The Immortality Factor (52 page)

And then one night, after we had driven all the way up to Boston for a lobster dinner at Anthony's Pier 4, Zack pulled the car into a side road off I-84 and parked on the shoulder beneath some huge old trees. It was after midnight, dark and raining. The only light I could see outside the car was the sign up the road, a motel, with a red
VACANCY
blinking underneath it.

Zack leaned across the console and kissed me. Very nicely. He was a good kisser, although I hadn't let him get any further with me.

“I've got a confession to make,” he said, kind of breathless.

“Oh?”

It was so dark inside the car I couldn't see his face, even though we were just about touching noses.

“I started dating you because I wanted you to get your father to help me convince Darrell and Arthur about—”

I broke into laughter. “You sure are going about it the wrong way,” I told him. “You'd've been better off if you'd invited my dad to go bowling.”

He laughed, too. At himself. “Yeah. I can see that now.”

“So why don't you? He's the one you want to get close to; you don't need to impress me.”

“But I want to impress you,” Zack said in a low, low voice. “I love you.”

That stopped me. For a long while neither of us said a word. No sound at all except the drumming of the rain on the car's fabric roof. I had never expected Zack to say anything serious. This was just supposed to be fun and games. Then I glimpsed the motel's sign again, just a smear of color in the rain-streaked windshield. He loves me. Sure.

And that's when I realized that I really loved him. It didn't matter a damn to me if all he wanted was to get into my pants. I loved Zack O'Neill and I wanted him.

“I mean it,” he said, misunderstanding my silence. “I never thought it could happen to me, but I've fallen in love with you, Tina.”

“And I love you, Zachary Taylor O'Neill,” I said. It sort of sounded like plighting my troth, making a real commitment. I grabbed both his ears and kissed him so hard his teeth left bruises on my lips.

When I let go of him, I heard him gulp as if he'd been holding his breath for fifteen minutes. Then Zack revved up the car's engine, put it in gear, and swung up onto the road. Okay, I told myself, here we go to the motel.

But Zack made a careful U-turn and headed back for the highway.

“Where're we going?” I asked him.

With the dashboard lit I could see the big grin on his face. “I'm taking you home.”

“Home?”

He pulled the car up onto the highway and put it on cruise control. Exactly at the legal speed limit. “I want to ask your father for your hand in marriage,” he said.

I almost fainted from surprise. Zack was as old-fashioned as Dad, for crying out loud!

“Marriage?” I blurted. “We haven't said anything about marriage.”

He looked stricken. “You will marry me, won't you?”

It was my turn to grin. “Not until I've found out whether you're any good in bed.”

Zack actually looked embarrassed. But we found a motel just over the Connecticut line. He was terrific, actually.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I
t was the wildest thing. I actually fell in love with Tina. She was beautiful, and intelligent, and the warmest, coolest woman I had ever met. Hey, I'm no celibate monk, you know. I've had my share of tosses in the sheets, back in college. But the truth is, all the way down deep inside I've always been kind of scared of women. They always get wonky, sooner or later. They're weird; I could never figure them out. Always saying one thing but meaning something else. Always giving you those spooky looks, like they expect you to say something or do something but they won't tell you what it is.

Tina was different. She was honest. Right up-front about everything. She said what she meant and she meant what she said. No game-playing. And she was smart, too. Never let her hormones get in the way of her thinking. Well, almost never.

I was doing a second series of experiments on the macaques, working with a couple of young surgeons from Yale–New Haven who were getting pretty good at amputating limbs. Damned monkeys were hell to work with, though. They howled their heads off whenever they saw one of us come into the cage
area. Bit a couple of the handlers, almost chomped the thumb off one of the guys.

At first I was almost scared to talk anymore to Tina about chimp experiments. I didn't want her thinking that I was more interested in Max than in her. But she cut right to the chase.

“You really need Max, don't you?” she asked me one night in bed. She hadn't moved in with me, but we spent a lot of nights together.

I'd been having dreams about the frigging chimp. Guilt dreams, I guess. I mean, I was out in the exercise area with Max almost every day. I was getting to like the damned ape. And Max was getting friendly with me, almost as friendly as he'd been with Cassie. Of course, I was bringing him bananas and candy every time I went out back to see him, so he loved me the way a cat loves the guy who feeds it.

Still . . . I had to struggle to maintain my objectivity. Max was an experimental subject, nothing more.
If
I could get Arthur to okay using him before Cassie came back from Mexico.

I knew Arthur wanted to push ahead as fast as we could, yet he was hung up over Cassie. Scared of her, like she'd strike us all dead or something if we touched Max. I wished he'd make up his mind and tell Cassie to rug it.

“Yeah, I really need Max,” I answered Tina. “Wish I didn't, though.”

“I've been talking to Dad,” she said.

“And?”

She smiled at me. “He'll come around.”

I was out in the exercise yard a couple days later when Vince came looking for me.

I never learned sign language, but Max could make himself pretty clear anyway. Soon as I came through the double doors he swung down out of his tree like a kid happy to see his old man. Max gave his hello hoot as he knuckle-walked up to me. I sat on the stone bench by the jungle gym and he patted my shirt pockets just like a hairy detective.

He found the hard candies I had stuck in the left pocket and jumped up and down, screeching with excitement. Made me laugh. He was gesticulating like mad, saying something in sign language, I guess. I reached in and pulled out one of the candies. Max went stock-still, watching me with those big brown eyes of his, while I unwrapped the candy.

He grabbed it from me so fast his hand was a blur. I could hear the candy crunch between his teeth. Then he motioned his right hand back and forth, from his lips to about waist high, several times.

“That means thank you.”

