THE IMMORTAL

THE IMMORTAL

Chapter One

This is a novel about death and life, about one man who clung to life and another who did not care if it ended, and the destiny that brought them together. It is about a golden accident that made one man immortal, and about his golden blood which could save old men from dying and bring back the dying from the very edge of death. It is about the most important thing in life—life itself—and what men are willing to do to survive.

It begins with a jet airplane taking from here to there a man of power who had accumulated a measurable portion of the world's wealth...

The jet thrust its way through puffy clouds, leaving them churned and tattered in its wake. Farther behind, where the sky still was blue before the jet had begun its slow descent into the clouds, twin contrails etched a white path, as straight as railroad tracks across a desert.

But more distant still, an unseen hand was erasing the jet's marks of passage. The contrails widened, blurred, and were gone.

The jet turned. The sun glinted briefly from its polished side. Where it had been reflected a name appeared. It was a single word like a fortress with stone walls and turrets and buttresses. The name was "Braddock." Around it, like a moat keeping out the rest of the world, was a bold, elliptical line.

Or perhaps that ellipse kept something in, as if behind that barrier existed whatever a man could want, what other men might chance their lives to possess.

Inside the jet was no ordinary airplane cabin. The pilot's cockpit was not unusual; it had the customary confusion of dials, gauges, and controls, and the customary pilot and copilot in uniforms with caps and earphones over them. But there was a small television camera mounted in front of them.

Behind the cockpit was a lounge with a bar and easy chairs and bunk beds with silk sheets and brocaded bedspreads carefully tucked into place.

Behind the lounge was the main sitting room, with a long, polished wooden table down the middle of it. A few chairs on either side of the cabin were bolted to the floor. At the front of the sitting room was a control panel atop a desk; the panel had four small television screens and several dozen switches and dials. In front of the panel, facing it, was a high-backed leather chair.

The cabin looked like a corporate conference room picked up and carried aloft.

The room did not have the usual smells of stale tobacco smoke and burned jet fuel and forgotten packaged meals on plastic trays. In their place were the expensive odors of leather and wool and perfume, and through them, thinly, the astringent chemical smell of medicines and the subtler odors of the aged.

In the cabin that could have held dozens were two persons. Jordan Braddock, the reality behind the corporate name, was seated in the leather chair in front of the control panel. The chair concealed all of him but his hand; it was the wrinkled hand of an old man. Seated behind him was his young wife. She was beautiful, with dark hair and dark eyes and a lithe, full figure. She was filing her nails with an emery board.

Heavy curtains were pulled shut over the cabin windows. Lighting was provided by fixtures along the top of the cabin and by the white flickering of one of the four television screens on the control panel.

On the screen was the picture of a man of about forty dressed in a business suit. He was seated at a desk and leafing slowly through a brochure, reading aloud.

"Trans-World Rockets is still offering controlling stock," he said, "but I'm not sure we should buy."

"Make up your mind, Elkin," said the man in the high-backed chair. "Does that mean we should or we shouldn't?" Braddock had a rough, impatient voice. It was a voice accustomed to command; over the years it had grown a little querulous at the inefficiency of other human beings, a little thin and shaky to match the hand resting on the arm of the chair.

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Braddock," Elkin said. "It was just a manner of speak—"

"Should we buy or shouldn't we?" Braddock repeated.

The man on the screen blinked. "No, sir, we shouldn't." He looked back at the brochure in his hand. "Alaskan Petroleum. We bought at three and a half, now up to four and a half... Company's ceasing activity for the wint—"

Impatiently the hand on the chair reached out to the control board and twisted a dial. The voice from the screen was cut off, but, unaware of what had happened, Elkin continued to read.

"Incompetence!" Braddock muttered. He opened a drawer in the desk, removed a bottle of pills, and shook two of them into his other hand. He downed them with a little water out of a glass and put the glass back on the desk.

"I'm surprised one of those 'incompetents' doesn't strangle you," Janet Braddock said indifferently.

"They don't have the guts," Braddock growled.

"Or leave you," she added.

"I pay more than anybody else."

Only the muffled whistle of the jets broke the silence of the cabin, that and the breathing of the old man and a thin, scraping sound.

"If you must do that," Braddock said, "do it in the lounge. The sound is irritating."

The man on the screen turned a page and continued to read. His lips moved silently.

"You might tell him he's talking to himself," Janet said.

The leather chair turned on its swivel, and Braddock looked at his young wife. His face was wrinkled, his hair white, his eyes rimmed "with red. But he had not surrendered to age and its dark companion, death. He fought them as he had fought all his enemies, with unfaltering determination to win and an easy willingness to use any weapon that could not be traced to him by the law.

Even this restraint was fading. In the past twenty years he had become his own law; within the world community of nations he had created his own nation running through and in and around the others, with its own civil servants and its own rules and its own interactions with other sovereign governments...

"I'll tell him when we arrive," Braddock said. "We'll be there in twenty minutes."

As he spoke, the cabin lurched. Braddock grabbed the arms of his chair with hands that still had steel within them. Water slopped over the top of the glass onto the desk.

"What—" Braddock began, and then the plane dipped sharply.

Janet had responded easily to the first sudden movement. The second almost threw her from her chair. The glass of water slid across the desk and smashed on the floor.

Braddock pushed a button on the control panel. A second television screen lit up, came into focus, and showed the faces of the pilot and copilot in the cockpit ahead. The pilot was trying to contend with the violent motion of the plane while the copilot made adjustments on the instrument panels in front of them and overhead.

"How many times have I told you," Braddock said, "if you see any turbulence you go around it!"

"It's not turbulence, sir," the pilot said. "It seems to be electrical trouble of some sort. I think you and Mrs. Braddock should fasten your seat belts. I think there's a short in the—"

"I don't need any explanations," Braddock said. "Can it be fixed?"

"I think so," the pilot said.

"Then do it!"

The loudspeaker gave a metallic click. The uniformed men in the cockpit, still working at their adjustments, relaxed slightly, and the pilot, his face red and angry, turned toward his copilot.

"Do it!" he repeated. "Some day—"

In the main sitting room, Braddock and his wife adjusted their seat belts. In front of Braddock the control panel still showed the image of Elkin on one screen, the pilot and copilot on the other. Elkin's mouth was moving soundlessly, but the pilot's voice was clearly audible.

"Some day," the pilot said, "I'm going to search the radar screen for a hurricane. Then I'm going to fly right into it. Give that old creep a ride like he's never seen—"

He broke off as the plane rolled slightly and he grabbed the wheel.

Janet looked at Braddock to check his reaction. Braddock chuckled. "That's power," he said, "the power to turn people off when they want to communicate, the power to listen to them when they don't want to be overheard."

"Do you spy on me that way, too?" she asked.

Braddock reached out and took Janet's hand. He held it loosely, rubbing his thumb sensuously over the smooth skin. He had sought and enjoyed power all his life. He understood how to get it and how to use it and how to keep it, but of late he had seen how he might lose it all. And it was not the memory of passion that he enjoyed in Janet now but the memory of youth, and while he owned her he still had a little piece of it.

"I don't have to," Braddock said. "It's not your conversation that interests me."

Janet left her hand in his fingers as if it were something that belonged more to him than to her. Dispassionately she said, "Sometimes I think you enjoy being disliked."

Braddock's cold eyes turned a little colder. "Wanting to be liked is a disease in this country. Let those who are weak settle for being liked. I want to be obeyed."

The lights flickered overhead. The television screens went dark, flickered on again, went dark again. The airplane dipped sharply. Pencils and pens slid off the desk. Papers fluttered to the floor.

"Damn it!" Braddock exploded. "What's—"

The angle of descent increased. The plane began to whine. The lights went off completely. Only a few flickering beams of sunlight came between the curtains on the windows, and then the overhead lights returned.

Braddock's finger, shaking now, was at the control panel. On the screen the pilot and copilot worked frantically at the controls.

"What's happened!" Braddock said, his voice shaking. "What's going on?"

The pilot's voice was broken by interference and power loss. "—can't—what's happen—whole electrical system—out—try—forced land—"

The whine grew louder. The plane angled down so steeply that Braddock had to cling to the arms of his seat to help the seat belt restrain his body.

Janet peered through the window beside her. Her face was composed, as if she did not understand what was about to happen to them—or did not care. She hummed tunelessly.

Braddock sat rigidly in the chair from which he had commanded obedience of a world which now had passed beyond his control. His face might have been the face of a Caesar grown old in power, humanity and mercy long forgotten. But the features now were carved by something more basic, the terror of impending doom.

He was eighty-five, but at this moment, revealed intermittently as if by flashes of lightning, he seemed as old as death itself.

Chapter Two

Around the vast globe of the world men faced death in many ways, in many forms; some waited meekly, some came halfway, some rushed into its arms; some crouched, some begged, some smiled, some sang; they passed peacefully, slept into a deeper sleep, knew agony and then nothing. And some challenged death and won and felt life more keenly and did not wonder why...

The sports car hurtled off the ramp. It landed on dirt with an impact that compressed the springs as far as they would go. The throaty roar of the engine was muffled for a moment by the whump! of landing. Dust sprayed. The car bounced, settled, straightened. The spinning tires bit into the dirt. The car leaped forward.

Inside the car a dark young man in a test driver's crash helmet grinned as he felt the car fight its way back into control, felt it respond again to his strong hands on the wheel, to his sensitive foot on the accelerator.

The car turned sharply, its rear wheels skidding, throwing dirt. It rocked back and forth but only briefly before it again headed down the middle of the dirt road. The road became a washboard of corrugations, but inside the driver rode virtually without vibration.

Ahead was a ramp slanted up on one side. The right wheels of the car went up until the car seemed about to topple over on its left side. Then the ramp ended. For a moment the car continued on its left wheels and then settled soundly back to equilibrium.

The man in the driver's seat grinned again.

It was a test, of course. The sports car was being tested, thrown against all the possible challenges that might lie ahead—and more. But there was more to the entire performance than that. It was a kind of defiance, a challenge thrown to Me. "Here I am. Test me! I will give you every opportunity to destroy me. If I am unworthy, let me fail. But I am not afraid."

The car hurtled on through its obstacle course.

A few hundred yards away, through an open window in a corrugated metal shed, a young man was watching the car's performance. Occasionally he made a note on some papers attached to a clipboard.

He wore white coveralls. His name was Joe Lopez. On his back was another name enclosed in an ellipse. The name was "Braddock."

Projecting from the window sill was a counter. On the counter was a telephone. Below it was a sign: "Braddock Testing Grounds—Keep Out!"

The test car approached a white line painted on an asphalt runway some distance away from the shed. Lopez picked up a stopwatch. At the line the car came to a full stop and then took off, rubber shrieking. Seven seconds later it crossed another white line in front of the shed.

The car slowed, swung around, pulled up to the shed, and stopped. The driver unbuckled his safety belt, pulled off his crash helmet, opened the door, and stepped out of the car, stretching tensed muscles.

He was Ben Richards, a test driver for a small part of the Braddock empire. He had a rugged good looks and a kind of animal vitality in the way he moved or stood that caused women to look at him again. He looked like a young man, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty perhaps. But he acted older. There was no self-consciousness about him. Underneath his easygoing ways and ready smile was an unplumbed depth of sobriety, as if he had seen a great deal of life and understood some of it, as if he had reached that watershed of individual existence where a man recognizes the reality of death and acknowledges that it comes ultimately to all men.

He stripped off his driver's gloves.

"Clocked you at seven seconds," Lopez said.

Richards smiled. "I was doing eighty-five at the end, Joe."

"Eighty-five in seven!" Lopez said. "Ben, this baby's got it!"

The driver went to the hood of the car and lifted it. A little steam was coming from beneath the radiator cap. He looked over the motor with the eye of a mechanic, seeing the relationship of each part to the whole, understanding how one small imperfection affects everything else.

"She's still overheating," he said, "and she's got a tendency to slide too much on the turns. Let's get her into the garage and—"

He looked at his watch. "Ouch! I'm supposed to be at Sylvia's at six."

"She called while you were out there," Lopez said. "Had a very important message for you."

Richards closed the hood of the car. Lopez looked at the pad in front of him.

"She wants you to pick up one can of tomato paste, seventy-five cents worth of Greek olives, and a loaf of Syrian bread," Lopez said.

"Syrian bread?"

"Sicilian bread?"

Richards took the slip of paper out of Lopez's hand. "I'll try Syrian first," he said.

"If you'd marry her, maybe she would stop with the crazy dishes," Lopez said.

Richards grinned. "Who wants her to stop? Come on. I've got to hurry."

Lopez came out of the shed with his clipboard and papers. He walked around to the passenger's side of the car and patted the roof.

"You know what I heard, Ben?" he said. "Old man Braddock himself might be flying into town. Some kind of big conference. You think he might come and take a look at her personally?"

Richards shook his head as he got into the car. "I doubt it. To him it's some numbers on a stock report."

Lopez got in beside him. "Yeah. He's probably off buying Chicago right now."

Chapter Three

A hospital is not ordinarily a place of hope but a place of extremity. Few men go there by choice. They are driven there by adversity, when all other possibilities have been eliminated. They are dragged there by fear, an inner sense harkening to the signs of imperfection. They are carried there by others, usually reluctant, sometimes unconscious and unable to protest. For some there is birth, for others there is cure, and for still others there is surcease from pain.

