The Immortality Factor Read online

  “Omnitech is a multinational corporation?” asked the examiner, stepping slowly toward the witness table. “With extensive operations in Europe, Asia, and Latin America as well as here in the States.”

  “And in Canada, too,” said Arthur. “We mustn’t take our good neighbor to the north for granted.”

  A few of the spectators giggled. Rosen nodded solemnly. Out of the corner of his eye Arthur could see a trio of TV cameras following the lawyer’s purposeful strides across the front of the room. The jury was focused on him, too.

  “And just what is your position vis-à-vis Omnitech Corporation?”

  “I am a corporate vice president. One of twenty.”

  “And a member of their board of directors?”

  “Yes.”

  “You founded Grenford Laboratory, did you not?”

  “Yes. Eight years ago.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “To engage in cancer research.”

  “Did you do so on government research grants?”

  “We received a few grants from NCI—”

  “The National Cancer Institute?”

  “Yes.”

  “NCI is part of the National Institutes of Health, is it not?”

  “NIH, yes.” Arthur could not help frowning. Everyone here knew the jargon, even the reporters.

  “Any other government support?”

  “No. The overwhelming majority of our support came from the corporation’s internal funding.”

  “I see.” Rosen walked away from the witness table a few steps, slowly, as if mulling over what he had just heard.

  Then he turned. “And when did your work on cancer research turn toward the objective of regenerating organs?”

  ARTHUR

  I almost laughed at his question. Like most of my really great ideas, it came to me during sex. Not that I’d tell him that.

  It was one of those delightfully unplanned, unanticipated moments. They don’t happen often, but when they do they have a momentum of their own. I had shaken hands with Elise Hauser while I was going through the reception line at the Humanitarian of the Year dinner at the Waldorf. She was virtually a giantess, a couple of inches taller than I. Straw-blond hair spilling down to her bare shoulders. She looked splendidly regal. The other women at the dinner were either dowdy white-haired old ladies loaded with jewelry or overdressed young bubbleheads in the latest flamboyant styles. Elise wore a simple white gown that clung to her like a famished lover, strapless and cut deliciously low.

  As the brother of the guest of honor, I was placed at the head table. As a ranking representative of the United Nations, Elise was, too. I got the waiter to shuffle the place cards so I could sit beside her instead of between Jesse and Julia. I hadn’t seen either of them since their wedding, and I felt terribly awkward about seeing them now. No, not just awkward. I felt hurt. Pained. At first I thought I’d stay away from this dinner, but Momma convinced me that it would look awful if Jesse’s only brother didn’t show up for his big night.

  Once we were seated next to each other, Elise asked me, “You are the brother of the award recipient?” Her accent was Viennese, her voice was low, throaty. A smoker’s voice, I thought. It sounded sexy.

  The ballroom was buzzing with two hundred conversations while waiters dashed among the tables with heavy trays laden with banquet fare. The male guests and the waiters were all in tuxedos; the room looked like a collection of penguins accompanying gaudily plumed peacocks. I filtered all of that out to concentrate on her.

  “Yes,” I said, smiling my best smile for her. “He’s my baby brother.”

  “He is a great man. You must be very proud of him.”

  “Oh, I am.” Then I figured I’d see if she had a sense of humor. “Of course, I taught him everything he knows.”

  Her brows arched. “You are joking.”

  “A little.”

  “You are a physician also?”

  “No, I’m a scientist.”

  “A physician is not a scientist?”

  That made me laugh. “They think of themselves as scientists, but real scientists think of them as pill-pushers or butchers.”

  “You don’t have a high opinion of your brother.”

  “But I do!” I said. And I almost meant it. “Jesse’s a fine man. An ornament to his profession. He deserves the award very much.” I didn’t tell her that he had stolen Julia away from me.

  “I see.” She turned her attention to the fruit cup in front of her.

