The Immortality Factor (20 page)

“I wish I knew,” Arthur said. “He's my brother, but he's become a stranger to me. And an enemy.”

 

P
at was staying at a motel near the airport. Arthur drove her there in the limo after dinner, said a polite good night, and returned to his suite in the Four Seasons. All the way there he wondered what would have happened if he had tried to make a move on Pat. Would she have rebuffed him? Or gone along because he was her employer? Or was she disappointed that he had done nothing but say good night?

Restless, unable to sleep, he put his clothes back on and walked for almost an hour along Wisconsin Avenue, unnoticed by the people who crowded the cafés and movie theater.

They were young, mostly. The singles crowd, roving the bars and fast-food joints, laughing and searching for romance, for excitement, for sex, maybe even for love. How many of you will die of heart disease? Arthur asked them silently. Plenty of the youngsters were smoking, he noticed with some disgust. How many will need new lungs? Or come down with cancer? How many of you realize that we'll be able to help you, if only they'll allow us to?

None of them, Arthur thought. None of them know. None of them give a damn.

But I care, he knew. I care. They're not going to stop me. I'm going to give you all the gift of life, maybe the gift of immortality.

Then he saw a pair of teenage boys in grimy T-shirts and jeans, spiked hair, dangling earrings. Puffing cigarettes. Christ, he said to himself, do you really want everybody to live forever?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
here was a miniature television set in the bathroom of Arthur's hotel suite, and he watched
CNN Headline News
as he shaved. It startled him when the screen showed the riot that had erupted in front of the Capitol. As Pat had guessed, it was little more than a scuffle. But he had never seen his name on placards before yesterday, never realized the emotions that his work was stirring.

“My god,” he said to himself, “what do they want of me?”

On the front page of the
Washington Post
there was a picture of demonstrators punching each other. The story about the trial itself was on page three.

Arthur was knotting his tie when the concierge called to tell him that his three visitors were on their way up to him. His doorbell chimed a moment later, and he went in his shirtsleeves to admit three lawyers: an old man, a young man, and a middle-aged woman, all in funereal dark business suits. They reviewed his testimony from the previous day over breakfast in his sitting room.

They accomplished nothing, Arthur thought. The young lawyer felt that Arthur had conducted himself brilliantly, especially when he tried to insist that the court stick to nothing but the scientific evidence. The woman worried
that Rosen was maneuvering to establish Jesse as the rightful originator of the regeneration idea and thereby strip Omnitech of any patents or other proprietary rights. The third, older and grimmer, said very little but looked as if the world were going to come to an end within minutes.

Finally, just when Arthur thought they were finished, the older man cleared his throat and said in a rasping voice, “About this business of wrongful death . . .”

Arthur fixed him with a hard stare. “That's got nothing to do with this trial, no matter what Rosen says.”

“It's not
this
trial that worries me,” said the lawyer. His two colleagues, sitting on either side of him, nodded their heads in unison.

“What do you mean?” asked Arthur.

“It seems clear to me that Rosen is trying to establish a connection between your research project and the unfortunate woman's suicide.”

“That's nonsense.”

“Perhaps so. Perhaps not. But the testimony in this trial can and undoubtedly will be used in whatever civil or criminal suits are instituted back in Connecticut in regard to her suicide. You are going to have to defend yourself against charges of responsibility for her death.”

“She killed herself,” Arthur snapped. “She was emotionally unbalanced. Is that my fault?”

“You have a high visibility in this matter,” said the old lawyer, his voice like a creaking hinge. “That makes you highly vulnerable. And Omnitech, of course, has the deep pockets that personal injury attorneys look for.”

“Personal injury?”

“She had a family,” said the younger man. “If they can prove wrongful death and fix the blame on you—”

“Nonsense!”

The old lawyer grimaced. “That is for a court of law to decide. A jury of your peers.”

