The Immortals (3 page)

“The blood bank didn't have any packed RBCs in Oneg,” the nurse said. “We had to get whole blood.”

Pearce nodded and the nurse closed the clamp to the intravenous feeding and released the clamp closing the tube from the saline solution before doing the same for the bag of blood. There was a brief mixture of fluids, and then it was all blood, running slowly through the long, transparent tubing with its own in-line filter into the receptive vein, new blood bringing new life to the old, worn-out mechanism on the hard hospital bed.

New blood for old,
Pearce thought.
Money can buy anything.
“A little faster.”

The nurse adjusted the pump. Occasionally the pump beeped a warning, and the nurse made further adjustments. In the bag the level of the life fluid dropped more swiftly.

Life. Dripping. Flowing. Making the old new.

The old man took a deep breath. The exhausted laboring of his chest grew easier. Pearce studied the old face, the beaklike nose, the thin, bloodless lips, looking cruel even in their pallor. New life, perhaps. But nothing can reverse the long erosion of the years. Bodies wear out. Nothing can make them new.

Drop by drop the blood flowed from the bag through the tubing into an old man's veins. Someone had given it or sold it. Someone young and healthy, who could make more purple life stuff, saturated with healthy red cells, vigorous white scavengers, platelets, the multiple proteins; someone who could replace it all in less than ninety days.

Pearce thought about Richard Lower, the seventeenth-century English anatomist who performed the first transfusion, and the twentieth-century Viennese immunologist, Karl Landsteiner, who made transfusions safe when he discovered the incompatible blood groups among human beings.

Now here was this old man, who was getting the blood through the efforts of Lower and Landsteiner and some anonymous donor; this old man who needed it, who couldn't make the red cells fast enough any longer, who couldn't keep up with the rate he was losing them internally. What was dripping through the tubes was life, a gift of the young to the old, of the healthy to the sick.

The old man's eyelids flickered.

*  *  *

When Pearce made his morning rounds, the old man was watching him with faded blue eyes. Pearce blinked once and automatically picked up the skin-and-bone wrist again. “Feeling better?”

He got his second shock. The old man nodded.

“Fine, Mister Weaver. We'll get a little food down you, and in a little while you'll be back at work.”

He glanced at the monitors on the wall and studied them more closely. Gently, a look of surprise on his face, he lowered the old arm down beside the thin, sheeted body.

He sat back thoughtfully beside the bed, ignoring the bustling nurse. Weaver was making a surprising rally for a man in as bad shape as he had been. The pulse was strong and steady. Blood pressure was up. Somehow the transfusion had triggered hidden stores of energy and resistance.

Weaver was fighting back.

Pearce felt a strange and unprofessional sense of elation.

The next day Pearce thought the eyes that watched him were not quite so faded. “Comfortable?” he asked. The old man nodded. His pulse was almost normal for a man of his age; his blood pressure was down; his oxygen level was up.

On the third day Weaver started talking.

The old man's thready voice whispered disjointed and meaningless reminiscences. Pearce nodded as if he understood, and he nodded to himself, understanding the process that was reaching its conclusion. Arteriosclerosis
had left its marks: chronic granular kidney, damage to the left ventricle of the heart, malfunction of the brain from a cerebral hemorrhage or two.

On the fourth day Weaver was sitting up in bed talking to the nurse in a cracked, sprightly voice. “Yessirree,” he said toothlessly. “That was the day I whopped 'em. Gave it to 'em good, I did. Let 'em have it right between the eyes. Always hated those kids. You must be the doctor,” he said suddenly, turning toward Pearce. “I like you. Gonna see that you get a big check. Take care of the people I like. Take care of those I don't like, too.” He chuckled; it was an evil, childish sound.

“Don't worry about that,” Pearce said gently, picking up Weaver's wrist. “Concentrate on getting well.”

The old man nodded happily and stuck a finger in his mouth to rub his gums. “You'll git paid,” he mumbled. “Don't
you
worry about that.”