  I turned and glanced down the row of dignitaries sitting at the head table to take a peek at Julia. Her eyes seemed to look slightly puffy, as if she had been crying. Is she really happy with Jess? He can’t possibly be taking care of her the way I could. What a fool she was to throw me over for him. My baby brother. Humanitarian of the Year. What a joke.

  A waiter took away my fruit cocktail before I had the chance to do more than stick a spoon into it. Another waiter slapped a plate of soggy salad in front of me.

  I returned my attention to the blond Amazon next to me. “Did you say you worked at the United Nations?”

  “Yes,” she answered, a forkful of wilted lettuce in midair between her plate and her lips. “In the secretary-general’s office.”

  “And what do you do there?”

  “Mostly I move paperwork from my desk to someone else’s desk,” she said with a sigh deep enough to raise my pulse rate. “Once in a while, however, I am able to do something useful.”

  “Such as?”

  “Increase the budget for UNESCO, so that some of the poorer countries can gain the benefits of medical research.”

  “I see.” I made a stab at my own salad. The dinner’s sponsors were obviously not spending much of their money on the food.

  “What kind of a scientist are you?” she asked.

  I was tempted to say that I was the best kind, the kind that deserved a Nobel Prize but would never receive one. But that would have sounded too bitter. So I simply replied, “Molecular biology.”

  “Ah. Genetic engineering.”

  She knew quite a bit about molecular biology, it turned out. And she was good at getting me talking. Before I realized it, I found myself telling her how Jesse and I had engineered a microbe that ate toxic wastes and reduced them to harmless natural elements. I patented that microbe and then licensed Omnitech Corporation to produce it. Jesse and I became pretty well off on the royalties; wealthy enough for Jesse to devote his medical practice to the poor and become Humanitarian of the Year. Wealthy enough for my department head at Columbia to get so envious that he drummed me out of the university.

  Elise seemed very impressed. I was certainly very impressed with her. I was staying at the Waldorf overnight and we ended up in my suite, in bed. She had a skier’s supple muscular body, strong and lithe, and she was used to getting her own way. She wanted to be dominant, but I wouldn’t let her. We both enjoyed every instant of our tussle.

  It was right after that, while we lay sweaty and spent on the rumpled bed, that the idea hit me. We were already working on the genes that control the suppressor factor that stops cells from multiplying. That was one of our approaches to dealing with cancer. But what if we could find the genes that produce the activating factors that make the cells mature and differentiate? If we could control both the suppressor and activating factors, we could control cell regeneration.

  “We could cure paraplegics,” I said out loud.

  “Huh?” Elise mumbled drowsily.

  I don’t get many flashes of inspiration like that. Usually Jesse’s the intuitive one; I tend to be more methodical. A plodder, in Jesse’s estimation.

  I sat up in the bed. “That’s the great thing about sex. It dissolves the barriers in your mind. It’s the most creative act a person can do.”

  “Thank you.”

  I was so excited that I got up from the bed and padded naked into the sitting room of the suite. I closed the door so I wouldn’t disturb Elise. The room was lit only by
the street glow coming through the window. A siren wailed past out there, its pitch Dopplering down as it yodeled along the avenue. Two in the morning and still the city growled and hummed. New York, New York: the town so big they had to name it twice.

  I fumbled around in the semidarkness, banged my shin against the damned coffee table before I found the lamp on the end table beside the sofa and clicked it on. The sofa felt cold and a little rough on my bare bottom, but I ignored that, looked up Jesse’s number in my notebook, then grabbed the phone and punched it out.

  I heard the phone ring once, twice . . .

  “Hullo?” Julia’s voice. Even after all these months her voice stabbed straight into my heart. I hadn’t expected her to answer. I guess I hadn’t wanted to think of her in bed with my brother.

  “Um, sorry to wake you, Julia. I need to talk to Jess.”

  “Arthur? Lord, I thought it was the hospital.”

  “No, it’s just me.”

  “We haven’t heard a word from you in a year and you phone at two a.m.?”

  “It’s important,” I said.

