The Immortality Factor (11 page)

I shrugged. “I know that. But the university assigns the rights to me whenever—”

“I'm afraid the rights won't be assigned in this case,” Barrow said ruefully.

Puzzled, I asked, “What do you mean?”

“The university will not release the rights to you.”

“Why not? They've done it before. It's a special deal that we made a few years back.”

“Not anymore.”

I felt more surprised than angry. “When you say the university, just
who
in the university made this decision?”

Barrow shook his head slightly. “That's not for me to say.”

That aroused my suspicions. I put my wine glass down on the bar. “Just what the hell is going on here?”

“You'll be called to a meeting with the chief legal counsel. He'll explain it all to you. I just thought I'd give you a little warning so you won't be caught completely by surprise.”

A Christmas gift from a lawyer. “Well, thank you—I guess.”

Barrow put on a regretful smile. “Sorry to spoil the party for you.”

“Don't worry about it,” I said, for some stupid reason trying to sound nonchalant. “Happy holidays.”

“Merry Christmas.”

The lawyer melted back into the crowd. For a while I just stood by the bar, my mind in a turmoil of surmises and worried suspicions. Finally I decided that there was nothing I could do until the legal department called me, so I retrieved my glass of wine and made my way through the crowd to the brunette I'd been eying. Maybe a lesson in the Romance languages will make me feel better, I thought.

It did, but only temporarily.

Sure enough, the day before the Christmas break began, I was called to the office of the university's chief legal counsel and was told point-blank that the rights to my patent would not be assigned to me.

“The university will retain the rights,” said the counsel. He was a lean scarecrow of a man, cadaverous almost, in a wrinkled dead gray suit. He looked decidedly unhappy.

“The university has assigned the rights to me on my previous applications,” I said. “We have an informal agreement—”

“That will no longer be the case,” he told me. “The university intends to license the rights to a commercial bidder.”

“Who made this decision?” I wanted to know.

The scarecrow spread his long arms. “The, uh, university.”

He was trying to stonewall me. “Was it your idea? Did the decision originate with the legal staff?”

“No!” He blurted it like a man proclaiming his innocence.

“Then where did it originate?”

Silence.

“It had to come from somewhere,” I insisted. “Someone.”

“From your own department,” the counsel admitted.

From Potter, I realized.

It was starting to snow when I stormed out of the counsel's office. Blind-angry, bareheaded, wearing nothing heavier than my tweed jacket, I tramped through the falling wet flakes back to my own building and straight to the office of the department chairman.

Potter's office was far from pretentious. Bigger than the cubicles his faculty members were assigned, it was nonetheless a small, stuffy room crammed with bookshelves and a mahogany desk that Potter sat behind like a general looking out at his battlefield from the safety of the walls of his fortress. He was a small man, small in every way; I had often thought that a larger office would merely diminish his stature. There was one window, behind Potter's back. The snow was thickening outside as I took the worn old wooden chair before the desk, my soaked shoes making puddles on his faded thin carpet.

“I'm very busy,” Potter said. And he started fluttering papers on his desk, with that venomous little half smile of his ticking at the corners of his mouth.

“You instructed the legal department not to assign the rights to my patent to me.”

Potter's lopsided little smile disappeared. “Who told you that?”

“Let's not play games, Professor. You did it and I know you did. The question is, why?”

“Legally, any patent granted for work by the faculty belongs to the university.”

“The university has assigned the rights to my previous patents to me. You know that. The arrangement was agreed to more than three years ago.”

“Yes, quite true,” Potter snapped, his eyes glittering angrily. “And you turn around and license the rights to Omnitech and make a fortune.”

“What of it? Other faculty members do the same thing. It's common practice.”

“They get rich!” Potter screeched. “They make fortunes for themselves while the rest of us try to live on a professor's salary.”

I sagged back on the hard wooden chair. By god, he's jealous. The old bastard is jealous!

“A professor's salary isn't exactly penury,” I said, more softly.

Potter's face contorted. “Do you know what Samuels told me last April? His university salary barely covers his income taxes! He invited me out to his big fancy house out on the Island just to show off how well he's doing and then he tells me that his salary is not quite big enough to pay his income tax!”

“But that's no reason to—”

“I won't have any more members of my department using this university as a launching pad for their personal fortunes. Never again!”

“That's unfair,” I said. “Dictatorial.”

Potter pointed a bony finger at me. “See here, Marshak. You've got to decide whether you're going to be a proper member of this faculty or a money-grubbing businessman. You can't be both. I won't have it.”

My insides were trembling. “Are you telling me that you won't allow me to have any of the benefits from the patentable work I do?”

“I'm telling you that you're here to teach and do research, not to build up your private fortune. If you want to get rich, then get out!”

I was fighting to remain calm, reasonable. “I've worked all my life to get where I am. I've seen others take my ideas and make fortunes on them. It's not fair of you to prevent me from getting what I deserve.”

“You signed the same disclosure and waiver forms that I did when you accepted your position on the faculty,” Potter said. “You're not going to get special treatment anymore. That's final.”

I got to my feet. My legs were shaking. “I thought that I had finally found a home, a place where I could work and live for the rest of my life.”

“You are using university facilities and students to line your own pockets,” Potter snarled at me. “You don't belong in academia, you're just a money-mad Jew.”

“I'm not going to allow you to stop me,” I said, looking down on the little man.

“Then get out!” Potter snarled. “And don't try to come back!”

Why did you leave teaching?
Patricia had asked me.
You obviously enjoy it.

Yes. I did enjoy the teaching. I did enjoy it. But that gloomy December evening as I stood outside with the thickening snow falling on my bare head, looking up at Potter's window, I felt as if I had been orphaned and thrown out onto the street.