Pearce looked down at the wrist he was holding. It had filled out in a way for which he could remember no precedent. “What's the matter with your gums?”

“Itch,” Weaver got out around his finger. “Like blazes.”

On the fifth day Weaver walked to the toilet.

On the sixth day he took a shower. When Pearce came in, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, dangling his feet. Weaver looked up quickly as Pearce entered, his eyes alert, no longer so sunken. His skin had acquired a subcutaneous glow of health. Like his wrist and arm, his face had filled out. Even his legs looked firmer, almost muscular.

He was taking the well-balanced hospital diet and turning it into flesh and fat and muscle. With his snowy hair he looked like an ad for everybody's grandfather.

The next day his hair began to darken at the roots.

“How old are you, Mister Weaver?” Pearce asked.

“Eighty,” Weaver said proudly. “Eighty my last birthday, June 5. Born in Wyoming, boy, in a mountain cabin. Still bears around then. Many's the time I seen 'em, out with my Pa. Wolves, too. Never gave us no trouble, though.”

“What color was your hair?”

“Color of a raven's wing. Had the blackest, shiniest hair in the county. Gals used to beg to run their fingers through it.” He chuckled reminiscently. “Used to let 'em. A passel of black-headed kids in Washakie County before I left.”

He stuck his finger in his mouth and massaged his gums ecstatically.

“Still itch?” Pearce asked.

“Like a Wyoming chigger.” He chuckled again. “You know what's wrong with me, boy? In my second childhood. That's what. I'm cutting teeth.”

*  *  *

During the second week Weaver was removed from intensive care to a private suite and his mind turned to business, deserting the long-ago past. A telephone was installed beside his bed, and he spent half his waking time in short, clipped conversations about incomprehensible deals and manipulations. The other half was devoted to Jansen, who was so conveniently on hand whenever
Weaver called for him that Pearce thought he must have appropriated a hospital room.

Weaver was picking up the scepter of empire.

While his mind roamed restlessly over possessions and ways of keeping and augmenting them, his body repaired itself like a self-servicing machine. His first tooth came through—a canine. After that they appeared rapidly. His hair darkened almost perceptibly; and when a barber came in to trim it, Weaver had him remove all the white, leaving him with a crewcut as dark as he had described. His face filled out, the wrinkles smoothing themselves like a ruffled lake when the wind has gentled. His body became muscular and vigorous; the veins retreated under the skin to become gray traceries. Even his eyes darkened to a fiery blue.

The lab tests were additional proof of what Pearce had begun to suspect. Arteriosclerosis had never thickened those veins; or else, somehow, the damage of plaque buildup had been repaired. The kidneys functioned perfectly. The heart was as strong and efficient a pump as it had ever been. There was no evidence of a cerebral hemorrhage.

By the end of that week Weaver looked like a man of thirty, and his body provided physical evidence of a man in his early, vigorous years of maturity.

“Carl,” Weaver was saying as Pearce entered the room, “I want a woman.”

“Any particular woman?” Jansen answered, shrugging.

“You don't understand,” Weaver said with the impatience he reserved for those immediately dependent on his
whims. “I want one to marry. I made a mistake before; I'm not going to repeat it. A man in my position needs an heir. I'm going to have one. Yes, Carl—and you can hide that look of incredulity a little better—at my age!” He swung around quickly toward Pearce. “That's right, isn't it, Doctor?”

Pearce shrugged. “There's no physical reason you can't father a child.”

“Get this, Carl. I'm as strong and as smart as I ever was, maybe stronger and smarter. Some people are going to learn that very soon. I've been given a second chance, haven't I, Doctor?”

“You might call it that. What are you going to do with it?”

“I'm going to do better. Better than I did before. This time I'm not going to make any mistakes. And you, Doctor, do you know what you're going to do?”

“I'm going to do what I've always done: my job, as best I can.”

Weaver's eyes twisted to Pearce's face. “You think I'm just talking. Don't make that mistake. You're going to find out why.”

“Why?”

