The Immortality Factor (34 page)

But I saw tears in his eyes. “There's not a damned thing I can do for most of them. Postpone the inevitable, that's about it. Give them another few years of life. Another few years of pain. It gets pretty hopeless.”

He
was
a great man, I knew. But he didn't know it, and neither did the rest of the world. I could change that.

It was fully dark outside.

“I'll have to get a taxi,” I said as we walked slowly down the hospital steps. An ambulance was coming in, we could hear its siren echoing off the buildings down the street.

“Tough to find a cab up here after dark,” Jesse said. “I'll drive you to your place.”

“Oh, no, it's much too far. Practically at JFK.”

“I don't mind,” he said.

“You're much too tired for that long a drive.” He did look tired, but I wondered if I was trying to convince him of it or myself.

We were walking under the bright anticrime lamps back to the guarded parking lot for hospital staff. The uniformed security guard in the shack nodded to Jesse, who gave him a sloppy salute and a grin.

“He was a Marine in Kuwait,” Jesse told me once we were out of earshot. “Now he's a sedentary overweight middle-aged rent-a-cop with a beer belly, waiting for his first heart attack.”

He sounded strangely bitter. Or perhaps frustrated, as if he should be able to do something about the guard.

“Okay,” he said, “I'll drive you downtown and you can pick up a taxi there.”

“Why don't you drive me to your flat?”

The words just popped out of my mouth. I felt just as stunned as Jesse looked.

He said, “Huh?”

“Your apartment,” I said. “It's not far from here, is it?” I felt rather like a ventriloquist's dummy, with someone putting the words in my mouth. But the ventriloquist was me, myself, my deepest desires.

“No, it's not far,” Jesse said slowly, hesitantly. “Just ten minutes or so.”

“You have a sofa, don't you? I could sleep there.”

But I didn't sleep on the sofa, of course. Once Jesse closed his apartment door behind us it was as if the world speeded up and went into overdrive. One instant he was reaching for my hand and a blink later we were tossing around in his bed like a pair of tigers mating and I didn't think about Arthur at all. Not until morning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
here were fewer news reporters out in the corridor when the hearing recessed for lunch than there had been the first day, Arthur saw. Most of them clustered around Jesse, who had been giving testimony all morning.

A couple of them approached Arthur but he brushed them off, saying, “I won't have anything more to give you until I start cross-examining the opposing witnesses.”

They seemed to accept that, grudgingly, and went back to the group poking their microphones at Jesse. I'll have to cross-examine him, Arthur told himself. That's going to be sweet.

He saw Pat Hayward waiting for an elevator.

“Going to lunch?” Arthur asked.

“Yes. There are several very nice places within a couple minutes' walk.”

“The congressmen and senators have all the conveniences, don't they?” Arthur said as the elevator doors slid open.

They rode down to the ground floor and left the building by a side door. As they crossed Independence Avenue they saw a gaggle of demonstrators
slowly trudging their picket lines out by the Capitol steps. Their placards seemed to be drooping in the hot sun.

“Not as many as yesterday,” Arthur said.

“I don't see any of the wheelchair contingent,” said Pat.

Arthur sighed. “We're yesterday's news. No riots today.”

With a laugh, Pat said, “We could start one, if you like. Just walk over to those religious zanies and let them see who you are.”

Laughing back ruefully, Arthur said, “I'd much rather have a nice, quiet lunch with you.”

“Me, too,” said Pat.

When the hearing reconvened Arthur saw that an extra man was sitting at the desks in the front of the room. He looked like an aging cowboy, a face made of rawhide. Arthur took his seat on the front bench, wondering who this stranger was. He wanted to ask Pat, but she was back at her seat in the rear of the chamber.

Graves cleared his throat and the crowd quieted down.

“We would like to welcome Senator Kindelberger to this hearing,” said the chief judge. “I would like to express my personal gratification that the senator recognizes the importance of these proceedings.”

