The Immortality Factor (53 page)

So I didn't resign.

I was in Arthur's office when they made the decision to use Max for experiments. He called me in specifically and sat me at his round conference table right beside him. Zack O'Neill, Darrell Walters, and Vince Andriotti were there.

“I've asked Pat to sit in on this,” Arthur explained to them, “because what we're about to decide will have vast public relations implications, one way or the other.”

“Cassie should be here,” Darrell Walters said.

Arthur's face clouded slightly. “Phyllis has tried to reach Cassie by phone and e-mail. She's not answering. Fax, too, no answer.”

Vince Andriotti shook his jowly head. “Maybe it's better if she's not involved in this. She's too damned emotional about Max. We gotta make a rational decision here.”

“I don't want to use him,” Zack O'Neill blurted. That surprised me, and the other men around the table looked shocked, too.

“This is no time for reverse psychology,” Andriotti growled.

But Arthur knew better. “You've become attached to Max, too. Just like Cassie.”

Looking unhappy, Zack admitted, “Yeah. Kind of.”

“Saints preserve us,” Walters muttered.

“I'd say we should wait until we get more chimps,” Zack explained, “but there's a danger if we wait.”

“Competition,” said Arthur grimly. “I know.”

“We've gone as far with the macaques and the minihogs as we can,” Zack said. “It'd be a waste of time and effort to keep on with them. We know what we've got to know. Now we have to move on to chimps.”

“Now, wait,” said Walters. “We're still a
long
way from understanding how regentide is working at the molecular level. You can see the gross results, sure, but we don't know beans about what's really going on inside the cells.”

“That doesn't matter,” Arthur said.

“It doesn't?” Walters looked startled. “You mean you don't care if we just stumble along without a firm understanding of how these molecules interact with one another?”

Andriotti chimed in, “If we had a valid model of the molecular chemistry, maybe we could see why the tumors are growing and figure out how to prevent that.”

But Arthur shook his head. “I don't want to get bogged down in heavy detail work. That's for universities.”

“But—”

“I want to get results,” Arthur insisted. “Let the academics figure out the details.”

Walters shook his head disbelievingly.

“I want to be able to move into human trials as soon as possible.”

“That means experiments on chimps,” Zack said.

“One chimp,” Arthur said.

“Max,” said Zack.

Andriotti tilted his chair back and crossed his beefy arms over his chest. “Okay, then, who's running this lab, Arthur? You or Cassie?”

Arthur didn't dignify that with an answer. Instead he asked O'Neill, “Is the surgical team ready?”

Zack nodded. “I'd been thinking about just lopping off a finger, but the head surgeon says it'll be a much better test if we take the whole arm.”

“That makes sense,” Arthur said.

They all fell silent.

I heard myself ask, “When is Cassie due to return here?”

“She's got at least another month's worth of work in Mexico,” Walters replied.

“But she could pop up here anytime she wants to,” Andriotti added.

“Especially if she knows Max is going under the knife.”

Arthur asked, “What about doing more than the arm?”

“What?”

He did not look happy, but he had made up his mind. “Do we want to do any of the internal organs? At the same time?”

“No,” Zack said firmly.

“Might make sense to do a kidney,” Walters mused. “While you've got the chimp on the table.”

“No,” Zack repeated. “I don't want Max opened up. The arm will be trauma enough.”

But Arthur said, “In for a penny, in for a pound. What else can we do with Max?”

No one spoke for a long, long moment.

Then, very hesitantly, Zack said, “The head surgeon suggested . . .” He stopped in midsentence and swallowed hard. “She suggested that we take one of Max's eyes.”

“One of his eyes!” Andriotti looked plainly disgusted.

Walters leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling.

But Arthur thought about it for a moment, then asked calmly, “What do you think, Zack?”

“I think I'm too emotionally close to the damned chimp to give a reasoned answer.”

Walters ran a hand across his lantern jaw. “The eye is connected directly to the brain, of course.”

