The Immortals (16 page)

Someone buzzed at the door for admission, and Pearce went to the intercom.

“It's me, Julia,” a voice said. “Are you all right?”

Pearce went into the airlock to admit her, hoping she was alone but knowing that it didn't matter: He could not exclude the world. She was alone, and she took hold of his arm in reassurance as she entered. “Sure,” he said.

“So much has happened.”

“My grant has been renewed,” Pearce said. “It seems the executive director of the National Research Institute has checked in as a patient.” Did he detect a flicker of awareness? “But I think it's time Tom Barnett moved on. He's capable enough to handle his own operation. Do you think you can find him another position?”

They had moved into the laboratory and stood in front of his experiment in apoptosis. “I'll do better than that,” Hudson said. “I'll recommend him to a friend in Chicago, who's looking for a senior geriatrician.”

“I'll need a new assistant,” Pearce said. “Would you like to apply?”

She looked at him as if he had made a declaration of love. “I'd have to give up what little free time I have, like reading and maybe some social obligations, but I can't think of anything I'd rather do.”

“I was hoping you'd give up administration,” he said.

“Not yet,” she said. “Maybe in a couple of years.”

“I want you to see this,” he said, opening the lid of his experiment. All the cell cultures were dead except for two.

“Success already?” she said.

“It's a beginning,” he said, and put his arm around her shoulder. But it was more than a beginning. It was the beginning of the end. The long search was almost over, and he knew he would discover what the alchemists had searched for all their lives: the secret of immortality. But he would not give it to the world until Locke was dead; no doubt he would be replaced by someone just as determined and just as ruthless, but he would not have Locke's combination of qualities or experience.

Julia put her arm around his waist, and they stood looking down at the immortal cells. He felt like the hero of an interplanetary romance.

And yet he knew that it would take a long time before he was confident that Julia herself was not one of Locke's agents, as Barnett had turned out to be. He could love her, and he would have to trust her, but he might never be sure.

Maybe that was the human condition.

H
e woke to pain. It was a sharp, stabbing sensation in the pit of his stomach. It pulled his knees up toward his chest and contorted his gaunt, yellowed face with an involuntary grimace that creased the skin along familiar lines, like parchment folded and refolded.

The pain stabbed again. He grunted; his body jerked. Slowly it ebbed, flood waters retreating, leaving its detritus of tormented nerve endings like a reminder of return. “Coke!” shouted the man on the twenty-ninth floor.

The word echoed around the big room, bounced off the tall ceiling and the wood-paneled walls. There was no answer. “Coke!” he screamed. “COKE!”

Footsteps pattered distantly, clapped against marble floors, muffled themselves in carpeting. They stopped beside the broad, silken bed. “Yes, Boss?” Even the voice cringed. Cringing made the man even shorter. The little eyes wavering on the monkey face refused to focus.

The sick man writhed on the bed. “The medicine!”

Coke snatched up the brown bottle from the gray metal nightstand and shook out three pills into a trembling hand. One of them dropped on the floor and he retrieved it. He held them out, and the sick man grabbed them greedily, popped them into his mouth. Into his hand Coke put a glass of water he had poured from a silver
pitcher. The sick man drank, his Adam's apple jerking convulsively.

In a few minutes the sick man was sitting up. He hugged his knees to his chest and breathed in exhausted pantings. “I'm sick, Coke,” he moaned. “I've got to have a doctor. I'm going to die, Coke.” Terror was in his voice. “Call the doctor!”

“I can't,” Coke squeaked. “Don't you remember?”

The sick man frowned as if he were trying to understand, and then his face writhed and his left hand swung out viciously. It caught Coke across the mouth and hurled him into the corner. He crouched there, one hand pressed to his bleeding lips, watching the sick man with a rodent's wary eyes.

“Be here!” the sick man snarled. “Don't make me call you!” He forgot Coke. His head dropped. He hammered futilely against the bed with a knotted fist. “Damn!” he moaned.

In that position he sat, as if graven, for minutes. Coke huddled in the corner, unmoving, watchful. At last the sick man straightened, threw back the heavy comforter, and stood up. He walked painfully to the curtained windows. As he walked he whimpered. “I'm sick. I'm going to die.”

