The Immortality Factor (8 page)

There was nothing to do but sit behind the wheel and listen to Chopin on the CD player. It was going to be a tough day. A meeting with Omnitech's chief
executive officer over a problem that one of the other corporate divisions had run into. He expected me to solve their problems, as if I didn't have enough of my own. And then a visit with Momma at the nursing home.

And the next day promised to be even tougher. Jess had phoned and invited me to dinner with him and Julia. I accepted, of course. I had to. But I wasn't looking forward to it. It would be the first time I'd seen Julia since their wedding, except for the humanitarian dinner. I wondered how I would get through it.

Omnitech's biomanufacturing plant had originally been an old Yonkers factory building, faded stained brick with row after row of little windows. It still looked old and seedy from the outside. But it had been completely gutted inside and rebuilt to house the people and equipment that produced genetically engineered biotechnology products. This was where Omnitech still manufactured the oil-eating bugs that Jesse and I had first developed, back when we were both still students. Still without paying us a penny for them.

When the residents of the neighborhood learned that the factory would be manufacturing “artificial bugs,” they just about went berserk. NIMBY gone wild. There were demonstrations and angry city council meetings. People screamed about “germ warfare” and “mutant monsters.” The mayor made threatening speeches and the TV news shows loved the whole controversy. Omnitech's public relations staff worked night and day, showing the news media, the mayor, the city council, delegations of worried citizens that the “bugs” to be manufactured could in no way harm human beings. They showed concerned neighborhood citizens the entire blueprints of the plant and pointed out the safeguards that ensured no contamination could get out of the building. None of that helped. At last they promised to hire as many local residents—especially ethnic minorities—as possible. That, and some well-placed emoluments, did the trick.

The city council's vote was close; Omnitech's request for building permits and zoning variations squeaked through by one vote. The corporation's CEO, W. Christian Johnston, congratulated himself in front of the board of directors. “We didn't buy one single vote more than we had to.”

The factory opened. Omnitech hired some of the locals. No mutant monsters haunted the neighborhood. The furor died away.

Johnston had originally wanted to build the factory in the Bronx and establish a training center for blacks and other ethnic minorities next to it. The thought of the Bronx really shook up the board of directors, though, so they compromised on this location in Yonkers. The battle to open the factory had been bad enough, Johnston conceded. He gave up his idea of helping the Bronx.

Johnston was a big success for Omnitech. He had battled his way out of the black ghetto of West Philadelphia and been hired by one of the corporation's construction subsidiaries. He moved ahead swiftly on a combination of brains
and the willingness to work harder than anybody else, and eventually he rose to the top of the corporate construction division in Pittsburgh. Once promoted to the board of directors, he quickly showed that he was much more than affirmative action window dressing. Within five years of his board membership, his election to CEO was virtually unanimous.

He was a big man. Not much taller than I am, but heavy, ponderous, like a football lineman, with huge hands that were still callused from his years of operating front loaders and construction cranes. He looked younger than his years; his rich baritone voice was still strong enough to shout down obstreperous board members when he had to. The only sign that he was nearing retirement age was his short-cropped hair. It was almost pure white. He called it “Omnitech blond.”

Now he led me down an aisle of gleaming stainless steel biogenerators, heading for the place on the factory floor where they were having trouble, a massive hulking black man in a three-piece Brooks Brothers suit. I was wearing a sports jacket and slacks.

“You've got that look in your eye, Arthur,” Johnston said to me.

“What look?” I said as innocently as I could.

“That look that means you want more money.”

“You've been talking to Lowenstein.”

“No, Sid's been talking to me.”

The factory floor was quiet except for the muted hum of electricity. Off in the distance somebody was playing a country and western radio station, all twanging and wailing. The biogenerators, big ten-foot-tall stainless steel cylinders topped by domes of heat-resistant tempered glass, made hardly any noise at all. The fluorescent lamps high overhead threw curving highlights against the polished steel and glass and made Johnston's deep black skin shine as if he were perspiring.

