Cities in Flight (9 page)

"I went to dinner with Colonel Russell last night," Anne said. "I was somewhat indiscreet about the project. At the end of the evening we had a quarrel which was probably overheard by at least two of MacHinery's amateur informers in the restaurant. I had to lie for my own protection as well as Colonel Russell's."

"But you have an Eavesdropper! If you knew that you might be overheard—"

"I knew it well enough. But I lost my temper. You know how these things go."

It all came out as emotionless as a tape recording. Told in these terms, the incident sounded to Paige like something that had happened to someone whom he had never met, whose name he could not even pronounce with certainty. Only the fact that Anne's eyes were reddened with furious tears offered any bridge between the cold narrative and the charged memory.

"Yes; nasty," Gunn said reflectively. "Colonel Russell, do you know the Bridge team?"

"I know some of them quite well, Charity Dillon in particular; after all, I was stationed in the Jovian system for a while. MacHinery's check will show that I've no official connection with the Bridge, however."

"Good, good," Guns said, beginning to brighten. "That widens MacHinery's check to include the Bridge too, and dilutes it from Pfitzner's point of view-gives us more time, though I'm sorry for the Bridge men. The Bridge and the Pfitzner project both suspect-yes, that's a big mouthful even for MacHinery; it will take him months. And the Bridge is Senator Wagoner's pet project, so he'll have to go slowly; he can't assassinate Wagoner's reputation as rapidly as he could some other senator's. Hmm. The question now is, just how are we going to use the time?"

"When you calm down, you calm right down to the bottom," Paige said, grinning wryly.

"I'm a salesman," Gunn said. "Maybe more creative than some, but at heart a salesman. In that profession you have to suit the mood to the occasion, just like actors do. Now about those samples—"

"I shouldn't have thrown that in," Anne said. "I'm afraid it was one good touch too many."

"On the contrary, it may be the only out we have. MacHinery is a 'practical' man. Results are what counts with him. So suppose we take Colonel Russell's samples out of the regular testing order and run them through right now, issuing special orders to the staff that they are to find something in them-anything that looks at all decent."

"The staff won't fake," Anne said, frowning.

"My dear Anne, who said anything about faking? Nearly. every batch of samples contains some organism of interest, even if it isn't good enough to wind up among our choicest cultures. You see? MacHinery will be contented by results if we can show them to him, even though the results may have, been made possible by an unauthorized person; otherwise he'd have to assemble a committee of experts to assess the evidence, and that costs money. All this, of course, is predicated on whether or not we have any results by the time MacHinery finds out Colonel Russell is an unauthorized person."

"There's just one other thing," Anne said. "To make good on what I told MacHinery, we're going to have to turn Colonel Russell into a convincing planetary ecologist and tell him just what the Pfitzner project is."

Gunn's face fell momentarily. "Anne," he said, "I want you to observe what a nasty Situation that strong-arm man has gotten us into. In order to protect our legitimate interests from our own government, we're about to commit a real, serious breach of security-which would never have happened if MacHinery hadn't thrown his weight around."

"Quite true," Anne said. She looked, however, rather poker-faced, Paige thought. Possibly she was enjoying Gunn's discomfiture; he was not exactly the first man one would suspect of disloyalty or of being a security risk.

"Colonel Russell, there is no faint chance, I suppose, that you are a planetary ecologist? Most spacemen with ranks as high as yours are scientists of some kind."

"No, sorry," .Paige said. "Ballistics is my field."

"Well, you do have to know something about the planets, at least. Anne, I suggest that you take charge now. I'll have to do some fast covering. Your father would probably be the best man to brief Colonel Russell. And, Colonel, would you bear in mind that from now on, every piece of information that you're given in our plant might have the giver jailed or even shot, if MacHinery were to find out about it?"

"I'll keep my mouth shut," Paige said. "I'm enough at fault in this mess to be willing to do all I can to help-and my curiosity has been killing me anyhow. But there's something you'd better know, too, Mr. Guns."

"And that is—"

"That the time you're counting on just doesn't exist. My leave expires in ten , days. If you think you can make a planetary ecologist out of me in that length of time, I'll do my part."

"Ulp," Gunn said. "Anne, get to work." He bolted through the swinging doors.

The two looked at each other for a starchy moment, and then Anne smiled. Paige felt like another man at once.

"Is it really true-what you said?" Anne said, almost shyly.

"Yes. I didn't know it until I said it, but it's true. I'm really sorry that I had to say it at such a spectacularly bad moment; I only came over to apologize for my part in last night's quarrel. Now it seems that I've a bigger hassle to account for."

"Your curiosity is really your major talent, do you know?" she said, smiling again. "It took you only two days to find out just what you wanted to know-even though it's about the most closely guarded secret in the world."

"But I don't know it yet. Can you tell me here-or is the place wired?"

The girl laughed. "Do you think Hal and I would have cussed each other out like that if the place were wired? No, it's clean, we inspect it daily. I'll tell you the central fact, and then my father can give you the details. The truth is that' the Pfitzner project isn't out to conquer the degenerative diseases alone. It's aimed at the end-product of those diseases, too. We're looking for the answer to death itself."

Paige sat down slowly in the nearest chair. "I don't believe it can be one," he whispered at last.

"That's what we all used to think, Paige. That's what that says." She pointed to the motto in German above the swinging doors. "Wider den Tad in kein Krautlein gewachseñ." 'Against Death doth no simple grow.' That was a law of nature, the old German herbalists thought. But now it's only a challenge. Somewhere in nature there are herbs and simples against death-and we're going to find them."

Anne's father seemed both preoccupied and a little worried to be talking to Paige at all, but it nevertheless took him only one day to explain the basic reasoning behind the project vividly enough so that Paige could understand it. In another day of simple helping around the part of the Pfitzner labs which was running his soil samples-help which consisted mostly of bottle-washing and making dilutions-Paige learned the reasoning well enough to put forward a version of it himself. He practiced it on Anne over dinner.

