Elixir. Part 5

"For a ride."

"Uh-huh." After a long silence, Quentin said, "Look, Vince, I know why you're here. I explained to Antoine that I need until the turn of the year. There's money coming in from Switzerland. It's just taking more time than expected."

Vince still said nothing. From Concord they crossed into Lincoln not far from Quentin's neighborhood. Houses along the way were lit up with Christmas lights. Quentin tried again. "Vince, we're businessmen. We've got a contractual arrangement which I intend to fulfill, but these things happen around the end of the year, and Antoine knows all that. You'll get the money-"

Vince pulled the car over with a jerk. To Quentin's horror, they had stopped in front of his own house. The Christmas tree was visible through the family room window. The upper floor was dark except for the master bedroom where Margaret was in bed reading or watching television.

"Now, we talk," Vince said, turning in his seat to face Quentin. His face was half in shadows, making his teeth flash white as he spoke. "Antoine Ducharme is two thousand miles from here. The last time you talked, he gave you an extension until December first, twelve days ago. You missed it, which makes you my responsibility now. And I don't do extensions."

"Look, Vince, please... It's all the red tape with money transfers. I swear on my life."

"Your life doesn't have weight." He pointed to the dark upper corner of the house. "Just behind that 'TotFinder' sticker is a pretty pink bedroom with a pretty pink bed where your pretty pink daughter Robyn is asleep." Before Quentin could ask, Vince handed him three photographs, all of Robyn: at her bedroom window that morning, being dropped off at school, at recess.

"Listen, Vince-" he began.

Vince clamped his gloved hand on Quentin's jaw. "No, you listen." He pressed his face so close that Quentin could smell garlic on his breath from his dinner. In a feather-smooth voice he said, "You have until Friday. Understand? The day after tomorrow. If you renege again I look bad, and that I can't live with. Neither can your daughter." He squeezed so hard Quentin's jaw felt crushed. "Two days. Two-point-five million dollars. Plus another two hundred thousand visitation fee which you'll wire to another account. The number's on the back." And he stuffed one of his business cards into Quentin's pocket.

Quentin started to protest, but thought better. He grunted that he understood, and Vince snapped his face away. In dead silence they drove back to the Emerson, as Quentin ma.s.saged his jaw and wondered how to manipulate Darby funds, thinking how his daughter's life hung in the balance.

"This is me here," Quentin said as they rolled by his Mercedes. But they continued all the way to the emergency room. "But I'm back there."

When Vince stopped the car, he extended his gloved hand. Quentin took it, gratified that it would end with a gesture of civility. Except that Vince didn't let go. Instead, his other hand closed over Quentin's.

"This is closer."

"I don't follow."

Still holding Quentin's hand, Vince said, "You're going to need to see a doctor."

"What?"

Vince then clamped one hand onto his index finger and bent it all the way back until it broke at the joint with a sickening crack. Quentin jolted in place with a hectoring scream which Vince instantly caught in his glove. Pain jagged through Quentin like a bolt of lightning, searing nerve endings from his hand to his crown and through his genitals to the soles of his feet.

While Quentin yelled and squirmed in his seat, Vince kept his viselike grip on Quentin's mouth. For several minutes he held him until the cries subsided to whimpers.

Quentin's hand had swollen to twice its size, while his finger hung at a crazy angle like a dead root.

Vince then opened the pa.s.senger door, and in the same silky voice he said, "The next time it will be your daughter's neck."

And he shoved him out and drove off.

The morning after Jenny and Abigail returned home, Wendy stood naked before the full-length mirror and felt her heart slump. She looked all of forty-two. In her younger days she was a slender size six, and 120 pounds. Now she was two sizes and fifteen pounds heavier. Her waist and thighs were getting that thick puddingly look. Crows' feet were starting to spread around her eyes and mouth, and the smiles lines were becoming permanently etched.

Worse still, she could see herself as an old woman: a hunched and wrinkled thing with flabby skin, thinning hair, teeth chipped and gray, creasing eyes, a neck sunken into the widow's hunch of osteoporosis, her legs whitened sticks road-mapped with varicose veins, her hands patched and k.n.o.bbed. It was the image of her mother staring back at her, a woman who had died of breast cancer at sixty-eight yet who looked fifteen years older because of a crippling stroke. The image was jolting.

