The Immortality Factor (42 page)

“I'll sue Omnitech Corporation and Arthur Marshak, both,” said Ransom. “I'll tie them up in the courts for years.”

“So Arthur goes overseas,” Jesse countered. “Or some other scientists in foreign countries follow his lead.”

“That's why it's so important,” Simmonds said, fists clenched on his lap, “to make certain that this trial finds the process scientifically wrong.”

“The trial's got to discredit the whole idea,” Ransom said. “Paint it so black that nobody overseas will touch it.”

“But that means they'll have to discredit Arthur,” said Jesse.

Kindelberger nodded solemnly. “He's got to be stopped.”

“No,” said Reverend Simmonds. “He's got to be destroyed.”

Ransom nodded eagerly. “And I think I know how to start moving things in that direction.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
he attack came a week after Reverend Simmonds's big rally in Central Park. A Sunday night. I was at the laboratory when it happened. They were fanatics, absolutely crazy. I think they would have killed me, if they had the chance. I know I would have killed as many of them as I could have, if I'd had the chance.

I'd been working all weekend on the idea of using Cassie Ianetta's tumor-killer in combination with the regentide, so we could lick the tumor problem and go ahead with the regeneration experiments. Not that I did any real lab work; it had been years since I'd gotten my hands wet. But I was carefully sifting through the reports Cassie had been sending up from Mexico and using my desktop computer to compare her results with the kinds of tumors that the regentide triggered in lab rats and the minihogs we had just started using.

Cassie's reports were far behind the schedule we had set, but I figured that she was having problems in Mexico that we hadn't anticipated. The results she had sent in looked good. Solid work. Encouraging. But something had slowed
her down. I made a mental note to call her and see if there was anything I could do to help get her back on track.

The idea of using her enzyme to suppress the tumors that the regentide caused looked promising to me, but I had to be careful not to let my enthusiasm carry me away. I had to be certain that it really would work against the tumors, and I wasn't just convincing myself this was so because I wanted things to work out that way.

I remember I was pretty pissed off with Jesse. He had fallen in line with that evangelist minister and told him enough about my work to get the preacher to rail against me at the big rally he held in Central Park the weekend before.

I didn't attend the rally, of course. I had work to do. I hardly even heard about it. I think it was Phyllis, my secretary, who showed me a full-page advertisement for the rally in
Newsday
or one of the other New York papers a few days before the event. Raising money for Jesse's hospital was a good idea, I remember thinking. I wrote a check and sent it to the box number in the ad.

That Sunday afternoon, though, Darrell Walters came sauntering into my office and plotzed himself in the chair in front of my desk.

“We're celebrities,” he said, grinning. Darrell's got big, slightly protruding teeth. When he grins he looks more like a horse than usual.

I saw that he held the first section of the morning's
Times
in his hand. “Celebrities?” I asked.

Darrell showed me the front-page photo of the mammoth crowd in Central Park. The story under it was mostly about the entertainment stars and other celebrities who had appeared at the rally.

“Where does it mention us?” I asked.

Darrell turned to a back page, where there was a little box off to one side headlined,
Simmonds Blasts “Godless Scientists.”
I scanned the story. It didn't mention the lab by name, or me, for that matter, but it was clear who and what Simmonds was complaining about. And I knew, of course, who had told him about us: Jesse. It couldn't have been anyone else.

Darrell was still grinning. “How's it feel to have the wrath of God called down on your head?”

I felt disgusted. “Why would Jesse do something like that? He's pandering to the wackos.”

“Well,” Darrell said, pushing himself up from the chair, “I just thought you'd like to know how famous we're getting.”

“With the wrong people,” I groused.

Darrell was chuckling as he walked out of my office. He left the newspaper on my desk.

I didn't think anything of it, except to feel pretty damned sore that Jesse would stoop to such tactics. Why? To raise money for his hospital? Or was he
really so angry at me that he was trying to hurt me? What did I do to him to deserve that kind of treatment?

