The Immortals (11 page)

Pearce smiled ruefully. “The trick of being senior is to outlast everybody else. I used to be a young geriatrician. Now I'm a subject for my own specialty.”

“That's why it's so difficult to tell you what I've got to say.” Color rose in her cheeks. “You're a legend. You've done so much for this hospital, both in the classroom and the hospital.”

Pearce waited, although it was clear what she had on her mind. He wasn't going to make it any easier.

She looked embarrassed. “The funds for your research have not been renewed.”

“The National Research Institute has decided to discontinue its funding?”

She nodded. “What is the National Research Institute, by the way? It's new to me.”

“In spite of the ‘National' in its name, it is a private philanthropy that sponsors research into the causes and treatments for aging. I don't know much more than that. They came to me, many years ago, and my only contact with them has been my annual report and request for renewal. The Institute has always seemed eager to receive the report, and up to now to renew the grant.”

“No longer, apparently. We received the termination letter today.”

Pearce looked thoughtful. “And the last experiment ended in failure yesterday. That's odd.”

“What's odd?”

“The coincidence. It's been my experience that most coincidences are not coincidences at all.”

“And most so-called conspiracies turn out to be coincidences,” she said.

Pearce laughed. “True, and no doubt this is one of them.”

“In any case, the termination came at the customary time, in response to our application.”

“What reason did they give?”

“No reason. They just didn't renew. Maybe you can get results in the few months that are left on the grant. Or maybe you can persuade the Institute to renew.”

Pearce smiled. “After fifty years? Well, I can understand their impatience. Thanks, anyway, Vice Chancellor.”

“Please call me Julia,” she said. “And you forgot a third basic dream of humanity.”

“And what is that?”

“Love,” she said and color rose in her cheeks. She colored beautifully. It was a trait that might yet interfere with her administrative duties.

“The alchemists left that to the magicians,” Pearce said. “Maybe because it wasn't basic. Or maybe they thought they could buy love with unlimited wealth.”

“Or the promise of immortality,” she added.

He got up to leave, but she stopped him at the door.

“Fifty years,” she said. “You must be—”

“Ninety,” he said.

“You don't look more than fifty,” she said. “If I didn't know better, I might suspect that you have found the elixir and kept it to yourself.”

“Good genes,” he said, “and the power of positive thinking.”

And then, as the solid wooden door closed behind him, he stood in the hall, with its special hospital odor that spoke to him of the practice of medicine more than the stethoscope and the scalpel themselves, and wondered what he was going to do now.

*  *  *

He was late for his hospital rounds, but the summons from Julia Hudson had been urgent. Now he wondered about the hurry to inform him of termination and why it had come through the executive vice chancellor, in person, rather than through customary channels. Maybe, after all these years, the regents were trying to get him to resign, which might explain why Hudson hadn't offered to finance his research out of the Center's own funds. Or maybe Hudson had wanted to break the bad news in person, to soften the blow, and he was being paranoid again.

But that was soon driven from his mind by the patients waiting for him in room after room of the hospital wing devoted to geriatrics. As the population had aged, the wing had grown until now it occupied an area as large as that of the next two specialties combined.

His group of senior medical students had preceded him, but his resident physician and research assistant,
Tom Barnett, was perfectly capable of supervising them and of replacing him, as, Pearce was sure, Barnett hoped someday to do. One problem with longevity, particularly longevity in career or profession, was the difficulty of the young in getting on: The road ahead was clogged with slow or stalled vehicles. Death was evolution's way of improving the species, and if death is delayed, the basic processes of life are frustrated.

As one of the roadblocks on the highway of progress, Pearce felt a bit ashamed of the way he clung to his practice and his research. But he had never married, his work gave meaning to life, and he didn't feel ninety years old. In fact, inside he felt about the same age as when he had stared down at a rejuvenated Leroy Weaver. He was as good as any physician on the staff, he knew—indeed, with the accumulated clinical experience of more than fifty years, he felt he was a good deal better. And his skills in the laboratory were superior to what they had been when he was forty and had been driven there by the miracle of Marshall Cartwright.

Now as he went from room to room and bed to bed, taking a hand here, feeling a brow there, checking a chart, speaking a cheerful greeting, asking an interested question by name, saying goodbye with feeling, he noted the ages of his patients. There were fewer sixty- or seventy-year-olds among them than there once had been when he was first starting his practice. Now most were in their eighties or nineties and a number of them into their hundreds.

People were living longer, but the diseases and systemic
failures they avoided in earlier life left them prey to the degenerative diseases and cancers of old age. You avoid heart failure, and you live long enough to have a cancer metastasize from your prostate; you keep your kidneys and liver working properly, and your brain finally succumbs to stroke or Alzheimer's disease. And the costs of treating the diseases of old age were far greater than the quick and easy deaths of youth or middle years. Even if one included the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome related diseases. Small wonder the social costs of medical care had soared until today only those were treated who could afford to pay, and the rest were left to their traditional resources: nostrums and faith healers and the few clinics that hospitals such as this one kept open to the public. Mostly to the old to use as clinical material for finding cures to the diseases of old age. Someday, Pearce thought, the few who could afford the best of care would become totally dependent upon it, and medicine would turn for its source of vaccines and antibodies and even antibiotics to those who had been denied the benefits of modern medicine.

Pearce could foresee a time when medicine would become a kind of contemporary religion where the common people came to worship, and physicians, indistinguishable from witch doctors shaking their rattles over their patients to drive out demons, would become the priests of a new mythology. Their altar would be an operating table, and their communion, a vitamin tablet and an oral antibiotic.

