he mouse lay dead upon the stainless-steel table, its dark, empty eyes staring out blindly at a world that for it and its siblings had been set about by bars into which nectar and ambrosia had fallen from the heavens and a hand had descended from time to time to lift and stroke and inject foreign substances. But in what significant way did that differ from the experience of the men and women who used it in their experiments?
The laboratory was shiny and sterile and neat, windowless and isolated. It was not the movie laboratory of test tubes and smoking retorts and laddering electricity. This was a biological research laboratory in a modern hospital, and it was fashioned from glass and stainless steel. Here and there pieces of equipment rested on scrubbed tables: microscopes and autoclaves and centrifuges, refrigerators and petri dishes and computers, all carefully cleaned each morning and evening with antiseptic solutions. Ultraviolet fluorescent bulbs periodically added their invisible radiation, and the single entrance was an airlock with negative pressure.
In the midst of the latest symbols of contemporary science, Dr. Russell Pearce looked like an anomaly–aging, contaminated with various kinds of microorganisms, rumpled, and dejected. His latest effort to synthesize the elixir vitae had failed. At first the synthetic blood protein had seemed promising; some of the mice to whom test substances had been administered had grown more active and the ones who sickened or aged were discovered to have received double-blind placebos. But now the proof of failure lay in front of him, a mouse dead of senescence, whose numbered tag matched a number assigned to those that had received what Pearce had hoped would be the elixir. The mouse was, in fact, the last of the group that had been administered the latest cure-all, the miracle fluid that would heal the sick, restore the elderly, and extend the life span indefinitely.
Pearce sighed, entered the results in his computer, and stared at the inscrutable screen as blindly as the mouse in front of him. It was a long road he had started down fifty years before, when an unemployed wanderer had sold 500 cc of his blood and that magic red fluid had rejuvenated an aging billionaire. But the restoration was only temporary, lasting as long as the gamma globulins had conferred their immunities, thirty to forty days. For fifty years now Pearce had been searching for the secret to immortality, just as, he was sure, aging men of wealth and power had been searching for Marshall Cartwright and his children.
The Executive Vice Chancellor’s office occupied a prime corner location of the Medical Center. Windows on both sides admitted the autumn sunlight and a view to the south and west toward the green suburbs, not north and east toward the carcinogenic inner city. The room looked like a seventeenth-century English library with pale wood shelves and a massive desk, and, in fact, had been purchased in entirety from a British estate, dismantled, and rebuilt in this upstart Midwestern city. It was the tribute youthful vigor pays to decadent tradition.
The Vice Chancellor seemed young and inexperienced, obviously uncomfortable talking to Pearce and what had to be communicated to him, but Pearce waited with the patience of his years. Then she swung her chair away from the windows and said, "How long have you been working at this Ponce de Leon project?"
"Fifty years," Pearce said.
"Isn’t that a bit long to pursue a will of the wisp?"
"It’s one of the two basic dreams of humanity: unlimited wealth and immortality."
"Even Ponce de Leon finally gave up."
"He was killed by Indians before he had the chance."
"The transmutation of base metals into gold and the concoction of the elixir of life," she said. Her smooth forehead furrowed. "But the alchemists abandoned their futile quests when the physical sciences proved their impossibility."
"Not exactly," Pearce said. "The alchemists transmuted themselves into chemists and physicists, and they learned that you can change base metals into gold, but it costs too much. And some of the alchemists became biologists, and they learned that the lifespan can be extended, but unless you reduce the birthrate you get overpopulation, pollution, starvation, and disease."
"You have an interest in the history of medicine, as well," she said. Clearly there was something on her mind other than simply getting acquainted with the faculty. "I understand now why you’re the senior geriatrician on the staff." She looked down at the folder open on her desk. "Indeed, the senior physician at the Medical Center."
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 some day 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 Immunity Deficiency 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. Some day, 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, Dr. 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 Dr. 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.
At first glance Pearce thought perhaps she was in her early twenties, but then he looked again at her eyes; they had seen a great deal of human joy and sadness and suffering.
"What kind of help?" he asked.
"You’d better come in and lock the door. It won’t hold anybody out, but it would give me time to get my defenses ready," she said calmly.
"Who are you expecting?" he asked.
"You and whoever may be following you."
"No one is following me," Pearce said impatiently. "I ask you once more, what kind of help?"
"I’m pregnant," she said. She stood up. She was a sturdy woman of medium height, and she was, indeed, pregnant, perhaps eight months along or more, Pearce guessed.
