The Immortals (6 page)

He waited, his eyes closed, listening to the harshness of Weaver's breathing, thinking of the tragedy of life and death—the being born and the dying, entwined, all one,
and here was Weaver who had run out of life, and there was his child who would not be born for months yet. It was a continuity, a balance—a life for life, and it had kept humanity stable for millions of years.

And yet—immortality? What might it mean?

He thought of Cartwright, the immortal, the hunted man. While men remembered, they would never let him rest, and if he got tired of hiding and running, he was doomed. The search would go on and on—crippled a little, fortunately, now that Weaver had dropped away—and Cartwright, with his burden, would never be able to live like other men.

He thought of Cartwright, trying to adjust to immortality in the midst of death, and he thought that immortality—the greatest gift, surely, that a man could receive—demanded payment in kind, like everything else. For immortality, you must surrender the right to live.

You're the one I pity, Cartwright.

“Transfusion, Doctor Pearce?” the nurse repeated.

“Yes,” he said. “Might as well.” He looked down at Weaver once more. “Type and crossmatch two units of blood and administer one unit when available. We know his type already—O negative.”

T
he search had been organized to last a hundred years. Half of that period was already gone, and the search was no nearer success than when it had started. Only the ultimate desperation can keep hope alive without periodic transfusions of results.

The National Research Institute was unique. It had no customers and no product. Its annual statement was printed all in red. And yet the tight-lipped donors made their contributions regularly and without complaint. Whenever one of them died, his estate was inherited by the Institute.

The purpose of the Institute was learning, but not education. It had an omnivorous appetite for information of all kinds, particularly old information recorded on paper or the newer kind coded into on or off electronic markers: vital statistics, newspaper accounts, hospital records, field reports. . . . A Potomac of data flowed through the gray, bombproof, block-square building near Washington, D.C., reduced to innocuous signals from which computers would make esoteric comparisons or draw undecipherable conclusions.

Possibly only one man in the Institute knew its function. The thousands of other employees, many of whom were not listed on the payroll, performed their duties
blindly, accepted their generous salaries, and asked no questions. If they wished to keep their jobs, that is.

The Institute survived on hope and thrived on death.

*  *  *

The main computer room was confusion that seemed to escape growing into chaos only by accident. Mail was opened, entered, stapled, and passed along assembly lines. Old newspapers were scanned by machines, key words identified by computers, and then checked, line by line, by human readers. Computer disks of all kinds were inserted into waiting receptacles and their information, like DNA, transformed into identical copies with new meaning. Copy boys raced along the aisles on roller skates. Clerks blue-penciled and clipped and commented to the computers. Operators punched electrons out of blank atoms. . . .

Edwin Sibert threaded his way between the desks with a taut feeling of excitement, as if he were on his way to a rendezvous with the world's most desirable woman. The copy room was old to him; he had spent six months there without learning anything. He didn't glance at it as he climbed the steps behind the office set over the copy room like a guardroom over a prison yard.

The outer office was lined with locked filing cabinets; their contents were meaningless. A colorless, elderly filing clerk puttered among the papers in one of them.

“Hello, Sanders,” Sibert said carelessly.

The desk by the door leading into the inner office was equipped with a switchboard, a scrambler, an automatic recorder, and a lovely dark-haired secretary. Her eyes had widened as Sibert entered.

“Hello, Liz,” he said, his voice as effective as his appearance. “Locke in?” He moved past her to the door without waiting for an answer.

“You can't, Ed—” she began, springing to her feet, “Mister Locke will—”

“—be very angry if he doesn't get my news immediately,” Sibert finished. “I've found the key, Liz. Get it—Locke, key? A poor thing but mine own.” He drew skillful fingers along the smooth curve of her throat and jaw.

She caught his hand, held it to her cheek for a moment. “Oh, Ed!” she said brokenly. “I'm—”

“Be good, Liz,” he said cheerfully, his blue eyes smiling gently in his expressive face. “Maybe—a little later—who knows?”