Kindelberger smiled toothily and hunched over the microphone in front of him. “I just want to say that I am here as an interested observer. The results of this trial will undoubtedly have a very deep and long-lasting effect on the American people and I firmly believe that it is important for the Senate to understand what is at stake here.”

“It certainly is,” said Graves. “Thank you, Senator.”

“You're entirely welcome, sir.”

Jesse was back in the witness chair, Rosen was at his seat, riffling through pages of notes. The TV cameras were still watching, although Arthur thought they were aimed now at Senator Kindelberger rather than the examiner or the judges.

“If I may recapitulate this morning's testimony,” Rosen began, “Dr. Marshak, you told this court that although you helped to invent the concept of regenerating organs, you did not take part in any of the work done at Omnitech Laboratory.”

“That's Grenford Laboratory,” Jesse said. “It's a division of Omnitech Corporation.”

Rosen bobbed his head up and down. “Yes, yes, Grenford Lab. Excuse me.”

Jesse leaned back in his chair. Arthur looked past him, at the jury of their peers, a dozen of the nation's top scientists. So far they've heard precious little about science, Arthur said to himself.

“Now, then, Dr. Marshak,” said the examiner, “we have heard Dr. Arthur Marshak, your brother, testify that, in his opinion, this work in organ
regeneration is ready for human trials. Yesterday he showed us the results of work done at Grenford Laboratory on various animal test subjects, including monkeys. Yet you say you are opposed to human trials. On what grounds?”

Arthur felt himself tensing, waiting for Jesse's answer.

“On the grounds that I do not believe that organ regeneration will work in human beings,” Jesse said, carefully enunciating each individual syllable.

Damn! Arthur said to himself. He's lying through his teeth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

W
hen Julia finally told Arby that she had fallen in love with me, Arby did what he always did: He turned cold as an iceberg and walked away from both of us. Didn't say a goddamned word. Just absolute frigid silence. Like he didn't know that we existed or didn't care.

He showed up at the wedding. Ma insisted on that. I wanted to bring Ma to the ceremony; I could have had an ambulance and a complete mobile life-support system for her, but Arby just pulled his big-brother act and flatly refused to allow her to be moved from the nursing home. Instead he arranged for a closed-circuit TV link to be fed into her bedroom; Ma watched Julia and me getting married on her TV set, live and in full color.

Arby sat in the front row, looking like a statue of ice. He didn't say a word to either one of us, didn't kiss the bride at the reception. When we returned from our three-day honeymoon at Niagara Falls (Julia had insisted on it) there was a Federal Express envelope waiting for us. Arby had started a trust for our children's education, the legal papers said, and funded it with a hundred thousand dollars.

Christ! What could I do? I phoned him a couple of times but I could never get past his secretary. So I wrote him a thank-you letter. Then we had to go off to Brazil for a few months and when we got back I found out that I had been named Humanitarian of the Year. So I invited Arby to the dinner at the Waldorf and Ma insisted that he had to attend, it would look terrible if he didn't. He came, but he wouldn't sit with us. Moved his place card to the other end of the head table.

Then that night—actually early the next morning—he phones me all hotted up over this idea of regenerating spinal neurons. He invites me to his lab for lunch. It goes fine and we're starting to heal the wound. Julia and I went to Eritrea for a couple of months and I phoned Arby from London the first day we got there. Everything seemed to be going along well. He even seemed genuinely pleased when I told him that Julia was pregnant. When we got back to New York we had him to dinner at our apartment.

Then Ma died and Julia lost the baby.

I had fought my way through a blizzard to get to Ma, damned near wrecked my car in the snow, but she had died before I could get there. Arby gave me that fish-eye look of his, like I should have been at her bedside at her last moments. As if I hadn't tried. I guess he was upset about her dying, but he took it out on me, like he usually does.

I had to stay over at the nursing home that night. Next morning I phoned Julia. She sounded a little strange to me; her voice was kind of shaky.