He half-turned toward the door. "I’m not an obstetrician. I have delivered only one baby in the last sixty years. What you need is a midwife."
"This is going to be a difficult delivery. I’m going to need more help than a midwife can provide."
"How do you know?"
"I know," she said.
"Then you belong in a hospital. Even if you can’t afford it, there is a clinic for indigents. Medical students need the practice."
"They’d draw blood," she said simply.
"They’d do some routine tests, typing in case of the need for transfusions, checking for drugs, diseases, anemia–but that’s all to the good."
"I can’t," she said. "That’s why I need you."
He shook his head wearily. "It’s been a long day. If you can’t use a midwife and you can’t go to the hospital, then I can’t be of any help to you."
"Don’t you understand?" she asked. "I’m a Cartwright."
Pearce’s mind slowed, waiting for the implications of Van Cleve’s statement to seep through the walls he had built around the image of Marshall Cartwright. After fifty years of searching, he had found his Holy Grail. But she was also in terrible danger–and so was he.
"Clearly you can’t go to a hospital," he said. "Even if I were to admit you myself, I couldn’t deliver your baby without attracting attention, and attention could be fatal. But why do you think the delivery will be difficult?"
"Cartwright women mature late. I’m fifty years old–"
"The first generation," he said. Cartwright had wasted no time putting into action Pearce’s admonition to be fruitful and multiply.
She nodded. "But menopause may have no meaning for us. That remains to be seen. Our organs are tough, however, and the mouth of the uterus may not expand sufficiently to allow the baby to be born. Although I never get sick and injuries heal quickly, and the baby will be the same, it can strangle or suffocate. A Caesarian may be necessary."
Pearce looked around the room. It was not dirty. It had been swept, perhaps even scrubbed, but grime was embedded in the painted walls and the wooden floor and the ancient furniture so deeply that mere soap and water could never reach it. "Not exactly the most sanitary of conditions."
"Not here," she said. "The time is not yet right."
"How far along are you?"
"Nine months." She held up a hand. "But Cartwright babies take a week longer. I got that from my mother. She died when I was only five years old. She never really got over the trauma of my birth. But she told me about my father–a wandering man, she called him, who loved her, she said, but could not stop to take care of her, or me. So I’ve been on my own since then, and I’ve done all right, in spite of the knowledge that I had to hide who I was, that people were searching for me. But then"–with a hint of bitterness–"women have always had to hide their superiority from men."
"What about your husband?"
"Him?" She laughed. "He wasn’t what you would call a husband, but then I’ve never had good judgment where men were concerned. My mistake was allowing him to get me pregnant. He disappeared as soon as he found out."
"You never told him about your–special ability?"
"To keep him young forever?" She smiled ruefully; even in rue her smile transformed her face into something approaching what Pearce would call beauty. "You think any man is worth keeping under those terms? Or maybe the habit of concealment ran too deep." She shook her head. "No, I would never tell anybody."
"And you’ve existed like this?" He waved his hand at the room, implying in that gesture the house, the neighborhood and the neighbors, and all the dirt, disease, degradation, and deprivation that involved.
"It’s not what you think," she said. "There are good people here, maybe more than among the medically privileged. But I haven’t always been here, even though it is the best place to hide, here where anonymity is a way of life. Sometimes I’ve allowed myself to rise into the middle class, but I can’t remain anywhere very long or the chances of suspicion, or even detection, become too great.
"The difficult part is knowing that I can help people who are sick or injured, and realizing that I can’t. The moment I let my sympathies take over the stories will start, the scent will be picked up, and the chase will begin. Do you realize–?" She broke off, unable to continue.
Pearce nodded slowly. "I’ve seen patients that I might be able to save if I used all the medical resources at my command, but I couldn’t because the antibiotics were scarce or prohibitively expensive, or because they would not stretch to all who needed them. Deciding who is to live and who is to die–that’s called triage."
"It’s even worse when you realize that you, yourself, are the fountain of youth."
"And how did you get my name?"
"That’s part of the legend, too, part of my inheritance, like a fairy godmother I could call upon in extremity. ‘There’s Dr. Pearce,’ my mother said. ‘He’s the only one you can trust, but don’t call upon him unless you’re really in trouble.’" She laughed again, putting her hands on her swollen belly. "I guess that’s what I am–a woman in trouble."
He nodded. "It’s happened once before, and I tried to help then. I’ll help you, of course. But–" he hesitated–"could I take a sample of your blood? I’ve been trying to synthesize the Cartwright difference ever since I ran across your father, but the original samples ran out long ago and I’ve had to proceed on guesswork. A sample from you might give me the clue I need."