A hospital is a place of disease, of accident, of death. If is not ordinarily a place of hope. But a few men find there what they did not dare hope for—new life.

An ambulance pulled up at the emergency entrance of a large metropolitan hospital. Its brakes screeched. Its siren trailed into silence.

The rear doors of the ambulance were thrown open from within. A white-coated attendant jumped out and turned to receive a stretcher.

The harsh light of the afternoon sun was reflected from the white sheets that covered a man's body. Only small movements of the sheets indicated that life still lingered under them.

At the head of the stretcher was the face of an old man. His eyes were closed. He might have been an ordinary man, some elderly pensioner come to the uneventful end of his uneventful days, some wino pulled from a gutter with all the diseases of the gutter combined with the diseases of the aged. But he was not. This man's skin was scrubbed and immaculate; his hair was groomed and snow-white except where it was stained with blood the color of rust

The attendant and an intern placed the stretcher on a hospital cart and pushed it through swinging doors and down a hospital corridor.

Wherever in the world they are found, hospitals have a basic similarity: a tempo of bustling efficiency, a look of tiled floors and sterile pastel walls, a smell of alcohol and ether, the pulse of Me itself, a sound of hushed expectancy, of muted voices, of crisp loudspeaker calls for doctors wanted here and there .. ,

A nurse waited at the elevator with the door held open. The elevator took in the cart and stretcher with its human burden, rose, and let them out on the top floor of the hospital. The intern, attendant, and nurse rolled the cart and stretcher into a room and lifted the man onto the bed.

Dr. Russell Pearce was waiting for them. He made a swift inspection, cleaned up some cuts with a swab of cotton dipped in alcohol, and looked up at the nurse.

"Requisition a pint of blood."

"Blood, Doctor?"

"This old man's in shock."

"That old man, Doctor, is Jordan Braddock."

Dr. Pearce was middle-aged and sandy-haired and tough. He bunked once. "He deserves to live, too, doesn't he?"

"Yes, Doctor."

He scribbled his signature on the slip of paper the nurse held out to him. "But not everybody feels that way, eh? Well, fortunately that's not our business. Our business is keeping them alive as long as possible."

The nurse nodded. "Yes, Doctor."

The requisition for one unit of blood arrived at the blood bank a few minutes later. A brisk technician came from the cubicle on the first floor, where the donors came to make their gifts of the precious fluid that was pumped through their healthy veins, or others came to sell for the price of a few bottles of whiskey the rarer stuff their bodies made for them without effort.

From one of the old man's ropy veins she drew five cubic centimeters of blood, almost purple inside the slim barrel of the hypodermic. Braddock didn't stir. In the silence his breathing was a raucous sound.

Back at her workbench, she typed the blood sample quickly, without wasted movements. She wrote down the results on an 8½-by-ll printed form: patient's name, date, room, doctor... Type: O. Rh: Neg.

Divided by a double-ruled line was a section headed "Donors." The technician opened the right-hand door of a refrigerator and inspected the labels of the bottles. From the second shelf from the top she selected one and transferred to the sheet the name of the donor, bottle number, type, and Rh factor.

She put samples of the donor's and the patient's blood into two small test tubes.

A drop of donor's serum in a sample of the patient's blood provided the major cross-match. The red cells didn't clump; even under the microscope, after centri-fuging, the cells were perfect, evenly suspended circles. A drop or two of the patient's serum in a sample of the donor's blood and the minor cross-match was done.

The technician signed the form and telephoned the nurse in charge that the blood was ready when needed. The nurse came for the blood immediately. The technician took out a red-bordered label. She wrote:

FOR

JORDAN BRADDOCK 9-4

RM. 805 DR. PEARCE

She pasted it beside the original label on the bottle containing the pint of blood.

Only then did she say, "Jordan Braddock?"

The nurse nodded, a little smugly. "That's right. Jordan Braddoek. He's going to die."

They exchanged the glances of those who have worked around a hospital for so long that they recognize instinctively the imminence of death.

The nurse picked up the pint of blood and carried it away casually, familiarly.

Two pint bottles hung from the metal "T"—the clear saline solution and the dark Me fluid. A glass T-joint reduced two plastic tubes into one. Below was a transparent filter. At the end of the tube was a 20-gauge needle.

The nurse released the clamp closing the tube just below the saline solution. The salt water ran, bubbling a little, through the tubing, the joint—backing up to the clamp below the blood—the filter, and spurted from the needle tip. The nurse clamped it off close to the needle.

Now the tubes were full. They were free of air bubbles that could be forced into the patient's veins to cause an embolism.

The clamp below the saline solution was closed off. The nurse waited while Pearce picked up the needle and studied Braddock's arm. The antecubital vein was available, swollen across the inside of the elbow. Pearce swabbed it with alcohol and iodine, pushed in the needle with practiced ease, and taped it down. He nodded to the nurse.

She released the clamp under the blood. Slowly it stained the saline solution and then swirled darkly as she carefully eased open the bottom clamp. In a second it was all blood, running slowly through the long, transparent tubing into the receptive vein, new blood bringing new life to the old, worn-out mechanism on the hard hospital bed.

New blood for old, Pearce thought. Money can buy anything. "A little faster."

The nurse opened the bottom clamp a little wider. In the pint bottle the level of the life fluid dropped faster.

life. Dripping. Flowing. Making the old new.

"How is he?"

Pearce looked up. He saw a woman of about thirty. She was a woman in good health, although she had a bandage around her head. She was a good-looking woman, and she knew it. Her gown fit her full figure perfectly, as if it had been grown on her rather than made for her. Even the bandage looked chic.

"You don't belong here."

"I'm his wife."

Pearce looked from Janet Braddock to the old man on the hospital bed and back to her.

"I'm Mrs. Jordan Braddock," she said. "How is he?"

Pearce didn't answer. He listened for a moment to Braddock's heartbeat with a stethoscope, lowered the clear plastic of an oxygen tent over Braddock's upper body, and adjusted the feed on the oxygen tank which was releasing oxygen to the tube that led into Braddock's nose.

Pearce took Braddock's medical record from the foot of his bed and made a note on it. Janet Braddock looked at Pearce, shrugged, and tipped her head, incuriously, to read what was written on the bottle from which blood was flowing into her husband's veins.

Finished, Pearce looked one last time at Braddoek and then at the T-bar and its suspended bottles. The last purplish drops were draining down the tube.

"All right, Mrs. Braddoek, let's go," Pearce said, and to the nurse, "Better tie his wrists down with gauze, although he's not likely to move them. I'll be downstairs. Call me if there's any change."

He led the way into the corridor and closed the door behind him. "To answer your question, Mrs. Braddoek, he's going to die... quite soon."

"Then why are you giving him blood?"

"That's my job," Pearce said. "Keeping people alive for as long as possible. It's not my job to judge when they should die. The transfusion will help—temporarily. And who knows—a miracle might happen."

Janet Braddoek looked down at the floor. "There's no chance for him?"

"None. It wasn't just the accident—he wasn't badly hurt, a few scratches and bumps were all—but that hastened what would have happened in a few weeks or months in any case. His body is falling apart. Pills and determination held him together, and now the determination is gone."

Janet Braddoek looked up. In her eyes there was something like exultation. "How sad. How terribly sad. All that money and it can't buy him what he needs most."

"How much will you inherit?" Pearce asked clinically.

"Just a small piece of the Braddoek empire. Not much, really. Fifteen million, perhaps. And I'm worth all of it."

Pearce watched her walk away down the corridor and thought, If I were a rich young man—or maybe a rich old one—I'd think she was right.

He went back into the hospital room. The nurse was removing the needle from Braddock's arm. Pearce looked at the gauze bandages that held Braddock's frail wrists to the sides of his mattress. He checked the oxygen tent and the flow of oxygen to Braddock's nostril. He checked Braddock's pulse and looked a little surprised.

The nurse was about to wheel the transfusion apparatus out of the room. Pearce stopped her. He took the bottle that had held the blood from the stand and turned it over. It had a label on it:

TYPE O Rh: Neg

DONOR: Richards, Benjamin.

Pearce placed the bottle back on the stand.

Chapter Four

When a man and a woman are in love, they can show it in different ways: in tenderness, words that speak tenderness, jokes that stand for tenderness, sighs, silence. All such things are mysteries, for no one knows what a man is like with a woman, or a woman with a man. As Solomon set down,

The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid.

The meal was over—tomato paste, Greek olives, Syrian bread, and all. A fire was burning in a fireplace. A short distance away was a dining table. Candles were still burning on it, and it still held a few dishes and two coffee cups.

A sofa stood in front of the fireplace, but it was empty. Sylvia Cartwright was sitting on the floor, her back against the sofa, her feet extended toward the fireplace. She was young and sum and blonde, with a fragile beauty that seemed about to shatter but never did. Ben was lying lengthwise beside the sofa, his head in her lap, enjoying the lazy well-being brought on by a full meal and a warm fire.

His coat had been draped over the sofa. Sylvia picked his wallet deftly from the inside pocket and opened it. She began to go through its contents: credit cards, a test-driver's pass to the Braddock Automotive Works with Ben's picture and name on it, a blood donor's card...

"See anything fascinating?" Ben asked.

"Quiet," Sylvia said. "I'm satisfying a long-suppressed impulse. I once tried to go through my father's wallet when I was a little girl and he took it away from me. Ever since then that's all I've thought about. I'm a driven woman."

"I'm not your father."

"Nobody's perfect."

Ben moved one hand lazily to take the wallet, but Sylvia pulled it away and tapped him on the nose with it. Ben made a face and let his hand drop.

"I've got a few impulses of my own that need satisfying," he said.

Sylvia frowned. "Is that all you're marrying me for?"

"You mean, aside from the fact that you're an incredible cook, lovely, bright, beautiful...?"

Sylvia was nodding.

"That's about it," he said, shrugging.

"Dirty old man," Sylvia murmured and leaned over to kiss him. She leaned back and resumed her inspection of his wallet. She stopped at a photograph in a plastic holder. It was a picture of Ben standing between a man and a woman, a pleasant-looking couple about seventy years old.

"Were these your parents?" Sylvia asked.

Ben nodded.

"How long ago was the picture taken?" she asked.

"Maybe ten years. They died about eight years ago, so it must have been at least ten."

"Ten years," Sylvia said. "You don't look as if you have changed at all."

She held the picture out to compare it with its sub-ject. Ben pulled her hand down to look at the picture and nodded.

They both looked up as the background music playing on the radio was interrupted by the voice of an announcer.

"From the KBRL newsroom we bring you a special bulletin about the condition of Jordan Braddock, a prominent industrialist who has major industries in this city, including the Braddock Automotive Works.

"Braddock was seriously injured when his private jet crash-landed outside the city four hours ago. His wife and the pilot and copilot of the airplane received only scrapes and bruises.

"A late report now comes from Braddock's physician, Dr. Russell Pearce, who says that Braddock's condition is critical.

"Stay tuned to KBRL for more late bulletins."

During the course of the news broadcast Ben had come to a sitting position. The announcement had jarred him, as all intimations of death disturbed him. He did not worry about himself—the kind of Me he had picked out for himself proved that, he thought—but he was shaken, always, by the death or near-death of others. It had taken him years to get over the death of his parents, if indeed he was over it now. The talk a little earlier had brought it all back.

Now Braddock. Somehow he had thought of Braddock as going on forever. But he knew this distant man of wealth was an old man; he had to die sometime. All his money could not save him. But to die like this, accidentally!

"Have you ever seen him, Ben?" Sylvia asked.

Ben shook his head. "I'm just a little part of him—I mean, just a small fish in a big Braddock ocean. His only interest in me is as a number on a roster. My interest in him is as the man who makes it possible for me to do what I enjoy—whether he knows it or not."

Ben stared at his hands as if they were prepared to wrap themselves around a steering wheel.

"I wish I could help him."

Chapter Five

New blood for old. New life dripping through a tube info old veins. A gift of the young. Someone young and healthy, who could make more purple life stuff, saturated with healthy red cells, vigorous white scavengers, platelets, the multiple proteins, someone who could replace it all in less than ninety days.

Think of a seventeenth-century English anatomist puzzling over the mystery of the blood and its relationship to sickness and to life. Think of a physician named Richard Lower daring to perform the first transfusion with a human being. Think of a twentieth-century Viennese immunologist who wondered why some blood transfusions were successful and others made the patient sicken and sometimes die. Think of a pathologist named Karl Landsteiner who discovered the incompatible blood groups among humans.

Think of a man named Braddock, who received a blood transfusion through a chain of events that started with Lower and went through Landsteiner and a geriatrician named Pearce to a donor named Richards. Think of an old man whose body couldn't make the red cells fast enough any longer, who couldn't keep up with the demands of life.

New blood for old. New life for the dying. But nothing can reverse the long erosion of the years. Bodies wear out. Nothing can make them new.

In a suite of rooms on the top floor of the hospital, an old man lying on a hospital bed opened his eyes. Above him, wavering in and out of focus, was a plastic tent, and through it dimly he could make out the fuzzy outlines of other objects, some of them moving, but the objects went out of focus and then his eyes closed.

