The Immortality Factor (16 page)

“Not yet. We've just started some preliminary work on the concept. That's why it shouldn't be repeated outside this room.”

Johnston was smiling happily down the table. But Lowenstein asked, “How many paraplegics are there in the United States, Art?”

That surprised me. “I don't really know. But there must be hundreds of thousands, at least. Maybe a million or more.”

“I looked it up,” Lowenstein said with a thin smile. “About ten thousand cases per year in the U.S. Most of them are the result of trauma—injuries. Automobile accidents, motorcycles, things like that.”

“How many altogether?” someone asked.

“Can't be more than three, four hundred thousand altogether,” said Lowenstein.

“How many of them would you be able to cure?” Gunnerson asked.

I waved a hand in the air. “I don't know. A fair percentage of the accident victims, I should think. If we get to them early enough so that their legs haven't atrophied.”

“That's not a very big market,” one of the older men muttered. He pulled a pocket calculator from his vest and tapped on the keys. “Let's say fifty percent of ten thousand. Not much of a market at all, really.”

That nettled me. “There's the rest of the world,” I pointed out. “And quadriplegics, too.”

“There's about two hundred thousand quadriplegics,” Lowenstein said. “In the U.S., that is.”

“Even so.” The old man shook his head as if in disappointment.

Feeling as if I had to defend myself, I said, “Well, there are some things that we do because they're the right thing to do. If we can make paraplegics and quadriplegics get out of their wheelchairs and walk, lead normal lives again—”

“How much would it cost?” someone asked.

Another board member said, “If the market's this small, there won't be any profit in it.”

“I don't see why we should invest money in a program that's not going to be profitable. Your burn rate is already too high, Arthur.”

“The money my lab burns,” I shot back, “produces this corporation's profits five years downstream. And I'm not asking for more funding.”

“Not yet,” someone muttered.

“But you will,” the old man said with a knowing smile. “Sooner or later you'll come to us for money, won't you?”

I had to admit, “Sooner or later.”

“I think you ought to drop this project right here and now, before you pour too much money into it.”

Johnston pursed his lips as if he wanted to say something, then decided against it.

“Now, wait a minute,” I said. “Do you mean that if we could save the lives often thousand people, we wouldn't do it unless we could make a profit at it?”

“We can't engage in programs that lose money,” Lowenstein replied. “For god's sake, Art, we're not the government! We can't print money, we've got to
earn
it.”

Most of the board members chuckled.

I tried to hold on to my temper. “But what if this technique would have wider applications than
merely
a few tens of thousands of paraplegics?”

“What do you mean?” Johnston asked.

“Suppose we could find out how to regenerate other types of tissue, in addition to spinal neurons?”

“Like what?”

“Hearts. Livers. Kidneys. Amputated limbs.”

That stunned them. They all sagged back in their chairs as if I had slapped their faces, all at the same time.

“Are you serious?” asked the oldest member of the board. I knew he had undergone quadruple bypass surgery and several other cardiac procedures.

“I am serious,” I told him.

“Regenerate a heart?”

“Regenerate any organ in the human body,” I said firmly. Then I added, “Eventually.”

The woman next to me asked, “Do you mean you could grow a new heart for a person? Inside her own body?”

“Without surgery,” I answered. “That's the goal of our work.”

“New breasts for mastectomy cases?”

I nodded.

Johnston gave Lowenstein an intense stare, then said to me, “I had no idea you had come so far . . .”

Waving my hand again, I confessed, “We haven't done anything so far except talk. And think.”

“But you think you might be able to regenerate organs?”

“Maybe.”

“Wait a minute,” said Tabatha. “This is going to need stem cells, isn't it?”

She was even sharper than I had thought. “It might. At the outset, at least.”

“Can we do that?”

“If we fund it ourselves, without government money,” Johnston answered for me.

“Regenerate any kind of organ? Like lungs?” one of the older men asked again, in a wheezing voice.

“Eventually we'll be able to regenerate any kind of tissue,” I said, knowing that
eventually
would probably be too late for him and most of the others around the table.

“That's a different kettle of fish,” said the man with the calculator. “That—it's kind of staggering, isn't it?”

I had them hooked. There was no way they were going to order me to drop the work now. But I didn't want to build their expectations prematurely.

“Look,” I said, “I don't want to give you the idea that we'll be able to do this by Christmas. All we've got right now is a few basic ideas—and the talented people who might be able to turn those ideas into reality. But it will take time. I have no idea of how long.”

“It would be very nice,” said one of the old men, “if you could have it done before my next physical.”

Everyone laughed. There was no question of stopping the research now. No one asked about how much money it would take, not even Lowenstein.

And I almost forgot that the executive committee was keeping secrets from the rest of the board.

But as the meeting broke up, I noticed once again that all six of the executive committee members drifted up to the head of the table and huddled with Johnston briefly, whispering. One of them even glanced back my way, like a guilty little kid plotting against me.

Something was definitely cooking, that was certain. I picked my PowerBook from the table and headed slowly for the door. Sure enough, I was barely out in the corridor when Johnston clapped me on the shoulder, like a policeman grabbing a suspect.

“That's a nice fast one you pulled on me in there,” the CEO grumbled.

“Fast one?” I feigned innocence.

Johnston started toward his office, one massive paw still gripping me by the shoulder, almost hard enough to hurt, dragging me along the corridor with him.

“That business about regenerating hearts. You never told me about that before.”

You didn't tell me you were going to sabotage the paraplegic work, either, I retorted silently.

Aloud, I replied, “It's new. We've just had a couple of conversations about it, nothing more.”

“But you made it sound to the board like it's almost a done deal.”

Johnston was clearly angry, I could see that. Why? What's going on?