"Do you think that’s wise?"
"To synthesize the elixir?"
She nodded.
"I’ve thought about it. Knowledge can be used for good or ill, but on the whole more knowledge is better than less. I’ll work it out, and then I’ll decide what to do with it."
"If the world lets you," she said. "But I can’t very well ask your help and then deny your fee." And as he got out his syringe and his bottle of alcohol and sponge, she added, "And what’s even more important, you can have the placenta and blood-filled umbilical cord when the baby is born."
He stopped in the midst of inserting the syringe. Of course. Aside from the genes themselves, the placenta and the cord were nourishing, maybe defining the baby. Who knew what magic they might contain?
"But you must promise me not to trust anybody," she said.
"I have assistants," he said.
"Nobody."
He nodded and went about his task. When he was done and the sample was stored in the refrigerated section of his black bag, she said, "I’m going to leave by the back way." She picked up her flashlight and her revolver. "Your pursuers will be here any moment."
She was more paranoid than he. "When do you want me to return?"
She hesitated at a door set into another plywood wall in an archway at the back of the room. "I won’t be here. I’ll get word to you where and when. Be careful, Dr. Pearce. The world is more treacherous than even you suspect." And she was gone.
The world had turned dark by the time Pearce emerged from the house. Night belonged to the citizens, hiding their blemishes, concealing their movements, masking their intentions. Pearce played his light around the porch, throughout the paved yard, and around his car. Everything seemed as empty and untouched as when he had arrived, but a feeling of danger jangled at his nerves. He shrugged his shoulders and essayed a chuckle. Van Cleve had infected him with her paranoia.
And then, as he picked his way down the stairs and moved toward his car, something monstrous loomed up behind him and he turned to splash his light upon a ragged, hulking, unshaven creature with a club in its hand raised to strike. It was so nightmarish, so traditional in its attitude, that he almost laughed.
He didn’t get the chance. A voice from the street shouted, "Stay where you are! Don’t move!" But as Pearce turned toward the voice, the figure behind him twisted away. A laser beam hissed through the night, and a voice cried out, but when he turned back the creature was gone.
"Who’s there?" he called out, although he thought he had recognized the voice.
"Dr. Pearce," a voice said, as it moved toward him. "Are you all right?"
When a figure came into the light, Pearce saw who it was. "Tom," he said. "What are you doing here?" He thought briefly of Van Cleve’s confidence that he was being followed before he dismissed it. "Not that I’m not glad you showed up."
"I happened to be passing the monitoring station as I was leaving," Tom Barnett said, "and your telltale showed your car in this dangerous part of town. I thought maybe you’d been hijacked or kidnapped, so I reported to the police and thought I’d better start immediately. But what are you doing here?"
That was it, of course. The computerized map system automatically reported its location. No one needed to follow him. Even if he had thought of that, and had believed the note’s warning of danger, how could he have made his way here on foot, and how could he have known it was wise to do so?
"I’m one of the few remaining physicians who still make house calls," Pearce said lightly. "A habit from the old days I find hard to break." He thought quickly: Trust nobody, Van Cleve had insisted. "I got a message–someone just pushed it into my hand." Might as well stick as closely to the truth as possible, he thought, and electronic messages left trails that could be checked. "I thought it was somebody I ought to know, but by the time I got here I knew there was something wrong."
"You’ve got to stop this, Russ," Barnett said. His voice was husky with concern. "You’re getting up in years, and you’re too valuable, and there may be people out to get you."
"Who could be out to get me?" Pearce scoffed. "But you’re right: these are dangerous times. You said the police have been called? We’d better cancel that alarm before we have to answer a lot of questions, and get back to the hospital compound before my attacker returns with his friends."
"You lead the way, and I’ll follow behind," Barnett said.
Pearce nodded and swung his bag with its priceless contents into the front seat beside him, where it wouldn’t be far from him, and pulled his car into the street where his headlights splashed across Barnett’s car. It was newer and more heavily armored than his, and Pearce wondered how Barnett could afford it on a resident’s salary. Perhaps he had inherited money or had his funds supplemented by his family, or a patron protecting his avenue of supply.
They retraced Pearce’s route, but this time with the comfort of convoy and Barnett’s laser gun. As Pearce drove, he was swept by a wave of weariness. The day had been long and filled with energy-consuming events, and he felt every one of his ninety years. A great sense of relief washed over him when he pulled through the Medical Center’s guarded gates and into the living compound where nothing but an all-out attack by a fully equipped military unit could threaten him.