  “Can’t you wait until morning?”

  I wanted to apologize to her, I wanted to tell her how much I still loved her and missed her and how deeply she had hurt me, but instead I only said, “By morning he’ll be off and running and it’ll take me another two days to track him down. Let me talk to him now, will you?”

  Something muffled, then Jesse’s voice. “Arby? What’s the matter? What’s wrong?”

  “I’ve got an idea.”

  “An idea? You’re calling about an idea at two in the morning?”

  “I know where you are at two in the morning,” I snapped. “Most mornings, anyway.”

  “I don’t believe this.”

  “It’s an important idea,” I insisted.

  “Great. Go back to sleep and maybe it’ll go away.”

  “Dammit, Jess, this is serious! We can repair the spinal damage that causes paraplegia.”

  “Sure we can.”

  “How soon can you get up to my lab?”

  “Arby, it’s two in the morning, for Chrissakes!”

  “I know what time it is, dammit! Are you interested in curing paraplegics or not?”

  Despite himself, Jesse was interested. I started explaining my idea and Jesse stayed on the phone, listening. Soon he was commenting, making suggestions, adding his own ideas. I heard my brother’s voice go from irritation to reluctance to enthusiasm as we batted concepts back and forth just the way we used to do in the old days, before Julia.

  “You thinking of using stem cells?” Jesse asked. “That’s asking for trouble, Arby.”

  “Adult stem cells, Jess, not fetal cells. And maybe we won’t even need that if—”

  Elise swept past, fully dressed, her hair glistening from the shower. She gave me a pitying smile and blew me a kiss. I barely waved to her while I continued to talk with my brother.

  JESSE

  Humanitarian of the Year. And you know what? I deserved it. As much as anybody in the city, I guess.

  I wouldn’t have thought so before I met Julia. Never even would have thought about it at all, really. I just did the work I wanted to do and never gave a hoot about awards and honors. That was my brother’s kick. Arby always took himself very importantly. Hell, he was talking about winning the Nobel Prize back when I was still in high school and he was a sophomore at Columbia.

  Must have hurt him like hell when they threw him out of Columbia. But he landed on his feet, no bruises. Started up the lab in Connecticut and started making tons of money. Me, I just plugged away at med school and then went into practice.

  It was Julia who saw the importance of honors and awards.

  “It will bring more attention to the hospital,” she told me. “It will help to attract more donations. And larger ones, too.”

  She was right, of course. The bigger my name got, the easier it was to raise big bucks for the hospital. And the medical center. Julia saw to it that when we went to Brazil we got plenty of media coverage. Translated into several million in donations.

  Arby was as uptight as a Mormon in a cocktail lounge all through the dinner at the Waldorf. We hadn’t seen him since our wedding. I’m sure he didn’t want to come to the dinner but Ma made him. She’s tough. Too bad she couldn’t come herself. I had wanted her to, but her doctors said she couldn’t travel and Arby sided with them.

  Anyway, he was stiff as a totem pole with us. Shook my hand, of course, and took Julia’s. Mumbled a couple of words. And then he got as far away from us as possible. Even rearranged the seating at the head table so he wouldn’t have to be between Julia and me. Sat himself next to some big blond dish. That’s my brother Arby: no matter what happens he comes out okay.

  I was awfully uncomfortable in that damned tux. I don’t even own a tie. Julia had to do the bow tie for me, and I went all through dinner with it strangling me but when it came time for my little speech I just had to undo it. Got my picture in the Times that way, with the tie hanging loose and my collar undone. They didn’t see that I was wearing nice comfortable running shoes. They were black and if anybody noticed they didn’t say anything.

  Anyway, we get through the dinner and the speech and Arby disappears with the blonde on his arm. Julia and I taxi back to our apartment.

  “Do you realize,” she said as we were undressing, “that this is the first time this month that you’ve been home before midnight?”

  I hadn’t realized it.

  “Have I been neglecting you?” I asked her.