While she had come to accept the grim inevitability, it was no less shocking to apprehend it in her own face. What Chris had dubbed the death gene-that nasty little DNA switch that never failed to click on the long slide to the grave.

But, d.a.m.n it! Wendy told herself, Jenny was right: Forty-two is still young. And she was still healthy. What benefit was there to wasting the good years left wringing her hands over mortality? No, she couldn't reverse gravity or cellular decay, but she could at least slow the progress.

"The wine is sweet whenever you drink it."

Chris's phrase hummed in her mind.

Feeling a surge, she put on her running suit and sneakers. A few minutes later she was pounding the pavement around Mystic Lake and debating with herself. You're forty-two years old. Twenty years from now you'll be sixty-two. In thirty years, seventy-two. It didn't make sense, not at her age.

But why not? And why not her?

She splashed through shafts of sunlight, thinking that the choices she made now would determine how she lived out the rest of her life: Her grief from Ricky's death would never leave her, but it was time to end the habit of mourning.

Half-consciously she rubbed her hand across her breast as she jogged along. As Jenny said, women over forty had babies all the time.

It was her visit that had done it-seeing Jenny's unequivocal joy. And hearing a baby in the house again-sounds that took her back to happier days. Jenny had given Wendy a pair of earrings, but the real birthday gift was leaving Wendy yearning for the same joy and feeling almost startled into the hope of it. Why not? She was still healthy.

"The wine is sweet whenever you drink it."

Yes! she told herself. YES! And she glided down the path thinking of baby names.

That night Chris peered through the eyepiece of his microscope and saw the landscape of eternity. And it took his breath away.

He was looking at the cells of his own body-cells that contained all the information that made him Christopher Bacon. Cells that should be turning bright blue, dying under his eye-but were thriving.

Eight weeks ago, he had sc.r.a.ped off some flesh from the inside of his cheek. He liquefied the sample and divided it into equal batches, one treated with nutrients-growth factors, hormones, vitamins, insulin, and a lot of other stuff-that sped up replication, collapsing the remaining life of his own forty-two-year-old cells into two weeks. The other he treated with the same nutrients plus tabulone. Within twenty-four hours the surface of each dish was covered with newly replicated cells. From those batches he made subcultures. He kept that up for four weeks until the untreated cells stopped subdividing and died. Meanwhile, the tabulone-treated cells continued to thrive. Two months later they were still replicating. If he had kept that up, he would have produced endless tons of his own cells.

The realization was staggering: The cells of his own flesh were reproducing indefinitely.

That could only mean that human death was not programmed in the genes but the result of a program of cell divisions-a finite process that climaxed in the eventual breakdown of cell walls. In other words, we lived as long as our cells kept replicating. But why did they stop at fifty?

He did not understand the genetics, but it confirmed his suspicion that aging had no clear evolutionary purpose. Traditional textbook reasoning about making room for the next generation made no sense since most animals never made it to old age. They were eaten by predators or died from disease. There was no reason for natural selection to genetically favor demise, Chris told himself. No purpose served.

His eye fell on the wall clock as the second hand made its circuit. Like all his clocks and watches, it was set ten minutes fast, a silly little habit to allow himself to pretend that it wasn't as late as it was-that he had a few more minutes free of charge.

While the radio played softly in the background, Chris watched the clock move inexorably around its course.

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 n.o.body 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 ccs into your syringe and shoot up?

Chris stiffened. Dangerous thoughts, he told himself. Very dangerous.

The kind of speculations he and Dexter Quinn would entertain 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 were 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 repet.i.tion 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 bulls.h.i.+t 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 s.h.i.+t."

"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 s.p.a.ce. 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 f.u.c.king 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 h.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sed 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. n.o.body 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, n.o.body 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 gla.s.s 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?"

G.o.d! 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 s.h.i.+ny red mushrooms growing at an impossible rate.

"Jesus Christ!" Quentin screamed. "What the h.e.l.l'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 k.n.o.bbed 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.