Which was just what Potter had done to me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I
t wasn't until I had driven halfway back to Old Saybrook that I realized that I had gotten precious little information about Arthur Marshak. Hours and hours about the new antibody process and Cassie Ianetta's work on stopping tumor growth. But the background information about the man himself was minuscule.

Is he really that self-effacing? I asked myself. He sure doesn't come across as humble or shy. Then I wondered, Is he hiding something? Is there a bigger story here than the one Omnitech wants me to write?

By the time I got to our weather-beaten old cottage I had made up my mind to phone Marshak first thing the next morning to schedule a follow-up interview.

As I tossed my bag on the kitchen table, I heard Livvie call from the living room, “That you, Patsy?”

Who else? I answered silently.

“Patsy?”

How I hated being called Patsy!

“Patsy, is that you or should I call 911?”

“It's me, Mom. Who else would it be?”

I walked into the tiny front room, suddenly feeling tired and cranky. The picture window had once looked out on a nice lawn and the shore of Long Island Sound. But our landlord had put up another bungalow on that lawn and now all we had to look at was its back windows.

Olivia Hayward—Livvie—was a head shorter than I and forty pounds overweight. She often said ruefully that she got her only child (me) from her second husband (of four) and I got my tall, slim genes from the sneaky, smooth-talking sonofabitch.

“How was your day?” Livvie asked. She sat in her usual recliner, a plastic tumbler in her hand and the vodka bottle at her elbow.

“Pretty interesting,” I said. I started to tell her about Grenford Lab and Arthur Marshak while I went back into the kitchen and poured myself a glass from the jug of white wine in the refrigerator.

I sat down beside my mother and told her about my day while the sun went down. Neither one of us made any attempt to begin dinner. I sipped slowly at my wine. Livvie drained her tumbler and poured herself another healthy slug of vodka.

“This scientist guy sounds nice,” Livvie said. “He makes a bundle, I bet. Is he cute?”

He's as handsome as they come, I thought. But aloud I answered, “What's that got to do with anything? I interviewed him, Mom. It's work, not romance.”

“You never can tell,” Livvie said, almost dreamily. “I met your father when he came to the house to fix the bathroom sink.”

And divorced him two years later, I added silently.

“Don't you even
think
about marriage anymore?” she asked me.

“Let's not start that again.”

“You're not getting any younger.”

I gritted my teeth, then leaned forward toward her and said, “Tell you what, Mom. You find somebody who
is
getting younger and I'll write a story about her and win the Pulitzer prize. Okay?”

Livvie gave me a puzzled look. “Just because you made one mistake shouldn't turn you off marriage forever.”

No, I said to myself, I should go on like you did and make four mistakes. Or the same mistake four times, really.

To change the subject, I asked, “Did I get any calls?”

My mother frowned with concentration for a moment. “Yeah, the phone did ring. Not too long ago, either.”

I got up and went to my bedroom, which doubled as my office. There was only one message on my phone machine:

“This is Arthur Marshak. I hope you don't mind my calling, Pat, after
spending a pretty intense afternoon at the lab. I just thought that it might be fun if we had dinner together some evening soon. Maybe tomorrow night, if you can make it. Get to know each other a little better, without the lab around us. Please give me a ring as soon as you can. Thanks.”

I plopped down on my bed, grinning foolishly, all my weariness and irritation vanished. The man must really be a mind reader, I thought. Really!

“Anybody important?” Livvie called from the front room.

My grin evaporated at the thought of bringing Arthur Marshak home to meet my mother.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
he next afternoon, the day I was supposed have dinner with Julia and Jess, I drove from the lab to Omnitech's corporate headquarters in lower Manhattan. I stuck to the Bronx River Parkway; I never took the Deegan Expressway if I could avoid it. Superstition, I suppose. Still, I never willingly drove on the highway that had killed my father and maimed my mother.

Find a date, Momma told me. Three o'clock in the afternoon and I've got to find a date for seven-thirty. It had been stupid to call Patricia Hayward. Desperate. Just met her and I phone to invite her to dinner. I must have sounded like an idiot. No wonder she hadn't called back. I began to think seriously of calling a professional escort service.

As a corporate vice president, I had my own office in the headquarters building. It was not as large as my office at the lab but decorated much more richly. The corporate officers know how to spend money on themselves: gleaming walnut paneling and thick luxurious carpeting. Nancy Dubois, one of the more ambitious junior executives, informed me that the carpet's color was
pale ecru. At the lab the walls were plain painted plasterboard or cinderblock and the carpeting was industrial heavy-duty gray.

My office had floor-to-ceiling windows, too. Seventy-eight stories up, it was a little scary. The building had been awfully close to the World Trade Center. When the terrorists struck, the police kept us out of the building for weeks until they determined that it was structurally unharmed. Still, it was scary standing there looking out those windows. I imagined an airliner hurtling straight at me.

Ground Zero was on the other side of the building. From my office I could see the harbor far below, and in the distance the small green figure of the Statue of Liberty. My desk was solid walnut. Its gleaming surface was almost always clear of papers or anything that looked like work. I worked at the lab. I came to the corporate office for politics. All the chairs were covered in bottle-green leather, including the big swivel chair behind the desk. I had to insist that they put in a credenza alongside the desk and get me a personal computer. Hardly any of the other corporate vice presidents had computers in their headquarters offices; they requisitioned secretaries to type for them.

Soon as I got in, I phoned Phyllis back at the lab. She assured me that all was well, no emergencies that could not wait until I returned the following morning. Then I phoned Elise Hauser at her UN office. But she was out of the country and would not return for a week.