I turned and saw Vince Andriotti coming up the walk toward me. Talk about in-your-face! I guess a scowl was Vince's natural expression, but he always looked to me as if he'd just as soon slug me as say good morning.

Max backed away from Vince. For some reason the chimp was either afraid of him or just plain didn't like him.

Vince sat down on the bench beside me.

“You really going to marry my daughter, or do I have to go out and buy a shotgun?”

“Chill out,” I said, “I really want to marry her.”

“When?”

“We haven't talked about that yet.”

“Talk about it,” he said. Believe me, he was deadly serious.

“I will.”

“Now, what about Max?”

The abrupt change of subject rattled me for a moment. “Max? It's not Max per se, Vince. I need a chimp—more than one, preferably.”

“You'll be a married man with children before we can get our hands on another chimp.”

I guess I nodded. “So it's got to be Max.”

“Unless you want to wait.”

“I wouldn't mind waiting, except that other labs are bound to hit on the same ideas we've developed. And I know Arthur wants to move ahead as fast as we can.”

“He's applied for a patent on your regentide, y'know.”

I had written the patent application. “Yeah, but with all the publicity we're getting, there must be dozens of teams working their butts off to duplicate what we're doing.”

Vince nodded his head just once. Like he had already thought it over and come to an irrevocable conclusion. “Damn right. And some of those bastards have chimps that they won't sell to us. Won't even loan 'em.”

“So it's got to be Max,” I repeated.

“I'll tell Darrell. I think he already knows but he's still worried about Cassie.”

“When will she be back?” I asked.

“Who the hell knows? Her reports are getting stretched out farther and farther. Instead of monthly, they're coming in now ten, twelve weeks apart. I think she's gone native.”

“Cassie?”

“Either that or she's a lot sicker than she's letting us know.”

“Any idea at all of when she'll be back?”

Vince grunted. “Can't be long now. Christ, she's been down there more than a year, now.”

“Then we've got to make a decision about Max right away,” I said.

“Yeah. Like I said, I'll talk to Darrell. And Arthur, too.”

With that, Vince got up and strode back into the lab like a top sergeant
heading off for a showdown with his officers. Max came scampering back to me, huffing and hooting. He wrapped his hairy arms around me and before I knew it we were tussling, rolling on the grass like a couple of kids. He only wants more candy, I kept telling myself. He's a frigging
animal,
he doesn't have emotions. He likes the candy, not the guy who brings it.

But I had a lot of fun wrestling with him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I
don't think Arthur ever did have a man-to-man talk with Zack O'Neill. And I never confronted Tina, either. From the gossip in the ladies' room, Tina had really fallen in love with him and they were planning to get married. Vince Andriotti didn't seem overjoyed with the prospect, but the level of tension around the laboratory eased off palpably. There wasn't going to be an explosion, after all.

We were still getting a fair amount of media attention. But in a different way now. Reverend Simmonds was still thumping his drums about godless scientists, but the media had grown tired of his same old story and he faded from the headlines at last. Ransom had gone charging off after a government agency that was involved in getting rid of nuclear wastes.

Simmonds was still drawing big crowds at his revival meetings, though. That summer rally in Central Park had lifted him into the big time. I paid particular attention to his latest tour of the country; he was playing to packed stadiums wherever he went.

The news reporters now looked on our laboratory—Arthur's laboratory,
that is—as a reliable source of copy whenever something happened in the biotechnology area. A university announces that its researchers have discovered a new gene that's involved in cancer, science reporters call Arthur to get his authoritative word on it. Activists go to court to stop an agribusiness firm from planting genetically improved tomatoes, the news media wants Arthur's “take” on the dangers of mutant tomatoes taking over the world.

I budgeted Arthur's time as efficiently as I could, but always made certain that he personally returned any calls from the news media within twenty-four hours. Usually the same day. I wanted the reporters to think of Arthur as a reliable source. I wanted them on his side.

Arthur and I had dinner together more than once during those hectic months. Nothing very romantic about it; we usually talked business over the dinner table. I got to see behind the facade he presented to the world, at least a little bit. He was worried that the regeneration work couldn't go any farther until they did at least one experiment on a chimpanzee, but he was hesitating about using Max.

Arthur laughed ruefully. “Wouldn't it be ironic if we lost this race because we're too tenderhearted to experiment on a chimp?”

“Race?” I asked. “I didn't know anybody else—”

“Oh, we're in a race, all right.” His face went tight. “Somewhere out there, maybe in Europe, maybe in Japan or Korea, other researchers are trying to duplicate what we've done and then move ahead of us.”

“But no one's said anything.”

“They wouldn't. We wouldn't have, if my fathead brother hadn't spilled his guts to Simmonds. This process will be worth billions of dollars, Pat. Thousands of billions. Of course others are trying to get there first.”

That was the most passionate moment we shared. Yet even though Arthur framed it all in terms of money, I got the strong feeling that what he really was worked up about was being first, getting there before anyone else does, getting the recognition for making the big breakthrough.

He never made a move on me, and I never gave him a hint that I wouldn't object if he did. In fact, we spent one evening discussing sexual harassment and whether or not it was affecting the laboratory in any way.

“It hasn't bothered Tina,” I told him.

Arthur didn't crack a smile. “Maybe,” he said. “But doesn't it worry you that someone might bring up charges of harassment years after the fact?”

“Does it worry you?” I asked.

He raised both hands, palms out. “I've never mixed pleasure with business at the lab.”

Was that his way of telling me that he was interested, but wouldn't hit on me as long as I worked for him? I wondered what he'd do if I resigned. Would he come calling, or would he forget about me altogether? And then I got a flash
of the scene it would make, Arthur coming over to the house in Old Saybrook and meeting Livvie. The sophisticated scientist meets my mother, the vodka queen.