The Immortality Factor Read online

  THE

  IMMORTALITY FACTOR

  Tor Books by Ben Bova

  The Aftermath

  As on a Darkling Plain

  The Astral Mirror

  Battle Station

  The Best of the Nebulas

  (editor)

  Challenges

  Colony

  Cyberbooks

  Escape Plus

  The Green Trap

  Gremlins Go Home

  (with Gordon R. Dickson)

  The Immortality Factor

  Jupiter

  The Kinsman Saga

  Mars Life

  Mercury

  The Multiple Man

  Orion

  Orion Among the Stars

  Orion and the Conqueror

  Orion in the Dying Time

  Out of the Sun

  Peacekeepers

  Powersat

  The Precipice

  Privateers

  Prometheans

  The Rock Rats

  The Sam Gunn Omnibus

  Saturn

  The Science Fiction Hall of Fame,

  Volume Two B

  The Silent War

  Star Peace: Assured Survival

  The Starcrossed

  Tales of the Grand Tour

  Test of Fire

  Titan

  To Fear the Light

  (with A. J. Austin)

  To Save the Sun

  (with A. J. Austin)

  The Trikon Deception

  (with Bill Pogue)

  Triumph

  Vengeance of Orion

  Venus

  Voyagers

  Voyagers II: The Alien Within

  Voyagers III: Star Brothers

  The Winds of Altair

  THE

  IMMORTALITY

  FACTOR

  BEN BOVA

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE IMMORTALITY FACTOR

  Copyright © 2009 by Ben Bova

  All rights reserved.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bova, Ben, 1932–

  The immortality factor / Ben Bova.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-0525-1

  ISBN-10: 0-7653-0525-9

  1. Stem cells—Research—Fiction. 2. Brothers—Fiction. 3. Immortality—Fiction. 4. Medical fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.O84I46 2009

  813'.54—dc22

  2008046454

  First Edition: April 2009

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  In memory of James Blish,

  who had faith in me

  When a conjecture inspires new hopes or creates new fears, action is indicated. There is an important asymmetry between hope, which leads to actions which will test its basis, and fear, which leads to restriction of options frequently preventing any attempt at [testing]. As we know only too well, many of our hopes do not survive their tests. However, fears accumulate untested. Our inventory of untested fears has always made humanity disastrously vulnerable to thought control. Independent science’s greatest triumph was the reduction of that vulnerability. [Italics added]

  —ARTHUR KANTROWITZ

  DARTMOUTH COLLEGE, 1994

  Now it is a characteristic of such intellectuals that they see no incongruity in moving from their own discipline, where they are acknowledged masters, to public affairs, where they might be supposed to have no more right to a hearing than anyone else. Indeed they always claim that their special knowledge gives them valuable insights.

  —PAUL JOHNSON

  INTELLECTUALS

  PREFACE

  This is not a science fiction novel, let that be understood from the outset.

  Although I am known primarily as a science fiction author, the book you hold in your hands is a contemporary novel. It is set in the here and now. Its major characters are scientists, the kind of men and women who are working today in laboratories around the world. It is the entire novel as I originally wrote it more than a decade ago.

  When this novel was first published, in 1996 under the title Brothers, a major section of the story was excised at the rather insistent suggestion of the book’s editor. This edition has restored that deletion, so that now the entire story is available for you to read.

  In the mid-1990s, the scientific research being done by this novel’s leading characters was futuristic. The idea of regenerating the cells of your body so that you could repair organs damaged by disease or injury, regrow a heart or kidney or limb, seemed little short of fantastic. But in the intervening dozen years such research has progressed to the point where it is the stuff of news headlines.

  Much of this research involves stem cells, those human cells that can develop into any and all the other hundred trillion cells of the human body. Many objections have been raised against using fetal stem cells on the religious or moral grounds that a human fetus is destroyed in order to harvest its stem cells. Even the President of the United States has expressed qualms about “destroying life to create life.”

  But as one of the characters in this novel expresses, scientists are smart enough to find ways to produce stem cells without using fetuses. Yet the objections—religious, moral, political—still continue. It will take time, and a great deal of patience, before the fears generated by this striking new capability in the minds of the ignorant and intolerant are eased or forgotten altogether.

  Even in this age of striking scientific advances and ever-accelerating technological breakthroughs, there are remarkably few novels about scientists. Most of the literary community—writers, editors, academics, critics—are sadly ignorant of modern science. And almost always, ignorance breeds fear and even contempt.

  Yet science and its offspring technologies are the driving forces in our modern world. There is hardly an issue before us—be it stem cell research, energy, the environment, the economy, education, war—that does not involve science and technology at its very heart. To be ignorant of science is dangerous in today’s world. It means that others are making the crucial decisions in your life, and the lives of your children.