Christ, Arthur told himself, I thought I had picked a jury of my peers here in Washington. If I have to stand trial over Cassie's suicide—

“You must not respond to any questions about the suicide,” the lawyer said in a tone that sounded already like impending doom. “You must not give them any material they can use against you and the corporation later on.”

“I understand,” Arthur said, realizing that the corporate lawyer was worried about the corporation, not his own life or reputation. “Thanks for the warning.”

Arthur ushered them out of his suite, glad to be rid of them, then went to the bedroom to put on his jacket. A civil or criminal trial in Connecticut. Great. Wonderful. Just what I need. Maybe they will burn me at the stake, after all.

CNN Headline News
was still on in the bathroom; they were showing yesterday's riot again.

The damned limo was nowhere in sight. Feeling angry and depressed, Arthur took a taxi to the Rayburn Building. The limo's probably taking the lawyers back to their office, he told himself. I'll have to get Pat to call the service and straighten them out.

The taxi driver was an elderly black man who seemed just as somber as Arthur felt.

“You goin' to that trial 'bout the doctors?” he asked as they inched through the morning traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue.

“I'm one of the doctors,” Arthur replied.

The driver glanced up at his rearview mirror. “Yeah, yeah—they had a picture of you in the paper Sunday.”

Arthur saw the dark, red-rimmed eyes study him as they waited for a stoplight to change.

“You really can grow a man a new heart?”

“That's what we're trying to do,” Arthur said.

“You ain't really done it yet?”

“Not in humans.”

“Well, hurry it up, Doc. Some of us cain't wait all that long, you know.”

Arthur smiled at him. “We're doing our best.”

When the cab pulled up at the entrance to the Rayburn Building, Arthur gave the man a ten-dollar tip.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

D
r. Jesse Marshak, please.”

Jesse looked fine, completely relaxed. He was wearing a light brown Western-cut suit with a bolo string tie. He took the oath with utter seriousness, but that boyish careless smile of his broke out as he sat in the witness chair. He carried no papers, no computer, no notes at all. He just sat down and smiled at Rosen and the judges. Arthur thought for an instant that Jess might throw one arm across the back of the chair and put his feet up on the desk.

“Dr. Marshak,” said Rosen, from his seat at the end of the judges' row of desks.

“Dr. Rosen,” said Jesse.

“You are the brother of Dr. Arthur Marshak?”

“That's right.”

“And what is your professional affiliation, sir?”

“I am chief of internal medicine at Mendelssohn Hospital in New York City, and director of research at the La Guardia Medical Center in Manhattan.”

Rosen glanced down at the list of questions he had prepared. “Are you now, or have you ever been, an employee of Omnitech Corporation?”

“No. Never.”

“Have you ever been a consultant to Omnitech?”

“Not in a formal sense.”

“What do you mean by that?” Rosen asked.

Jesse glanced at Arthur, then, “I batted some ideas around with my brother, but I never had a formal, legal agreement of any kind with Omnitech.”

“Did you work in any way with your brother on this program to regenerate human organs?”

“I did not.” Firmly.

“And why not? If the idea was originally yours, why didn't you work on the program to bring it to fruition?”

Jesse smiled again. “I was busy.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

E
ritrea. I could smell the poverty the instant the plane's hatch opened.

The acrid tang of dung. Human sweat. Dust. Above all, overpowering heat. The blast of sun-scorched hot air coming in through the hatch was like standing in front of an enormous oven. And I had to step into it.

Julia was right behind me as I clambered down the cargo plane's flimsy ladder and to the dusty airstrip runway. The rusted hulk of a burned-out truck stood baking in the sun with a mangy starving cow tied to its battered front bumper. Talk about the contradictions of the Third World! I could count the cow's ribs. I wondered what the hell a cow was doing in the middle of the airstrip. Beetles crawled in the dust. Flies droned in the air. Off in the distance the brown hills shimmered in the heat haze. I wanted to turn around and climb back into the plane and fly home to New York.

