with the water, Angie was sitting up, her thin pajamas a foul-smelling mess. But the coughing and upchucking had stopped. Tamara sat on the edge of the bed, gently massaging the child’s back.

  She looked up at Luke and reached for the water. Holding the cup to Angela’s lips she said softly, “Take a sip, Angie. It’ll take the sour taste out of your mouth.”

  Angela sipped. “I’m okay now,” she said weakly. “I don’t know what happened. I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” Tamara whispered. To Luke she said, “You go to your room. I’ll clean her up.”

  Feeling useless and grateful at the same time, Luke went to the door that connected the two rooms. “I’ll come back to say good night, Angel.”

  Angela nodded and tried to smile.

  As he fidgeted in his room, unable to concentrate on the movie the TV was showing, Luke heard the squeaky wheels of the chambermaid’s cart, then muffled sounds from Angie’s room. Changing the bedclothes, he figured. Then the cart squeaked past in the other direction.

  At last Luke heard a tap on the door. Pulling it open, he saw that Angie was sleeping peacefully, as if nothing had happened.

  “She’s all right now,” Tamara said as he stepped into the room. The bed was freshly made. Luke wondered what his granddaughter was wearing beneath the covers. We didn’t bring that many clothes for her, he realized.

  Tamara wiped the back of her hand across her forehead. “I shouldn’t have let her have a hamburger. That was stupid of me.”

  Luke asked, “Should we feed her intravenously?”

  Tamara nodded. “For the time being. We can give her broth, gelatin, things that are easy to digest.”

  “Yeah.”

  Tamara saw Luke’s unfinished hamburger, still resting on the night table. “Are you going to eat that?”

  He shook his head.

  “Do you mind? I’m starving.”

  “Go right ahead.”

  Luke almost grinned at her. Slim as she is, she’s a real carnivore, he thought. Must have a high metabolic rate.

  “Did you have enough to eat?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Plenty.” He realized he was very tired. And he felt chilled, achy. “I’m going to bed now.”

  Tamara nodded. “It’s been a long day.”

  “Tomorrow will be easier.”

  “Hope so.”

  He left her chewing on his half-eaten hamburger and closed the door that connected the two rooms. Stripping quickly, he rummaged in his suitcase for the one pair of pajamas he had packed. Prison gray. Could be appropriate, he thought.

  Once he stretched out in bed, he still felt cold, even with two blankets over him.

  This isn’t going to work, he told himself. I’m too old to do this. I’m already falling apart.

  Then he realized, I’ll have to do something about it. In his mind’s eye he saw the mice he’d experimented on in his lab, scampering in their cages youthfully in spite of their advanced age.

  If it works for the mice it ought to work for me. Same genes involved. Get me to start producing telomerase the way I did when I was a teenager. The freaking fountain of youth.

  He fell asleep and dreamed of the day he’d met the young beauty who eventually became his wife.

  Lucas Theodore Abramson

  “YOU HAVE GOT to be the stubbornest SOB I have ever had the misfortune to attempt to educate,” his biochemistry professor once told Luke.

  Twenty-two-year-old Luke stood in front of the older man’s desk and bit back the reply that came to mind.

  “You think you’re so goddamned smart, you don’t give anybody else any credit for having any brains at all,” his professor rumbled on. “Including me.”

  Running a hand through his thick mane of dark hair, Luke protested, “That’s not entirely true, Prof.”

  The professor shook his head disapprovingly. “You’ve got to stop being so damned stubborn, Abramson. You’ll never get ahead unless you learn to get along.”

  Luke never learned to get along. He went his own way, often bucking his professors, department chairmen, committee heads, university executives. He succeeded because he was brilliant and saw farther and faster than those around him.

  Slowly, grudgingly, the scientific orthodoxy surrounding him learned to respect Luke’s abilities. Over the years they came to realize that this loner of a cellular biologist was making important strides in basic biomedical research.

  Decade after decade, Professor Lucas T. Abramson took graduate students into his laboratory and turned them into award-winning researchers. He won few awards himself. He didn’t need them. He wasn’t interested in them. All he wanted was to do the work he chose to do with as little interference from the outside world as possible. Stubborn, they called him. Cantankerous. But brilliant.

  Luke demanded very little from the establishment: just a lab to work in, a few assistants to help, and the freedom to pursue his own line of thinking.