The nurse moved back and forth in the room tending to her duties, and did not notice.

An hour later, perhaps, the old man opened his eyes again. He ran his tongue over dry lips and tried to move his hands. They would not move. He did not understand why. He tried again to move them, and finally he realized that they were tied down. A look of anger crossed his aged face and then his jaw clenched stubbornly. He focused all his remaining strength on his right hand and strained against the bandage holding it down. He struggled to free it Finally the gauze snapped.

The old man rested a few moments, his eyes closed. When they opened again they focused on the plastic above his face. Slowly, like a man moving through water, he lifted his hand, grasped the plastic, and pulled. The plastic tore. Braddock's hand fell limp onto the bed. The effort had taken all his strength, but when he closed his eyes there was on his face a faint smile of triumph.

When Pearce made his morning rounds, Braddock had his eyes open. He was watching the doctor with dark eyes.

"I never saw anything like it, Doctor," the nurse said. "He pulled one hand free and tore the tent—"

"That's all right, nurse," Pearce said. "This is an unusual old man."

The nurse would not be stopped. "I tied him down again and he slept quietly until about three-quarters of an hour ago. Then he started acting up—"

Pearce picked up the old man's wrist and began automatically to count. "Feeling better, ehF* he said to Braddock.

Pearce received his second shock. Braddock nodded.

Pearce glanced at his watch, looked away, and glanced at it again. Gently, thoughtfully, he lowered füe old arm down beside the thin, sheeted body. He wrapped the wide, flat band of the sphygmomanome-ter around the stringy bicep and pumped it tight, listening at the inside of the elbow with his stethoscope. He looked at the gauge and let the air hiss out and listened for a moment at the old man's chest.

"We can remove this," Pearce said. He took the oxygen tube from Braddock's nose. Braddock's eyes closed wearily.

Pearce took Braddock's chart from the foot of the bed and stared at it for several minutes before he made an entry. He scarcely noticed the nurse who was bustling around the room trying to justify her presence. Braddock was making a surprising rally for a man in as bad a shape as he had been. The pulse was almost normal for a man of his age. Blood pressure was up. Somehow something, perhaps the transfusion, had triggered hidden stores of energy and resistance.

Braddock was fighting back.

Pearce felt a strange and unprofessional sense of elation.

'I've been a nurse for fifteen years, Doctor," the nurse said, "but I've never seen anything like this. It's a miracle, isn't it?"

Pearee stared at Braddock for a moment. "I hope that's what it is, Nurse. I've never seen one."

The next day Pearce thought the eyes that watched him were more alert.

On the third day Braddock started talking.

The old man's thready voice whispered disjointed and pointless reminiscences. Pearce nodded under-standingly as he examined the old man, and inwardly he nodded, to himself. Arteriosclerosis had left its marks: chronic granular kidney, damage to the left ventricle of the heart, malfunction of the brain from a cerebral hemorrhage or two.

On the fourth day Braddock was sitting up in bed talking to the nurse in a cracked, sprightly voice. "Yes, sir," he said. "That was the day I whipped 'em both. Gave it to 'em good, I did. Let 'em have it right between the eyes. Always hated those kids. You must be the doctor," he said suddenly, turning toward Pearce. "I like you. Gonna see that you get a big check. Take care of the people I like. Take care of those I don't like, too." He chuckled. It was an evil, childish sound. "Don't worry about that," Pearce said gently, picking up Braddock's wrist. "Concentrate on getting well."

The old man nodded happily and stuck a finger in his mouth to rub his gums where a partial plate had been removed. "You'll get paid," he mumbled. "Don't you worry about that."

Pearce looked down at the wrist he was holding. It had filled out amazingly. "What's the matter with your gums?"

"Itch," Braddock got out around his finger. "Like blazes."

On the fifth day Braddock walked to the toilet

On the sixth day he took a shower. When Pearce came in he was sitting on the edge of the bed, dangling his feet. Braddock looked up quickly as Pearce entered; his eyes were alert, no longer sunken. His skin had a subcutaneous glow of health. Like his wrist and arm, his face had filled out. Even his legs looked firmer, almost muscular.

He was taking the well-balanced hospital diet and turning it into flesh and fat and muscle. Next day his hair began to darken.

"How old are you, Mr. Braddock?" Pearce asked.

"Eighty-five," Braddock said. "Eighty-five my last birthday. Born in Wyoming in a cabin chinked with mud. Poor as Indians. I made it all myself, son, first oil, then automobiles and airplanes, now computers—always on to something new. Get there first. Be ready at the stand to sell when the crowd shows up. Sell out to the late-comers just before the crowd leaves. Buy low, sell high. Secret of success, son. Remember that."

"What color was your hair?" Pearce asked.

"Black as a villain's heart. Had the blackest, shiniest hair in the country. Girls used to beg to run their fingers through it." He chuckled. "Used to let 'em. A few black-headed Idds in Washalde County before I left."

He stuck his finger in his mouth and massaged his gums ecstatically.

"Still itch?" Pearce asked.

"Like a Wyoming chigger." He chuckled. "You know what's wrong with me, son? In my second childhood. I'm cutting teeth."

That was the day Pearce withdrew a dozen small samples of Braddock's blood for tests.

Chapter Six

Money. For some it is security. For some it is the satisfaction of personal needs. For some it is an unreal dream. For some it is pleasure in itself. For some it is power.

In substantial amounts money makes a difference in people and the way they think and act which has little correlation with physical reality. Up to a certain level people react to money much the same way: the middle-class wage earner is only a laboring man with a little more money to spend. But then there is a quantum jump, a chain reaction of dollars instead of neutrons, and people change. It is almost as if the money had taken over the people. Money talks. Money acts. Money gets. And people become money.

On the eighth day Pearce found the hospital corridor changed almost beyond recognition when he made his morning round. He got off the elevator and stopped. The walls were the same pastel green. The floor was the same rubbery brown. But the corridor had changed.

People were moving through it who did not wear hospital white. A short distance away a young man in shirt sleeves came out of a room on one side of the corridor and crossed to another room. The door of that room was open.

The corridor was not hushed with respect for sickness and imminent death. It had the sounds of a busy office. People talked in normal voices. Typewriters clicked steadily. Telephones rang.

And in front of Pearce stood a man of about fifty. He was a tall man, powerfully built, with shoulders that filled out a sports jacket without padding. The sports jacket was a loud green-and-black plaid. He wore a hat, a Tyrolean number. It wasn't funny. There was nothing funny about him. Under the hat was a face like the face of a hunting bird, with the nose of a hawk and the eyes of a creature that kills for sport—his or whoever commands him.

"Who are you?" the man said.

"I'm Doctor Russell Pearce, and I have patients on this floor. Who are you?"

The man ignored him. He spoke into a small two-way radio-telephone. "A fellow in a white coat with a black bag in his hand. Says he's a Doctor Pearce."

"If you don't mind," Pearce said, trying to brush his way past.

The man held an arm out in front of him. "I do mind."

"You're keeping me from my patients."

"You have your work. I have mine."

Pearce heard a voice over the radio-telephone that he recognized. A woman's voice. The voice of Janet Braddock. He had not seen her in the hospital since the first night. "Let him pass, Locke."

"Yes, Locke, let me pass," Pearce said.

"Adrian Locke, Doctor Pearce," the man said sardonically. "You'll get to know me better."

As Pearce walked down the corridor he passed the door from which the young man had come. The hospital room had been turned into a business office complete with desks, a small switchboard, filing cabinets, and secretaries. The switchboard girl looked up at him. She was chewing gum noisily.

The next room was Braddock's. The door was closed. A stockily built man in shirt sleeves was sitting beside the door. He got up as Pearce approached, and the doctor hesitated.

The door opened. Janet Braddock nodded to the guard. Pearce walked into the room.

Braddock was in the hospital bed, but aside from that single fact everything in the room was changed. In the corner of the room was a machine clicking off stock-market quotations. In another corner was a heavy-walled filing cabinet, each drawer with a heavy, built-in lock. Beside the bed was a tray. It was no ordinary hospital tray. It held the remains of a steak, a baked potato, a large salad, a small bottle of wine, and a large pot of coffee.

Braddock sat up in the bed, scarcely needing the support of pillows behind his back. His hair was almost as black as he had described. His face had filled out. The wrinkles in it had smoothed themselves like a ruffled lake when the wind has gentled. His body was muscular and vigorous. The veins had retreated under the skin to become blue traceries.

He was talking on the telephone; it was a console model with twenty plastic buttons. Several of them were lighted, "If the world wants to believe I'm almost dead, let them. Keep buying all the Braddock stock you can. It will go up again as soon as my recovery is announced."

"Which will be announced immediately," Pearce said.

Braddock put down the phone and looked at Pearce. He seemed amused. Pearce put his medical bag on the bed.

Braddock was picking up the reins of empire.

"Your flirtation with death hasn't changed you any, has it," Pearce said. "The income of a billionaire and the soul of a thief."

Braddock shrugged. "Nobody ever changes. What are you so mad about?"

"Have you taken over this whole floor?"

"Yes."

"You had all the patients moved out? Have you any idea how crowded this hospital is?"

"I paid for this hospital. I built it. I endowed it," Braddock said. "I'm using it."

"That's the attitude of a vulture."

"I never had any use for it before. Other people did. They used it. Now I need it. I'm using it."

Pearce shook his head and picked up his wrist. "How do you feel?"

"I haven't felt this good in thirty years," Braddock said. "Maybe forty."

Pearce listened to his chest.

"Doctor," Braddock said. "What if I told you I'm getting younger."

"I'd say you're getting senile."

"Say what you like. Something's happened. I'm all lighted up inside. How did you do it?"

"I did nothing," Pearce said.

"Tell me, Pearce," Braddock began and the doctor put a tongue depressor into his mouth, cutting off whatever Braddock had been about to say. Pearce examined Braddock's throat.

"I'm a geriatrician," Pearce said. "I deal in old age, not in miracles."

Pearce removed the tongue depressor and Braddock smiled.

"You tried something new on me," Braddock said. "You didn't expect it to work this well. Now you'd like to hide it."

Pearce shook his head. "I did nothing out of the ordinary."

"I don't believe that, Pearce" Braddock said. "But I'll tell you what you're going to do now."

"Tell me what I'm going to do," Pearce said.

Braddock's eyes switched to Pearce's face. "You think I'm just talking. Don't make that mistake. I don't make idle conversation. You're going to find out why."

"Why?"

"Why I've recovered like I have. You can't deceive me. I can feel it. I'm not eighty-five years old any more. My mind isn't. My body isn't. Why?"

"What's your guess?"

"I never guess. I know. I get the facts from those who have them, and then I decide. That's what I want from you—the facts. I've been rejuvenated. What was done to me?"

"What does it matter? If you've been rejuvenated, that should be enough for any man."

"You're a reasonable man. You believe in facts. You live by logic. Understand me, Doctor! I may be thirty now, but I will be eighty-five again. Before then I want to know how to be thirty again."

Pearce sighed. "You're not talking about rejuvenation now. You're talking about immortality."

"Why not?"

"It's not for mortals. The human body wears out. Three score years and ten. That—give or take a decade or so—is what we're allowed. After that we start to fall apart."

"I've had mine and then some. Now I'm starting over at thirty. I've got forty or fifty to go. After that, what? Forty or fifty more?"

"We all die," Pearce said flatly. "Nothing can stop that. Not one man born has not come to the grave at last. There's a disease we contract at birth from which none of us recovers. It's invariably fatal. Death."

"Suppose somebody develops a resistance to it?"

"Oh, I didn't mean that death was a specific disease," Pearce said quickly. "We die in many ways: accident, infection—" And senescence, Pearce thought. For all we know, that's a disease. It could be a disease. Etiology: virus, unisolated, unsuspected, invades at birth or shortly thereafter—or maybe it is transmitted at conception.

Incidence: total.

Symptoms: slow degeneration of the physical entity, appearing shortly after maturity, increasing debility, failure of the circulatory system through arteriosclerosis and heart damage, malfunction of sense and organs, loss of cellular regenerative ability, susceptibility to secondary invasions ...

Prognosis: 100 per cent fatal.

"Everything dies," Pearce went on smoothly, "Trees, planets, suns... It's natural, inevitable..." But it isn't, he thought. Natural death is a relatively new thing. It appeared only when life became multicellular and complicated. Maybe it was the price for complexity, for the ability to differentiate, to think.

Protozoa don't die. Metazoa—sponges, flatworms, coelenterates—don't die. Certain fish don't die except through accidents. "Voles are animals that never stop growing and never grow old." Where did I read that? Pearce thought. And even the tissues of the higher vertebrates are immortal under the right conditions.

Carrel and Ebeling proved that. Give the cell enough of the right food, and it will never die. Cells from every part of the body have been kept alive indefinitely in vitro.

Differentiation and specialization—that meant that any individual cell didn't find the perfect conditions. Besides staying alive, it had duties to perform for the whole. A plausible explanation. But was it true? Wasn't it just as plausible that the cell died because the circulatory system had broken down?

Let the circulatory system remain sound, regenerative, and efficient, and the rest of the body might well remain immortal.

