The Immortalist (12 page)

“But isn't it right now that we're in danger of losing our objectivity? We want the miracle to succeed. We want all the wonderful things it promises. And, being only human, we're hardwired to overlook anything that might be wrong with it.”

Gifford threw his fork onto his china plate with a clang. “And what would that be, Cricket?”

“MHC-1, for one thing. Or Hank's idea of redundant targeting. Maybe something no one's thought of yet. All I know is that this Lottery on Friday—it's risky.”

“Let me assure you, I've taken every possible precaution. The FDA and the NIH went over this project with a fine-tooth comb. We've carried out every test that anyone has ever suggested. Twice. The Methuselah Vector is absolutely safe. There is no possibility whatever of harm from it.”

Hostile looks greeted Cricket around the table. She strove to keep calm. “The tests you performed—they were all done in the laboratory, under controlled conditions. But now you're proposing to release the Methuselah Vector into an uncontrolled, messy environment—the real world. Nature has a way of coming up with unexpected variables—‘unknown unknowns,' as someone once put it. Exactly the kind of random interactions your laboratory tests were designed to avoid.”

“Caution can be irrational, too,” snapped Gifford. “With that attitude, the invention of fire would still be in Study Committee.”

There was a round of chuckles. Gifford, however, had not been joking. He glared at Cricket, who stood clenching the tablecloth, fighting the urge to dress him down. Then someone's hand touched Cricket's shoulder. Freiberg gently pushed her back down into her seat, even as he rose. For a moment he worked his mouth silently, planting his broad knuckles on the table. “Ridicule is no answer, gentlemen,” he finally said. “I second the concerns of Dr. Rensselaer-Wright. In fact, I will go further. I have heard the word
immortality
bandied across this table. Each repetition gives me a shudder. It's not enough that God should be dead. Man must now make himself God in His place. The Greeks had a name for that—
hubris
.”

Freiberg's German accent crept out as he pitched his voice higher and more melodramatically. “Have you listened to yourselves? Living forever isn't enough for you. You're remaking the world—deciding who shall live and who shall die; who shall rule; who shall have the privilege to fuck; who must live out eternity as a genetic dead end. This, I warn you, is not your place. You are reaching for sacred fire. Take care that you do not get burned.”

The room fell into a hush, and all eyes turned to Gifford, who sat at the far end of the table, nostrils flaring, tapping his toe against a table leg. No one would have been surprised to see him hurl a thunderbolt. Even Freiberg went a little pale as Gifford slowly stood up, leveling with him, eye to eye.

Out on the landing, the string quartet was playing Haydn.

Dishes clattered far off in the kitchen.

The governor of California gave a muffled cough.

Then, just as a blowup seemed inescapable, there was a thwack of flesh against the table and an earsplitting
“Ouch!”

Heads jerked toward Jack Niedermann. He sat smirking, then flicked his hand and blew on his fingertips as if they had been stung by fire. “What a close call!” he exclaimed. “Hubris! Greek tragedy! I guess the next thing is we'll all be chained to rocks and have our livers pecked out by a flock of large, ill-mannered birds.”

The room erupted in laughter. Even Freiberg chuckled as he sank back into his seat. “Apologies to Hesiod,” he said with a ruffled smile.

But Cricket did not laugh. Her concerns had been dismissed, not answered.
Let it go,
she told herself.
It's not your responsibility.
Focus on Emmy.

“Ah, here comes Mr. Thieu,” exclaimed Gifford. “For those of you partial to dessert, he brings . . . what is it?”

“Oeufs á la neige,”
announced Mr. Thieu.

Cricket felt a brush against her shoulder. A waiter removed her half-eaten salmon and replaced it with a small dish containing a dab of meringue floating on caramel sauce. A dish was also set down at Yolanda's place, although her chair was still empty.

“Excuse me,” said Cricket to the waiter, “have you seen the woman who sat next to me? The woman in the red dress?”

The waiter stopped and thought. “
Ido a casa
. Home.”

“She went home? Really? You saw her?”

“Yes.” He looked indecisively at the dish he had set down for Yolanda.
“Dejarlo?”

“No. Take it. Take mine, too.”

Yolanda gone home.
Without a word.
Cricket herself had no appetite left. All she wanted was to clear the hell out of here. But she was troubled by the empty seat beside her. What did Yolanda say she had? A headache? A cold? That wouldn't have made her leave so abruptly. Then, too, there was that rash around her mouth—tiny, clear bubbles, like a cold sore. A number of things could have caused that. Chicken pox. Common herpes. Lupus. Impetigo.

She debated calling up Yolanda to check on her. But what was her number? Emmy often babysat her kids, so Hank had to have it. Cricket was just about to steal out to the foyer to call him when she felt a hand on her shoulder.

It was Gifford. “Come with me, Cricket,” he said, an earnest look in his eyes. “There's something I need to show you.”

Nine

CRICKET NERVOUSLY RAN
HER FINGERS UP
and down Hannibal's neck as the motor of the golf cart whirred to a stop. They were outside a nearly windowless brick and concrete building that occupied a small plaza cut into an ivy-covered hillside. It was already dark, and in the dim orange lighting of the small parking area, she could barely read the brass placard marked
ADVANCED VIROLOGY RESEARCH
.

“This is what I wanted you to see,” said Gifford, swelling his chest.

She felt like a high school sophomore being driven to lovers' lane for the first time. Gifford had offered little explanation for having stolen her away from the banquet, deflecting all her questions with an enigmatic, almost mischievous smile. She wondered if he was angry at the way she had stood up to him at dinner.

Now Gifford, still in his dinner jacket and white tie, got out, walked around the front of the cart, and offered his hand. Arm in arm, they walked to the steel outer door of the building, where Gifford scanned his ID badge and paused for a green LED light. The door clicked open onto a narrow passageway, presided over by a blue-uniformed guard behind a window.