"It all rests on our way of thinking about why antibiotics work," he said, while the girl listened with an attentiveness just this side of mockery. "What good are they to the organisms that produce them? We assumed that the organism secretes the antibiotic to kill or inhibit competing organisms, even though we were never able to show, that enough antibiotic for the purpose is actually produced in the organism's natural medium, that is, the soil. In other words, we figured, the wider the range of the antibiotic, the less competition the producer had."

"Watch out for teleology," Anne warned. "That's not why the organism secretes it. It's just the result. Function, not purpose."

"Fair enough. But right there is the borderline in our thinking about antibiosis. What is an antibiotic to the organism it kills? Obviously, it's poison, a toxin. But some bacteria always are naturally resistant to a given antibiotic, and through-what did your father call it?-through clone-variation and selection, the resistant cells may take over a whole colony. Equally obviously, those resistant cells would seem to produce an antitoxin. An example would be the bacteria that secrete penicillinase, which is an enzyme that destroys penicillin. To those bacteria, penicillin is a toxin, and penicillinase is an antitoxin-isn't that right?"

"Right as rain. Go on, Paige."

"So now we 'add to that still another fact: that both penicillin and tetracycline are not only antibiotics-which makes them toxic to many bacteria-but antitoxins as well. Both of them neutralize the placental toxin that causes the eclampsia of pregnancy. Now, tetracycline is a broad-range antibiotic; is there such a thing as a broad-range antitoxin, too? Is the resistance to tetracycline that many different kinds of bacteria can develop all derived from a single counteracting substance? The answer, we know now, is Yes. We've also found another kind of broad-range antitoxin-one which protects the organism against many different kinds of antibiotics. I'm told that it's a whole new field of research and that we've just begun to scratch the surface.

"Ergo: Find the broad-range antitoxin that acts against the toxins of the human body which accumulate after growth stops-as penicillin and tetracycline act against the pregnancy toxin-and you've got your magic machine-gun against degenerative disease. Pfitzner already has found that antitoxin: its name is ascomycin. . . . How'd I do?" be added anxiously, getting his breath back.

"Beautifully. It's perhaps a little too condensed for MacHinery to follow, but maybe that's all to the good-it wouldn't sound authoritative to him if he could understand it all the way through. Still it might pay to be just a little more roundabout when you talk to him." The girl had the compact out again and was peering into it intently. "But you covered only the degenerative diseases, and that's just background material. Now tell me about the direct attack on death."

Paige looked at the compact and then at the girl, but her expression was too studied to convey much He said slowly: "I'll go into that if you like. But your father told me that the element of the work was secret even from the government. Should I discuss it in a restaurant?"

Anne turned the small, compact-like object around, so that he could see that it was in fact a meter of some sort. Its needle was in uncertain motion, but near the zero-point. "There's no mike chose enough to pick you up," Anne said, snapping the device shut and restoring it to her purse. "Go ahead."

"All right. Some day you're going to have to explain to rue why you allowed yourself to get into that first fight with me here, when you had that Eavesdropper with you all the time. Right at the moment I'm too busy being a phony ecologist.

"The death end of the research began back in 1952, with an anatomist named Lansing. He was the first man to show that complex animals-it was rotifers he used-produce a definite aging toxin as a normal part of their growth, and that it gets passed on to the offspring. He bred something like fifty generations of rotifers from adolescent mothers, and got an increase in the life-span in every new generation. He ran 'em up from a natural average span of 24 days to one of 104 days. Then be reversed the process, by breeding consistently from old mothers, and cut the life-span of the final generation way below the natural average."

"And now," Anne said, "you know more about the babies in our labs than I told you before-or you should. The foundling home that supplies them specializes in the illegitimates of juvenile delinquents-the younger, for our purposes, the better."

"Sorry, but you can't needle me with that any longer, Anne. I know now that it's a blind alley. Breeding for longevity in humans isn't practicable all that those infants can supply to the project is a set of comparative readings on their death-toxin blood-levels. What we want now is something much more direct: an antitoxin against the aging toxin of humans. We know that the aging toxin exists in all complex animals. We know that it's a single, specific substance, quite distinct from the poisons that cause the degenerative diseases. And we know that it can be neutralized. When your 'lab animals were given ascomycin, they didn't develop a single degenerative disease but they died anyhow, at about the usual time, as if they'd been set, like a clock at birth. Which, in effect, they had, by the amount of aging toxin passed on to them by their mothers.

"So what we're looking for now is not an antibiotic-an anti-life drug-but an anti-agathic, an anti-death drug. We're running on borrowed time, because ascomycin already satisfies the condition of our development contract with the government. As soon as we get ascomycin into production, our government money will be cut down to a trickle. But if we can hold back on ascomycin long enough to keep the money coming in, we'll have our anti-agathic too."

"Bravo," Anne said. "You sound just like father. I wanted you to raise that last point in particular, Paige, because it's the most important single thing you, should remember. If there's the slightest suspicion that we're systematically dragging our feet on releasing ascomycin-that we're taking money from the government to do something the government has no idea can be done-there'll be hell to pay. We're so close to running down our anti-agathic now that it would be heartbreaking to have to stop, not only heartbreaking for us, but for humanity at large."

"The end justifies the means," Paige murmured.

"It does in this case. I know secrecy's a fetish in our society these days-but here secrecy will serve everyone in the long run, and it's got to be maintained."

"I'll maintain it," Paige said. He had been referring, not to secrecy, but to cheating on government money; but he saw no point in bringing that up. As for secrecy, he had no practical faith in it-especially now that he had seen how well it worked.