The Immortality Factor (44 page)

“Very well, Arthur. I think I understand.”

“Thanks for calling.”

I didn't know what else to say.

Then Arthur said, very softly, “I love you, Julia.”

And he hung up.

I felt miserable for weeks afterward.

And for weeks afterward, for months, actually, the Reverend Roy Averill Simmonds kept up his attacks on “the godless humanist scientists” who were “tampering with God's plan for mankind.” He never mentioned Arthur by name, not publicly, but the news media began to pick up the trail and send reporters to almost any laboratory in the country that was working on stem cells or anything hinting of extending the human life span. They covered Grenford Laboratory extensively, and Arthur's work on organ regeneration became the center of intense media scrutiny.

Naturally, they got most of the scientific details wrong, or ignored them altogether. But the basic idea of growing a new organ within one's body, or regenerating a lost limb—that fundamental possibility became the focus of solemn round-table discussions on television and long, self-important, usually incorrect editorials in newspapers and magazines.

During all that time I was taking the best physical care of myself that I had ever taken. Ever since the miscarriage, I had decided that I would work myself up to tip-top physical condition before becoming pregnant again. I worked out at a “wellness center” near my midtown office. I had monthly checkups, not by my gynecologist (whom Jesse knew) but by an Indonesian internist who specialized in infectious diseases. I stayed on the pill.

My plan was to get pregnant once again only when I was absolutely certain
that any possible infection that might have caused my miscarriage was completely gone from my system. I decided that I would wait a year; if twelve blood tests in a row showed that there were no exotic microbes lingering in my blood, then I could safely bear Jesse's baby.

My biological clock was ticking loudly; I knew that time was running fast, but I was determined not to go through another miscarriage. I wanted a baby, a healthy dear baby that Jesse and I could love and bring up together.

In the meantime I worked out, ate sensibly, drank little, and lost nearly ten pounds. Jesse never noticed, except now and then to comment on how terrific I looked. I smiled to myself and we made love whenever he wasn't too exhausted from the grueling hours he put in at the hospital and medical center.

I bided my time. And Jesse never knew what I was doing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
he terrorists' attack on the lab wasn't as bad as the media's. Simmonds kept drumming away at us. He never mentioned me or the laboratory by name; we could have sued him for slander or gotten an injunction, the corporate lawyers told me. He was too clever to fall into that trap. But I watched one of his televised rallies one night, broadcast from Denver.

The baseball park was filled to capacity, and he was working himself up into a sweat beneath the bright lights. He had peeled off his Western-style suede jacket and pulled his string tie loose from his collar. One hand gripping a cordless microphone, he pranced and jittered across the stage, perspiration pouring down his reddened face, the picture of honest distress and righteous wrath. He looked like an overworked little gnome, with those bushy brows and his slightly hunched posture.

“This life is only a preparation for the paradise that God has created for us! And yet unholy scientists, godless atheists and Antichrists, they want to stretch out their lives, they want to make themselves immortal, they want to challenge God's plan!”

I thought he was very clever telling them that we want to make ourselves immortal and ignoring the fact that we would make his audience immortal too, if we could.

“So they can keep themselves alive for ten or twenty or fifty-so years more with their devil's science,” he went on. “How do you think God's going to feel about that? He's prepared paradise for us and they're telling him, ‘No, thanks, Lord, we'd rather stay here in this vale of tears because we don't really trust You to give us paradise.'

“And that's what they're really saying, isn't it? They don't trust God and His goodness. They don't believe what the Lord Jesus Christ has told us out of His own mouth. They don't want paradise or any part of God's plan.”

He hesitated, let his head droop and the hand holding the microphone drop to his side as if he were utterly exhausted. I couldn't hear a sound from the huge crowd surrounding him. Not a cough or a shuffle of feet.

Slowly, slowly, Simmonds brought the mike back to his lips. “Do you know what God thinks of people like that?” he asked softly. “Do you know what God's gonna do to those who don't trust Him?”

He turned slowly in a full circle, his question hanging in the air.

“He'll send them all to hell!” Simmonds roared. “And they'll deserve it! Those who have no faith in the Lord Jesus Christ will be condemned to spend eternity in hellfire! Don't let these fiendish scientists, these tools of Satan, lead you on the road to everlasting damnation! Accept God's plan, not the evil enticements of secular scientists. Save your souls, don't worry about your bodies. God will take care of you in this life and the next.”

For a man who didn't worry about his body, I thought, Simmonds wears expensive shirts.

But he made me think about my own religious feelings. I really had none. I couldn't accept the idea of some supernatural being creating the universe for his entertainment. That's what most religions seemed to be saying: God created the universe and put us in it just to see if we would do what he tells us. Nonsense. It seemed to me that the only reason people turn to religion is because they're frightened of death. There are no atheists in foxholes, and many a dying man has suddenly seen the light. That's what Simmonds was playing on: stark fear. Fear of death.

For months he kept yapping about scientists interfering with God's plan, and he or somebody in his organization must certainly have tipped off the reporters about who he meant because it wasn't long before they started to descend on us like a plague of electronic locusts.

I'm a ham, I admit it. I don't mind in the least sitting in front of a TV camera and telling everybody what I think. But I didn't want to make the lab a target for more animal rights activists or religious kooks. We were doing very sensitive work and I didn't want the staff upset, either.

Johnston and the corporate board backed me all the way. A
little
publicity was fine, as far as they were concerned: just enough to keep up investors' interest in our work and keep the stock moving upward. That would even help blunt the European takeover bid. But tabloid stuff about Dr. Frankenstein creating monsters in his lab—whether in print or on TV—we all wanted to avoid that.