And yet, as he said good night to Barnett and thanked him once more for saving him from robbery or even death, he could not help but wonder why the police had never arrived.
Early morning hospital corridors echo footsteps like late night sidewalks, and Pearce pushed away his uneasy feeling of being followed as he made his way to his laboratory with his tube of irreplaceable fluid still locked in his black bag. His sleep had been more than usually disturbed by the awakenings of the elderly, the swirling memories, the bladder pressures, the terminal insomnia, and at last he had surrendered to his impatience to be up and about his work. Soon the corridors would be thronging with breakfast wagons and hospital gurneys headed for morning tests and surgeries, nurses bustling about their innumerable tasks, and the hospital once more engaged in its epic struggle between sickness and good health, between death and life. But he reached the laboratory in the bowels of the basement without seeing more than a couple of night-shift nurses yawning at their stations.
Pearce poured half the blood sample into a tube that he sealed and returned to his black bag. The other half he poured into a density gradient tube, diluted it with cesium chloride, and inserted it into the ultracentrifuge. He set the dial at 100 and turned it on. After a few minutes, he turned off the machine and removed the test tube. He held the tube in the ultraviolet light case. DNA molecules were the heaviest part of the blood and the bottom of the tube was the darkest. He poured the top 90 percent of the fluid into another tube that he put into his black bag.
He should turn this process over to a laboratory that specialized in these procedures, he knew, but he could trust none of them. That wasn’t Van Cleve’s paranoia; it was simple realism. The price of liberty might be eternal vigilance, but the price of immortality was eternal suspicion.
Tom Barnett came into the laboratory while he was cleaning and sterilizing the tubes, and Pearce told him the grant renewal application had been rejected. "We’re out of business, Tom," he said. "You might as well use your remaining assistantship working on something that will have a pay-off."
"What about you?" Barnett asked.
"I’m going to keep tinkering," Pearce said. "They’ll probably reclaim the space, and the live subjects probably are too expensive, but maybe I can hang on to the equipment. No use starting a new line of research at my age."
"I’d like to help," Barnett said, "even if I can’t be paid."
"I couldn’t allow that. You’ve got a career ahead of you. Go on with you," Pearce said roughly. "Get about it. I’ll give you glowing references as a clinician and a researcher."
Barnett left reluctantly, and Pearce returned to his labors.
He removed from the refrigerator a flat silica gel in a sterile plastic wrapping, placed it between two electrical contacts that passed a current across the gel, and carefully poured what was left in the density gradient tube over the gel. A few minutes later he put the gel under the ultraviolet light and with a sterile, sharp-bladed knife scraped from the top of it the darkest rungs of the ladder. He put them into a receptor tube and removed the gel remnants through electrophoresis. What he had left, if he was lucky, was DNA.
He put the rest of the gel into his black bag for later analysis of the remaining blood fractions, but for now he was going to focus on DNA. Whatever special properties were possessed by the Cartwright blood had to be traceable to the DNA and, what was even more important, reproducible.
Pearce put his DNA sample into an aluminum box stuffed with test tubes. He added some primer, polymerase, and nucleotides. The PCR machine would do the rest, applying heat to the DNA, breaking the bonds that hold the strands of the double helix together. When the temperature was reduced, the primers would attach themselves to either end of the strip. Polymerase, the magical substance, would trigger the formation of new DNA strands from the nucleotides. Then the process would begin over again, with the PCR machine raising the temperature to separate the strands of the DNA molecules that now had doubled in number.
It was like a chain reaction, each raising and lowering of the temperature creating twice as many strands of DNA as had existed before. The process was exponential. That was why it was called a polymerase chain reaction. Within a few hours Pearce would have a billion copies, and a supply of DNA that he could separate into fragments with enzymes and then test each fragment on a separate sample of tissue cells.
The process had just begun, but at least it had begun. He felt a curious sense of elation that he had not felt for more years than he could remember. It made him feel youthful again. He never felt truly old. He always felt forty inside, that age at which his internal calendar had stopped when the most important event of his life had happened, but his body was less flexible, his muscles didn’t recover as quickly from exertion, and he felt pains where once had been nothing but silky articulation. And yet he had the feeling that aging was a state of mind. If there was such a thing as psychosomatic illness, why couldn’t there be such a thing as psychosomatic wellness? It would bear thinking about.
He had been so busy with his tasks that he was startled to turn around and find someone in the laboratory with him. It was the Executive Vice Chancellor, Julia Hudson, and she was looking at him with an intensity that first startled and then alarmed him. …
the exciting conclusion
in our May issue,
on sale now!