He tugged on a thick, velvet cord; the curtains whispered apart. Sunlight flooded into the room, spilled over the sick man; it turned his scarlet pajamas into flame, his face into dough. “It's a terrible thing,” said the sick man, “when a dying man can't get a doctor. I need the elixir, Coke. I need treatment for this pain. I can't stand it any longer.”

Coke watched; his eyes never left the tall, thin man who stood in the sunlight and stared blindly out over the city. Coke took his hand away from his mouth; the back was smeared and red, and blood welled through three cuts in the lips.

“Get me a doctor, Coke,” the sick man said. “I don't care how you do it. Just get him.”

Coke pulled his feet under him and scuttled out of the room. The sick man stared out of the window, not hearing.

From here the ruins were not so apparent. The city looked almost as it had fifty years ago. But if a man looked closely, he could see the holes in the roofs, the places where the porcelain false fronts had fallen and the brick behind them had crumbled and toppled into the streets.

Twelfth Street was blocked completely. Mounds of rubble made many other streets impassable. The hand of Time is not as swift as that of man, but it is inexorable.

The distant, arrowing sweep of I-35 drew the eye like movement, bright through the drabness of decay. The Kansas Medical Center was out of sight behind the rising ground to the south, but the complex, walled entity on Missouri's Hospital Hill was brilliant in the sunlight. It was an island rising out of a stinking sea, an enclave of life within the dying city.

The sick man stared out the window at the first tendrils of smog thrusting up the streets from the river, climbing toward the twenty-block-square fortress on Hospital Hill. But they would never get that far.

“Damn them!” the sick man whimpered. “Damn them!”

*  *  *

Flowers peered out the slit-windows of the one-man ambulance into the sooty night. The misting rain now was mixed with smog. The weather was a live thing against which the fog lamp struggled helplessly. It shifted constantly, there was no place to grab it, and the amber beam retreated in defeat, let itself be rolled back.

Ever since Flowers had left the trafficway with its lights and its occasional patrols, he had been lost and uneasy. Even the trafficway wasn't safe anymore. A twenty-millimeter shell caroming from the ambulance's armored roof made a fearful din.

Where had the police been then?

The maps that listed Truman Road as “passable” were out of date. This had to be Truman Road; it was too wide to be anything else. But he had only a vague notion how far east he had come. On either side of the street was darkness; possibly it was a shade denser on the right.

Unless that was a strip razed by wind, fire, or dynamite, it was a park. He visualized the city map. It was either the Parade or the Grove.

Something exploded under the front wheel. The ambulance leaped, shuddering, into the air. It came down hard. Before the shocks absorbed it, the chauffeur lost control and the ambulance slewed toward the left.

Flowers grabbed the emergency wheel and took over from the chauffeur, turning the ambulance in the direction of the skid. Like the muffled wail of a parturient woman came the sound of screaming tires.

Lights loomed up unexpectedly, dim-red lanterns in the
night, almost invisible in the swirling smog. They would have been waist high to a man standing in the street. That meant there was something supporting them.

Flowers twisted the wheel sharply to the right this time, clutched his seat with taut legs as the ambulance took the curb, fought the crazy tilt as it lit in mud and skidded again. It was a park, all right. He raced through it, fighting desperately for control, dodging trees and bent telephone poles with their tangles of old webs, until he jogged the ambulance back into the street. He was blocks past the beginning of madness. He pulled up.

In the ambulance, balanced at the side of the road, Flowers sat and sweated. He rubbed the back of a hand across his forehead and fought the twitching nerves across his shoulders.
Damn the city!
he thought savagely.
Damn the street department! Damn the resident who would send out a medic on a night like this.

But it was nobody's fault.

The night traveler went at his own risk. There weren't enough of them to waste scarce taxes on street repairs, and it was no trick to avoid the holes, ruts, and uprooted slabs of concrete by daylight.

He thought back over the near accident. That hadn't felt so much like a hole. It had felt more like a landmine. And those lanterns could have been sitting on a barricade that sheltered a band of hijackers.