"Whatever you've discovered," Braddock said, "I want to invest in it. You don't know anything about finance, Pearce. Whatever you have, it's worth billions. Find out what it is, give it to me, and we'll both make fortunes that will put the richest men in history below the poverty line."

Pearce shook his head. "You've just had a reprieve from death and all you can think about is making money from it..."

"Money is not immoral," Braddock said. "People making money is what keeps other people alive. If I can keep them alive longer, give them better health and a better life, what does it matter if money is made from it? If money were not to be made from it, it would never happen at all."

Pearce picked up his instruments and put them back in the bag.

"Remember what I've said," Braddock said.

"I'll remember." He turned and walked out of the room, past the guard, and down the hall past the man who called himself Adrian Locke, until he reached the elevator. As he waited he noticed Janet Braddock coming toward him.

"You said he was going to die," Janet said in a low voice.

"I thought it was the truth."

"What am I supposed to do now?"

Pearce shrugged. "Earn your money, I assume."

Chapter Seven

Among men there are those who give to their tasks an extra measure of dedication. Through a trait of character or a love for what they do, they put more of themselves into their jobs, and they cannot rest until those jobs are completed as well they can be done.

They are the overachievers. They have done most of the things in this world that men remember.

Pearce entered the garage by a side door. It was a modern garage. Equipment was racked neatly on peg boards against the wall or hung on extendable cords from the ceiling. In one corner of the garage was a glassed-in office. In the center, standing on concrete scarcely marred by oil stains, was a red sports car. Its hood was raised, and Pearce could see only the lower halves of two men, clothed in overalls, bent over the engine.

Suddenly the garage was throbbing with the roar of an accelerated engine. As the noise ebbed, Ben Richards said, "See? You don't get that rattle unless she's in gear. I think it's a bearing."

Lopez fiddled with the engine for a moment. "Need a number three," he said, raising himself up with a wrench in his hand and starting for a counter against the wall. He stopped as he saw Pearce.

"Benjamin Richards?" Pearce said.

Ben gunned the engine again. Lopez grinned, shook his head, and jerked a thumb in Ben's direction. He went on toward the counter.

Pearce approached Ben slowly, almost gingerly, as though he were approaching a recently discovered masterpiece of art. He stood beside Ben for a moment, watching his deft fingers at work on the engine, before Ben noticed him.

Ben nodded. "Hi."

"Hi," Pearce said.

He continued to watch as Ben picked up a small piece of tubing, snipped it with a pair of shears, and fitted it onto two metal nipples.

"Well done," Pearce said. "This morning I watched a colleague do that with a major artery."

"You must be the doctor who called me. About that pint of blood I gave a couple of weeks ago. Doctor—"

"Pearce." The doctor offered his hand, but Ben showed that his hand was too greasy to be shaken. Pearce nodded. He found himself liking this man in spite of himself; the emotion was somehow inappropriate, as if he had found himself liking a king or a saint.

"I hope you're not after another pint right now," Ben said.

Pearce shook his head and smiled. Lopez returned to the car with a new wrench and moved in beside Ben.

"What I would like is to ask you a few questions," Pearce said.

"Shoot."

"Can we have a moment? In private?"

"Is it important?"

Pearce nodded.

Ben stood up and indicated the glassed-in office. He led the way. Pearce closed the door behind them.

"Well?" Ben said curiously.

Pearce hesitated. He did not quite know where to begin.

"Have you ever been sick at any time in your life, Mr. Richards?" Pearce studied Ben's face.

"You mean really sick?"

Ben thought for a moment and then shook his head. Pearce glanced around the room; it was strange to have a conversation like this taking place in an ordinary office, with an ordinary metal desk and chair, an ordinary calendar on the wall, and outside the glass wall an ordinary sports car being gunned occasionally as its ordinary motor was worked on...

"No major illnesses at all?" Pearce asked. His voice sounded odd to him, as if he were hearing himself on a record or a tape.

Ben shook his head again.

"How about minor illnesses," Pearce asked, "say the childhood diseases? You know, mumps, measles, chicken pox, scarlet fever, whooping cough... ?"

Up to this point the questions had been a minor annoyance to Ben. Now he began to get interested in the direction they were leading him. "No, now that you mention it." He shrugged. "I guess I'm one of those people who just don't get sick."

All of Pearce's attention was focused on Ben now. It was as if the fate of a great many people depended on Ben's answer, or as if in the next moment Pearce might open up a sealed experiment which could change the future of the world.

"Now think carefully, Mr, Richards," he said. "As far as you can recall, have you ever been ill—ever had any disease, major or minor?"

Ben picked up a red cloth and began wiping his hands on it. Outside the office Lopez gunned the motor.

"I can't remember any, no," Ben said slowly.

"How about flu? A cold? Sore throat? Cough?"

Ben began to feel angry. "Look, if you're trying to tell me there's something wrong with me, why not say it?"

Lopez gunned the motor again. Ben, annoyed, opened the office door and called, "Joe, hold that back a minute, will you?"

Pearce realized that he had given Ben the wrong impression with his questions. "Forgive me. I'm terribly sorry. No, Mr. Richards, there's nothing wrong with you. On the contrary—"

"Then why all the questions?"

"That pint of blood you donated was received by Jordan Braddock," Pearce said.

"Braddock?"

"You find that strange?"

"I work for him—" Ben said, "or for one of his companies. He doesn't know me."

"I think he'd like to."

"And then I was thinking about him—when he had his accident."

"He had to get the blood from somebody," Pearce said. "Yours happened to be available and the right kind. Very much the right kind for Braddock. A very strange thing happened after he received your blood. He made a dramatic recovery—"

"That's great!" Ben said. And then, "You think I had something to do with it?"

"I don't know," Pearce said. "It's the only variable I can identify, aside from divine intervention. And I don't believe in miracles. Not for Braddock. I'd like to run some tests on you at the hospital tomorrow, take some samples of your blood. You can drop by after work if you like. It shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes."

"Sure," Ben said.

"Thank you," Pearce said. "And for the moment I would like to keep this between us."

Ben nodded. He was still a little puzzled, still a little uncertain about how he should react, what he was supposed to think.

Pearce turned to leave the office and then turned back. "On your blood bank card—was your age filled in correctly?"

"I guess so," Ben said.

"You are forty years old?"

"That's right."

Pearce looked hard at Ben. There are men who hold their age well, who remain youthful in appearance long past the time when other men are moving into middle age, but if one looks closely one can see around the eyes and the nose and the mouth the fine lines and the creases engraved in the skin by the years, the weathering of the skin as the oils dry...

Ben might have been thirty, Pearce would have estimated, but more likely twenty-five.

Chapter Eight

Laboratories are unique places. There is nothing else quite like them anywhere. Not in appearance. They look like any good, clean, modern kitchen, perhaps, with scrubbed file on the floor and lots of polished stainless-steel sinks and wire cages. Wire cages—in a kitchen? No. That's the difference between them. That and the sound. In a laboratory there's nothing to muffle noise; footsteps echo, voices reverberate, and pervading everything is the hush of expectancy. And the smell—no, not the smell of alcohol and iodine and other chemicals nor the smell of dry-food pellets and animal droppings. The other smell—the smell of truth. Here and nowhere else can you smell it so clearly. Nowhere else is it so important. Here nothing else matters. This is what a laboratory is about.

Pearce held up a bottle of purplish fluid and looked at it. The liquid swirled in the vial, the color of grape juice, frothing a little at the top. A little sodium citrate and a few hundred centimeters of blood—customary commodities around a hospital. But Pearce did not feel any customary feelings about what was in the vial. He looked at it as if it might be a magic liquid which could, if he used it properly, turn death to Me.

The alchemists of the Middle Ages sought two wondrous substances, Pearce thought. One of them, the philosopher's stone, would transmute base metals into gold. The other, elixir vitae, the elixir of life, would prolong life indefinitely, would make men young. No alchemist found either substance—or, if he did, he did not reveal it. Why should he? Men have killed other men for pennies: what would they do for the secret of unlimited gold and immortality? What would they stop at doing?

The liquid swirled in the vial. There was no name on it. Pearce did not dare put a name on it, but if he had it might have been "elixir vitae."

He turned the vial upside down and inserted a hypodermic through the air-tight seal and pulled back the plunger to draw a few cubic centimeters into the plastic cylinder. He reached into a nearby cage and picked up a white rat. He injected the blood into the animal and put it back into the cage.

Two other cages were next to that one. In one of them a white rat was moving around briskly. It ran to the side of the cage next to the one in which he had placed the rat he had just injected. It stood on its hind legs, its front feet braced on the bars, sniffing at the cage, its nose twitching, and then it twitched its nose at Pearce.

In the third cage a rat lay on its side, asleep or sick.

"Eenie, meenie, miney," Pearce muttered. "Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego. What shall I call you? What will you tell me?"

He looked at them—one lying on its side, one trotting around its cage, one beginning to stir. Pearce felt a little breathless, a kind of nervous fluttering high in his stomach, as if something wonderful, something unprecedented, was about to happen.

Ben Richards made his way through the side door of the hospital nearest the visitor's parking lot. He had found Ms way through the hospital maze once before and this time without directions he traced his way quickly through corridors and down a set of stairs to the basement and through more corridors to a door inset with frosted glass. Painted on it in black letters were the words "Hematology Laboratory." Ben knocked on the door. Pearce opened it. "Come in, Ben," he said. "It's good of you to come back again so soon."

"I'm as curious as you are," Ben said. He grinned. "Maybe more. I want to know what all this is about."

"It's about you and Jordan Braddock and these little creatures," Pearce said, indicating the white rats.

"What do I have in common with them—or Jordan Braddock, for that matter?" Ben asked.

Pearce sat down on the edge of a laboratory table. "I told you—the blood you donated was given to Braddock. He was dying, Ben. Nothing in the world could have saved him but a miracle. The transfusion was a palliative. But he recovered. Quickly, completely, impossibly. He not only recovered but he became young again."

"Young?"

"Young. Not just seventy again—though that would have been miracle enough—but young. We did complete lab tests. Arteriosclerosis had never thickened his veins, or else, somehow, the damage of that fibrous tissue had been repaired. The kidneys functioned perfectly. The heart was as strong and efficient a pump as it had ever been. We could find no evidence that Braddock ever had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage."

"Is that as incredible as it sounds?"

"Nothing like that has ever happened in medical history," Pearce said. "From all the tests we could devise, Braddock's body had aged no more than thirty years. He looked thirty years old."

Ben shook his head. "How do I fit into this thing?"

"As I mentioned to you at the garage," Pearce said, "the only variable in the whole affair was the transfusion, the blood—your blood."

"How can my blood have worked that kind of miracle?" Ben could not keep out of his voice a note of incredulity. Things like this happened in books, in newspapers, to other people—not to him. "And what has all this to do with the rats?"

Pearce walked to the cages. "Take a look at this little fellow in the first cage. He's a control. He and his two brothers are triplets. They were born in the same litter. I've had them for seven years. Seven years is a long time for a rat to live. This one, as you can see, is dying—of old age."

Pearce moved on to the second cage. "His brother here I gave a transfusion with Braddock's blood following his rejuvenation."

In the second cage the rat was active. It ran to its food pan and nibbled, then ran back toward Pearce and climbed the side of the cage.

"In the third cage," Pearce said, "his other brother received a tranfusion of your blood a week ago. Look at him!"

The third rat acted like a youngster, running, jumping, scrambling around its cage, coming over to sniff at Pearce and Ben, leaping to the other side to sniff at its brother.

"I've also inoculated him with every fatal disease a rat can contract. He's immune to all of them, like you."

Ben leaned back against the laboratory table. He took a deep breath. "Immune? Me? I thought I was just lucky, if I thought of it at all. Why me? What's different about me? What's wrong with me?"

"Nothing wrong," Pearce said. "Something very right. Something the rest of us ought to have, maybe, but it was left out and we never knew it. We thought sickness and death were inevitable. Coffee?"

Pearce had turned away from the cages. From the next table he picked up a bottle of instant coffee. Ben nodded. Pearce ladled two heaping spoonfuls into two old cups. Beside the cups a glass beaker of boiling water was standing on a metal framework and heated by a bunsen burner. He poured each cup full of water and stirred them.

"Think of it this way," Pearce said. "All of us have some immunity factors in our blood. They make us immune to diseases we've encountered, either through actual infection or through the substitute of immunization. We resist the onslaught of polio, diphtheria, smallpox, and mumps. You name it—somebody's immune to it, and somebody isn't. You have a more efficient blood factory than the rest of us, apparently. You manufacture immunities to all diseases, whether you've come into contact with them or not. How you do it I don't know yet. Sugar?"

Ben shook his head and accepted one of the cups from Pearce. He nodded toward the cages.

"So I passed these immunities on to Braddock," Ben said, "and he passed them on to that rat"—he pointed at the active rat in the second cage—"like a chain reaction."

Pearce nodded.

"But where did I get them from?" Ben asked.

Pearce shrugged and looked thoughtful. "I wish I knew. Some trick of nature, perhaps, some chance meeting of the right genes. A mutation, maybe—a lucky chemical or radiation change in the chromo-somes you inherited from your parents... An improved blood that keeps your circulatory system young, resistant, rejuvenated. 'Man is as old as his arteries,' Cazali said. Take care of your arteries, and they will keep your cells alive forever. Whatever it is you didn't get it directly from your parents. I hope you don't mind. I looked into their hospital records. They had the usual diseases of childhood, maturity, and old age. They were—normal. Like the rest of us."