“Good evening, Dr. Gifford,” said the guard, turning down the volume of the baseball game on his monitor.

“Good evening, Sam. Quiet night?”

“Like a tomb.” The guard paused. “You know we ain't open yet.”

Cricket felt Hannibal brush past her leg. “Should the dog be in here?”

“It's okay.” Gifford stopped to give Hannibal a vigorous rub behind the ears. “We won't be going into any of the restricted areas.”

Ahead it was dark. When Gifford flicked the light switch, Cricket was dazzled by the glare from dozens of glassy surfaces, as if she had entered a carnival hall of mirrors. When her eyes adjusted, she saw that she was standing in a foyer shaped like an upside-down T. Ahead was a long corridor, flanked by glass-walled rooms on either side. To her left, one of the short arms of the T ended in a green metal door with a porthole window and a sign that read:

RESTRICTED ENTRY

LEVEL 4 BIOSAFETY PRECAUTIONS REQUIRED

She gasped. “My God, Charles! You've built yourself a BSL-4 lab?”

“Mmm-hmm.” He grinned. “It meets the highest level of biosafety precautions in the world. Behind that door on the left are a gauntlet of air locks and decontamination showers. There's a main air lock, plus secondary air locks for each of the individual labs. Each lab is self-contained, with its own negative-pressure HEPA air-filtration system and liquid and solid waste disposals. All personnel will wear positive-pressure suits with their own life-support systems.”

The two walked slowly down the corridor. Cricket sucked her lower lip like a little girl on Christmas Eve. Four labs were on either side, each equipped with two laminar air-flow hoods, an ultra-high-speed centrifuge, a walk-in cold-storage area, and a radioactive glove box, as well as a standard panoply of high-pressure liquid chromatographs, thermal cyclers, freezers, incubators, and chemical reagents—all of it brand-new. The labs were separated from each other by glass partitions, making it possible to view the entire workspace from any point in the corridor—or, indeed, from inside any of the labs themselves.

“These walls are made of two separate sheets of eight-ply polycarbonate-and-glass laminate. They're airtight, acid resistant, bulletproof, and even earthquakeproof.” He pointed to a chrome control box, one affixed to a window in front of each lab. “This is an intercom system that's wired into the headsets of the biosafety-suit helmets to allow two-way communication with the workers inside.”

“What's that at the far end of the hall? It looks like an operating room.”

“That's the autopsy suite. It can handle postmortem dissections of anything from a mouse to a gorilla.” Gifford looked intensely into Cricket's eyes. “Well, what do you think?”

Surely, he didn't have to ask. It was the most gorgeous laboratory she had ever seen. Even the CDC had nothing to compare to it.

“Who paid for this?” she said with a hushed voice.

“Eden. Pure development money, no strings attached.”

“No Defense Department funding?”

“For germ warfare? No, not a cent. I wouldn't do that kind of work.”

Kudos to you
.
Daddy would have turned over in his grave.
“What's it for, then?”

Gifford's eyes lit up. “To reengineer viruses to fight cancer. Take a virus that infects the same organ where a cancer tumor grows, and reengineer it so it kills the cancer cells, but leaves the normal cells alone.”

Cricket chuckled. “The sheer perversity of it! Forcing viruses to save lives, instead of taking them.”

“Impressed?”

“I love it.”

“As well you should. It was your idea, Cricket. I got it from your paper on avian sarcoma.”

“Well . . .” Cricket could feel herself blush.
“That was years ago. I was just brainstorming. I didn't think anyone would take it seriously.”

Gifford grinned. “We'll have to try out hundreds of viruses and then tweak their genetic design. Of course, all of those viruses, by definition, will be capable of causing disease or even death. Hence, the need for Level Four precautions.”

“You're talking about a big, big project.”

“Yes, I am. And it's yours. Take it.”

Cricket was sure she had misunderstood him. “Excuse me?”

“The project. The BSL-4 lab. All yours.”

“Mine? Are you crazy?”

“Read my project proposal. If you think it's sound, take it and run with it. If not, tear it up and do it your own way. There's practically unlimited funding for anything you want.”

“Charles, I'm flying out of here first thing in the morning.”

“Don't.” Gifford's eyes brightened with excitement. “Stay, Cricket. Or, to put it better—come home.”

“I—I . . . This is hugely generous, but . . . I don't have it in me anymore, Charles.” Even the thought of all that responsibility made her break out in a sweat. “I'm in a different place now. I just want to take Emmy home and see if I still remember how to be a mother.”

“Be a mother for her here. Look, I don't blame you for not being tempted by my offer of this one lab. Take it all, then. The whole institute. I'll give you the directorship of Acadia Springs. Your father's old job. Take it, Cricket.”

She was stunned. Could she possibly have heard him right?

“You'd be perfect for it. You've got more than brains. You've got will and imagination. More even than your father had, God rest his soul.”

“Just like that? All Acadia Springs?”

“Yes, Cricket. Don't be so shocked. The Methuselah Vector needs me now. I need to concentrate on that.”

“Why? What's left? Clinical trials? Marketing? Surely Eden can manage that.”

“Eden's just a merchant. The Methuselah Vector is no ordinary commodity. It's a force that will change how all humanity lives. The release has got to be done right. Fairly. For everyone. Rich and poor alike. That means lowering the costs. I'm going to apply the same ingenuity that created the Vector to the problem of making it affordable. Right now it costs two hundred thousand dollars to make one dose. I want to bring that down to a few dollars—or even pennies.”

Cricket felt bowled over. “Charles . . . I . . . n-need to think about this. If you're serious.”