I thought that maybe I should call him and thrash this out, face-to-face. But then I figured that if I called him while I was angry it'd just lead to another argument. Cool down first. Let it rest for a few days.

A week passed.

Maybe I don't get into the labs and do any real work, but I was chewing into Cassie's reports and Zack O'Neill's latest analyses of the tumor problem so deeply that I forgot about dinner and just stayed there at my desk that Sunday evening. I got up a couple of times, once to the food dispensers for a granola bar and a cup of coffee (nowhere near as good as Phyllis's) and once to the toilet.

According to the police report, it was ten minutes before midnight when the attackers struck. They must have figured that on a Sunday night nobody would be at the lab except one or two security guards. Actually, we had two of the older men on duty, making their rounds, and one animal handler back in the pens: a grad student who worked the night shift so she could study in peace and quiet and attend her classes during the day.

The first inkling I got that something was wrong was when I heard the chimps start to howl. All the way in my office I could hear them. It made me look up from my computer screen, not scared but certainly startled.

My office door was open and so was the door to the corridor beyond the outer office. But still, what the hell could be going on at the animal pens to set the chimps off like that? It sounded as if the macaques were shrieking, too. I got up and headed for the rear of the building, feeling almost glad for an excuse to stretch my legs a little.

No alarm bells were ringing. The normal lights were on, although most of the offices and labs were empty and dark. But as I went down the corridor, hurrying a little because the chimps and the monkeys were all screaming now, I saw light spilling out from Zack O'Neill's lab. The place looked as if somebody'd set off a bomb in there. Shattered glassware all over the floor; all of Zack's apparatus smashed to pieces. The rat pens were all open and none of the animals were in sight.

Check that. I saw one of the lab rats scampering down the corridor. Like an idiot I chased after it.

Back toward the animal pens I ran, and when I passed the computer center I saw three people in there. In ski masks.

That's when my heart clutched in my chest. We're being raided! And if they trash the computer we'll lose every goddamned bit of data we've got.

They say heroism is a reflex action. I'm no hero, god knows, but I barreled in there yelling at the top of my voice, “What the hell do you think you're doing?”

The three of them almost jumped out of their skins. I could see whites all around their eyes, through their damned ski masks.

I'm not a big man, and I certainly didn't have anything on me that could serve as a weapon. But neither did they, thank god. They hadn't expected anyone to jump in on them.

I grabbed a metal ruler that was on one of the console desks and held it like a one-foot-long sword. “Get out of here!” I yelled. “Now!”

The biggest of the three said from behind his ski mask, “I'll take care of him. You go ahead and dump the machine.”

He was wearing a light windbreaker and dark slacks, together with the mask and gloves. Seemed pretty young to me, judging by his voice and his lightness on his feet. The other two were smaller, maybe women, for all I could tell.

“Better go away, old man,” he said to me, coming straight at me.

Fencing blades are three feet long, my ruler was only twelve inches. But I was boiling with anger. He came at me and I feinted at his extended hand. When he made a grab for the ruler I disengaged and slashed him across his face. He yowled and backed away. I smacked him again, then kicked him in the shin as hard as I could, and when he was off balance I jammed that metal ruler into his side hard enough to split his kidney, if only the ruler had a point.

He forgot his two pals and stumbled for the door. I screamed at the other two, “Get out of here before I kill you!”

They ran.

I picked up the phone. It was still working so I punched 911 and told the surprised woman at the county police headquarters that Grenford Laboratory was being attacked by terrorists.

“Is this some kind of joke?” she asked, half bored, half annoyed.

“This is Dr. Arthur Marshak. I am director of Grenford Laboratory and a band of people in ski masks are wrecking the place. Call the state police at once. We're under attack!”

“Yessir,” she said. “Right away, sir.”