"They weren't my real parents," Ben said. "I was adopted."

Pearce looked up quickly. "That makes more sense. Something like this has to be genetic. There's a good chance your real father or mother or both were like you—and any other children—"

"Then they'd be alive—my father, my mother—I could—"

"Not necessarily," Pearce said. "They could have met with an accident They could have been drowned, fallen from a height, been in an automobile accident, been shot or stabbed in a vital spot, any number of possibilities from which the ability of the body to fight off damage would not have a chance to come into operation—"

"Other children—" Ben said. "You mentioned other children. I had a brother. I remember my adopted parents telling me. I don't remember him. As far as I know I've never seen him—"

"There's a good chance he would have the same physical characteristics, the same immunity to disease, the same longevity... You're immune to another common disease of mankind, Ben—a disease we call 'old age.' "

"Come on," Ben said, disbelief in his voice and on his face.

Pearce looked at Ben steadily. "Man, don't you ever look at yourself in the mirror? You're forty years old and you can pass for twenty-five. If my guesses are correct, you're going to look the same way you do now for another forty years—and for a long time after that."

"How long?" Ben asked.

Pearee shrugged helplessly. "I don't know. I don't, really. You know what happened to Braddock, just from getting a transfusion. You've seen what happened to the guinea pigs. Well, you have the original stuff in you, the stuff that rejuvenates man and animal. Who knows how long your blood will keep you from aging—whether it will ever wear out?"

"How long?"

"If you must have a figure," Pearee said, "I can give you a guess—five normal lifetimes, ten... There's no reason why your body should lose its ability to manufacture these immunity factors; perhaps your kind of blood—your new blood—will wear out like everything else in this world. But as far as present standards of life expectancy are concerned—you're immortal."

"Immortal," Ben repeated. It was like an incantation, a magic word, a word to make magic, a word to change the natural order of things.

Immortal.

Chapter Nine

How much is immortality worth?

To the man who is dying, everything. To the child, whose seventy years stretch ahead of him like an eternity, not much. To the adult, whose plans for career, family, and eventual retirement depend on a concept of a normal lifespan, something more. To the elderly, who listen for the hushed wingbeats of approaching death, a great deal...

To the immortal...

Dazedly Ben made his way back through the hospital corridors and stairwells to his car, getting lost only once.

Dazedly he started the car and pulled out of the graveled lot onto a side street, down the side street to a thoroughfare, and down the thoroughfare onto a freeway.

He had been driving on the freeway for several minutes, automatically doing all the skillful and courteous things a good driver does, before the fog in his head began to thin.

"Hey," he told himself, "it's not just thirty or forty years you're risking—it's forever." He shivered at the thought.

Within a few miles he had begun to get used to the idea. By the time he reached the cloverleaf he had begun to enjoy it. By the time he turned into the side street he had begun to explore some of the implications.

He sat in the parking lot outside the apartment building going over the entire conversation with Pearce in his head. He thought about the rats, about Braddock, about Pearce, and when the girl came up the walk and passed in front of the car he was ready.

"Sylvia!"

Sylvia turned, bewildered, and looked at Ben. "What are you doing here? We don't have a date—You didn't mention—"

Ben got out of the car and was beside her. He put his arm around her shoulders. "This is something special—something I want to tell you. Let's go inside—"

"If you're going to take back your proposal," Sylvia said shakily, "it's too late—" She stopped. "This is something serious, isn't it?"

Ben nodded. "But nothing to be worried about. Something good."

Sylvia's shock began to lift. "A surprise? You know I can't stand surprises. Ben, tell me."

"Upstairs," Ben said firmly.

They went up the elevator in silence, Sylvia turning to Ben with questions framed on her lips and Ben frowning her into silence. And then when they had walked down the hall, Ben took the key from her fingers and opened the door. They went in, Ben closed the door carefully behind them, locked it, and put her down in a chair.

He told her the story as Pearce had told it to him, slowly, piece by piece, building up to the final revelation, as it had come to him.

She sat in her chair finally, not speaking, not even looking at him, unable to accept the reality of what he had been saying. "Ben," she said finally, "it's just not possible. You misunderstood him. Maybe—"

Ben shook his head sympathetically. "I didn't misunderstand anything. It is possible. Everything fits together. It's difficult to believe, but I've gone over everything again and again, and it all makes a kind of crazy sense—"

The room was relatively dark. The sun had gone down while they were talking, and only the fading twilight outside the windows kept away the night. Sylvia moved for the first time. She got up with a kind of robot abstraction and turned on a lamp.

"But, Ben—" she began.

"Hey," Ben said, "you know I didn't just tell you that I'm going to die tomorrow. On the contrary. I'm going to be alive for a long, long time."

"I know, but—" She didn't know. She put both her hands to her head and shook it.

"Aren't you happy?" Ben asked.

"Honey, I am. It's just that it's—it's so hard to—Ben, are you putting me on?" Before he could answer, she continued, "Because if you're not—if you're serious—you'd better hold me because I'm going to—"

Ben was beside her instantly, his arm around her. She looked up into his face, searching for an answer to her questions...

"Then it's the truth," she said, finality in her voice.

He nodded. She leaned her head helplessly on his shoulder.

"Oh, Ben," she said. There was an overwhelming happiness for him in her voice and in the way she held onto him.

Ben held her tightly, waiting for the shock to pass. Finally she raised her head and looked into his face as if she were seeing him for the first time. She touched his face with her fingers, traced one finger along his cheek.

"And you're really going to stay like this for so much time—beautiful, perfect... ?" she said, trying to understand the implications.

Ben smiled, for the first time able to enjoy the reactions of someone else to the news he had learned. "That's what Dr. Pearce said."

"Ben, it's wonderful. It's unbelievable that this should happen to you." It was a few minutes later after they had held each other and reassured each other that though the world had changed their feelings were still the same and would never change, she drew back and said, "But—do you realize that in another twenty years when I look like my mother, I'll look like your mother, too?"

Ben was instantly aware of her emotional state and her growing pain. "Oh no... no... no." He loosened the hold of his arms which had surrounded her with security against the uncertainty he had brought into her life. He held her now at arm's length, smiling broadly. Twenty years of youthful years together, enjoying each other, growing to know each other in every way, had seemed like an eternity a few hours before, but now, before the fact of his immortality, they were beginning to look like the lifetime of a May fly.

"You didn't understand everything. You're going to be this way, too. It's not just me. We're going to live a long time, both of us. Honey, we'll have the greatest and longest marriage the world has ever seen. Remember what I told you about Braddock! Remember what I told you about the rats. All you need is a transfusion from me—and voilà!" He humorously introduced himself to her. "Two-thousand-year-old man, meet the two-thousand-year-old woman." He turned serious again. "I can pass it on to you. And there's a chance that you can pass it on to somebody else, and that somebody can pass it on to somebody else—I don't know. I can't explain it to you scientifically. You'll have to come to the hospital with me, talk to Dr. Pearce, see for yourself."

"It can really be passed on, Ben—" Sylvia said wonderingly, "—to anyone, everyone?"

"I don't know. It looks that way," Ben said. "So far it has worked with the rats."

"Ben," Sylvia said, "let me sit down before I collapse."

He eased her into a chair and began to pace the floor. "You know, Sylvia, after I left Dr. Pearce's lab, I was in a daze, like you after I told you, and I walked past a ward that was full of kids, I asked a nurse what was wrong with them. She must have thought I was crazy or nosy or something. But she told me they were all terminal cases—mostly cancer, I guess. Leukemia maybe. They were the saddest kids I ever saw—no, that's not right—they weren't sad. They were just kids—noisy, playing, reading, having fun. I was sad looking at them, knowing what was in store for them. I felt like running in among them and saying, 'Hey, kids, wait, don't die, hang on, maybe I can help you.' They would have been sure I was crazy, wouldn't they? But maybe I can help them."

He smiled at Sylvia. "How about it? Want to spend the next few centuries with me?"

Sylvia smiled tremulously. "I don't know. They say the first hundred years are the hardest. If—when we have children—what will happen to them?"

"The chances are good," Ben said, "that they will inherit my blood, my immunities."

Sylvia laughed.

"What are you laughing at?" Ben asked.

Sylvia pointed to two imaginary children standing in front of her. "Mrs. Jones, I'd like you to meet my son and my daughter. He's 195 and she's 193. I'm 221 myself—and those aren't pounds, Mrs. Jones. They're years. Oh, Ben," she said, her voice suddenly changing to awe and uncertainty.

Ben went to his knees in front of her and pulled her into his arms.

"It's scary, Ben," she said. "It's never happened to anybody. What's going to happen to us?"

Chapter Ten

A taste of the good life, a stroke of luck, a few days of bliss, a weekend at the Ritz—it is never enough. Men want more. Happiness remembered is not enough. "What have you done for me lately?" is the question man asks the Fates.

When Pearce entered the hopsital room, Janet Braddock was coming out of the bathroom, adjusting her skirt. She was an attractive sight, her dark hair a little tousled, the top button of her blouse unbuttoned.

Braddock was sitting on the edge of the bed. He was wearing a red silk robe and black silk pajamas. He looked like a thirty-year-old man, his body overflowing with health and vitality.

Patiently he submitted to Pearce's examination. Pearce checked his pulse, heart, eyes, throat, and finally blood pressure.

"Well, doctor, how am I?" Braddock asked.

"Better than you deserve," Pearce said. "You can leave the hospital today. I can't keep you any longer. You have recovered completely—if that phrase can cover what has happened."

Braddock stood up. "You saved my life and I want you to know I'm grateful," he said, moving to where his wife had seated herself in a chair. "I'm a new man." He squeezed his wife's shoulder and glanced down at her. "Isn't that so, my darling?"

Janet Braddock buttoned the top of her blouse.

Braddock smiled. "If you had just arrived a few minutes earlier, you wouldn't have needed all those instruments to assure you of my good health." He turned to Pearce. "I think you've received a satisfactory payment for your services?"

Pearce shrugged. "The amount was ostentatious, but I accepted it."

"That isn't all," Braddock said. "It could be just the beginning, if you are willing to cooperate." He moved toward Pearce.

"I'm always willing to cooperate in anything that will advance my profession or improve the human lot," Pearce said. There was an edge of irony to his voice.

"I'm prepared to endow a chair of medicine at the University in your name. The Russell Pearce Research Chair of Medicine. How does that sound to you? Is that humanitarian enough?"

"It sounds good, so far," Pearce said.

"The endowment will be twelve million dollars," Braddock said. "The income from two million dollars of that will be the salary of the man who holds the chair. The rest will be for salaries of supporting researchers and staff and expenses."

"Is that all?"

"There's more, if needed."

"And what are you going to get out of it?" Pearce asked cynically.

"All I ask," Braddock said heavily, "is your agreement that, if necessary, you'll provide me with the same treatment that saved my life. You could be the first holder of that chair, Pearce. You could have more money"—he hesitated as he evaluated the man he faced—"and more opportunity to do research, to do good, than you will ever have again."

Pearce looked at Braddock without blinking, and yet he hesitated. "I'll think about it."

"Don't think too long!" Braddock said savagely. "That feeling I had—inside of me—it was like electricity." He moved closer to Pearce, in his walk the shadow of the stiff-legged movements of an old man. When he spoke again there was in his voice the echo of an old man's quaver. "It's gone. I want it back."

Pearce went directly to his laboratory, pausing long enough only to make a telephone call on a pay telephone. Ten minutes after he reached the laboratory, he was not alone.

"Hello, Ben," he said. "Something has happened that I thought you should know about."

"Something—serious?" Ben said.

"A change in what we thought was true." Pearce went on quickly as he saw the apprehension in Ben's face. "Not about you—about the transmission of whatever it is you have. I could have told you about it on the telephone, but I wanted you to see for yourself."

He moved aside to give Ben a view of the cages that held the white rats. The rat in the nearest cage still lay listlessly on its side, its flanks barely moving as air went in and out of its lungs. In the next cage, the rat looked the same as the first.

"This is the fellow that received Braddock's blood," Pearce said. "He's old again. In the tests we did a week ago, everything indicated that he was a young animal. Today those same tests show that he has lived a full seven years."

In the third cage the guinea pig was still active but displayed nowhere near the activity it had showed on Ben's earlier visit. "Your rat is losing vitality as well," Pearce said.

"What does it mean?" Ben asked. "The rejuvenation doesn't last?"

"Exactly. I told you about the immunity factors in the blood?"

Ben nodded.

"It should have occurred to me then," Pearce said. "The immunity factors are in the gamma globulin—proteins formed to combat specific toxins created by invading bacteria. But the immunity they provide is passive when they are injected into another body; they combat toxins only as long as they survive, and they survive only about six weeks. We give injections of gamma globulin to pregnant women who have been exposed to German measles to provide a temporary immunity. For a permanent immunity the body must manufacture its own gamma globulin and keep manufacturing it, and that it does, if it is capable of doing so, only when it is exposed to the disease itself."

Pearce looked at the cages again. "So far, at least, it seems that yours is the only blood that manufactures this kind of gamma globulin."

