The Immortals (24 page)

Science, surgery, and salvation—the clinic had something for everybody.

It was going to be another ordinary day, Harry decided. Soon would come the shrill cacophony of six o'clock, and the factories would release their daily human floods into the worn channels between the high walls. For an hour or two, then, he would be busy.

But it was a good shift. He was busy only between six and curfew. Other times he could sneak a view of the
Geriatrics Journal
or flip a few reels of text over the inner surface of his glasses. He didn't need them for seeing—if he had he would have used contact lenses—but they were handy for viewing and they made a man look professional and older.

At twenty-four that was important to Harry. . . .

Sunday was bad. But then Sunday was a bad day for everybody.

He would be glad when it was over. One more week and he would be back on duty inside. Six more months and he would have his residency requirements completed. As soon as he passed his boards—it was unthinkable that he would not pass—there would be no more clinics.

It was all very well to administer to the masses—that was what the oath of Hippocrates was about, partly—but a doctor had to be practical. There just wasn't enough medical care to go around. Curing an ear infection here, a case of gonorrhea there, was like pouring antibiotics into the river. The results were unnoticeable.

With those who had a chance at immortality, it was different. Saving a life meant something. It might even mean a reprieve for himself, when he needed it. And reprieves had been stretched into immortality.

The prognosis, though, was unfavorable. A man's best hope was to make something of himself worth saving. Then immortality would be voted him by a grateful electorate. That was why Harry had decided to specialize in geriatrics. Later, when he had more leisure and laboratory facilities, he would concentrate on the synthesis of the
elixir vitae.
Success would mean immortality not only for himself but for everybody. Even if he did not succeed within a lifetime, if his research was promising, there would be reprieves.

But it was the synthesis that was important. The
world could not continue to depend upon the Cartwrights. They were too selfish. They preferred to hide their own accidental immortality rather than contribute harmless amounts of blood at regular intervals. If Fordyce's statistical analysis of Locke's investigations was correct, there were enough Cartwrights alive to grant immortality to 50,000 mortals—and that number would increase geometrically as more Cartwrights were born. One day a baby would inherit life as its birthright, not death.

If the Cartwrights were not so selfish . . . As it was, there had been only enough of them discovered to provide immortality for a hundred to two hundred persons; nobody knew exactly how many. And the tame Cartwrights were so infertile that their numbers increased very slowly. They could contribute only a limited quantity of the precious blood. From this could be extracted only a small amount of the gamma globulin that carried the immunity factor. Even at closely calculated minimal dosages, the shots could not be stretched beyond a small group of essential persons, because the immunity to death was passive. It was good for no more than thirty to forty days.

But once the blood protein was synthesized . . .

Harry had an idea of how it might be done—by taking apart the normal gamma globulin molecule and then putting it back together again, DNA fragment by fragment. With radiation and the new quick freeze, absolute, he could do it. Once he got his hands on a research grant and laboratory facilities . . .

He walked slowly toward the street entrance, past the consultation rooms with their diagnostic couches on both sides of the long clinic hallway. He paused between the giant Aesculapian staffs that supported the lintel of the doorway, just before he reached the moving curtain of air that kept out the heat of summer, the cold of winter, and the dust and disease of the city. At this stage in his career, it was folly to think of research grants. They were for older, proven researchers, not for callow residents, nor even eager young specialists.

The clinic was built out from the Medical Center wall. Opposite was the high wall of a factory that made armored cars for export to the suburbs. That's where the Center got its ambulances. A little farther along the Medical Center wall was a second smaller outbuilding. On its roof was a neon sign:
BLOOD BOUGHT HERE.
Beside its door would be another, smaller sign:
WE ARE NOW PAYING $50 A PINT.

In a few minutes the blood-tank technicians would be busy inserting needles into scarred antecubital veins as the laborers were set free by the quitting whistles. They would pour through the laboratory, spending their life resources prodigally, coming back, many of them, to give another pint before two weeks had elapsed, much less two months. No use trying to keep track of them. They would do anything: trade identity cards, scuff up their inner arms so that the previous needle hole would not show, swear that the scars were from antibiotic shots. . . .

And then they would gulp down their orange juice—some of the children did it mostly for that because they
had never tasted orange juice before—grab their fifty dollars and head for the nearest shover of illicit antibiotics and nostrums. Or they would give it to some neighborhood leech for rubbing salve on some senile invalid or for chanting runes over some dying infant.

Well, they were essential. He had to remember that. They were a great pool of immunities. They had been exposed to all the diseases bred of poverty, ignorance, and filth from which the squires had been protected. The squires needed the citizens' gamma globulins, their antigens. The squires needed the serums manufactured in citizen bodies, the vaccines prepared from their reactions.

A remarkable teacher had once shocked him into awareness by saying, “Without filth there is no cleanliness; without disease there is no health.” Harry remembered that in his contacts with the citizens. It helped.

Past the blood bank, the Center wall curved away. Beyond was the city. It was not dying; it was dead.

Wooden houses had subsided into heaps of rotten lumber. Brick tenements had crumbled; here and there a wall tottered against the sky. Aluminum and magnesium walls were dented and pierced. Decay was everywhere.

But, like green shoots pushing through the forest's mat of dead leaves, the city was being born again. A two-room shack was built with scavenged boards. A brick bungalow stood behind tenement ruins. Metal walls became rows of huts.

The eternal cycle,
Harry thought.
Out of death, life. Out of life, destruction. Only man could evade it.

All that remained of the original city were the walled factories and the vast hospital complexes. Behind their protective walls, they stood tall and strong and faceless. On the walls, armored guard houses glinted in the orange-red fire of the declining sun.