Pearce caught up with his group of students before
the end of rounds. The group had grown larger over the years, to match the growth in the geriatrics wing. Geriatrics was a growth industry, and medical students alert to the latest trends invested their time and hopes in an appropriate specialty. Pearce wondered if it had been different when he had made his own choice so many years before, but it was so long ago that his younger self was like a stranger and he could not remember.

He waited at the back of the group, unnoticed, while Barnett had each of them, in turn, prod the patient, poor Mr. Sam Aikens with his chronic nephritis, and jabbed at the physicians-to-be with hard questions, as if trying to trick them into a faulty answer that would allow him to display his erudition and wit, and demonstrate to everyone the necessity of study and of being right. It was one way of teaching, and he had been subjected to that in his medical school days, as well as the three-days-on and three-days-off ordeal of residency, but it wasn't his way. A ready answer was not always a right answer, and being quick was often inferior to being thorough.

Mr. Aikens was a charity case. Barnett would have treated a paying customer more gently.

Barnett was quick, but his quickness had produced no better results in the elixir synthesis than Pearce's thoroughness. Of course, he thought ruefully, there is little discrimination between failures.

“I'll take over, Doctor Barnett,” he said, making his way to the front of the group. He felt the students' relief and sensed the reluctance with which Barnett surrendered his place. He would have to do something for Barnett, he told
himself, as he told the students about Mr. Aikens and his life and his family situation, and asked the patient to describe his symptoms. He asked each of them, in turn, to hold Mr. Aikens's wrist and feel his pulse, a function measured better by instruments and recorded on a panel behind the patient's bed, along with other vital signs. And he asked them to feel Mr. Aikens's back gently, to sense his pain, and to try to get inside Mr. Aikens's illness.

“All these devices,” he said, sweeping his hand around the room, “are wonderful, but they cannot replace the physician's inner sense and a caring—one might almost say, a curing—touch.”

The students reacted differently as they were dismissed for the day, some of them relieved to discover that the practice of medicine had not yet been mechanized, others, uneasy in human relationships, resentful that this old doctor was asking them to do more than memorize the names of the body parts and the various ailments to which they were prone. But Barnett was gone before Pearce could tell him about the outcome of the grant application. When he got back to his office, he opened the piece of paper that Mr. Aikens had slipped into his hand when Pearce had held it.

“I need you,” the note read. “Come to 3416 East 10th tonight and ask for Marilyn. Destroy this note. We're both in danger.”

*  *  *

The address was in an area that once had been middle class but had been sliding down the income slope ever since. The neighborhood was poor, but the people within
it were not yet hopeless. It lay outside the inner city, but the inner city was metastasizing toward it, and Pearce had been forced to cross oncological arms after leaving the comparative safety of the interstate. He had kept the bulletproof windows of his armored car rolled up and a prayer on his lips to Hephaestus, the god of craftsmen, that his engine had been well and truly made.

The house stood among narrow, two-story residences on narrow lots. Once, no doubt, they had been single-family homes, but now, Pearce suspected, they were carved up into single rooms for multiple families. The computer map had got him this far, but Pearce could not have deduced which house was his destination had he not been able to determine from an old street sign that this was Tenth Street and from an intact house number that he was in the 3400 block. The house just to the west had a
4
and a
1
hanging awry beside it from the edge of the front porch roof, and the one in front of Pearce, a
6.
Behind it, in the dusk, loomed the blank wall of a structure built of concrete blocks, either a small factory or a large garage. Beside the house was a lot piled with old iron pipes and littered with rusting construction equipment, and the remains of a small drilling derrick.

What once had been a small front yard had been paved for parking, but the only other vehicle was a rusted hulk from which the wheels had been removed. Pearce would have preferred to pull his car around to the back and out of sight, but the lot was too narrow for a driveway and he had to trust his vehicle to luck and its own defenses.

He stepped out cautiously, his black bag in his hand, wondering why he was responding to this anonymous cry for help. It might well be a trap. Physicians had been abducted before by gangs desperate for medical treatment, or for their instruments and drugs. But seldom had a plan been laid to lure a physician into danger, and he did not think Aikens would join any such attempt.

He moved carefully up squeaking wooden stairs, shining a light onto a porch with boards missing like a ghetto-dweller's teeth. The front door was unlocked, and when Pearce pushed it open, he noticed that the frame had been splintered, not once but many times, until, no doubt, the residents had surrendered to the inevitable.

The hall was dark. Above, Pearce's light revealed an empty socket; if a bulb had been available, and the electricity had not been cut off long ago, it would have been stolen. Stairs led up from the hall to a landing and a door and then turned to ascend toward a mysterious second floor. To his right was an archway, perhaps to the building's one-time living room, but the arch had been closed by plywood covered with graffiti. The plywood had been painted and repainted in a futile effort to maintain a minimal level of self-respect, but the graffiti showed through like palimpsests of earlier civilizations.

In the middle of the plywood was a hinged panel that served as a door. No name or number on it—anyone who had reason to be there knew who lived within, and anyone else had no good reason to be there. Except himself, he thought, and knocked.

“Come in,” a woman's voice said.

He pushed open the panel to find himself blinded by a flashlight. He had a feeling there was a weapon behind it. “Marilyn?” he asked.

The light went out. “You're Doctor Pearce?”

“Yes.” Several moments passed before his eyesight returned.

“I'm Marilyn Van Cleve, and I need your help.”

He could see now. An oil lamp on an old card table illuminated a woman seated beside it in a large, shabby recliner. She had a flashlight in her lap and an old-fashioned revolver on the table beside the lamp. She was an attractive woman with brown hair cut short and large brown eyes that looked at him warily but unafraid. Her most attractive feature, however, was her health; in the midst of a sea of sickness, she glowed with a well being that made her seem lit from within.