ELIXIR (6 page)

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Authors: Gary Braver

BOOK: ELIXIR
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And he thought: During the next hour, ten thousand people would die—some by fire, some by floods, some by famine, some by accident, some by another’s hand. But most deaths would be from “natural causes” brought on by aging—people over sixty-five. And nobody over 112. But who was to say that the upper limits couldn’t be pushed? Or that people shouldn’t die but by accident alone?
His eye slipped to the workbench where sat a solitary vial containing tabulone.
As he stared at it, a thought bulleted up from the recesses of his mind:
When are you going to try it, huh? When are you going to slip a couple cc’s into your syringe and shoot up?
Chris stiffened.
Dangerous thoughts
, he told himself.
Very dangerous
.
The kind of speculations he and Dexter Quinn would have after the third pint of Guiness. Mental idling that seemed okay when you were feeding a fine buzz—though he still recalled that weird gleam in Dexter’s eyes, as if Dexter was giving the notion serious consideration. Chris could understand that: Dex was twenty years his senior and hated the thought of becoming old because he had never married and had no family to carry on. He also had an impaired heart.
“You want to know when you’re old?” Dexter once said. “When you can’t get it up and you don’t care anymore that you can’t get it up.”
Chris had begun to chuckle when a look of sad resignation in Dexter’s face stopped him.
It’s when a tooth falls out and you don’t go to the dentist. When you stop coloring your hair. When you don’t bother about that lump under your arm.
It’s when you give up trying to do anything about it. What’s called despair: When all that’s left is the countdown.
Dexter was closer to the countdown than Chris, but Chris understood the mindset of defeat. He also understood the beer-soaked hankering for eternity. He had felt it himself. Every time he visited his father, it nipped at his heels: the groping for common words, the sudden confusion and bewilderment, the repetition of phrases and simple acts, the fading of memory. A man who once advised Eisenhower could not recall the current president. A man of trademark wit who now muttered in fragments. A man who last Memorial Day had to be reminded who Ricky was. What chilled Chris to the core was the thought that the same double-death was scored on his own genes.
It was too late for Sam, but not for him.
While he sat at his microscope, the realization hit him full force:
Admit it! The real reason you don’t want anybody to know about tabulone is that you want it for yourself, good buddy. All that stuff about social problems, Frankenstein nightmares, and getting yourself canned—just sweet-smelling bullshit you tell your wife and pillow. You’re playing “Beat-the-Clock” against what stares back at you every time you look in the mirror—the little white hairs, the forehead wrinkles getting ever deeper, the turkey wattle beginning to form under the chin. The spells of forgetfulness.
The only thing between you and what’s reducing Sam to a mindless sack of bones is that vial of colorless, odorless liquid on the shelf. Your private little fountain of youth.
Those were the thoughts swirling through Chris Bacon’s head when Quentin Cross stormed into his lab.
His face looked chipped out of pink granite. He snapped off the radio in the middle of a news story about Reagan pledging an all-out war on drugs at home and abroad. “What’s the latest yield with the new whatchamacalit enzymes?”
Quentin had a talent for irritating Chris. He was pompous, officious, and often wrong. And for Chief Financial Officer and the next CEO, he had the managerial polish of a warthog. “Not much better than ethyl acetate or any other solvent.”
“Christ!” he shouted, and pounded the table with his good hand. His other was in a cast from a fall, he’d said. Quentin’s eyes shrunk to twin ball bearings. “I’m telling you to increase the yield or this company and its employees are in deep shit.”
“Why the red alert?”
“I asked what kind of yield.”
Quentin was a soft portly man with a large fleshy face, which at the moment seemed to take up most of his space. Chris opened his notebook. “A kilo of starting material yielded only five milligrams of the toxogen.”
“Five milligrams?” Quentin squealed. His left eye began to twitch the way it did when he got anxious. “Five milligrams?”
At that rate, they would need nearly half a ton to produce a single pound of the stuff—which, Chris had calculated, would cost a thousand dollars a milligram after all the impurities had been removed. It was hardly worth the effort.
“Try different chiral reagents, try different separation procedures, try different catalysts, different enzymes. Anything, I don’t fucking care how expensive.”