"Can you check it, or are these just educated guesses?" Ben asked.

Pearce sighed. "We can check it, and I hope to do so if you agree to let me use a little more of your blood. I'll separate it into cells and plasma. There are more than seventy proteins in the plasma. We can separate those, get the gamma globulin with zinc, inject our old animals with that, use some of the other fractions, blood cells, on the other animals, see how they respond."

"But you don't have any doubt about how it's going to come out," Ben said.

Pearce shook his head. "Sometimes you have a feeling. It pays to trust your feelings."

Ben sagged back against a table. "How about Braddock?"

"He's complaining," Pearce said. "He has lost the electricity—that's what he calls it."

"He's a powerful man," Ben said. "What is he going to do?"

"I was afraid of something like this," Pearce said. "Even before this happened, you were valuable. Now—it means that you have to make an important choice. Braddock wants to set up a research project, endow a chair."

"Well?"

"I'm against the idea."

"Why?"

"For your sake."

"But it sounds like a good idea."

"It did," Pearce admitted, "when we thought a chain reaction was possible, each person stimulating the next to start producing the immunity factors. But now we know that you are the only source. You alone. One man who holds within his body the source of eternal life. Nobody knows you exist except me."

"And Sylvia," Ben said. When Pearce looked questioning, Ben said, "My girl."

"If word that you exist were to leak out, your life would be over."

Ben frowned as he considered the words, "Why 'over'?"

"You've got to understand this, Ben. You're a walking fountain of youth. If men knew you existed they'd fight over you the way they used to fight over women or gold. Men have killed each other over things as unsubstantial and fleeting as that. What would they do to possess immortality?"

"What could they do to me?" Ben asked.

"For one thing, they would take away your freedom. You can give blood four times a year—maybe a little oftener considering the state of your health and the unique ability of your body to repair itself. Out of billions of people in the world, that might be enough to save four from death—the exact level of gamma globulin dosage would have to be determined. Four men in the world to survive beyond their normal span—five counting you, but you won't count except as a factory for making the proteins that keep the others alive. Which four will it be? Will it be a lottery? A vote? A contest? Or a battle? You know who wins a battle—the strongest. You know who wins a race—the swiftest. Everyone, every powerful figure in the world, would scheme to lay his hands on you. And when one or more of them got you, they would have to put you in protective custody and guard you even more closely than the crown jewels. How could they let you roam loose? You might get hurt. No more fast cars, Ben. You might kill yourself, and then where would they be, these old men who count on you as their gateway to youth. How could they even let you live the ordinary pampered life of a household pet? Some other desperate old men might grab you for themselves."

Pearce shook his head. "I can't paint the picture black enough," he said. "My advice to you is to run, you and your fiancee, lose yourselves somewhere before Braddock and everyone else learns about you."

Ben leaned toward Pearce, a look of incredulity on his face. "You're a doctor, and you tell me this—knowing what it could mean to people?"

Pearce sighed. "I know the lengths to which people will go to hold onto life."

"You haven't given me the whole picture," Ben said. "I've been given this unique gift. Am I to keep it selfishly to myself? What about all the people out there who might be saved, not just by me but by the knowledge that might come out of me? By studying my blood, you may be able to find out what makes it different. You may be able to reproduce it in other people. You may be able to synthesize it. Think of it—a universal cure for disease, maybe even death itself?"

"Elixir vitae," Pearce muttered.

"What? It's possible. Science has synthesized other things."

"Never anything nearly as complicated as a blood protein. Oh, it can be done—maybe. Not in my lifetime perhaps, but in yours, if it could be done. Don't you see? I'd be fighting dying men for every sample of blood I needed for analysis. Ben, don't you know—I'm tempted to make use of you myself? I want to know the answers. I want to find out how you do it. I want to synthesize it. I want to do all these things. And, Ben, I'm getting along in years. One of these days I'll need a transfusion myself."

"And you'll get it," Ben said. "We could keep my identity a secret."

"Braddock would find out. He would be in there with his men; he would own half the researchers himself, totally. They would find out sooner rather than later what the investigation was about, who the person was who came in the night, where I went and returned with mysterious blood samples, why those packages of liquids kept arriving in the mail. Then he would find you and put you where he would have you always at hand, always safe."

"We'd have to tell him," Ben said. "If it's his money he'd deserve to know what was being done with it. And then he'd have no reason to do as you suggest. Not if he knew I was safe, cooperating, available."

"You have no idea what that man is capable of doing—I've destroyed your blood-bank records. I'm giving you one last chance, Ben. For your own sake, take it."

"Dr. Pearce," Ben said, "I think you've misjudged Braddock. He can't be as ruthless as you suggest. I've never met anybody like that. You just haven't hit it off."

"I hope you're right," Pearce said.

"If Braddock will put up the money for research I want to go ahead with it," Ben said.

"You hope to cure all the ills of mankind?'' Pearce asked.

"Maybe that's part of it," Ben said. "I don't know. When you first told me about this—immortality—it sounded great. Now it seems as though it might get lonely. You know—looking for new friends every twenty years or so. I want to get started on this as soon as possible."

Pearce looked at Ben for several moments as if he hoped to find in his face some lack of resolution. Then he nodded. "I suppose you're right about Braddock knowing. He might be content with a research set-up. At least it's worth a try. I'll arrange a meeting for you—sometime in the next few days. By that time, you can be sure, Braddock will know everything there is to know about you—your job at his plant, your private life, your personal history, everything... I hope I'm wrong about him, but I don't think I am. He sees people as objects. To him you'll be simply a more valuable object than most."

Chapter Eleven

Money is motivation.

Money is a symbol of the success which all men seek.

Money is power.

Money also can buy things, and it usually is found in a desirable neighborhood.

The meeting occurred as Pearee had predicted, only sooner. Braddock did not wait a few days to summon Ben, to view this fabulous creature in the unique flesh.

After Ben passed the guardhouse at the gate in his three-year-old yellow convertible, he drove for almost five minutes before he came in sight of the mansion. The grounds surrounding it were green and disciplined, with bushes and trees and flower beds planted precisely where Braddock—not nature—wanted them. Making its way through them was an asphalt driveway as wide as many roads, bordered by white bricks. It led eventually to a house with tall white columns in front and two wings on either side that stretched interminably.

Around everything, grounds, driveway, and mansion was a tall brick wall painted white. On top of it, Ben thought, would be broken glass embedded in concrete.

Guards in uniform, with holstered revolvers at their sides, were visible around the grounds. As Ben pulled up in front of the mansion, two of them came toward the car. One of them held a nervous Doberman pinscher on a short leash. Ben eyed the dog suspiciously.

He did not like the looks of the place nor the feel of it. He began to be a little sorry that he had insisted on accepting Braddock's offer.

I'm Ben Richards," he said. "I have an appointment with Mr. Braddock."

"Identification?" said the guard with the dog.

Ben pulled out his billfold and flipped to his Braddock Automotive Company card. "How's this?"

The dog put his forepaws on the side of the car and growled. His master spoke into a walkie-talkie and listened briefly. Then he nodded at Ben. "You can go right in, Mr. Richards," he said politely.

"As soon as you move the dog," Ben said, not stirring.

"Of course. Come on, Loki."

The door was opened as Ben approached the house. Ben passed a butler who indicated a doorway to Ben's left. He went through the tall hallway. It had a great traditional staircase going up the back and branching into two small staircases at a landing halfway up. The room on the left, as Ben went through the open door, was quite different.

It, too, was enormous and high-ceilinged, its furnishings, in keeping with the rest of the house, on a grand scale. But the furnishings were more modern, including the gigantic desk behind which sat a man whose face Ben knew from photographs in the newspaper. To the right were glass doors beyond which was a patio beside a long swimming pool. To the left a balcony ran the length of one side of the room.

"Mr. Richards," Braddock said, "how good of you to come to see me."

"My pleasure, Mr. Braddock," Ben said. He hesitated and then added, "I never thought I would have the opportunity to meet you."

Braddock stood. "The honor is mine," he said, offering his hand. "Of the two of us, I have no doubt who any disinterested observer would call the more unique, the more valuable. You are a most exceptional individual."

Braddock looked at Ben as if he had a jeweler's loupe screwed into one eye.

Ben took his hand and shook it briefly. The hand was dry and somehow lifeless, Ben looked at Braddock as closely as he dared without appearing to study the man. If he had looked thirty, as Pearce had said, he no longer would be mistaken for that age. The dark hair was beginning to gray, and there were wrinkles in the face around the eyes and the mouth.

"You know about my plan for finding out more about this unusual body of yours," Braddock said. "Dr. Pearce has told you about the foundation I propose to set up to do the research to analyze your blood and try to duplicate its amazing properties."

"I think it's a wonderful thing you're doing," Ben said, "to put your money into something to benefit others."

"Yes," Braddock said heavily. "Yes. But nothing beside what you are being asked to contribute. The secret of how your body functions. Without that the foundation would be nothing. In setting up the foundation I have only one stipulation, that you will agree to make yourself available for study. This would involve donating blood every three months—which the foundation would use as it saw fit."

"Which Dr. Pearce would use as he saw fit," Ben corrected firmly. "He'd be in charge."

"And suppose I should want another transfusion," Braddock said. "If I must ask Pearce, exactly what am I getting for my money?" Braddock waved away Ben's interruption. "Oh, I'm interested in mankind, of course, but I'd like my own needs taken care of first. It seems to me that the one must come before the other or how can I help mankind? I don't want Dr. Pearce or anyone deciding whether I'm entitled to live."

"Nor does anybody else," Ben said sharply. "You can work all that out with Dr. Pearce."

"I want it worked out right now," Braddock said forcefully.

Ben bristled under the tone. "And I want it left up to the doctor."

Braddock pulled himself in. After a few moments of silence, Ben decided he had been dismissed. He turned to leave.

"You haven't said what you expect out of this personally," Braddock said.

"Personally?" Ben shrugged. "I hadn't thought about it."

Neither of the men noticed that Janet Braddock, on her way past the entrance to the balcony, had stopped to listen.

"You intend to go on being a test driver?" Braddock asked. "There are lots more desirable occupations."

"Why not?"

"Because it's out of the question," Braddock snapped. "Thanks to you, I'm alive. My remaining alive will one day depend on you. That means I should have something to say about the manner in which you live."

Ben's eyes widened. "Mr. Braddock, let's understand each other. If I don't work for you I'll work for somebody else, but I'm going to go on doing what I want to do, what I always have done."

Braddock raised his hands in conciliation. "You are right, of course. Your life is your own. Forgive the impatience of an old man—and the overbearing ways of a man who has had his way too much of the time. I like you, Mr. Richards. I like the way you stand up for your rights and for what you believe in. And I would like to see to it that you have a better job—and a better salary along with it—than you have at present."

"I'm a test driver," Ben said.

"Whatever you say," Braddock said. "Thank you for coming. I wanted to look at you in person, thank you in person for saving my life."

"It was nothing—"

"It was a great deal—to me, Mr. Richards," Braddock said.

"Of course. I meant—"

"You meant the blood was there, and you did not decide who would use it. Of course. That is the way it should be. And you will find that the man who did receive it is grateful. He will remember for as long as he lives the man who gave the blood. And now, good-bye. I hope this will be the beginning of a very long relationship—a partnership between my financial resources and your physical resources."

After Ben left, Braddock turned to a large mirror on the wall and looked at himself. He studied his face closely, frowning, and then turned to the telephone.

"Here I am, Mr. Braddock," Pearce said. "I don't usually make house calls, you know. I am not a general practitioner; I'm a geriatrician. But you said it was important."

He put down his black bag on a chair.

"My time is worth money, Pearce," Braddock said. "More money than you can imagine. You'll be paid for your time—"

"I'm not a blue-collar worker to be paid by the hour," Pearce said.

"Time is money—money also is time. You'll be paid enough so that you can employ an associate, if you wish—someone who can save you time by extending your efforts." Braddock was sitting behind his desk but he got up and walked toward Pearce.

"Are you ill?" Pearce asked.

"Not ill," Braddock said, "but I want you to give me another examination."

Pearce looked at Braddock's face. He looked grayer, more haggard. "I examined you carefully only a couple of days ago."

"A few days can make the difference between success and failure, between life and death. I want you to examine me, Pearce."

Pearce shrugged. "Let's go out into the sunlight on the patio," he said. He led the way through the open glass doors with his black bag in his hand and put it down beside one of the deck chairs. "Sit down here."

Braddock sat down, silent for once. Pearce noticed now that he was holding a hand mirror. And then he looked at Braddock's face in the sunlight. He was shocked at how much the man had aged in two days,

"Have you been taking care of yourself?" he asked.

"Of course I have," Braddock growled. "Get on with it."

Pearce proceeded with the examination to the limit of the instruments in his black bag: pulse, stethoscopic examination of the chest, visual inspection of nose and ears and throat.

When Pearce finished, Braddock looked into his hand mirror. "Well?" he asked. It was almost like a question he was putting to the mirror.

"Your condition is not as good as it was when you left the hospital," Pearce said carefully.