But there would be no “later”—they both knew that. He had wasted a month on her before he was sure she knew nothing. He pulled his hand free and opened the door and stepped into the inner office.

Beyond Locke was an entire wall of one-way glass. From here the director of the Institute could watch the copy room or, if he wished, switch to indirect observation of the other rooms and offices of the windowless building. Locke was talking to someone on his private phone.

“Patience is our greatest asset,” he said. “After all, Ponce de León . . .”

Sibert turned his head quickly, but he caught only a glimpse of a face that great age had unsexed. It was wrinkled and gray and dead except for the eyes that still burned with life and desire.

“Interruption,” Locke said smoothly. “Call you back.” The screen set into the wall opposite him went dark as he touched the arm of his executive chair. “Sibert,” he said, “you're fired.”

Locke was no youngster himself, Sibert thought. He was pushing ninety, surely, though he looked fit and vigorous. Medical care had kept his body healthy; geriatrics and hormone injections had kept his shoulders broad, his muscles firm and unwithered. Perhaps surgery had replaced his old heart and several other organs, but they could not rejuvenate his aging arteries and his dying cells.

“Right,” Sibert said briskly, another man than the one who had spoken to the secretary in the outer office. “Then you won't be interested in my information—”

“Maybe I was hasty,” Locke said. His lips framed the unfamiliar words awkwardly. “If your information is important, I might reconsider.”

“And a bonus, too?” Sibert prompted.

“Maybe,” Locke growled, his eyes small. “Now, what's so earth-shattering that it can't come through channels?”

Sibert studied Locke's face. It had not spent all its days in an office. There were scars around the eyes and a long one down one cheek almost to the point of the jaw; the nose had been broken at least once. Locke was an old bear. He must be careful, Sibert thought, not to tease him too much.

“I think I've found one of Marshall Cartwright's children.”

Locke's face writhed for a moment before he got it
back under control. “Where? What name is he using? What's he—”

“Slow down,” Sibert said calmly. He deposited his lean young body in the upholstered chair beside the desk and leisurely lit a cigarette. “I've been working in the dark for five years. Before I give anything away, I want to know what I've got.”

“You're well paid,” Locke said coldly. “If this pans out, you'll never have to worry about money. But don't try to cut yourself into the game, Sibert. It's too big for you.”

“That's what I keep thinking about,” Sibert mused. “A few hundred thousand bucks—what's that to an organization that spends at least one hundred million a year? Fifty years of that is five billion dollars. Just to find somebody's kids.”

“We can get the information out of you.”

“Not in time. And time is what you don't have. I left a letter. If I don't get back soon, the letter gets delivered. And Cartwright's kid is warned that he is being hunted. . . .”

“Let me check that statement with truth serum.”

“No. Not because it isn't true. You might ask other questions. And it would take too long. That's why I couldn't wait for an appointment. Try to squeeze the information out if you want to.” He lifted his right hand out of his jacket pocket; a tiny, ten-shot plastic automatic was in it. “But it might take too long. And you might lose everything just when everything is within your grasp. You might die. Or I might die.”

Locke sighed heavily and let his heavy shoulders relax. “What do you want to know?”

“What's so important about Cartwright's kids?”

“Barring accidents, they'll live forever.”

*  *  *

The middle-aged man walked slowly through the station, his face preoccupied, his hands thrust deep in his jacket pockets. He retrieved an overnight bag from a locker and took it to the nearest washroom, where he rented a booth. He never came out of the washroom. A reservation on the Talgo express to Toronto was never picked up.

A young man with a floppy hat and a conquistador beard caught a taxi outside the station and left it in the middle of a traffic jam in the business section, walked quickly between the immovable cars until he reached the adjacent street, where he caught a second taxi going in the opposite direction. At the airport, he picked up a no-show reservation on the first outgoing flight.