Flowers shivered and stepped on the accelerator and wished fervently that he were back at the Center, working out his shift in the antiseptic, bulletproof comfort of the emergency ward.

The chauffeur seemed to have settled down again. As Flowers eased the ambulance back into the middle of the road, he relaxed his grip on the wheel.

The smog shifted, and he saw the light. It glimmered far down the street like something lost in the night.

Flowers turned off all illumination and coasted past the café. Inside was a waiter behind a long counter, and a single customer. Flowers swung the ambulance around the corner into a puddle of darkness.

Before he opened the door, he broke open a fresh filter packet and slipped the filters into his nostrils, taking time to see that they were a good fit. He slid the needle gun out of the holster on the ambulance door. The magazine was full. He set the ambulance controls for automatic defense and stepped into the night.

He sniffed the air tentatively. It wasn't conditioned, not by a wild stretch of imagination, but the odor wasn't unbearable. A few minutes shouldn't reduce his life expectancy appreciably. The smog swirled around him, clutching, trying to insinuate its deadly tendrils down into his lungs. Boyd was right:
We swim in a sea of carcinogens.

There were two ways to deal with the problem. You could climb out of the sea, or you could filter out the carcinogens. But while you were about the first, the ideal solution, you had to do your best for those who had to live in the sea.

The rain had almost stopped, but Flowers pulled his coat tight at the collar. He had left his black bag in the ambulance, but even a flash of his white jacket could be
dangerous here. He could run into hijackers or Antivivs, or just an ordinary citizen with a grudge.

Flowers passed quickly in front of the broad, patched window, through the pool of yellow light, his cropped, bare head bent. His hand rested on the right-hand coat pocket where he could feel the comfortable shape of the needle gun.

The street number was long gone from above the door. Flowers pushed his way through the airlock and into the brightness.

The waiter was a thick-necked urban with a battered nose and a scar starting at his hairline and seaming the left side of his face down to his neck. He wore a filthy white jacket in obvious imitation of a doctor's uniform.

The man puffed carelessly on a cigarette that was almost lost between his fingers. Flowers's brief thrill of horror turned to disgust. The urbans weren't content merely to live in the sea; they had to add their own carcinogens.

Flowers diagnosed the thin, weasel-faced customer automatically:
Thyroid. Hypertension.
He gave the man five years. The customer eyed Flowers slyly as he spooned something out of a bowl into his crooked mouth.

“What's for you?” asked the waiter eagerly. “Got a new health-food menu. Got a new tonic fresh from the lab—all the known vitamins, plus trace minerals, iron, and a new secret ingredient in an oral suspension of medicinal alcohol. You wanta see the lab sheets, analysis, testimonials?”

“No,” Flowers began, “what I—”

“Augmented fruit juice?” the waiter continued doggedly. “Vegetables? Got a drink contains the liquified whole vegetable, eighteen different kinds. One glassful gives you your weekly requirements of eleven vitamins, eight minerals and—”

“All I want to—”

“Say now,” said the waiter, his voice dropping conspiratorially, “I got some stuff under the counter—straight Kentucky bourbon, no vitamins, no minerals, just plain rotgut.”

“All I want to know is the address here,” Flowers said.

The waiter looked at him blankly. Suspicion was like a wall between them.

Finally he jerked a thumb back the way Flowers had come. “That way,” he said, “that's Benton.”

“Thanks,” Flowers said coldly. He turned toward the door, danger at the back of his neck, prickling. He went out into the night.

“Pssst!” Something hissed behind him.

Flowers jerked and looked back. The hiss came from Thyroid, his weasel face screwed up ingratiatingly. Flowers stopped. The man sneaked close. “Where are you going? I can maybe tell you.”

Flowers hesitated. “Tenth,” he said. “Thirty-four hundred block.” What possible harm?

“Two blocks east, turn left. It's straight north,” the man whispered huskily. Flowers muttered his thanks and turned away. He had just noticed that the man had no filters in his nose and felt embarrassed. “Look!” the man said quickly. “Want some penicillin?”