The Sixth Commandment (45 page)

The gorilla-butler, with a shoulder holster and gun strapped across a soiled T-shirt, pushed forward.

“Out the back door, Miss Thorndecker,” he said. “I heard the shots and come running. I seen him. Out the back door and onto the grounds.”

Mary Thorndecker nodded. “Alma, you and Fred see to the patients. Some of them may have heard the commotion. Calm them down. Sedation, if needed. The rest of you get your hats and coats. Bring flashlights and lanterns. We must find him. He is not a well man.”

I pondered that: “He is not a well man.” And Hitler was “disturbed.”

It took us maybe ten minutes to get organized. Mary Thorndecker ordered us around like a master sergeant. I couldn’t fault her. She got us spread out on a ragged line, at about fifteen-foot intervals. Most of the beaters had flashlights or lanterns. One guy had a kerosene lamp. And all the interior lights of Crittenden Hall were switched on, cutting the gloom in the immediate vicinity.

At a command from Mary, we started moving forward, trying to keep the line intact. Once we were out of the Hall’s glow, the dark night closed in. Then all I could see was a bobbing, wavering necklace of weak lights, shimmering in the rain.

“Thorndecker!” someone called in a quavery voice, and the others took up the cry.

“Thorndecker!”

“Thorndecker!”

“Thorndecker!”

Then it became a long, wailing moan: “Thooorndecker!” And we all, scarcely sane, went stumbling across the slick, frosted fields, lights jerking up and down, calling his name again and again, echoing his name, while the cold rain pelted a black and ruined world.

Oh yes, we found him. We had passed through the cemetery and were slowly, fearfully working the stand of bare trees on the far side. There was a shout, the wild swinging of a lantern in wide circles. We all ran, breathless and blundering, to the spot. We clustered.

He lay on his back, spreadeagled, face turned to the falling sky. He wore only pajama pants. He was almost completely bald; only a few wet tufts of hair were left. Bare feet were bruised and bleeding. His eyes were open. He was dead.

Arms, shoulders, torso, neck, face, scalp—all of him exposed to view was studded with suppurating tumors. Great blooms of red and yellow and purple. Rotting excrescences that seemed to have a vigorous life of their own, immortal, sprouting from his cooling flesh. They had soft, dough-like centers, and browned, crusted petals.

There was hardly an inch of him not choked by cancerous growths. Eyes bulging with necrosis, mouth twisted, nose lumped, the limbs swollen with decay, trunk gnarled with great chunks of putrescent matter. The smell was of deep earth, swamp, and the grave.

The trembling circles of light exposed the horror he had become. I heard a sobbing, was conscious of people turning away to retch. Someone began to murmur a prayer. But I was stone, transfixed, looking down at what was left of Dr. Telford Gordon Thorndecker, wanting desperately to find meaning, and finding nothing.

The butler-thug volunteered to remain with the body. The rest of us wandered back to Crittenden Hall. We moved, I noted, in a tight group, seeking the close presence of others to help hold back the darkness, to prove that live warmth still existed in the world. No one spoke. Silently we filed through the cemetery, gravestones glistening in our lights, and straggled across the stubbled fields to the brightness of Crittenden Hall, a beacon in the black.

A half-hour later I was seated with Dr. Kenneth Draper in Thorndecker’s private office in the Crittenden Research Laboratory. I had left Mary Thorndecker to deal with the police. I had latched onto Draper—literally. I took him by the arm and would not let him go, not for an instant, I am not certain if any of us were acting rationally that night.

I marched Draper upstairs to his apartment and let him dress. Then I pulled him into that marvelous Thorndecker sitting room where I swiped a bottle of brandy, and thought nothing of it. I made Draper gulp a mouthful, because his face was melting white wax, and he was moving like an invalid. I took him and the brandy back to the research lab. Found the keys, turned off the alarm, opened the door, turned on the lights.

In Thorndecker’s private lab, I pushed Draper into the chair behind the desk. I peeled off my soaked hat and coat. I found paper cups, and poured us each a deep shot of brandy. Some color came back into his face, but he was racked with sudden shivers, and once his teeth chattered.

Thorndecker’s journal, the one he had been working on the last time I saw him alive, still lay open on the desk. I shoved it toward Draper.