Quentin wasn’t getting it. They had their best people working on it, following state-of-the-art procedures, and spending months and millions. “Quentin, I’m telling you we have tried them and they don’t work.” He had never seen Quentin so edged out. Something else was going on. Or he was suffering pathological denial. “Quentin, the molecule has multiple asymmetric centers—almost impossible to replicate. We can produce its molecular mirror image but not the isomer.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because nature is asymmetrical and organic chemistry isn’t. It’s like trying to put your right hand into a left-handed glove. It can’t be done.”
For a long moment Quentin stared at Chris, his big pink face struggling for an expression to settle on. He looked as if he were about to burst into tears. It didn’t make sense. “Quentin, I’m sorry, but it’s beyond our technology, maybe even our science.”
“Then invent some new technology and science. You’re the golden boy here. We’re paying you sixty grand a year—fifteen thousand more than you’d get at Merck or Lilly. So, you better find a more efficient synthesis or we’ll get somebody who can.”
“Quentin, I’m not very sophisticated in the intricacies of international trade, but we’re killing ourselves to manufacture a molecule that comes ready-made on trees. And we’ve got an endless supply of pits and exclusive rights. Please tell me what I’m missing here, because I don’t get it.”
“Just that we don’t want to be dependent on raw materials from foreign sources.”
Chris was about to respond when a small alarm went off in the rear lab.
“What’s that?”
“It’s nothing,” Chris said vaguely, but the sound passed through his mind like a seismic crack. “Just one of the connectors.” He wanted Quentin gone. The alarm was rigged to each of his control mice. An infusion tube had failed, which meant that an animal had been cut off from tabulone. He couldn’t explain the potential consequences because Quentin Cross knew nothing of what Chris was doing back there. Nobody did. But he had to reconnect the animal immediately.
“What kind of connectors?”
“One of the animals.” Chris made a dismissive gesture hoping Quentin would take the hint and leave. But he moved toward the back lab door.
Jesus!
Of all times. Chris could be fired, even prosecuted for misuse of company equipment. And by the time Quentin got through, nobody in North America would hire him. “It’s nothing.” He tried to sound casual. But Quentin was at the door. Chris played it cool and pulled out his keys.
Inside were rows of glass cages with eighteen of his longest-lived animals. Each had a metal cannula permanently cemented to its skull with a feedback wire connected to an alarm should there be a rupture. After years of continuous supply, they were totally dependent on the serum, like diabetics or heroin addicts.
Quentin followed Chris inside to where a small red light pulsed.
Methuselah.
He had bitten through the tubing, and the stuff was draining into sawdust. Had it been one of the younger mice, there would be no problem. But Methuselah, the oldest, had been infused for nearly six years.
Chris shut off the alarm and auto-feed and gave the mouse an affectionate stroke with his finger. He still looked fine, but he needed to be reattached immediately. “I have to get him rehooked, so if you don’t mind …”
But Quentin did mind. “What are you doing with all the mice?”
“Testing toxicity.”
“Toxicity from what?”
“Veratox.”
“That’s preclinical. We’re testing the stuff on people.”
“I know that, but these animals have cancers.”
“You mean you’re trying to cure them?”
God! Why doesn’t he leave?
“Look, I’ve really got to hook him up.” But Quentin stayed as Chris reattached the tubing.
He was nearly finished when he saw something odd in Methuselah’s movement. The animal sashayed across the cage as if drunk.
“What’s his problem?”
Before Chris could answer, Methuselah stumbled into the corner, his eyes bulging like pink marbles.
Then for a long moment, Chris and Quentin stood paralyzed, trying to process what their eyes took in.
Methuselah flopped onto his back as his body began to wrack with spasms. His mouth shuddered open and a high-pitched squeal cut the air—an agonizing sound that seemed to arise from a much larger animal. Suddenly one of his eyes exploded from its socket, causing Quentin to gasp in horror. Methuselah’s body appeared to ripple beneath the pelt, at the same time swelling, doubling in size with lumpy tumors, some splitting through his fur like shiny red mushrooms growing at an impossible rate.
“Jesus Christ!” Quentin screamed. “What the hell’s happening to him?”