  Thus this novel. I am trying to depict scientists as I have known them, after spending most of my adult life working with them in one capacity or another. But this novel is about far more than scientific research. It is, at heart, a novel that deals with the human reactions to new knowledge, new understandings, new capabilities.

  To me, scientific research is the most human thing that humans do. The drive to understand the world in which we live, and to change it to better suit our needs, is uniquely human. Yet there are dark
forces of fear and ignorance that oppose this search for understanding.

  Such conflict offers the novelist a truly fascinating setting for examining the human experience. Whether this novel does so successfully is for you to determine.

  The concept of a science court was originated by Dr. Arthur Kantrowitz, of Dartmouth College, a man with whom I was privileged to work for many years when he was director of the Avco Everett Research Laboratory in Massachusetts.

  Much of the technical information in this novel has been graciously provided by Dr. Kenneth Jon Rose, Dr. Martha Davila-Rose, Dr. Glen P. Wilson, William Cuthbert, and Lionel Berson. I have, of course, taken a novelist’s liberties with the information they so kindly provided, so any shortcomings or mistakes of fact are my fault, not theirs.

  BEN BOVA

  Naples, Florida

  December 2007

  THE

  IMMORTALITY FACTOR

  WASHINGTON :

  THE CAPITOL

  The crowd surging along the barriers that blocked off the Capitol steps was on the verge of turning ugly. It was much larger than the Capitol Police had anticipated and growing bigger by the minute. At first it had been orderly, well organized, mostly women of various ages led by earnest young men in dark suits and narrow ties who shouted their directions through electric bullhorns. Their permits were all in order and they patiently submitted to searches by the special antiterrorism squad and their bomb-sniffing dogs.

  The placards they carried were professionally printed in red, white, and blue.

  NO MONSTERS!

  DON’T INTERFERE WITH GOD’S WORK

  STEM CELL RESEARCH KILLS BABIES

  MARSHAK IS A BABY KILLER

  But now a different sort of crowd was pouring in, men and women, older for the most part, lots of gray hair and bald heads, many in wheelchairs. They were being searched, too, before being allowed across the broad parking area in front of the Capitol building. They had only a few placards among them, many of them hand-lettered.

  DON’T CONDEMN ME FOR LIFE TO THIS WHEELCHAIR

  I NEED A NEW HEART

  MY BABY IS DYING. PLEASE HELP ME!

  The demonstrators marched up and down the parking area outside the Capitol steps, chanting slogans and counterslogans.

  “Marshak does the devil’s work!”

  “Marshak is a gift from God!”

  “Marshak . . . Marshak . . . Mar-shak . . . Mar-shak!”

  Now TV news vans were pulling up, like sharks drawn to blood, camera crews focusing on the placards and the marching, chanting, shouting, red-faced demonstrators.

  The sky overhead was a clear summer blue, although the morning traffic had already raised a smoggy haze on the streets. Security choppers buzzed overhead; no news media helicopters were allowed near the Capitol. A hot, muggy July morning in the nation’s capital; it would have been a slow Monday, news-wise, except for the demonstration. Knots of picketers began to cluster around each of the camera crews, yelling out their slogans and waggling their placards.

  Captain Wally Lewis watched it all from the top of the Capitol steps with a sour frown on his dark fleshy face.

  “Better call the Army,” he said into his handheld radio.

  The little speaker crackled. “You mean you can’t handle a few yahoos?”

  Lewis grimaced. “There’s more’n a few.” Squinting through the pollution haze past the Supreme Court building up toward the roadblock on Maryland Avenue where incoming buses were stopped and searched, he added, “And more busloads heading this way.”

  “How many more?”

  “Six . . . eight . . . must be a dozen I can see from here. Plenty of nuts in with them.” Then Lewis added, “Some terrorist outfit could use ’em for cover.”

  “You see any A-rabs among ’em?”

  “Like they’re gonna wear turbans and bushy beards,” Lewis grumbled.

  “You’re overreacting, Wally.”

  With the weary head shake of a veteran, Lewis said into his radio, “These people are gonna turn nasty, I tell you. I can feel it in my bones.”

  “The hearing’s over at the Rayburn Building, ain’t it? Dumb shits don’t even know where it’s happening.”

  “Don’t matter where the hearings are,” said Lewis. “If there’s a riot it’s gonna be right here.”

  “Who in hell would’ve thought people’d get this worked up over some science stuff?” In the tiny radio speaker his supervisor sounded more surprised than annoyed.