As Harry stood there, the whistles began to blow—all tones and volumes of them, making a strange, shrill counterpoint, suited to sunset in the city. It was primitive and stirring, like a savage ceremony to propitiate the gods and ensure the sun's return.

The gates rolled up and left openings in the factory walls. Laborers spilled out into the street: all kinds of them, men and women, children and ancients, sickly and strong. Yet there was a sameness to them. They were ragged and dirty and diseased; they were the city dwellers.

They should have been miserable, but they were usually happy. They would look up at the blue sky, if the smog had not yet crept up from the river, and laugh, for no reason at all. The children would play tag between their parents' legs, yelling and giggling. Even the ancients would smile indulgently.

It was the healthy squires who were sober and concerned. Well, it was natural. Ignorance can be happy; the citizens need not be concerned about good health or immortality. It was beyond them. They could appear on a summer day like the mayfly and flutter about gaily and die. But knowledge had to worry; immortality had its price.

Remembering that always made Harry feel better.
Seeing the great hordes of citizens with no chance for immortality made him self-conscious about his advantages. He had been raised in a suburban villa not far from the city's diseases and carcinogens. From infancy he had received the finest of medical care. He had been through four years of high school, eight years of medical school, and almost three years of residency training.

That gave him a head start toward immortality. It was right that he should pay for it with concern.

Where do they all come from?
he thought.
They must breed like rabbits in those warrens. Where do they all go to? Back into the wreckage of the city, like the rats and the vermin.

He shuddered.
Really, they are almost another race.

Tonight, though, they weren't laughing and singing. Even the children were silent. They marched down the street soberly, almost the only sound the tramp of their bare feet on the cracked pavement. Even the doors of the blood bank weren't busy.

Harry shrugged. Sometimes they were like this. The reason would be something absurd—a gang fight, company trouble, some dark religious rite that could never really be stamped out. Maybe it had something to do with the phases of the moon.

He went back into the clinic to get ready. The first patient was a young woman. She was an attractive creature with blond hair worn long around her shoulders and a ripe body—if you could ignore the dirt and the odor that drifted even into the professional chamber behind the consultation room.

He resisted an impulse to have her disrobe. Not because of any consequences—what was a citizen's chastity? A mythical thing like the unicorn. Besides, they expected it. From the stories the other doctors told, he thought they must come to the clinic for that purpose. But there was no use tempting himself. He would feel unclean for days.

She babbled as they always did. She had sinned against nature. She had not been getting enough sleep. She had not been taking her vitamins regularly. She had bought illicit terramycin from a shover for a bladder infection. It was all predictable and boring.

“I see,” he kept muttering. And then, “I'm going to take a diagnosis now. Don't be frightened.”

He switched on the diagnostic machine. A sphygmomanometer crept up snakelike from beneath the Freudian couch and encircled her arm. A mouthpiece slipped between her lips. A stethoscope counted her pulse. A skullcap fitted itself to her head. Metal caps slipped over her fingertips. Bracelets encircled her ankles. A band wrapped itself around her hips. The machine punctured, withdrew samples, counted, measured, listened, compared, correlated. . . .

In a moment it was over. Harry had his diagnosis. She was anemic; they all were. They couldn't resist that fifty dollars.

“Married?” he asked.

“Nah,” she said hesitantly.

“Better not waste any time. You're pregnant.”

“Prag-nant?” she repeated.

“You're going to have a baby.”

A joyful light broke across her face. “Aw! Is that all! I thought maybe it was a too-more. A baby I can take care of nicely. Tell me, Doctor, will it be boy or girl?”

“A boy,” Harry said wearily.
The slut!
Why did it always irritate him so?

She got up from the couch with a lithe, careless grace. “Thank you, Doctor. I will go tell Georgie. He will be angry for a little, but I know how to make him glad.”

There were others waiting in the consultation rooms, contemplating their symptoms. Harry checked the panel: a woman with pleurisy, a man with cancer, a child with rheumatic fever. . . . But Harry stepped out into the clinic to see if the girl dropped anything into the donation box as she passed. She didn't. Instead, she paused by the shover hawking his wares just outside the clinic door.

“Get your aureomycin here,” he ranted, “your penicillin, your terramycin. A hypodermic with every purchase. Good health! Good health! Don't let that infection cost you your job, your health, your life. Get your filters, your antiseptics, your vitamins. Get your amulets, your good-luck charms. I have here a radium needle which has already saved thirteen lives. And here is an ampule of
elixir vitae.
Get your ilotycin here. . . .”

The girl bought an amulet and hurried off to Georgie. A lump of anger burned in Harry's throat.

The throngs were still marching silently in the street. In the back of the clinic, a woman was kneeling at the
operating table. She took a vitamin pill and a paper cup of tonic from the dispensary.

Behind the walls the sirens started. Harry turned toward the doorway. The gate in the Medical Center wall rolled up.

First came the outriders on their motorcycles. The people in the street scattered to the walls on either side, leaving a lane down the center of the street. The outriders brushed carelessly close to them—healthy young squires, their nose filters in place, their goggled eyes haughty, their guns slung low on their hips.

That would have been something, Harry thought enviously—to have been a company policeman. There was a dash to them, a hint of violence. They were hell on wheels. And if they were one-tenth as successful with women as they were reputed to be, there was no woman—from citizen through technician and nurse up to their suburban peers—who was immune to their virility.

Well, let them have the glamour and the women. He had taken the safer and more certain route to immortality. Few company policemen made it.

After the outriders came an ambulance, its armored ports closed, its automatic 40-millimeter gun roaming restlessly for a target. More outriders covered the rear. Above the convoy a helicopter swooped low.

Something glinted in the sunlight, became a line of small round objects beneath the helicopter, dropping in an arc toward the street. One after another they broke with fragile, popping sounds. They strung up through the convoy.