Chris was so stunned that he no longer registered Quentin’s presence. Methuselah’s body stopped erupting almost as fast as it began, only to shrivel up to a sack of knobbed and bloodied fur as if its insides were dehydrating at an wildfire rate. Its head withered to a furry cone half its original size, the contents draining from the mouth and eye socket. At the same time his feet curled up into tiny black fists. When the spasms eventually stopped, Methuselah lay a limbless, shapeless, dessicated pelt crusted
with dark body fluids. A demise that would have taken weeks had been compressed into minutes.
“What happened to him?”
“I don’t know.” Chris had seen his mice die before, but never like this. Never.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Quentin squealed. “What the hell were you pumping into him? What is that stuff?”
“The toxogen.”
Quentin didn’t believe him for a moment. “We animal-tested Veratox for a year and nothing like this ever happened.”
Quentin’s eyes raked Chris for an answer. “I guess the pathology somehow accelerated.”
“Accelerated? There’s nothing left of him. It’s like he died on fast forward.”
“I’ll do a postmortem,” Chris mumbled. “Maybe he had a prior condition, or maybe it’s some unknown virus.” He didn’t know if Quentin would buy that or not, but he played it out and put on rubber gloves, put the remains of Methuselah into a plastic bag, and deposited it in the refrigerator for a necropsy when he was alone.
“I don’t know what you’re doing in here, but let me suggest you put your efforts into synthesizing Veratox—which is what the hell we’re paying you for, and not saving a few goddamn mice.”
Then he turned on his heal and stomped out, leaving Chris standing there frozen, the words echoing and reechoing in his head:
It’s like he died on fast forward.
C
hris arrived home around nine, still badly shaken. Methuselah’s death was like nothing he had seen before. Other animals had experienced accelerated senescence before dying, but over a period of days or weeks—not minutes, and never so extreme. Held in submission for six years, cancer had apparently invaded healthy cells and replicated with explosive vengeance. To make things worse, Quentin was surely questioning Chris’s dedication to Veratox.
As Chris stretched out on their big double bed, he knew his days at Darby Pharmaceuticals were numbered. Quentin had all but said he’d replace him, no doubt with some younger talent with hot new strategies on creating synthetic pathways. Now he’d been caught red-handed in his own private project, using company material, time, and funds. How the hell at forty-two was he going to find a new job when the industry was hiring fresh grad students? How the hell were they going to live on an English teacher’s salary?
Chris tried to compose his mind to rest. His eyes fell on the framed plaque on the opposite wall of their bedroom. It was an old Armenian wedding toast etched in beautiful calligraphy in the original language and English—a gift from a college friend on their marriage day.
“May both your heads grow old on one pillow.”
For a long moment he stared at the words, then he closed his eyes.
Wendy was taking a shower, and the hush of the water filled his mind like whispered conversations. On the inside of his forehead he watched a closed-loop video of Methuselah erupting in cancerous growths, then shriveling up to a burnt-out pelt.
Who’d want to dip a needle into that?
Just ten wee minutes was all it took.
Like he died on fast forward.
It could take years to work out that limitation—first on mice, then rabbits and dogs, then primates. And that was assuming he could determine the genetic mechanism. Sadly, he had neither the expertise nor the equipment to do what was required. No way to do it alone and undercover.
No way.
No time …
Chris didn’t know how long he had dozed—probably just a few minutes, but in that time his brain had dropped a few levels to dream mode. He was at the door of the nursing home, and Sam was sitting in his wheelchair, but everything had an
Alice in Wonderland
absurdity to it. The wheelchair was too big for Sam, who was the size of a child, sitting in diapers and grinning but still an old man in wispy hair and sad loose flesh. A little boy and old man at once. And he was waving. “Bye Bye, Sailor.”
“Hey, sailor, wanna party?”
Chris’s eyes snapped open.
Wendy was standing by the bed, naked but for a flimsy negligée.
The room was dimmed and from the tape deck Frank Sinatra filled the room with “Young at Heart.”
“I said, you want to party?” She was grinning foolishly.
Suddenly Chris was fully awake. Wendy climbed onto the bed and straddled his thighs.
“My God!” he whispered. “It’s the Whore of Babylon.”
She laughed happily and kissed him.