“When did it start?” I asked him.

“What will they do to me?” he said in a dulled voice. “Will I go to jail?”

I could have told him that if he kept his mouth shut, probably nothing would happen to him. How could they prove all those Crittenden Hall patients had died other than natural deaths? I figured the Coburn cops would be satisfied that Thorndecker had killed his wife and her lover, then died himself from terminal cancer. It was neat, and it closed out a file. They wouldn’t go digging any deeper.

But I wanted to keep Draper guilty and quivering.

“It depends,” I told him stolidly, “on how willing you are to cooperate. If you spell it out for me, I’ll put in a good word for you.”

I didn’t tell him that I had about as much clout with the Coburn cops as I do with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“All right,” I said, in the hardest voice I could manage, “when did it start?”

He raised a tear-streaked face. I poured him another brandy, and he choked it down. He stared at the ledger, then began turning the pages listlessly.

“You mean the—the experiments?”

“Yes,” I said, trying not to yell at him, “the experiments.”

“A long time ago,” he said, in a voice so low I had to crane forward to hear him. “Before we came to Crittenden. We started with normal mammalian cells. Then concentrated only on normal human cells. We were looking for the cellular clock that causes aging and death. Dr. Thorndecker believed that—”

“I know what Thorndecker believed,” I interrupted him. “Did you believe in the cellular clock theory?”

He looked at me in astonishment.

“Of course,” he said. “If Dr. Thorndecker believed in it, I
had
to believe. He was a great man. He was—”

“I know,” I said, “a genius. But you didn’t find it? The cellular clock?”

“No. Hundreds of experiments. Thousands of man-hours. It’s extremely difficult, working with normal human cells
in vitro.
Limited doublings. The cells become less differentiated, useless for our research. We confirmed conclusively that the cell determines longevity, but we couldn’t isolate the factor. It was—well, frustrating. During that period, Dr. Thorndecker became very demanding, very insistent. Hard to deal with. He could not endure failure.”

“This was before you came to Crittenden?”

“Yes. Dr. Thorndecker’s first wife was still alive. Most of our research was being done on small grants. But we had no exciting results to publish. The grant money ran out. But then Dr. Thorndecker’s first wife was killed in an accident, and he was able to buy Crittenden and establish this laboratory.”

“Yes,” I said, “I know. And then?”

“We had been here only a short time, when one night he woke me up. Very excited. Laughing and happy. He said he had solved our basic problem. He said he knew now what our approach should be. It was an inspiration. Only a genius could have thought of it. A quantum leap of pure reason.”

“And what was that?” I asked.

“We couldn’t keep normal cells viable
in vitro.
Not for long. But cancer cells flourished, reproduced endlessly. Apparently they were immortal. Dr. Thorndecker’s idea was to forget about finding the factor in normal cells that caused senescence and death, and concentrate on finding the factor in abnormal cells that caused such wild proliferation.”

“The factor that made cancer cells immortal
in vitro?”

“Yes.”

I took a deep breath. There it was.

I knew what was coming. I could have stopped right there. But I wanted him to spell it out. Maybe I wanted to rub his nose in it.

“And you found the factor?”

He nodded. “But the problem was how to separate the longevity effect from the fatal effect. You understand? The cancer cells themselves simply grew and grew—forever, if you allowed them to. But they killed the host organism. So all our research turned to filtering out the immortality factor, purifying it in effect, so that the host’s normal cells could absorb it and continue to grow indefinitely without harm. Very complex chemistry.”

“It didn’t work?” I said.

“It did, it did!” he cried, with the first flash of spirit he had exhibited. “I can show you mice and guinea pigs in the basement that have lived three times as long as they would normally. And they’re absolutely cancer-free. And we have one dog that, in human terms, is almost two hundred years old.”

“But no success with chimps?”

“No. None.”

“So this essence of yours, this injection, wasn’t always successful?”

“No, it wasn’t. But animals are notoriously difficult to work with. Sometimes they reject the most virulent cancer cells. Sometimes a strain of rats supposed to be leukemia-prone will prove to be immune. Animals do not always give conclusive results, insofar as their reactions can be applied to humans. And animal experimentation is expensive, and takes time.”