  “You most certainly have.” She had that mischievous grin on her face, the kind that said fun and games.

  So I gave her my utmost attention. And she did likewise for me. It was terrific.

  We’re drifting off to sleep, around two or so, when the phone rings. Julia grabs it because she wound up on that side of the bed. I’m thinking it’s some kind of disaster at the hospital, who the hell else would call me at two in the morning?

  It’s Arby. He’s got some big cockamamie idea about regenerating spinal neurons in paraplegics. I can’t believe it. He hasn’t said a word to me in a year, and now he’s bubbling over with enthusiasm, just as if he had never been sore at me at all.

  And he just wouldn’t let me off the phone. I mean, the idea was interesting enough, but he kept rattling on and on about it and telling me he wanted me to help him with it, just like we worked together years ago before he founded his big-time lab, before Julia came into our lives.

  Julia sat there in the bed beside me, pressing close so she could hear what Arby was talking about. I got maybe six words in every fifteen minutes or so. Arby kept yakking and yakking. About science. About us working together to cure paraplegics and allow them to walk again.

  After more than an hour of this, Julia gets up from the bed and starts rummaging in the night table on her side. She looked like she was posing for Playboy or something, in the nude like that. I started thinking that I ought to hang up on Arby and grab her again.

  But she pulls out a pad and ballpoint pen and scribbles a note for me.

  He wants to make up with you, her note said.

  I looked up at her, Arby’s voice still chattering in my telephone ear. Julia sat beside me again and nodded, with a really happy smile on her face. Then she wrote some more on the pad.

  This is Arthur’s way of getting together with you again, it said. Don’t brush him off.

  Like she was a mind reader, at that precise instant Arby asked, “Can you make it over here tomorrow for lunch?”

  “You mean have lunch at your lab?” I asked.

  Julia nodded so vigorously it made her breasts bob up and down. I damn near dropped the phone.

  “Yes,” Arby was saying. “At the lab, tomorrow. Well, later today, actually.”

  I grinned at my wife and said into the phone, “Okay, Arby. I’ll be there around twelve-thirty. How’s that?”

  “Wonderful!” he said. And at last he hung up.
/>   I put the phone back in its cradle and then pulled Julia to me.

  “He wants to get together with you again,” she said, all smiles. “He wants to end this separation.”

  JULIA

  I had never intended to come between Arthur and Jesse. I had never meant to cause hurt or pain.

  As a matter of fact, I had never intended to fall in love or get married or live in America. I had a very nice career going with British Airways, thank you, and I was quite the self-possessed modern woman, making ready to shatter the glass ceiling of corporate chauvinism to become the first woman chairman of BA’s board, eventually. I had it all planned out, you see.

  In the meantime I was having great fun, traveling the world and advancing my career. I had a few flings here and there, always very cautiously, of course. It wouldn’t do for an ambitious woman executive to get the wrong kind of reputation. And there was always AIDS to worry about.

  But Arthur simply swept me off my feet. Here was this handsome silver-haired man with an absolutely deadly smile, intelligent as the devil, successful, quite well-off financially, who just happened to sit beside me on the Airbus flight I was making to New York. And he exuded this kind of animal heat without even realizing it.

  This was something I hadn’t planned on; not at all. In fact, within two weeks my plans were completely demolished and I was suddenly living in a different world. Truth to tell, I allowed Arthur to sweep me off my feet. It was enormous fun and tremendously exciting. I transferred to the New York office and told myself that the glass ceiling could remain unshattered a while longer because I was going to add romance and marriage to my life plan.

  Looking back on it, I realize that I never actually loved Arthur. I was in a whirl and we certainly shared wildly passionate times in bed, and when he asked me to marry him I said yes without hesitation. I was living life in the fast lane, the kind of life I could only dream about before meeting Arthur, and I never even thought of what could happen to us in the long run. It was foolish of me; vain and selfish and foolish. That’s what happens when one acts without thinking.