The Immortality Factor (56 page)

I didn't tell her that I had inoculated myself. I didn't want to influence her examination or her conclusions in any way. But I knew. I was cured. I'd never have to worry about cancer again.

“Still,” the oncologist went on, “your general physical condition isn't good. You're run down, on the ragged edge of exhaustion. You've got to take it easier, gain a little weight, learn to relax and enjoy life a bit.”

“But I am enjoying my life,” I told her.

She glanced around at my spartan cell. “You actually live in here?”

“Temporarily,” I said. “Until Max is well enough to go back to his regular quarters.” That was a bit of a lie. I intended to stay with Max until his arm had grown back completely. And his eye.

When I wasn't with Max I was in my office, doing the work I should have done in Mexico. Every now and then I wondered where Bill was and if he ever thought about me. It still ached, deep down. And the wound wasn't healing; it was festering. Bill was just the same as the rest of them. I couldn't trust anyone, not a soul.

I began to wonder if I was going insane. All I could think of was revenge, some way to punish them all for what they'd done to Max. To me. I dreamed of tortures, I even found myself doodling pictures on notepads of men with their arms chopped off. Their eyes put out. Their cocks sliced into pieces.

I'm going crazy, I thought. And a voice inside my head answered, So what? They've made you crazy, the whole hateful bunch of them.

At least Max's arm was showing signs of budding and regenerating. The eye was a different matter, though. Max didn't like most of the tests I had to put him through, so when we had to do CAT scans I put him to sleep with a sedative in his evening meal and then ran him through the machine at night.

There were tumors growing where his eye had been. And spreading along the optic nerve into the frontal lobe of his brain.

Arthur, Darrell, Zack, and I held a conference about that. Zack sat across the table from me, making feeble wisecracks about my bashing his nose.

Go ahead and joke, I told him silently. One of these days you're going to pay for everything you've done. In spades. In blood.

“It's the same old problem,” Darrell was saying. “The regentide isn't specific enough to regenerate only the cells we want to regrow. It starts other cells growing wild.”

“We've got to use the enzyme treatment,” I said. “Otherwise the tumors will kill him.”

Darrell said, “That's compounding one experiment with another experiment. Not good practice, Cass.”

But Zack spoke up. “We don't want Max to die on us, do we? That'd screw up the experiment terminally.”

I'd like to take care of you terminally, I thought.

Arthur looked worried. He asked me, “Cassie, are you confident that the enzyme treatment can kill the tumors? After all, we don't have all the results in from your field tests, as yet.”

“Confident enough,” I announced, “that I've used the treatment on myself.”

I had told Arthur that I was going to do it, but still his eyebrows went up. Darrell and Zack looked shocked.

“And it works,” I added.

That kicked off a long discussion, with Arthur grumbling that it was a big risk for me to take, and Darrell worrying that I didn't have the proper scientific objectivity about either the enzyme treatment or Max, and Zack staying strangely silent, just eying me as if he were afraid I'd sock him again if he opened his mouth.

I would have, too.

In the end, they agreed to let me use the enzyme treatment on Max's tumors. I knew they would. They really didn't have any choice. If Max died, their precious experiment died with him. They couldn't move on to human trials without Max.

But they didn't have to worry. I wasn't going to let Max die. I was going to save him.

Don't think that I stayed in my little cell all the time. I didn't become a total hermit. And despite the crude jokes going around the lab, I didn't spend all my time with Max, either. I dug into the data from the Mexican fieldwork and started churning out the reports. I had one of the lab's visiting MDs do Pap smears for me, but I checked the results myself. The cancer was gone. Totally.

And I started catching up on the lab gossip and the news that I had missed while I'd been away. Like Zack's romance with Tina Andriotti. And Arthur's interest in his public relations consultant. “Maybe they're involved in some private relations,” I heard more than once.

I also heard about Reverend Simmonds and his campaign against us. What a silly thing to do, to try to stop us from learning and growing.

I ran Max's enzyme treatments myself. Max went into hysterics when he saw me with a hypodermic syringe. He howled and ran around his pen throwing up handfuls of straw, peeling back his lips and snarling at me, flinging his toys at the Plexiglas wall between us. I put the syringe away and showed him that both my hands were empty. I wanted to go into his pen and calm him down, but for the first time in my life I was scared of Max. Even with only one arm he could've broken my bones, he was so frightened.

I had to give him the needles when he was asleep, snoring peacefully from the sedatives that I put into his evening meal. I watched his progress fretfully. The enzyme was tailored for human cells; I wasn't certain that it would work
as well on a chimpanzee. If it didn't, we'd have to develop one specifically tailored for Max. And quickly. The tumors were starting to put pressure on his brain.

It wasn't affecting his behavior, so I thought we had enough time to make the treatment work. But I worried, worried every day and night. It was still too chilly to let Max stay outside for very long, and he looked so pathetic trying to climb the trees with only one hand. Even the jungle gym was a trial for him. More and more we just stayed indoors; in his pen, for the most part, but I walked him along the lab's corridors for exercise.

One night as I sat up sleeplessly clicking from one TV channel to another, I caught one of Reverend Simmonds's revival meetings. From some auditorium in Omaha or Fort Wayne or someplace out in the midwest.

“Don't be deceived by these godless men of science,” he was yelling into a microphone, holding it up to his mouth the way rock singers do, his face beaded with perspiration, his shirt soaked through. “These secular scientists are evil incarnate.”

It was nonsense, of course. But the more I listened, the more I realized that he was speaking to me. His eyes seemed to stare right out of the TV screen into mine. The words he was speaking faded from my consciousness almost entirely and I heard his
real
message, the message he meant for me:

Come to me and I will help you to avenge yourself on all those who have done you harm. Come to me and together we will work our vengeance on the men who have betrayed you.