  He steered clear of applied research. Despite his unspoken, bitter war with cancer, he never aimed his work specifically at oncology. Luke went deeper, probing into the fundamental cellular processes of the human body.

  He picked up on earlier research on the effect of telomeres on cell biology. It took years of patient, unspectacular experiments, but eventually he was able to show how to rejuvenate aged, decrepit lab mice and make them youthful again—by triggering their telomeres to regrow.

  And then his granddaughter was stricken by glioblastoma multiforme. Luke was devastated by the news. But he quickly realized that by inhibiting the growth of Angela’s cells’ telomeres—rather than accelerating their growth—he might be able to destroy the tumors that were killing her.

  The bureaucracies that controlled scientific research refused to allow him to leap from experiments with lab mice to an effort to save his granddaughter’s life. So be it, Luke thought.

  He went his own way. With his granddaughter. They call you stubborn when what you’re doing doesn’t work. When it does work they call you goal-oriented.

  University of Pennsylvania

  VAN McALLISTER’S EXPRESSION was somewhere between disbelief and curiosity.

  “You mean you’ve taken the child out of the hospital and brought her here?”

  McAllister had one of those smiling, bright-eyed faces that still would look youthful when he was Luke’s age. But he wasn’t smiling now. He was leaning his slim rump on a bench in his campus laboratory, facing Luke, who was perched on a lab stool. No one else was in the lab; the previous night’s snowfall had snarled Philadelphia traffic so badly that Luke had been half an hour late for his meeting with his former student, yet still none of the lab staff had shown up

  “With her attending physician,” Luke said.

  “Isn’t that … unusual?”

  “It’s all perfectly legal, if that’s what you’re worrying about.”

  “What did her parents say about this?”

  “That’s not important,” Luke temporized. “What I need to do is get the necessary enzymes to activate the genes that will suppress her telomerase production.”

  “For how long?”

  “A few days, maybe a week or two. I want to get her to Bartram’s facility out in Oregon.”

  McAllister gave out a low whistle. “Why didn’t you fly straight there from Boston?”

  Luke waggled a hand in the air. “We’re driving. I need to start Angie on the telomerase inhibitors right away. By the time we get to Oregon I expect her to be showing signs of improvement.”

  “But the side effects…”

  “Her physician is coming along with u
s.”

  McAllister stood up, his youthful face deadly serious. “Prof, telomerase inhibitors? You know what that could do to the kid?”

  Luke nodded, tight-lipped.

  “You’re running the risk of progeria, for God’s sake.”

  “I know. But once we’ve killed the cancer we can reverse the progeria symptoms.”

  “You hope.”

  “I’m going to start taking telomerase inducers,” Luke said.

  “What?”

  “I’m too old to be running across country like this. I need to be younger. Stronger.”

  “You’re not a lab mouse, for God’s sake!”

  Forcing a grin, Luke said, “Anything those mice can do, I can do.”

  “That’s crazy! You can’t—”

  Luke pushed himself to his feet. “Van, I can and I will. We’re talking about my granddaughter’s life. I’ll do whatever I have to do to save her.”

  “Including putting your own life on the line?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your telomerase experiments aren’t ready for a human trial. No way!”

  “I’m volunteering.”

  “And you expect me to help you?”

  “Nobody needs to know you’re involved, Van. This’ll be just between you and me.”

  “We’ll have to sign the kid into the hospital.”

  “No. We’ll take care of her in the motel.”

  “In the motel?”

  “Listen to me, Van,” Luke coaxed. “We’re not talking about surgery or radiation treatment. We don’t need big facilities. Just the proper enzymes and a little time. Angie’s comfortable at the motel, and her physician is keeping watch over her.” With some heat he added, “Hell, they wanted to hand her over to Hospice, for God’s sake. Do you think they’d do anything more for Angie than we will?”

  McAllister shook his head. “I could get fired for this. You know that.”

  “I know it. But will you do it?”

  The younger man turned away and walked down the aisle between lab benches. Luke stood there, watching, waiting. He saw through the lab’s windows that the last clouds from the previous night’s snowstorm were blowing away. The sky outside was turning a brilliant blue.

  “Nobody else will be involved?” McAllister asked, his back still to Luke.