Braddock's face reddened with anger. He waved the mirror between them. "I'm getting older. Don't tell me I'm imagining it! I'm getting older. I can feel it and I can see it." He looked into the mirror like someone afraid of what he would see there. "Every day that goes by feels like a month. Look!" He touched his cheek. "That line. There. It wasn't there yesterday. I know it." He put the mirror down on his leg again. "Don't lie to me—I'm getting older, aren't I?"

Pearce shrugged. "Aren't we all?"

"I didn't bring you out here to play games. Answer my question!"

Pearce hesitated and then said, "Yes. You're getting older."

"How quickly?"

"That's something no doctor could tell you without exhaustive tests involving cell studies and extrapolations, and even then they'd be just guesses. Nothing like this has ever happened before. The rate of aging may not be constant. It might accelerate—or slow down. It might even stop."

"Guess!"

"As a rough guess, then, I'd say you're aging a year every week or so."

Braddock shoved himself out of the deck chair. He was furious. "I thought I had another lifetime ahead of me. Now you tell me I must measure it in months, weeks. What kind of injustice is this?"

Pearce looked at Braddock steadily and then looked away. He looked at the green garden that surrounded the pool and smelled the air, with its hint of chlorine.

When Braddock had calmed a little, he asked, "What happened? What went wrong?"

"Nothing went wrong," Pearce said. "We could have guessed it, by analogy, from the beginning. But we had nothing to work from. No prior experience."

"What are you babbling about?"

"Your rejuvenation was the result of a transfusion from Ben Richards. The active ingredient in the rejuvenation was the substance in the blood which confers immunities—the gamma globulin. But the immunities it confers are passive. They last only as long as the gamma globulin lasts in your bloodstream."

"And how long is that?" But Braddock did not really want to know the answer. He waited for it like the blow from a whip.

"About thirty to forty days."

"And then?"

"The protein molecules die, and the immunity dies with them."

"And what happens to me?"

"You are once more prey to all the ordinary illnesses of man—disease and death. The rejuvenation was temporary; your cells remember, and they begin to return to their former condition. You can't manufacture the immunity factors. Nobody can—except Ben Richards."

"And he is walking around like anyone else." Braddock said.

"Why shouldn't he?" Pearce asked, but he knew the answer, Braddock's answer.

"I can't believe you know what you're saying. He may be immortal but he's no superman. He can be killed in an accident as easily as you or I. He could be crushed under a truck as he crossed a street. That would be a tragedy, wouldn't it? People get murdered. Can you imagine some careless kid spilling that golden blood into a filthy gutter? Or some jealous woman putting a knife into a vital organ of that priceless body? If he's not killed first on that insane job of his."

Pearce shook his head. "Ben Richards' way of Me is his own concern."

"It's our concern," Braddock said firmly. "What if I need a transfusion in a month from now—or a year from now—and he meets with an accident?"

"What do you want?" Pearce said. He had looked into the future for Ben, and now he saw it coming and it made him melancholy.

"He should have limits put on him," Braddock said.

"For example—"

"Whatever limits are necessary."

"No matter if he does have something you cannot live without, he has as many rights as you—he's entitled to live his own life."

"He's entitled to protection—'' Braddock said, "—from himself as well as from the world. He must be insane to risk eternity for a whim."

Pearce began to stow away the instruments in his medical bag. Sun glinted off the water in the swimming pool and made him squint against the glare. There was nothing he could do to stop Braddock and nothing he could do to help Ben—except warn him, and he had done that. Perhaps he should warn him again. Perhaps this time Ben would listen.

Braddock still was musing. "Suppose somebody else finds out about Richards, kidnaps him. Have you thought about that? Have you thought about what men would pay to get their hands on him?"

"Whatever men will pay for life," Pearce said.

"I'd pay one hundred million a year if I had to," Braddock said. "More. What am I talking about? I'd give it all and start all over again and get it all back in a few years. But that shouldn't be necessary. How much can a man spend? How much can he need? I suggest that you talk to him about moving outside the city, somewhere isolated, where he can be guarded. We'll plan a new life for him, something splendid. He can live the way a king would only dream about."

"It won't work. I'll tell you why it won't work. Because you would kill him. You think you wouldn't but you'd kill him as certainly as you're a member of the human race. You'd bleed him to death, or you'd kill him just because you couldn't stand having something immortal around. In any case, I can tell you right now," Pearce said, "he won't agree to such a proposal. He's independent, Braddock. Understand that. He wants his life, not yours, not something you lay out for him."

Braddock's anger had built itself to a savage intensity. He was about to reply when he turned away and breathed deeply. When he turned back toward Pearce he was once more in control of himself. It was, Pearce thought, an impressive display.

"Then I guess there is nothing we can do, is there?" Braddock said calmly.

Pearce looked hard into Braddock's face, and the aging billionaire returned his gaze impassively.

"Good-bye, Pearce," Braddock said.

Pearce nodded curtly, picked up his bag, and left. On the front steps of the building he stopped and looked at the guards and the giant Doberman and then turned and looked back at the massive building behind him. Behind that door lurked a man with desires as large as the world, the power to satisfy them, and the will to let nothing stop him. Now he wanted something more than he had ever wanted anything before, in a long lifetime of unslaked appetites. He wanted life itself, and it did not matter if that life belonged to someone else.

Pearce shivered and got into his car and drove away without stopping even at the guardhouse at the gate.

Chapter Twelve

Freedom.

What is it but a word, a concept without relevance?

Who is free? Who is not the prisoner of others? Who is not locked in by obligations, responsibilities, fear, social pressures, lack of opportunity, compunctions, childhood training, guilt, love?

Free? Who is free who must eat and sleep, earn a living, protect what he has earned, sicken, die?

Freedom? It is all relative.

Ben was working on the engine of the sports car when Adrian Locke came into the Braddock Automotive Company garage.

"Mr. Richards?" he said.

Ben looked up from the engine. The man who asked his name was a tall, powerfully-built man of mature years—thirty-five or forty, perhaps. He was dressed in a gray, belted sports coat and slacks. He had a black-and-white plaid hat on the back of his head. Ben looked at his face. His eyes looked older.

"I'm Ben Richards," Ben said.

"I'm Adrian Locke," the man said. "I work for Mr. Braddock. You know, just like you, only I work for him personally. You know what I mean?"

"Yes," Ben said. He lowered the gleaming hood of the car with a cloth under his hand to protect it from smears.

"Mr. Braddock wants to see you," Locke said.

Ben wiped his hands on the cloth. "You have any idea what about?"

"Mr. Richards," Locke said, "Mr. Braddock doesn't tell people what he wants to see them about. He just says, 'Come. Now.' And they come. Follow me in your car and we'll be at his house in twenty minutes."

"I can't leave just now," Ben said. "The mechanic—Lopez—was called away a few minutes ago. Ill have to wait until he gets back and tell him where I'm going and what to do while I'm gone."

Locke waved his hand. "Don't worry about that. Mr. Braddock doesn't, and he owns the place. Right? You can call him from Mr. Braddock's. I don't think we should keep him waiting."

Locke moved to the door and waited. Ben thought for a moment and then began to remove his coveralls. As they pulled away from the garage, Ben thought he heard the telephone ringing.

The drive across town was strange, following Locke's small imported car. Locke drove fast and recklessly. At times Ben had difficulty keeping the car in sight, even with his skill and experience, when Locke took chances with approaching traffic and traffic signals that Ben would never have taken in ordinary driving.

Finally he caught up with Locke at the guardhouse. Locke was looking behind him, then nodded as he saw Ben's convertible. He made a follow-me motion and drove into the grounds at a more sedate pace.

At a point where another driveway split away from the one that led toward the front steps of the mansion, he motioned again. At the end of the driveway he stopped in a small clearing in the midst of a grove. They were on the right side of the mansion. There was a door at near ground level. Ben pulled up behind Locke's car and got out

"Why don't we use the front door?" Ben asked.

Locke motioned at the side door. "We're meeting in there. After you, Mr. Richards—" He nudged Ben toward the door.

Ben held back, suddenly suspicious. "I don't like this way of doing things," he said, and looked around.

Two men appeared. One came around the side of the building, the other from the bushes at the edge of the grove of trees.

Ben looked quizzical, started forward as if accepting Locke's explanation, and then pivoted toward Locke. As he turned he swung a hard left at Locke's jaw and connected. There was a satisfying sound of impact and flash of pain through Ben's fist. Locke reeled back.

Ben lunged toward his car. That was a mistake. One of the men—the one who had come around the side of the mansion—grabbed him from behind and pulled him back. Then the one from the bushes got his arm.

Ben struggled with them. He pulled one arm free and lashed out, but his fist met only air. He was off balance and one guard was still holding him from behind. The guard in front pulled back and then jumped forward to grab the free arm again.

While Ben was occupied with the guards, Locke got to his feet. Ben saw him approach. Locke was reaching into his jacket pocket. Ben struggled harder. Locke's hand came out of the pocket holding something metallic.

As it approached Ben's face, the object looked like a small gas cylinder, but it became bigger and bigger as it came closer. Ben bucked and tried to turn his face away, but it was useless. Locke's thumb pressed the cylinder and Ben's vision was obscured by a cloud of gas which burned his eyes and clogged his nose and lungs.

Ben coughed and wheezed. Tears blinded him, and he squeezed his eyes shut and waggled his head in torment. "Damn you!" he said and twisted away. He flailed at them wildly, hit one. He was wrestling with the other one when he sensed Locke behind him. An instant later he felt a blow to his neck and shoulder that sent him to his knees. His right arm felt numb.

"Get him inside," Locke said.

Locke opened the door. Half-dragged, half-carried, Ben was edged through the doorway onto what appeared to be a small, bare landing. The three of them, preceded by Locke, descended a metal staircase into a storeroom.

The walk of the room were lined with shelves. On the shelves were stocks of canned food, cereal, sugar, flour, and other provisions. On the floor were unopened cartons.

The only furniture in the room was a table and two chairs. They stood directly in front of what seemed to be an elevator. The door was open. Ben could not imagine what an elevator was doing in a storeroom, but he still was dazed and he thought perhaps he was not thinking clearly.

He had no ability to resist as the men led and pushed him across the floor and into the elevator. The doors closed behind him. The elevator began to descend.

The guards had loosened their grip as if they sensed his inability to resist. Ben stretched his head to ease the pain in his neck and rubbed it with his hand. He looked at Locke.

"Sorry about that," Locke said affably. He looked down and pointed. "Salesman tried to sell me one of these things about ten years ago. Nothing like this, of course."

"What is it?" Ben got out.

"It's a bomb shelter," Locke said, as if the answer were obvious.

The elevator continued downward long past the point where Ben expected it to halt, but at last it slowed, stopped, and opened its doors. The room that lay outside the doors looked like the control room of a space capsule or the cockpit of a modern airplane, with controls in front and behind, and a broad window. Or so it seemed to Ben's smarting eyes.

He did not have time for more than a glance, as the two men hustled him past the control room and through a doorway and down a short ramp into a kind of living area.

"Get everything off him but pants, socks, and shirt," Locke said.

As if they had practiced, the two men stripped Ben. Taking with them the clothing they removed they left him in the room. As soon as they were out of the room, Locke pressed a switch or button on the control panel and a curved metal door slid across the doorway. Ben was locked in.

"You know what to do," Locke said to the two guards. "You have the first shift. Nobody comes down unless I give the okay personally. Nobody comes up unless I am in the control room. If there are any questions, choose caution."

They nodded and walked into the elevator; they faced the front and the elevator doors closed.

Ben rubbed his eyes and looked around him. The room seemed little different from an ordinary, modern motel room. A little larger than most, perhaps, it differed in two other significant respects: it had no windows but one and that opened into the control room where Locked watched; and overhead, out of reach, a television camera lens turned to follow his movements.

He was locked in a gilded prison, and there was nothing he could do in privacy. Someone would always be watching.

And as Ben stood in the middle of the room in slacks from which the belt had been removed, in shirt, in sox, trying to understand the implications of the room and his presence in it, he heard a whirring sound and turned. Where one side of the room had been delineated as a bathroom by a low partition, a screen was descending from the celing. It stopped just beyond Ben's reach.

The screen lighted up and became the face of Jordan Braddock. He looked older and more desperate than the last time Ben had seen him.

"Relax, Mr. Richards," the image said. "This was inevitable, this spot secluded from the world's cares and perils. Consider yourself fortunate. Somebody would have done this to you sooner or later, and they might have had less concern for your feelings—and your comfort. It might even have been the U.S. government. And if you're at all familiar with bureaucracy, you'll know what I've saved you from. A fate worse than death. We know all about death, don't we, Mr. Richards."

"Thanks," Ben said. Angrily he continued his investigation of the room. Television set, radio, books, chairs, table, but no bed.

"You'll find that all the furnishings are bolted down and quite sturdy," Braddock said. "We wouldn't want you using them as weapons. Somebody might get hurt, and it might be you. That we do not want to happen. You'll have food served to you—very good food, incidentally, prepared by my own chef. You will have to eat it with plastic utensils. My chef would consider that a desecration, and we agree. But then he won't know, will he? And we know what's important. Life and safety. True? In any case, these quarters are only temporary. Their chief virtues were that they were available, handy, and easily adapted. We've already begun work on much finer facilities. When they're completed you'll be moved. You know, Richards, in a way I envy you. You'll have no worries about your future, and you'll have a better Me than any man ever dreamed of. You'll be provided with the most beautiful women in the world. You'll be waited on, pampered, given everything."