“It's part of the brain,” said Andriotti, “an extension of it.”

“It'd make a helluva test,” Walters admitted. “If you could regrow an eyeball.”

“That's true,” Arthur said.

“But it's kind of ghoulish,” Walters said. “Gives me the willies.”

“I don't want to do that to Max,” Zack said. “But still—”

“But still he's the only chimp we've got,” Arthur finished for him.

“If this leaks out to the media before the eye grows back,” I said, “we'll have animal-rights commandos trying to blow up the whole laboratory.”

“With us in it,” said Andriotti.

“Maybe they'd be right,” Walters muttered.

Again the table fell silent. All eyes turned to Arthur. It was his decision to make.

“All right, dammit,” he snapped. “We use Max as soon as the surgical team is ready. Before the week is out. Take the arm, but not the one he uses for sign language.”

“And the eye?” Zack whispered.

“Yes, the eye, too,” Arthur said with an exasperated sigh. “What the hell.”

Then he turned to me. “But not a word of this goes beyond the walls of this building. Understand that? This operation has got to be so secret it'll make the CIA look like a network news broadcast.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I
felt like a vampire. I wasn't as close to Max emotionally as Zack had become, and nowhere near as wrapped up in the chimp as Cassie. But still it felt—well, evil, almost, to be chopping off one of his arms and taking an eye, as well. What did Darrell call it? Ghoulish.

But what choice did I have? If we had other chimps, if we could have kept our work secret, then I could have gone slower, been more careful, kept my promise to Cassie to protect Max. But I wasn't going to let them stop me: not the competition, not the crazies like Ransom and Simmonds, not the government bureaucrats who'd smother us in red tape the instant we slowed our pace. Everything I've really wanted in life has been taken away from me. Columbia. Julia. Momma. Any chance of real recognition. Even Jesse had turned away from me.

Well, they weren't going to snatch this prize from my fingers. As long as I'm running the show we'll move as fast and as hard as we can, I decided. And damn the torpedoes.

I knew that Johnston was talking to at least two of the biggest pharmaceutical
firms in Europe. Nancy Dubois wouldn't give me the time of day, but Johnston himself told me that more than one European corporation was interested in a merger with Omnitech.

“That could be our salvation, Arthur,” the CEO told me. Then he added, “But don't breathe a word of it outside this office, understand me?”

“Are the Japanese also interested?” I asked as casually as I could manage.

Johnston's brows popped up. “The Japs? I haven't talked to Nakata in weeks.”

Which was an evasion, not an answer. I worried about that as I drove from corporate headquarters back to the lab. Is Johnston talking seriously to the Japanese? If he is, what conditions are they putting on a possible merger? Where does the lab fit in?

The only course I could see was to plow ahead. I still believed that the best thing we could do was to move forward with the regeneration work as fast as we could. That would make the lab too valuable to sell off. But would it make us so attractive that some overseas firm would buy the entire corporation?

We kept all the preparations for Max's surgery top secret. We swore the surgical team to secrecy, even made them sign confidentiality statements. Not that there was anything we could really do to them if they talked. This wasn't the government and they were consultants, not employees. About the worst we could threaten was to splash their names around the profession as unreliable.

Pat got a stroke of genius in that regard. She suggested sending the whole team off on a month's vacation after the operation on Max, just to get them away from the media.

“The Caribbean, Europe, anyplace where they won't be tempted to talk to reporters,” she said.

“How about Australia?” I suggested.

“Or Tibet?”

We gave them their choices. I'm sure they knew the motivation behind our generosity but they went for it anyway. The chief of the surgery team opted for a month traveling through Italy. Most of the others picked the Caribbean, although one of the nurses wanted to visit her family in Taiwan. Fine by me. Sid Lowenstein got red in the face when I told him about it, but even he saw the wisdom of the plan once I explained it to him.