So I called a meeting of the whole staff, everybody, down to the cooks and security guards. Packed everybody into the cafeteria, standing room only. Rented a squad of security people to watch the building while I explained to my people what was going on and why. Held the meeting at the end of the nominal working day on a Friday, at five p.m.

The cafeteria was packed shoulder to shoulder, two hundred and fourteen people. I had our personnel chief take a count. I insisted that
everybody
be there.

I stood up on the only table left in the room; we had moved the others out into the halls. All their eyes were on me, from Darrell and Zack and Vince Andriotti down to the secretaries and stock clerks and our purchasing agent, who insisted on keeping a cigar between his teeth even though we didn't allow smoking anywhere inside the building.

“You're probably wondering why I called you here this afternoon,” I started out. It was a lame joke and it got more groans than laughs.

“I'm sure that all of you know about the research we're doing on organ regrowth,” I said. “This is important work. Vital work. It's going to change history.”

They shifted on their feet a little. Somebody coughed.

“We've tried to keep this work as quiet as possible as far as the media is concerned, but the terrorists' attack on the lab a few weeks ago has let the cat out of the bag. We're prime news now.”

“Were they really terrorists?” a woman's voice asked from the back of the crowded room.

“I call them terrorists,” I answered. “The FBI calls them terrorists. Working for animal rights is one thing. Destroying lab equipment, throwing genetically engineered rats out into the cold world, kidnapping experimental animals—that's terrorism and it's criminal.”

“The rats can't survive on their own,” Tina Andriotti called out. “Whoever broke them out of Zack's lab has killed them, one way or another.”

“What happened to the chimps?” someone asked.

“Hold on. I don't want this meeting to become a debate about animal rights. We all treat our animals as humanely as we can, but we all know that without animal experiments we can't make any progress. Right?”

A few scattered voices answered, “Right.” It was halfhearted, I thought, but enough. I went on.

“You probably know that an evangelist preacher has been bad-mouthing
us all across the country. Other ministers and media commentators have taken up the same theme. Even a few politicians have spoken out against us.”

“Only young ones,” Zack O'Neill wisecracked. Everybody laughed at that.

“Some of you may have noticed,” I went on, “that we're getting a lot of calls from news reporters. They've even been showing up at our doorstep unannounced. Perhaps you've received calls at home, or had reporters try to interview you.”

I heard a few murmurs and saw heads nod.

“All right. From now on, I want you to refer any media contacts to me. If a reporter calls you or tries to talk to you, just tell them to call me about it. Then tell Phyllis. Get their names and their affiliations, if you can. We need to know who they are and where they're coming from.”

More nods.

“Fine. One more thing,” I added. “We've got to tighten up the lab's security. You probably know that the terrorists were let into the back compound by one of our own employees. That staggered me, I've got to admit.”

I glanced at my personnel chief. I had warned her I'd be mentioning this, and assured her all over again that I didn't blame her for it.

“We've been studying the situation ever since the attack. I asked our personnel and security chiefs, together with the head of administrative services, to see what can be done about preventing another such attack. They've come up with several recommendations that I think are sensible.”

I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out a plastic badge.

“One of them is that we all start wearing security badges.”

That brought out a collective groan. One wise guy in the back of the crowd yelled in a Hollywood Mexican accent, “Badges? We don' need no steenkin' badges!” That broke the unhappiness very nicely.

“I don't like them any more than you do,” I said, clipping the badge to my jacket pocket. “But it makes sense. We want to be sure that everybody inside our building
belongs
here.”

We were adding more security cameras, too, and tightening up our procedures for checking out new employees.

“Over the next week or so, each of you will be scheduled to have your photo taken,” I told them. “If you like the picture you can order some for yourselves free of charge. Fair enough?”

“Whoever heard of an ID photo that comes out good?” Vince Andriotti grumbled.

The only full-time employee who was not at the meeting was Cassie Ianetta. Her field trials in Mexico had gotten even more seriously bogged down; what should have taken six months now looked as if it would drag on for more than a year. Of course, she had flown to the lab immediately as soon as she had heard about the terrorists' attack. She went straight from the front door
to the animal compound. I found her there, rolling on the tiled floor with Max, the two of them hugging each other like long-lost siblings.

Once they untangled, I began to explain what had happened. Cassie certainly thought of the attackers as terrorists.

“Kidnap the chimps?” she raged, glaring at the empty cages. “Kidnap them? They'll kill them! They don't have the facilities or the people to take care of them! They've murdered them!”

Her voice was so shrill that Max let go of her hand and scampered back outside. Cassie's face looked as if she had crucified her own mother. She turned and ran after Max.

“I'm sorry,” she called after him. Max had scampered up into his favorite tree. “I wasn't angry at you, Max, baby. I could never be angry at you.”

From up in his perch, Max pointed his index finger at his mouth and twirled it around a few times.

“Candy?” Cassie asked, repeating the sign. “Come on down and we'll find some candy.” She gestured for him to come down to her.

Cassie stayed for a weekend, spending just about the whole time with Max. She certainly coaxed Max out of his fright; in that one weekend she had him back to normal, just about.

Before Cassie left to return to Mexico, she dropped into my office.

“I'm sorry the trials are going so slow,” she said, perching herself on the chair in front of my desk like a frail little sparrow. “It takes ten times longer to get anything done down there.”

And ten times as much money as we had budgeted, I said to myself. But I didn't want to bother Cassie with that.

“You're making progress,” I said. “You should be finishing up soon.”

She nodded tiredly. “I'm going to try the enzyme on myself.”

I could feel my eyebrows hike up. “Why?”

“It's come back,” Cassie said. “I had a checkup and they found a spot.”