“I told them it's just in the talking stage, didn't I?”

Frowning as he strode into the anteroom of his own office, Johnston said, “The board members aren't scientists, Arthur. You know that. You tell them something might be possible, they assume you've got it in the bag.”

“Well, it's not, and I'll be happy to explain that to them at the next meeting.”

“Yeah, you do that.” Johnston finally let go of my shoulder and headed for his broad, curved, ultramodern desk.

“What's going on?” I asked.

Johnston looked up at me as he sat behind his desk. “What do you mean?”

“Why are you so upset about what I said? Why's the executive committee so wired?”

“I don't like being surprised at board meetings.”

“I told you about the paraplegic work.”

“But not about growing new hearts.”

I put on a grin, trying to lighten the mood. “Well, you don't think I'm going to let Sid shoot me down without fighting back, do you?”

Johnston did not grin back. “Sid's fighting to save this corporation from being
bought out by a bunch of European bastards who'll gut the company, milk it for all it's worth, and then throw us all on the garbage heap.”

“Is that what the executive committee's so tense about?”

“Yeah,” said Johnston. “What else?” But his gaze did not meet mine.

The desk phone buzzed and Johnston's secretary's voice announced, “Your call to Tokyo is coming through, Mr. J.”

“All right,” he said to the phone speaker. As he picked up the handpiece he shooed me toward the door with his free hand.

 

S
till wondering what was really burning Johnston's guts, I drove back to the lab and got there by late afternoon. I made a brief stop at my own office, then wandered out to the laboratories where the research work was being done. The real world. I loved the sights and sounds and smells of the working labs. I knew each one of the researchers and their technicians by name. I chatted with them about their work, their families; I exchanged jokes with them. I knew every inch of the elaborate glassware apparatuses they were using, every humming, beeping, blinking instrument on their benchtops. Like a good general, I wanted to know exactly what my troops were doing, and I let them do their jobs without sticking my fingers into their experiments.

The real world. The board of directors can play their games and talk their talk, but out here is where the real work gets done. You can't bullshit with science. It either works or it doesn't. Like Omar Khayyám's moving finger: it writes and neither piety nor wit can change any of the words.

I ended up in Darrell Walters's office, a ramshackle corner room stuffed to the ceiling with gadgets and shelves full of reports and pictures tacked to the walls and a well-scarred wooden drawing table and a big flip-chart easel covered with scribbled lists in half a dozen different-colored felt-tip marking pens in Walters's scrawling hand lettering.

Darrell had no desk. He preferred a broken-down stuffed sofa and an eclectic scattering of chairs, some wood, some plastic, one a high swiveling barstool.

I sat on the barstool. Darrell had stretched out on the sagging sofa. Vince Andriotti had joined us, scowling darkly, his natural expression.

We were brainstorming the idea of regenerating organs.

“Whatever made you tell the board of directors about it?” Darrell asked from his supine position.

I shook my head ruefully. “It was either get them excited about growing new hearts or have them direct me to stop the nerve regeneration experiment.”

“I guess most of the board members could use new hearts,” Darrell said.

“Some of them have never had a heart,” I joked.

“What about growing brains for 'em?” Andriotti suggested.

Swiveling the barstool back and forth, I said, “You know, one of the women on the board asked me if we'd be able to regenerate skin and muscle tissue. Instead of plastic surgery for face-lifts and breast replacements.”

“Now,
that's
a moneymaking idea!” Darrell said.

Vince was sitting backward astride one of the wooden chairs with his heavy forearms draped on its back and his chin buried in his hairy arms. He asked, “Does this mean I can stop moonlighting and get a legitimate charge number for the job?”

“Haven't you got one?” I was surprised.

“Not yet.”

“Tell Accounting to open a charge for you first thing tomorrow morning. I'll okay it.”

“Great.”

Darrell's mind was on more esoteric matters. “Arthur, how in hell can you grow a new heart in a patient's chest without squeezing the heart and lungs that're already in there? There won't be enough room for the new heart to grow.”

“I don't know how elastic those organs are, do you? Maybe they can be squeezed to a certain extent, or pushed aside a little.”

“They put artificial hearts in peoples' chests,” Andriotti pointed out.

“After they've removed the natural heart,” said Darrell.

“Not always. Sometimes they leave the natural ticker in there and use the artificial heart as a booster pump, to help the natural one 'cause it's gotten too weak to pump blood all the way through the body.”

“It's a point we'll have to check out with Jesse,” I said.

“Is your brother going to be working with us on this?”

“Yes,” I said automatically. Then, remembering, I added, “Until he goes to Africa.”

“We'd better get a team of tame physicians, then,” said Darrell, “and bring them on board the program.”

“Surgeons?” Vince asked.

“No!” I snapped. “This work should not involve surgery. Never.”

“What about if we have to grow the organs in vitro and then implant them in the patient?”

“Well—maybe then, I suppose.”

Andriotti's swarthy face went crafty. “So maybe we oughta have at least one little surgeon on the team? As a consultant, not regular staff.”

I conceded the point with a reluctant nod.

“What kind of experimental animals should we be thinking about?” Darrell mused.

“Pigs, minihogs,” said Andriotti. “Their cardiovascular systems are damned close to ours. Same blood clotting times, too, I think.”

“Macaques,” Darrell said. Most of our animal experiments were done on lab rats first and then the monkeys.

“Chimps, eventually,” I said.

Darrell pretended to be shocked. “Lord, don't let Cassie hear you say that!”

“Where is she?” I asked. “She ought to be here; we could use her brains on this.”

“She's prob'ly having dinner with Max,” Vince cracked.

I looked at my watch. It was well past the nominal quitting time. I got down from the stool and went to the phone on the wall by Darrell's sofa.