The day came. The team's anesthesiologist had mixed a powerful sedative into Max's evening meal. The chimp was sleeping like a baby when we went to his cage and started strapping him down and prepping him for surgery.

I went with them, every step of the way. This was my responsibility and I wasn't about to duck away from the messy part of it. I suppose Jesse would have said it's part of my god complex. As long as I'm there watching nothing will go wrong.

It was incredibly messy. Giving a sleeping chimp an enema is not easy, and
the results are foul and stinking beyond belief. Then came the needles and the catheters. By the time they wheeled Max into our little surgical lab he was wired up like an astronaut. And firmly strapped to the table. The display screens off to one side of the room showed his pulse and respiration rates, blood pressure, brain wave patterns, everything. They beeped and hummed softly. The room was cold, tiled walls and floor, big ring of high-intensity lights over the surgical table. It smelled of antiseptics and strange, other odors. I wondered if we were catching whiffs of the anesthesiologist's gases from the metal cylinders up by the head of the table.

We were all dressed in hospital greens, complete with masks and hairnets and disposable booties over our shoes. Very antiseptic. They had put a breathing mask over Max's muzzle. I noticed that it was held tightly in place with leather straps. They were taking no chances on the chimp waking up and using his teeth. I thought it didn't show much confidence on the anesthesiologist's part.

Darrell stood beside me through the whole long, gruesome procedure. At the last minute Zack begged off. He looked almost as green as the surgical gowns. Sick with fear and guilt.

The chief surgeon was a little round butterball of a woman with the tiniest hands I had ever seen on an adult. She handled the laser scalpel without a flaw. Max's left arm came off just above the elbow, the laser beam cauterizing as it cut so there was relatively little blood. The whole procedure took less than ten minutes, once she started cutting. But the smell of burnt meat and hair made me queasy.

The eye was different, more delicate. She had to use knives for that. I had to look away. I was getting sick to my stomach from the smell and the blood.

I heard Max whimper.

“Watch it!” one of the assistant surgeons snapped.

I turned back and saw that Max was stirring slightly. The monitor displays were getting jagged instead of showing smooth curves and their audio signals whined to higher pitches. The anesthesiologist twirled knobs on his control console and Max calmed down. So did the displays. The chief surgeon glanced at the anesthesiologist. I could only see her eyes above the mask, but she radiated displeasure.

At last the eye came free. An assistant took it tenderly in her gloved fingers and deposited it in a freezer box. If the regeneration didn't work we would attempt to replace Max's original eye. I felt bile burning in my throat.

Then it was patching, suturing, bandaging, while I fought the urge to throw up. The homestretch. I looked up at the clock on the cold tile wall and realized with some surprise that we'd only been in there for a little more than two hours.

It was over. The chief surgeon peeled off her mask and hat. Her hair was
matted down and glistening with perspiration. The tension dissolved. Everyone unmasked, relaxed, stretched tightened backs, and walked around a bit on stiff legs. The surgical team began to congratulate one another.

I looked down at Max, still strapped to the table and muzzled with the breathing mask. His left arm was only a bandaged stump now. More bandages covered the empty socket where his right eye used to be.

His other eye opened.

I felt a jolt, whether it was fear or surprise or guilt, I don't know. But in that instant I saw in Max's one remaining eye all the pain and shock and terror that a human being would have shown. I'm sure I was projecting my own emotions, yet I'll never forget the sight of that one eye going suddenly wide and then blinking and filling with tears. I knew, in that one startling moment, how I would have felt if I'd awakened one fine morning and found that my arm had been amputated and an eye put out.

Without a word I turned and walked out of the surgical lab as calmly as I could. Once outside I almost ran to the men's room and locked myself in a stall. I didn't want any of my people to see me vomiting.

 

I
sent a long e-mail to Cassie and then for good measure faxed the same letter to her, explaining as gently as possible what we had done to Max and trying to make it clear to her that we had no viable alternative. I thought that putting it all on paper would be easier—for both of us—than breaking the news on the telephone.