I leaned back and lighted a cigarette. Like most specialists, he tended to lecture when riding his own hobbyhorse. I probably knew as much about nuclear physics as he did, but bio-medicine was his world; he was confident there.

“Animal experimentation is expensive,” I said, repeating his last words, “and it takes time. And Thorndecker never had enough money for what he wanted to do. But more than that, he didn’t have the time. He was a man in a hurry, wasn’t he? Impatient? Anxious for the fame the published discovery would bring?”

“He was convinced we were on the right track,” Dr. Draper said. “I was, too. We were so close, so close. We had those animals in the basement to prove it—the ones who had doubled and tripled their normal life spans.”

I rose and began to pace back and forth in front of the desk. Somehow I found myself with a lighted cigarette in each hand, and stubbed one out.

“All right,” I said, “now we come to the worm in the apple. Whose idea was it to try the stuff on humans?”

He lowered his head and wouldn’t answer.

“You don’t have to tell me,” I said. “I know it was Thorndecker’s idea; you don’t have the balls for it. I’ll bet I even know how he convinced you. ‘Look, Draper,’ he said, ‘there can be no progress without pain. Sacrifices must be made. We must dare all. Those patients in Crittenden Hall are terminal cases. How long do they have—weeks, months, a year? If we are unsuccessful, we’ll only be shortening slightly their life span. And think of what they will be contributing! We can give their remaining days meaning. Think of that, Draper. We can make their deaths meaningful!’ Isn’t that what Thorndecker told you? Something like that?”

He nodded slowly. “Yes. Something like that.”

“So you selected the ones you thought were terminal?”

“They were, they were!”

“You
thought
they were. You weren’t sure. Doctors can never be sure; you know that. There are unexpected remissions. The patient recovers for no explainable reason. One day he wakes up cured. It happens. You know it happens.”

He poured himself another cup of brandy, raised it to his pale lips with a shaking hand. Some of the brandy spilled down his chin, dripped onto his shirtfront.

“How many?” I demanded. “How many did you kill?”

“I don’t know,” he muttered. “We didn’t keep—”

“Don’t give me that shit!” I screamed at him. “Thorndecker kept very complete, precise records, and you know it. You want me to grab up this journal and all the others for the past three years, and take them to the cops? You think you can stop me? Try it! Just try it! How many?”

“Eleven,” he said in a choked voice.

“And none survived?”

“No,” he said. Then, brightly: “But the survival time was lengthening. We were certain we were on the right track. Dr. Thorndecker was convinced of it. I was, too. We had purified the extract. A week ago we were absolutely certain we had made the breakthrough.”

“Why didn’t you try it on another patient?”

Draper groaned.

“Don’t you understand? If it had succeeded, how could Thorndecker publish the results? Admit experiments on humans? Fatal experiments? With no informed consent agreements? They’d have crucified him. The only way was to inject himself. He was so sure, so sure. He laughed about it. ‘The elixir of life, Draper,’ he told me. ‘I’ll live forever!’ That’s what he told me.”

I marveled at the man, at Thorndecker. To have such confidence, such absolute faith in your own destiny, such pride in your own skill. To dare death to prove it.

“What went wrong?” I asked Draper.

“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “Initially, everything was fine. Then, in a short time, the first symptoms appeared. Hair falling out, skin blotches that signaled the beginning of tumors, sudden loss of weight, loss of appetite, other things …”

“Thorndecker knew?”

“Oh yes. He knew.”

“How did he react?”

“We’ve spent the last few days working around the clock, trying to discover what went wrong, why the final essence not only didn’t extend life but produced such rapid tumor germination.”

“Did you find out what it was?”

“No, not definitely. It may have been in the purifying process. It may have been something else. It could have been Dr. Thorndecker’s personal immunochemistry. I just don’t know.”

“Julie Thorndecker was aware of this?”

“She was aware that her husband was fatally ill, yes.”

“Was she aware of the experiments you two ghouls were carrying out?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know.”

I sat down again. I slumped, so exhausted that I could have slept just by closing my eyes.

Dazed, not thinking straight, I wondered what I could do about this guy. I could have him racked up on charges, but I knew a smart lawyer could easily get him off. Do what? Exhume the corpses and find they had died of cancer? He’d never spend a day in jail. There might be a professional inquiry, and his career would be ruined. But so what? I wanted this prick to
suffer.