I banged the phone down and wondered what I should do next. Suddenly I felt sort of ridiculous standing there with a ruler in my hand and my pulse throbbing so hard I could hear it in my ears. Should I remain here and guard the computer center? Or go out to the animal compound? The chimps and monkeys were still screeching madly and now I could hear the truculent squealing of the minihogs.

The computer or the animals? I hesitated. The computer held all our data, all the information we had gleaned so painstakingly. But the animals were irreplaceable, too. In their genes and their proteins were the results of years of careful breeding and experiments.

Max. I had promised Cassie I would look after Max. God knows what
those bastards were doing out there in the animal pens. I bolted out of the computer center and ran toward the rear of the building, my ruler still firmly gripped in my hand.

I saw one of our uniformed guards as I raced down the corridor. He was sprawled on the floor like a sack of laundry. I stopped and knelt over him. He was breathing and his eyes were open, but unfocused. Pupils so dilated I could barely see his irises. Drugged, somehow.

The chimps and monkeys sounded as if a bloody war were going on outside. There were more than a dozen macaques in the cages, and four chimpanzees, three females and Max. They were making enough noise to wake Tarzan in Africa.

I saw more lab rats scurrying frantically as I ran down the corridor. And I could hear the stubborn angry squealing of our minihogs over the hoots and shrieks of the monkeys and chimps.

Pushing through the double doors into the animal compound, I saw a half dozen people, all in windbreakers and ski masks—except for one tousled blond youth who had a nasty gash on his cheek, just below his left eye.

“That's the sonofabitch who cut me,” he yelled, pointing at me. I photographed his face with my mind. I wanted to remember what he looked like so the police could identify him.

Four of the youngsters were trying to push one of our minihogs into a van they had backed into the compound through the back gate, and the hog was resisting with all her stubborn strength. Inside the van, I saw our erstwhile caretaker wrestling with another hog. Her eye caught mine and she quickly looked away, but I recognized her easily enough. So that was how they'd gotten in. She was one of them, a plant, a spy in our midst.

The only chimp I could see was Max, who was way up in the topmost crotch of the taller tree in the compound, howling and screaming like mad, his lips pulled back to show his fangs. He looked ferocious, but I realized he was only scared out of his wits. It was he who had been making most of the noise, all by himself, although the macaques were doing their part, too. I found out later that the three female chimps had been easily drugged by their caretaker and put into the van. Just as she had shot the security guard when he made his rounds back there. Max had been too smart to stay there and watch the others fall to her dart gun. He had scampered up the tree and set up the terrible din that had scared the macaques and alerted me.

Max had also reverted to a time-honored tactic: I saw smears of brown on two of the raiders. He had thrown shit at them.

“Get that fucker!” said the blond youth. “He can identify me!”

The four who had been trying to haul the minihog into the van straightened up and came at me. Isn't there anybody else in the lab? I asked myself.
There should have been one more security guard up in the front of the building, but god knows what had happened to him. I was alone against the gang of them.

Except for Max, who was hollering at them from the relative safety of his perch. And the minihog. Two hundred pounds of obdurate, angry muscle. Once the four kids turned their back to her, the hog put her head down and ran straight at their legs. She was like a pink bowling ball hitting eight pins. Down they all went in a tangle.

And I saw the dart gun they had used on the chimps, lying on the ground not more than ten feet from where I stood, by the door. I rushed for it while the hog bolted past me, squealing and running around the perimeter of the compound, as the terrorists scrambled to their feet.

I leveled the gun at them. “If these darts can tranquilize a chimp, think what they'll do to you,” I said.

They stopped in their tracks. Until the caretaker, still in the van, yelled, “The gun's empty. I used up all the fuckin' darts.”

They rushed me. I slugged with the gun butt and slashed with the ruler but they swarmed me under and beat the crap out of me. The last thing I remember was thinking that I was probably going to need a hell of a lot of dental work after this. I heard a siren wailing in the distance. And then I blacked out.