“Why I've recovered like I have. Don't try to kid me. You've never seen anything like it. I'm not eighty years old anymore. My body isn't. My mind isn't. Why?”

“What's your guess?”

“I never guess. I know. I get the facts from those who have them, and then I decide. That's what I want from you—the facts. I've been rejuvenated.”

“You've been talking to Doctor Easter.”

“Of course. He's my personal physician. That's where I start.”

“But you never got that language from him. He'd never commit himself to a word like
rejuvenation.”

Weaver glowered at Pearce from under dark eyebrows. “What was done to me?”

“What does it matter? If you've been ‘rejuvenated,' that should be enough for any man.”

“When Mister Weaver asks a question,” Jansen interjected icily, “Mister Weaver wants an answer.”

Weaver brushed him aside. “Doctor Pearce doesn't frighten. But Doctor Pearce is a reasonable man. He believes in facts. He lives by logic, like me. Understand me, Doctor! I may be thirty now, but I will be eighty again. Before then I want to know how to be thirty once more.”

“Ah.” Pearce sighed. “You're not talking about rejuvenation now. You're talking about immortality.”

“Why not?”

“It's not for humans. The body wears out. Three-score years and ten. That—roughly—is what we're allotted. After that we start falling apart.”

“I've had mine and a bit more. Now I'm starting over at thirty. I've got forty or fifty to go. After that, what? Forty or fifty more?”

“We all die,” Pearce said. “Nothing can stop that. Not one man born has not come to the grave at last. There's a disease we contract at birth from which none of us recovers; it's invariably fatal. Death.”

“Suppose somebody develops a resistance to it?”

“Don't take what I said literally. I didn't mean that death was a specific disease,” Pearce said. “We die in many ways: accident, infection—”
And senescence,
Pearce thought.
For all we know, that's a disease. It could be a disease.
Etiology:
Virus, unisolated, unsuspected, invades at birth or shortly thereafter
—
or maybe transmitted at conception.

Incidence:
Total.

Symptoms:
Slow degeneration of the physical entity, appearing shortly after maturity, increasing debility, failure of the circulatory system through arteriosclerosis and heart damage, decline in the immunity system, malfunction of sense and organs, loss of cellular regenerative ability, susceptibility to secondary invasions.
 . . .

Prognosis:
100% fatal.

“Everything dies,” Pearce went on without a pause. “Trees, planets, suns . . . it's natural, inevitable. . . .”
But it isn't. Natural death is a relatively new thing. It appeared only when life became multicellular and complicated. Maybe it was the price for complexity, for the ability to think.

Protozoa don't die. Metazoa—sponges, flatworms, coelenterates—don't die. Certain fish don't die except through accident. “Voles are animals that never stop growing and never grow old.” Where did I read that? And even the tissues of the higher vertebrates are immortal under the right conditions.

Carrel and Ebeling proved that. Give the cell enough of the right food, and it will never die. Cells from every part of the body have been kept alive indefinitely
in vitro.
Differentiation
and specialization—that meant that any individual cell didn't find the perfect conditions. Besides staying alive, it had duties to perform for the whole. A plausible explanation, but was it true? Wasn't it just as plausible that the cell died because the circulatory system broke down?

Let the circulatory system remain sound, regenerative, and efficient, and the rest of the body might well remain immortal.

“When we say something's natural, it means we've given up trying to understand it,” Weaver said. “You gave me a transfusion. Immunities can be transferred with the blood, Easter told me. Who donated that pint of blood?”

Pearce sighed. “Donor records are confidential.”

Weaver snorted derisively.

*  *  *

The blood bank was in the basement. Pearce led the way down busy, noisy corridors, cluttered with patients in wheelchairs waiting for X rays and other tests, and others on gurneys being maneuvered to labs or back to their rooms.

“If you're smart,” Jansen told him on the stairs, “you'll cooperate with Mister Weaver. Do what he asks you. Tell him what he wants to know. You'll get taken care of. If not—” Jansen smiled unpleasantly.

Pearce laughed. “What can Weaver do to me?”

“Don't find out,” Jansen advised.