“So what is it?” he asked me. His tone was bantering, almost. He was smiling but his dark eyes showed no trace of amusement.

“Oh, just something that Jesse and I have started tinkering with. I can handle it with discretionary funding for the time being.” I was trying to decide how much to tell him. Corporate support is vital to any research program, but if the corporation refuses its support the program dies. No sense risking a refusal so early in the game. I certainly didn't want to get him worried about stem cell politics.

But Johnston was insistent. “What's it all about?”

“Well . . .” I drew out the word reluctantly. “If this concept pans out, we might be able to do something about paraplegics.”

“Do what?”

“Get them up and walking, I hope.”

“Like that guy who played Superman?”

It was too late for Christopher Reeve, but at least I had Johnston's attention. I began explaining as we strode along the factory aisle. On either side of us the biogenerators cultivated silent industrious colonies of genetically altered bacteria that were tirelessly producing more of themselves. The microbes had been designed to digest various forms of industrial wastes, crude petroleum, toxic chemicals. They were harvested and shipped to oil spills, chemical factories, paper mills, municipal landfills. There they gobbled up the wastes and converted them to carbon dioxide, methane, water.

Other processors in the factory were producing agricultural products: bacteria that made potatoes resistant to frosts, microbes that fixed nitrogen from the air for wheat and other cereal grains so that they needed far less chemical fertilizers than previously.

Johnston looked intrigued with my idea about paraplegics, but not happy. “Another medical project. A lot of competition there.”

“Nobody's doing anything like this,” I said.

“Maybe so. But you've got all those goddamned government agencies to deal with. Look what they're doing to your clinical trials. Lowenstein tells me we'll hafta send your team to Mexico, for god's sake. Or maybe Brazil.”

“That's part of the cost of doing business,” I replied. “You factor that into the price when the product comes on the market.”

“Yeah, and then the goddamned government pressures us to lower the price,” Johnston grumbled.

I kept a straight face. I'd never heard the CEO use the word “government” without “goddamned” in front of it.

“Medical projects are a big pain in the butt, you know.”

“But very profitable,” I said.

“Oh, yeah? You heard what the goddamned Department of Agriculture is doing now? They want us to pay royalties for the genetic materials we use. Royalties to some half-assed Third World countries who claim that the raw materials we use come from their territories. Part of the Biodiversity Treaty, they claim. Royalties, by damn! There go any profits we might make.”

I let him grumble. There were hardly any other people on the factory floor. The equipment churned along unattended, except for the teams sitting in the monitoring stations up on the iron grillwork balcony above us. They watched their gauges and display screens as intently as any NASA mission controllers.

But there were half a dozen men and women in white smocks standing around the conglomeration of pipes and tubing at the end of the row. They all had radiation gauges clipped to the breast pockets of their smocks.

“This is why I asked you to drop by,” Johnston said. “This is where we're having trouble.”

There were big red
DANGER
—
RADIATION
signs plastered on the tubing and
walls all around the equipment. I noticed that Johnston stopped a good twenty feet short of the black and yellow warning lines on the wooden floor.

The corporation had other research operations, in addition to my lab. One of them was under way here at the Yonkers plant, a program to engineer a microbe so that it could take dissolved radioactive uranium and thorium out of contaminated water and convert them into solid pellets. The pellets would be much easier to dispose of safely than tons of radioactive water. They were working with a microbe called
Deinococcus radiodurans
, which could withstand enormous amounts of radioactivity, from what I'd read. The engineers called the bug “Conan the Bacterium.” The process was being developed by Omnitech's nuclear power division. It was not a Grenford Lab program, not my problem. Until now.

“Does Habermeir know you've asked me to look into his work?” I asked, keeping my voice low enough so that the technicians attending the apparatus couldn't hear me.

Johnston made a snorting noise that might have been a laugh. “I told him I was doing it. He wasn't happy about it, but what the hell.”