  “Yeah,” said Lewis. Then he added silently, Who in hell?

  THE TRIAL:

  DAY ONE, MORNING

  The noise of the demonstrators was barely audible across Independence Avenue, where the Rayburn House Office Building seemed quiet and calm, little different from any other summer Monday morning.

  People were streaming into Room 2318, though, where the House Committee on Science normally holds its hearings. Four uniformed guards at the door carefully eyed the arriving men and women. Although this was an open hearing, every visitor had been searched at the security station in the building’s lobby.

  There was an electrical crackle of tense expectation in the air inside the hearing room. News reporters jammed the two long tables provided for them and spilled over into the first few rows of benches just behind the prospective witnesses. Their camera crews lined both sides of the unpretentious room, training their glaring lights on the three tiers of long desks lining the front wall of the chamber, where the committee members and their aides normally sat, and the smaller witness table facing it.

  “State your name, please, and your affiliation.”

  “Arthur Marshak, director of Grenford Laboratory.”

  “Be seated.”

  As he took the witness chair, Arthur Marshak gave the impression of a handsomely distinguished, hugely successful man of the world. His hair had turned silver in his thirties. The Silver Fox, they called him—behind his back. Poised, self-assured, he worked hard to keep himself in shape. He wore a lightweight suit of deep blue with a carefully knotted maroon tie. He placed a black leather-bound PowerBook computer on the table before him, then sat. The green-baize-covered table also held a single pencil-thin microphone and a stainless steel pitcher of water on a tray with several plain drinking glasses.

  Facing him from the bottom tier of desks where congressional committee members usually sat were three unsmiling elderly men, the judges, sitting in the green leather padded chairs. The chief judge, in the center, was president of the National Academy of Sciences, Milton Graves: balding, bespectacled, round-faced, he looked like a harmless old man, yet he was a wily veteran of Washington political infighting. On Graves’s left sat a tanned professor of biochemistry from Caltech; on his right, a sad-eyed professor of jurisprudence from Yale. The examiner sat at the end of the row, next to the impromptu gallery that had been set up for the jury.

  The chief judge peered at Arthur from over the rims of his bifocals. “Dr. Marshak,” he said, as if he had not known Arthur for more than ten years, “I want to point out that although this is not a court of law, you are bound to reply fully and truthfully to all the questions asked of you, under penalty of contempt of Congress.”

  Arthur nodded. “I understand.” Beneath his calm exterior Arthur felt slightly troubled. Should I call him Your Honor? Or Dr. Graves? Milton Graves had helped Arthur to set up this trial, but now he was acting as if they were strangers.

  The men and women of the jury, a dozen carefully picked scientists, sat in their makeshift gallery along the plain white wall that held portraits of former committee chairmen.

  “The point of this science court,” Graves said, raising his voice to address the spectators, “is to determine the scientific validity of organ regeneration in human beings. This court has the responsibility of making a recommendation of public policy to the highest levels of government. To make that recommendation, we must ascertain the scientific facts. We will deal strictly with science in this hearing, nothing more.” T
hen he added, “And nothing less.”

  This would be laughable if it weren’t so deadly serious, Arthur thought. We’re here to make a sober, calculated decision of scientific fact with half of Washington’s news media breathing down our necks. Waiting for me to say that I can grow a new heart for you when your original heart is failing or regenerate an amputated limb. It’s going to be a circus.

  His brother Jesse was sitting in the front row, off to one side. Arthur turned slightly in his chair to see him, but Jesse avoided his eyes. Julia was not with him. Just as well; she shouldn’t risk another miscarriage, Arthur thought. Better that she stays home.

  “Dr. Marshak.”

  Arthur snapped his attention to the examiner. He was a lawyer from a Washington firm, young and tall and utterly serious. Dark brush of a mustache. He looked completely humorless. Slowly he rose to his feet and stood at the end of the table, rigid and upright, posed like a young Abe Lincoln. He held a doctorate in biology, but Arthur wondered how long it had been since this lawyer had seen the inside of a lab.

  “Dr. Rosen,” said Arthur coolly.

  “Grenford Laboratory is a division of Omnitech Corporation, isn’t it?”

  Arthur’s brows went up. “I don’t see what that’s got to do with the matter at hand.”

  “Please answer the question, sir.”

  Arthur shot a glance at Jesse. His brother gave him the slightest of smiles. So this is the way they’re going to play the game, he thought. A fencing match. Very well, he told himself. En garde. He knew all about fencing.

  “You must answer the question,” said the judge on Arthur’s left, the law professor.

  “Yes,” Arthur said warily, “Grenford Lab is a division of Omnitech.”