“What’s the occasion? Fancy meal, expensive French wine, now
Playboy After Dark.
” He had bought the negligée as a Valentine’s gift several years ago but had all but forgotten it.
The light from the bathroom gilded her features. “How about I’m in love with you.”
“Even though I’m a madass Frankenstein trying to fool Mother Nature?”
“Love is blind.”
“Thank God.”
She smiled and brought his hands to her breast. He undid her negligée and dropped it on the floor. At least they could joke about it, he thought.
In a moment, he pushed away all the muck in his mind. And while
Wendy fondled him, Chris lost himself in loving her. In the amber light, he studied the beautiful fine features of her face and large liquid eyes, her long arms and swanlike neck outlined in a fine phosphorescent arc.
Wendy guided his hands across her body from her breasts to her stomach and pubis. Gently he caressed her as she lowered her face to his, moving her hips in slow deliberate cadence to the music. She hadn’t been this romantically aggressive in years.
The scent of her perfume filled his head. He kissed her and felt himself flood with sensations that rose up from a distant time. Suddenly he was back in their cramped little apartment in Cambridge where they had settled after marriage. She had just gotten her masters in English at Tufts, and he had finished his postdoc at Harvard. Greener days, when their passion seemed endless, and the sun sat idle in the sky.
“You’re not wearing a diaphragm.”
“That’s right.”
“Is it safe?”
“No.”
“Isn’t that taking a big chance?”
“Yes.” She took his face in her hands. “Let’s have a baby.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Wendy, a-are you sure, I mean … ?”
She put a finger to his mouth. “Yes, I’m sure. Very.”
“But we should maybe think about it, talk it over. I mean, we’re forty-two. Aren’t we a little long in the tooth?”
“But young at heart.”
She was smiling and her eyes were radiant—as if a light had gone on inside of them, one long-extinguished. He wanted to ask what had brought on the change of heart, what magical snap of the fingers had ended the dark spell. Maybe it was four days of Abigail in the house.
“I want another baby. I do. Really.”
His mind raced to catch hold of any objections but found none. For years he had wanted another child, but two miscarriages and Ricky’s death had the effect of a long-acting poison. Wendy had refused to take another chance; he had complied, and had fallen into the mindset of remaining childless the rest of their lives.
She kissed him warmly and grinned. “What do you say?”
“Yeah, sure,” he whispered.
“I love you.”
He slipped himself into her and pulled her face to his. “I love you. Oh, do I ever!”
A moment later, they were in tight embrace and moving in rhythm to an all-but-forgotten love song.
“Christ!”
Quentin sat in his office hunched over the computer. Everybody else had gone for the day.
Three weeks ago he had wired Antoine $2.5 million for a single ton of apricot pits, and another two hundred thousand to Vince. He felt sick. He had juggled the books to disguise profits from a neuropeptide and other products sold to a Swiss firm. But his problems weren’t over. In six months he’d have to pay another $2.5 million unless Chris Bacon’s lab had some kind of breakthrough, which didn’t seem likely. The only good news was that Ross’s press on Reagan had paid off with the FDA giving top priority to expediting Veratox.
For nearly an hour Quentin had been studying financial records on the toxogen, nearly sick at how they had spent millions of research-and-development dollars for a compound too expensive to manufacture.
But as he scrolled the figures, something caught his eye that made no sense.
Over a six-year period, they had purchased some nine hundred mice from Jackson Labs in Maine—most for Chris Bacon’s group. What bothered Quentin were the dates and prices. According to the catalogue he found in the office library, Jackson raised hundreds of different hybrid mice bred with any number of genetic mutations or biomedical conditions—diabetes, leukemia, hepatitis, etc.—including certain cancers.
There had to be some mistake. The average price for a mouse with malignant cancers was about four dollars—the price paid for some three hundred over the years. However, Darby’s records showed that they had also ordered a breed listed as “special mutant” which at $170 each was the most expensive mouse in the catalogue by a factor of five. And over a six-year period they had purchased 582 of them, totaling nearly $99,000.
The signature on each was Christopher Bacon’s.
But what held Quentin’s attention was the catalogue notation:
“Shortest-lived breed—Gerontology studies.”