At Detroit he caught a jet to St. Louis. There he changed to a slow, two-dozen-seat transport to Wichita. There he hired an old, two-seater jet, filed a flight plan, and proceeded to ignore it. Two hours later he set down at Kansas City's nearly deserted International Airport and caught a decrepit bus down the old interstate and across the crumbling New Hannibal Bridge to the downtown shopping district.

The section was decaying. Business had followed the middle class into the suburbs. Buildings and shops had not been repaired for a decade. Only a few people were on the street, but the young man with the beard did the best he could, ducking through arcades, waiting in doorways,
and finally edging into a department-store elevator just before the doors closed. The car creaked upward. When it reached the fifth floor, only the young man was left. The young man walked swiftly through the floor to the men's room.

Two minutes later he flushed an ugly, black mass of hair down the toilet, buried a hat under a heap of paper towels, and grinned at his reflection in the mirror. “Greetings, Mister Sibert,” he said gaily. “What was it Locke said to you?”

“You were an actor, weren't you, Sibert?”

“Once. Not a very good one, I'm afraid.”

“What made you quit?”

“It couldn't give me what I want.”

“What's that?”

“If your psychologists didn't find out, I won't tell them. That would make your job too easy.”

“Your mistake, Sibert. A live actor—even a poor one—is better than a dead adventurer. That's what you'll be if you try to set up something on your own. We've got you, Sibert—trapped in plastic, like that solidograph, and in measurements and film and ink. Wherever you try to hide, we'll dig you out. . . .”

“If you can find me, Locke,” Sibert said to the mirror. “And you've lost me for the moment.”

He raced down the firestairs to the Main Street entrance, went through the used-clothing stores, up the escalators, down the stairs, and out a side entrance onto Twelfth Street. As an eastbound bus elevated itself on its pads and pulled away from the stop, Sibert slid between
the closing doors. A mile past City Hall he got off, ran through two alleys, and swung into a cruising taxi.

“Head west. I'll tell you when to stop,” he said, a bit breathlessly.

The cabby gave him a quick, sharp glance in the rearview screen, swung the creaky '44 Mercedes around on a forward wheel, and started west. In that glance Sibert compared the man's features with the picture in the rear seat's holographic projection. For whatever assurance it brought, they matched.

When he dismissed the taxi, he waited until it rolled out of sight before he turned north. The street was deserted; the sky was clear. He walked the five blocks briskly, feeling a sick excitement grow as the apartment buildings of Quality Towers grew tall in front of him. He couldn't see the Y where the Kansas River flowed into the Missouri. Smoke from the industrialized Bottoms veiled the valley.

In the early days of the city, the bluff of Quality Hill had been a neighborhood of fine homes, but it had made the cycle of birth and death twice. As the city had grown out, the homes here had degenerated into slums. They had been razed to provide space for Quality Towers, but fifty years of neglect and declining revenues and irresponsible tenants had done their work. It was time to begin again, but there would be no new beginning. A wave of smog drifted up over the bluff and sent Sibert into a fit of coughing.

Money was leaving the city. Those who could afford it were seeking a cleaner, healthier air and the better life in
the suburbs, leaving the city to those who could not escape. They could die together.

Sibert turned in the doorway and looked back the way he had come. There was no one behind him, no one visible for blocks. His eyes lifted to the hill rising beyond the trafficway. The only new construction in all the city was there; it had been that way for years.

Hospital Hill was becoming a great complex. In the midst of the general decay, it was shiny and new. It reached out and out to engulf the gray slums and convert them into fine, bright magnesium-and-glass walls, markets of health and life.

It would never stop until all the city was hospital. Life was all. Without it, everything was meaningless. The people would never stint medicine and the hospitals, no matter what else was lost. And yet, in spite of the money contributed and the great advances of the science of health and life in the last century, it was becoming increasingly more expensive to stay as healthy as a man thought he ought to be.