The Immortality Factor (2 page)

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?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
he 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.” Then 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.”

“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?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.