Julia's voice sounded bright and certain. “Well, here we are! It feels good to be out of that awful plane, doesn't it?”

Even Cairo, filthy and crowded and plagued with every disease known to medical science, was starting to look good to me.

A team of dark-skinned men in shabby clothes helped the plane's crew to unload the medical supplies that had been our main cargo. Even the pilot helped to unload, while Julia and I stood in the hammering sun, feeling lost and uncertain, looking totally out of place in our clean new khaki shirts and slacks and white baseball caps.

Within minutes all the crates and cartons were piled up on the dusty runway. My soft-sided glitzy black Samsonite luggage sat there in the bug-crawling dust, with Julia's handsome blue matched set beside them.

The pilot mopped his face with a dirty handkerchief as he came toward us. His shirt was dark with sweat, sticking to him.

“UN blokes should be here soon enough,” he said.

“You're not leaving us here alone!” I said.

The pilot stretched his arm and pointed. “That'd be your reception committee, I expect.”

A cloud of brown dust was scurrying along the road toward the airstrip. I squinted and made out a truck. But it seemed to be a grayish brown color, not the glaring white of the UN.

“Well, good luck,” said the pilot. He stuck his hand out.

I didn't take it. “What if that's not the UN?”

“Who else could it be?”

Julia smiled and said, “I'm sure the captain has a schedule to maintain. We shouldn't keep him, dear.”

The pilot laughed. “Well, yes, sort of. Got to taxi over to the fuel dump and fill up the tanks and all that.”

“Carry on,” said Julia. “We'll be fine.”

I wanted to say otherwise but I didn't want to look like an asshole in front of them. So I strained my eyes watching the approaching truck, then looked at the gaggle of laborers who had unloaded the plane, then at Julia. She seemed completely in charge of herself, totally unperturbed. What if that's
not
the UN? I asked myself. What if it's bandits or one of those warlords come down here to steal the medical supplies?

But I just stood there like a dumb jackass while the pilot climbed back into his rattletrap cargo plane and started the far-side engine with an explosive roar that made me hop almost out of my skin. Julia sat on one of the wooden crates. I stared at that approaching truck with my stomach churning inside me, and the plane trundled off noisily toward the fuel dump at the far end of the flyblown, almost deserted, sun-blasted airstrip.

“It is the UN, darling,” Julia said. I saw that she held a small pair of field glasses to her eyes. Where did she get those? I had never seen them before.

But I sure felt relieved at her announcement. And even more relieved when she passed the binoculars to me and I could see the blue United Nations
symbol on the side of the white truck. It was all covered over with a film of gray-brown dust, of course.

The truck bore four Pakistani soldiers and a Canadian captain in desert camouflage uniforms and blue UN helmets, plus the doctor who was leaving Eritrea. He was an Indonesian, small, dark, and very happy to be on his way home.

“It is hopeless here,” he told me somberly, while the plane taxied back from the fuel dump. “Absolutely hopeless.”

Great news.

“Surely it can't be all that bad,” Julia said with a smile.

The Indonesian merely shook his head. As soon as the crew popped open the hatch in the plane's side he scampered for it, without another word. While the local laborers sweated to load the truck, the plane took off, engines howling, blowing gritty dust in our faces. Then it dwindled into the burning sky and disappeared. All of a sudden I felt very alone in a strange and barren landscape of brown hills and unbearable heat.

Julia snapped me out of it. “Well, then,” she said cheerfully, “shall we put our bags on the truck?”

The Pakistani soldiers did nothing to help us. They stood around—uneasily, I thought—and squinted toward the distant bare hills, heavy automatic rifles slung over their shoulders. Their fingers were never far from the triggers.

The Canadian captain introduced himself as Ralph Eberly, from Vancouver. He supervised the loading, even helped Julia with her luggage.

“It's not far to the field hospital,” he told us. “Then we can get out of this awful heat.”