I nodded. I didn't like stepping on the toes of other scientists in the Omnitech family. But I needed Johnston's support for my own programs and to keep that support I had to keep the CEO happy. Politics. There was no way around it, you had to be good at politics to get to do the science you wanted to do.

Still, I couldn't help muttering, “How can you expect anything but trouble, dealing with radioactive material?”

Johnston fixed me with a stern gaze. “There's a lot of money to be made in cleaning up nuclear wastes. And it's a
good
thing to do, Arthur. You're always telling me we should be doing
good
things, aren't you?”

“I know, but—”

“Well, cleaning up the environment from radioactive wastes is as good as they come, I think. So does the PR department. We could get a lot of happy mileage out of this, once it works right.”

“If it can ever be made to work right.”

Johnston smiled with a mouthful of teeth. “You're the scientist, Arthur. I'm just a money-grabbing corporate executive.”

“Sure you are.”

The black man laughed. “You going to help us out on this one?”

“I'll try,” I said, with what I felt was the right amount of reluctance. Let him know I'm doing him a favor and he owes me one in return. “I'll talk to the technicians. And I'll need to see all the reports the project engineers have written.”

Johnston beamed at me and clapped me on the back hard enough to stagger a moose.

“Regrow nerve cells so paraplegics can be cured, huh?” he said. “Could put us into a whole new business line. Maybe I could use it to hold off the goddamned Germans and their buyout attempt.”

That surprised me. “The Germans are back?”

“They never left, Arthur. And now they've got a whole goddamned consortium of European firms with them. This time it's going to be rough. Really rough.”

 

S
o I left Johnston worrying about a hostile takeover and drove up to the nursing home in White Plains with a boxful of reports on the nuclear waste project denting the back seat of my car.

Visiting Momma was never easy. We both knew she was dying and there wasn't a damned thing we could do about it. Me, the big-time scientist, and I had to sit there just as awkward and helpless as some peasant from the Middle Ages.

Momma had always been a fighter. When the auto accident took Dad's life and both her legs, she battled back from her wheelchair, fought the doctors and lawyers and insurance companies and the entire care-giving bureaucracy of New York to stay in her own home and maintain control of her two sons. Gertrude Marshak did not admit defeat, not to anyone.

As the elder son, I became the man of the house, the responsible one who fixed the plumbing and did the grocery shopping and took odd jobs while attending school and studying for scholarships. Jesse could have a more normal life; he was outgoing, gregarious. He kept our apartment in Brooklyn Heights lively with friends and music and his own irrepressible charm.

“Watch out for your brother,” Momma told me time and again. “Jesse has no common sense, you'll have to take care of him.”

I did that, without resentment, without stint. When Momma had her first stroke Jesse was spending the weekend at a friend's house and I couldn't find him because he and his friend had decided to take the subway out to Jones Beach and they hadn't come back yet. I was all of fourteen years old. I was frantic, trying to track him down while the ambulance crew wheeled Momma out of the apartment. Even in the hospital, waiting up all night to hear if Momma would live to see the sunrise, I kept telephoning every half hour to see if Jess and his friend had come home yet. It wasn't until the next morning that Jess showed up at the hospital with a single daisy in his fist that he had picked from the hospital's front lawn.

Well, that was Jesse.

Now I climbed the creaking stairs of the Sunny Glade Nursing Home, heading for the corner room on the second floor that had been Momma's home for the past four years. A young attendant in whites smiled at me as she passed
me on the bare wooden stairs. I smiled back automatically. I was thinking ahead, beyond this visit with Momma, worrying about tomorrow night's dinner and Julia.

It was hard to think of the pitiful shriveled thing sitting up in the hospital bed as the woman who had been my mother. It looked more like the dried and wrinkled husk of some discarded marionette, its strings long cut, its usefulness long over. An oxygen tube was taped to one nostril. Her once-luxuriant hair was dead white and so sparse her scalp showed through. A faded baby blue nightgown hung limply on her emaciated frame.