It was weird. I was raised in the Catholic Church but had stopped believing in anything while I was still a teenager. I didn't for one minute believe that Reverend Simmonds was any closer to God than I was. But he wanted to stop Arthur and all those other men who could cut and maim you so casually. In the name of science. Just slice you open and leave you there to bleed inside forever. He wanted to punish them.

And so did I.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

S
o I sweet-talked these Wall Street people all through breakfast, telling them how important the medical center was to the city and how we needed their support to raise the fifteen mil that paid for the center's operating expenses.

“I'm not talking about bricks and mortar,” I said to them, while we munched low-cholesterol muffins and sipped decaffeinated coffee. “The money pays for the research that the staff does. We're not building any monuments.”

One of the women smiled guardedly at me. “I took the trouble to visit your medical center last week. It's certainly not a monument. It's shabby, in fact.”

“On the outside,” I countered. “The equipment inside is first-class. And so are the people.”

“Yes, that's so,” she agreed.

They were all in three-piece suits; even the women wore vests and tailored blouses. Grays and darker grays. The real sports among them wore navy blue. I came in a light brown suede jacket and darker corduroy slacks. Turtleneck shirt, so there'd be no problem about wearing a tie.

Arthur was waiting outside in a taxi, just as he said he'd be. I dashed the
few feet from the building's doorway to the cab and ducked inside. The wind whistling down Wall Street was cold, driving litter and crumpled sheets of old newspapers through the air. It looked like real spring weather would never get here.

“Hello, Jess,” Arthur said as I slammed the taxi door shut. He looked and sounded uptight.

“Hi, Arby.”

“Where do you want to go?”

I tapped on the thick glass separating us from the driver. “Mendelssohn Hospital,” I yelled.

“Que?”
the driver hollered back.

I gave him the address in Spanish. He seemed to understand and got the taxi moving.

“I didn't know you spoke Spanish,” Arthur said.

I could've grinned and told him there was so goddamned much he didn't know about me. Instead I just shrugged and said, “It helps.”

“Yes, I suppose it does.”

He just sat there, sunk into his cashmere topcoat, staring at me. I wondered what was going through his head.

“Why'd you want to see me?” I asked.

“How's Julia? You said she's pregnant again?”

“She's fine.”

“When's the baby due?”

“Believe it or not, the target date is Christmas Day. It's going to be a boy, sonogram shows.”

He didn't crack a smile, didn't say anything, just moved his head a little in what might have been a nod.

“So why do you want to see me? What's going down?”

“Do I need a reason?”

“Arby,” I said, “you never do anything without a reason. We both know that. Don't try to pull the old brotherhood routine on me.”

“You told Simmonds about our work,” he said flatly.

So that was it. “It came up in conversation,” I said. Which was the truth. “While we were setting up the rally last summer.”

“You told him.”

“So what? It wasn't a secret.”

I can always tell when Arby's trying to control his temper. His face gets flushed, like he's embarrassed.

“It
was
a secret,” he snapped. “At least, it should have been. Do you have any idea of the trouble you've caused? The difficulties we've had to deal with?”

“I heard about the raid on your lab,” I said.

“Someone might have been killed.”

Before he could get too far up on his high horse, I kidded him. “I heard you got a pair of black eyes out of it.”

“Someone might have been killed,” he repeated. He wasn't going to be jollied out of his mood.

The cab was inching up Riverside Drive, caught in the usual crush of cars and trucks and buses. The driver seemed perfectly relaxed. The meter was running faster than his speedometer.

“Okay,” I said, trying to placate Arthur. “I happened to mention something about your work to Simmonds. Maybe some of his followers are kind of fanatic. Is it my fault they raided your lab?”

“Do you have any idea of how much effort it's taken to handle this problem?”

“Come on, Arby. I own some Omnitech stock, too, remember? I follow it in the
Wall Street Journal
. You're doing okay.”

“No thanks to you,” he muttered.

I couldn't get sore at him. He was angry enough for the two of us.

“So what do you want to do, Arby? Give me a lecture? I haven't seen Simmonds in almost a year, for chrissakes.”

“I'm setting up a court trial.”

“You're what?”

He waved one hand in the air. “Not a lawsuit, nothing like that. This is going to be a court of science. We're going to put our work on regeneration on trial, to see if a jury of scientists decides whether it's valid or not.”

I felt puzzled. “A trial. By scientists? Why?”

Arby's eyes blazed at me. “Because your Reverend Simmonds is trying to crucify us in the media, that's why! We're going to have a sane, rational, disciplined trial that will involve some of the top scientists in the nation.
That
will provide the backing we need to show the world that our work is valid and should be pursued.”

“Okay,” I said. “Good for you.”

“I want to know which side you'll be on.”

“Me? Why should I get involved?”

“Because you helped to originate the idea. And you're my brother. One side or the other will ask you to testify, you can bet on it.”

I shook my head. “I don't want to have anything to do with it. You took the ball and ran with it. I haven't done a thing on that subject for more than a year.”

“Since you went to Africa,” Arthur said.

“You're not going to bring that up again, are you?”

“Julia's really all right?”

“Couldn't be better,” I said. And it was the truth. She looked radiant, her tests were all fine, and she hardly even had any morning sickness. It was going to be an easy pregnancy, from all the early indications.

Arthur fell silent. I knew there was more that he wanted to say; I just hoped he figured out how to say it before we got to the hospital. The traffic was easing up a little, now that we'd passed the George Washington Bridge.

A trial. A courtroom trial, about science. Leave it to Arby to come up with something like that. Maybe it wasn't a totally dimwit idea, at that. Get all the big hitters to testify, show the media and the politicians and anybody else who's interested that scientists can grow new organs for you. Might drown out Simmonds and his fundamentalist kooks.