“You okay?” I asked her.

“Yes, I think so.” Before I could ask her what she meant by that she added, “I seem to be bleeding.”

Julia's anything but the panicky type. “A lot?” I asked.

“More than before.” She had been bleeding a bit ever since the pregnancy had begun.

“Hemorrhaging?” I asked.

“I don't think it's that bad,” she said. But there was that frightened little quaver in her voice.

“Stay in the apartment. Lie down and take it easy. I'll be there in an hour.”

“But the roads are still treacherous.” I heard real alarm in her voice now.

“I'll take it easy. Don't worry. I got here all right, I'll get back to you. Now go lie down.”

Arby had already left for his laboratory. I was glad that he hadn't been standing over my shoulder while I talked with Julia. He'd start pestering me with questions and blaming everything on me.

The sky was bright blue when I went outside. It must've stopped snowing soon after I had arrived, because the one plowed lane in the lot was covered with less than an inch of snow. So was my car. I didn't bother sweeping the snow off my Firebird or chipping the ice off the windshield. I just revved up
the engine and turned on the defroster and rear-window defogger. The engine heated up slowly, but in a few minutes I could push most of the crap off with the windshield wipers. Still couldn't see out the back too well, but another five minutes or so would take care of that.

The wheels spun on the ice underneath the snow. I hate that whirring sound they make. But I jockeyed the car back and forth until the tires found something to grab on to and then I shot out of the parking lot like a torpedo. Banged the goddamned fender against one of the posts at the covered front entrance to the nursing home; there was another patch of ice on their curving driveway. I didn't stop. The car wasn't badly dented, I figured, and I was in a hurry to get home.

Julia lay unconscious in a pool of blood on the bed when I got there.

It was a nightmare. Took forty fucking minutes to get an ambulance. I couldn't stop the hemorrhaging and I knew I was too rattled to drive. Besides, the damned Firebird probably didn't have enough gas to make it to the hospital. It had been reading empty the last ten minutes before I found a parking spot among the snowbanks along our street where somebody had shoveled his car out and gone to work.

The paramedics came pounding at the door at last and we bundled Julia off to the hospital. I put her in a private room and got the chief of obstetrics/gynecology by the scruff of the neck, just about, to come in and examine her.

It was a miscarriage. Nothing anybody could do about it. I didn't give a shit. Julia was the one I was worried about.

“She'll be all right,” the ob-gyn told me. “She's lost a lot of blood, though. She'll need—”

“Not from the bank,” I told him flatly. “I'll give her blood. I'm the same type as she is.”

I wasn't going to run any risk whatsoever of Julia getting tainted blood. I know they do all kinds of screening and there's practically no chance of an HIV carrier donating to the blood bank anymore. But that was my wife we were talking about and I wasn't going to take any chances.

“We're supposed to screen blood from donors, even family members,” she told me. Like I didn't already know.

“Consider it already screened,” I said. It'd take more than a week to schlepp the goddamned blood up to Syracuse and back for the screening procedure.

The ob/gyn hesitated, then caught the look in my eye. “It's on your responsibility,” she said.

“Damned right.”

“She'll need more than one donor can provide,” the ob/gyn said. “Is there anyone else in the family with the same blood type?”

That's how Arby found out about the miscarriage. I phoned him at his lab
and begged him to come down right away. For once in his life he didn't pester me with a million questions. Soon as he heard Julia needed blood he was on his way.

We both spent a pretty miserable day at the hospital, giving blood, drinking orange juice, hovering in the corridor outside Julia's room. Despite it all, I had to laugh at Arby. He was scared green of needles. I don't think he'd have given blood for me or Ma or anybody else in the world except Julia.

He hardly said a word to me all through those long hours of worrying. The doctors kept telling us that Julia would be fine; even the nurses said there was nothing to worry about except the stray chance of an infection. One of the staff psychologists looked in on her, then gave me her card and told me Julia and I both might want some counseling about the loss of the baby.