It was a quiet Friday morning a few weeks later when the envelope arrived. Chris had taken the day off because he was burned out. In seven months, sometimes working twelve hours a day, he had increased the yield of Veratox by a thousandth of a percent. The synthesis could not be done—not with the science he and his team knew. Wendy was seeing her doctor. She had missed her period, but she wanted to be sure because drugstore kits were not foolproof.
The envelope, whose postmark said Canton, Ohio, contained a small card and a newspaper clipping dated last month.
Canton, Ohio. Medical authorities are baffled by the unexplainable death of a former Ohio man, Dexter Quinn, who died while eating at the Casa Loma restaurant.
According to eyewitnesses, Quinn, 62, a recent retiree from a pharmaceutical company in Massachusetts, was just finishing dinner when he apparently experienced convulsions. Patrons and staff tried to aid the man, but Quinn appeared to rapidly age. “When it was over, he looked ninety years old, all wrinkled and scrunched up,” reported Virginia Lawrence, who had sat in a nearby booth. “It was horrible. He just shriveled up like that.”
Even more bizarre, several witnesses say that before the strange affliction, Quinn looked considerably younger than his age. “I thought he was about forty,” said waiter Nick Hoffman. Karen Kimball, proprietor of the Casa Loma, who had served Mr. Quinn was too distraught to take questions.
According to George Megrich, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy, “no unusual chemicals signatures” were found in Quinn’s system. But he did say that his internal organs resembled those of the elderly. “His prostate gland was greatly enlarged, and his liver and kidneys had the color and density associated with dysfunctions of older people.”
Baffled, Megrich speculated that Quinn had died of some virulent form of Werner’s syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that causes victims to age abnormally fast. “Fifty years of aging can be compressed into fifteen years,” Megrich said, “but
not fifteen minutes. Frankly, I have no idea what happened to this man. It’s very very weird …”
“A medical card in his wallet had your name on the back.” The card was signed: “Karen Kimball, an old friend of Dexter’s.”
Chris felt himself grow faint. He thought about flying out to consult with the doctor and medical examiner. But he knew what had happened.
No virus, no plague, no known diseases.
It was tabulone. Dexter Quinn had tried it on himself.
Veratox was the lead story on the eleven o’clock news.
With Wendy beside him, Chris tried to lose himself in the report, but his mind was elsewhere—stuck in a booth in a restaurant in Canton, Ohio. He had told her how he had just learned of Dexter’s death, but did not show her the news clipping. He simply said it was a heart attack.
You want to know when you’re old? When all that’s left is the countdown.
Chris tried to convince himself that he just wanted to spare Wendy the horror. But deep down he knew the real reason. Wendy was dead set against the tabulone project. The truth would only confirm her revulsion.
What bothered him even more was how he had let his life split into a kind of dual existence—one open, the other hidden. Like Jekyll and Hyde.
The Channel 5 anchor announced that the FDA had approved a new and highly successful treatment for cancer called Veratox to be marketed by Lexington’s own Darby Pharmaceuticals. It went on to describe the unprecedented results with malignant tumors. The report jumped from supermarket shots of apricots to cancer patients at the Massachusetts General Hospital to an interview with the head of oncology holding forth on what a miracle compound Veratox was.
But Chris could barely concentrate, and not just because all the TV hoopla was hollow—FDA approval nothwithstanding, they still couldn’t synthesize the toxogen to make it marketable. What clutched his mind was that Dexter had died like Methuselah. He had probably absconded with undetectable amounts of tabulone and saved it to administer to himself after retiring. But something had gone horribly wrong. Maybe he had run out of supply. Maybe he missed a treatment. Maybe he had miscalculated the dosage. Maybe none of the above.
While physicians on the TV screen recommended hospitals everywhere give Veratox usage top priority, something scratched at Chris’s mind.
“I thought he was about forty.”
How was a sixty-two-year-old man mistaken for one two-thirds his age, especially since Dexter was not a younglooking sextarian? He had a bad heart, so he couldn’t exercise much. At best he could pass for the late fifties. Not forty. It was as if he had somehow rejuvenated.
Ross Darby beamed at the camera from his office desk. “I have every confidence that Veratox could prove to be a turning point in the battle against what is surely the greatest threat to human health and longevity … .”

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