"Everything but freedom," Ben growled. He had begun to hate this room from which he had concluded what was obvious from the start: there was no way out.

"A much-overrated commodity," Braddock said. "And relative, in any case. I am the prisoner of my wealth, which does not let me move freely outside a certain protected sphere, and the prisoner of my insatiable desire to live."

The room smelled like a place that had been closed for a long time, even though chilled air moved through tiny ducts in the ceiling to change it constantly. Perhaps it was prison air, and what Ben missed in it was the smell of freedom.

"What happens when people start looking for me?" Ben asked.

"They won't," Braddock said. "I've already arranged that."

Ben turned away. He did not want Braddock—or the camera above—to see his frustration.

Chapter Thirteen

Death. It is the terminus for which we all are heading... the end beyond which there is no life. No life, joy or suffering, no pleasure or pain, no sensations or sorrow, no terror, regret, fear, guilt. Nothing. On the whole, death does not seem to be a fate without a redeeming feature: If not to be sought, at least it need not be greatly dreaded.

But what of the living? What of those who find their shared experiences suddenly cut off? Perhaps it is they who dread death—the death of others who impoverish the living by their departure.

Pearce stood at the door of the apartment, pushing the buzzer, dreading the moment that lay ahead. He had heard before, in the voices of the suddenly bereaved, the tone he had heard on the telephone. He had heard it in his own voice, discovered it in spite of himself, when he had been forced—too often—to break the news to others.

The door opened. Sylvia was there, her face ravaged by tears and grief.

"I came over as soon as I could, Sylvia," he said;

"what—?"

He didn't get a chance to finish. Sylvia, crying uncontrollably, rushed into his arms. She tried to talk but she could not get out any words, except the doctor's name, before she broke into sobs that shook her slim body.

Pearce led her gradually to the couch and sat down, still holding her and her grief. "Can't you tell me what's happened?" he asked at last.

Sylvia tried to pull herself back from her near hysteria. "It's—Ben—Ben—he—Doctor Pearce. He—he's dead—"

And her tears began again. Eventually they wore themselves out, and she was able to talk about what had happened, brokenly.

"They called me—a few minutes ago—from the police station. They pulled his car from the river below the cliff. Someone reported the guard rail broken, I can't believe it. He's gone around that turn so often. It's a bad spot, but Ben was a careful driver, Doctor Pearce. People thought he was reckless, because he was a test driver. But he left all that on the testing grounds. He knew what cars could do and what they couldn't do, and he respected their limitations—-and his. And now he's gone. And only a couple of weeks ago he was talk—talking about living for hundreds of years—" Her eyes closed with the pain of the thought.

"How did they know to notify you?" Pearce asked.

"His wallet was in the glove compartment."

"Did he usually keep it there?"

"I don't ever remember him putting it there. I don't know. Maybe. It's hard to remember."

"Did they find his body?"

"No. Not yet." She choked and fought back a sob. "They found a shoe they thought was his and a jacket. They're dragging that area, but the current might carry the—the body down—downstream. They said he couldn't—couldn't have survived—the fall."

Pearce patted her shoulder while she sobbed again.

Finally, he said, "I don't want to raise any hopes that might prove false, but there's a chance this was a mistake."

She lifted a tear-stained face. "Do you think it's possible?"

"I don't know. But I have a feeling that Ben's alive, I'll have to make a visit in the morning. Maybe I can find out something, something that will support my suspicions."

The doctor's car came up the driveway without pausing at the guardhouse more than long enough for the gate to be swung back. It pulled to a stop in front of the Braddock mansion with brakes locking the wheels in place and tires skidding.

Pearce went up the stairs to the door, ignoring the guards and the dog that barked at him and pawed at the air on the end of its chain. Pearce pushed at the doorbell until the door came open and brushed past the butler into the foyer and past the stairs to Brad-dock's study.

Braddock was reading a morning newspaper when Pearce burst in upon him. "Man killed in car plunge," he said, reading the headline. "A terrible thing. Terrible. A man with so much to live for—and so much living ahead of him. I read about it this morning. Terrible."

Braddock got up from his desk and walked to the patio door. He looked out.

Pearce watched him, trying to control his mounting anger, shaking with the attempt to control his voice. "It was even more terrible for his fiancee. I was with her early this morning. They're still dragging the river for his body."

"They haven't found him yet?" Braddock asked.

"No," Pearce said, "and they won't. We both know that, don't we?" No longer able to control his rage, Pearce slapped the desk with the palm of his hand. "How dare you—how dare you do a thing like this? I'm telling you here and now you won't get away with it. Even you can't just kidnap a human being with impunity!"

"I'm going to overlook what you're saying because I realize you're upset," Braddock said. "But you'd better try to control yourself. It's not in keeping with your position as a doctor."

"You're beneath contempt," Pearce said. "And not only that, you're a poor actor. Standing there assuming a pose of offended dignity, calm and poised, when not more than a week ago you were shaking at the thought of Ben Richards' death. Do you expect me to believe that you can accept it so calmly now? Never! You've taken him somewhere. I know that. I want him released. Immediately."

"You may not believe it, Doctor Pearce," Braddock said imperturbably, "but I am a philosophic man. I have learned to accept the unavoidable. I urge you to do the same."

Janet Braddock came to the doorway. She was clothed in a bathing suit. A terrycloth robe was worn carelessly over it. She looked at the two men. "Shall I go out again?" she asked.

"Not at all, my dear," Braddock said. It might be a good idea for you to hear this. The good doctor is accusing me of having kidnapped a man."

Janet walked toward a sideboard where some decanters of liquor were standing, in company with some glasses and a bucket of ice. "Anyone I know?" she asked. She poured some brandy into a glass.

"A test driver in one of my plants, of all people," Braddock said.

"You're making a joke out of this—this outrage!" Pearce said.

"A man with magic blood," Braddock said. "Magic blood, no less. One sip of it and you're three years old again."

"Are you going to release Ben Richards?" Pearce asked, taking a step toward Braddock.

"What do you think of such a story, Janet?" Braddock asked. "Do you believe it? Do you think anybody would believe it?"

Janet looked at the two men carefully as if weighing their values and their virtues. Her inspection finished, she walked toward the patio with the glass of brandy in her hand. "I think I'm going to get some sun," she said. She continued on to the patio and stretched herself out beside the pool.

"I'll tell you what I think, Pearce," Braddock said. "I think you've been my physician too long. I'll send you a check. Don't come back."

"This won't end here," Pearce said. "I'll go to the police if I have to."

Braddock smiled. "You do that. And if they don't listen, go to the district attorney. But if you do, Pearce, make sure you take along some concrete evidence. Old Charley Brentwood's a friend of mine—and old Charley's a stickler for concrete evidence." His smile broadened. "And one thing more. I wouldn't tell them my presumed motive, if I were you. You see, if they should believe you and then Richards shows up, you've doomed him, haven't you? Think of a dozen Jordan Braddocks trying to find and control Ben Richards. Add to that a thousand adventurers who know he's worth a hundred fortunes, and a million embittered people who are dying or whose loved ones are dying because Richards won't save them, and a hundred governments, including ours, that would like to study him or use him or whose leaders are dying... Think about it."

Pearce stared at Braddock with a mixture of pity, amazement, and loathing. "God have mercy on you, Braddock!"

One hundred feet below, a different confrontation was taking place: Adrian Locke in the control room of Ben's prison cell, and Ben watching him through the window that separated them. Locke was doing his morning exercises; Ben was watching him. Ben had seen them before, and he was bored. He looked it. The room was littered with newspapers and magazines. A bed, which had emerged from the wall when he needed it, was unmade. Ben himself had a couple of days' growth of beard.

Locke wore sweat pants, a T-shirt, and his perennial hat. He was running in place and he was breathing heavily.

"You're not doing yourself any good just moping around day after day," Locke said. "This is what you ought to be doing—keeping in shape. Keep your body tuned up, your muscles hard, your old heart pumping, and you'll live longer. Right?" He stopped running and began breathing deeply. In a moment he began flexing his chest muscles. "This one's good for the pecs."

Ben crossed to a small table and picked up a pack of cigarettes, shook one out into his fingers, and moved toward the door, standing about five feet from it. Locke looked at Ben and shook his head as if he were an incorrigible child.

"You smoke too much," Locke said. "Smoking is bad for your health. All the doctors say so. Every cigarette you smoke cuts an hour off your lifespan, they say. Smoking's not immoral; its stupid. Right?"

Ben just looked at Locke as if to say, "What else is there to do in here?" or even "What does it matter, since every hour in this place seems like a day?"

Locke picked up a metal gas cylinder and a wooden match from a box. He walked toward the door, noticed how close Ben was to the door, and motioned Ben to step back. Ben moved back a few steps. Locke shook his head. Ben retreated farther.

Locke pressed a button on the panel. The door slid open in its track. Locke stepped to the doorway and tossed the match to Ben, He waited until Ben lit his cigarette and then extinguished the match. He brandished the metal cylinder.

"Suppose you did get past me," Locke said. He jerked his thumb to the elevator behind him. "You still have to get up that elevator, and it only opens from the inside. Give up, Richards. Relax and enjoy it. This is the way it's gonna be. Mr. Braddock says so, and Mr. Braddock can afford to see that it is so. You keep fighting it, and you just make yourself miserable. You give us trouble, and we get mean. Human nature, right?"

The elevator whirred behind him.

"Breakfast time," Locke said, and stepped back and pressed a button on the control panel. The door to Ben's room slid shut.

The elevator doors opened. A dark-haired guard was inside. He was dressed in a suit. He put a key back into his pocket and pushed a small cart into the control room. It had a tray on it. The tray was covered with a napkin.

The guard stepped back into the elevator and pressed a button. The elevator started up as the doors closed.

Locke lifted title napkin and took his breakfast from the tray: a big glass of orange juice, a soft-boiled egg, a slice of whole wheat toast and a glass of milk. With the gas cylinder still in his hand, he pushed the button that opened Ben's door, pushed the cart down the ramp into the room and backed up through the doorway until he could once more punch the button that closed the sliding door. "Eat, Richards!" Locke said. "It's good for you."

Chapter Fourteen

Death is nature's way of starting over.

Without death there would be no change, evolution, progress.

Death clears the stage for the next act.

Death allows another generation to break new lances over old problems.

Without death fortunes would accumulate forever; the palsied hand of the old would never release the young widow, the child grown middle-aged.

Death makes room for life.

Death wipes the slate clean so that life can create something new.

Ben was lying on the rumpled bed, smoking, when the projection screen descended from the ceiling. His eyes followed it down. His beard was heavier and darker now, and he showed signs of his imprisonment. He had a drawn look around the eyes. He moved nervously as he waited for an image to appear on the screen. In a moment he saw Braddoek's face.

"Did you see the evening paper?" Braddock's image asked. "We send them down, you know. We don't want you to get out of touch. Well, no matter. You've been officially declared dead. How's that for a man who expected to live forever? You're dead. That old fool, Pearce, actually went to the authorities. For all the good it did him. Who would believe a ridiculous story like that? Did you know that, Richards? You're not only amazing, you're incredible.

"If it makes you feel any better, within another month you'll be moved. This room is a mess. Well, it wasn't intended for lengthy occupancy—at least, not by a reluctant guest. Pretty soon you'll have plenty of fresh-air and sunlight. You'll like that It will be much more healthful. And in another couple of months you'll be able to spare another pint of that precious blood of yours. I'm going to be very curious to find out whether I'll gain as many years as I did the last time."

Ben sat up and ground his cigarette out in an ash tray. "You'll have a job getting the blood out of me."

"Not at all," Braddock said. "You'll be gently put to sleep. You won't even be aware when it happens. You'll never miss it."

Ben stood up angrily. "Just so you can keep on living!"

"No," Braddock said. "More. Don't underestimate me, Richards. I've given this a lot of thought. For instance, I've started a search for your brother."

"My brother?"

"Oh, yes," Braddock said. "I know all about you. At any rate, assuming he has your physical assets, when I find him I'm going to use him—him and you—to begin a great humanitarian project. I'm going to save the cream of mankind, the best minds, lie finest scientists, the greatest businessmen, statesmen..."

"If they're men of your choice, I'd hate to see it happen," Ben said.

"Why?"

"Because the rest of us would have nothing to live for," Ben said bitterly.

"Now, Richards, you're not showing the true humanitarian spirit. I'm trying to treat you the way intelligence says you should be treated—you're a natural resource, Richards, like oil or uranium, only much more valuable. Because they can be used up, but your gift—this great, natural, accidental gift—can be multiplied. You can breed—prolifically—and every one of your children should inherit your golden blood which will not only keep them alive for a long, long time but a dozen or two others as well. What right have you to monopolize this gift, Richards? It belongs to the human race!"

"Braddock," Ben said, "I swear to you—if I ever get my hands on you—"

"You won't get your hands on me," Braddock said.

Ben came close to losing control of himself. "Somehow, some day, you'll make a mistake, and I'll get out. You hear me? I'll get out of here, and you'll never find me again. You'll try. You'll never give up. But you'll never find me, because I know now what people are like and I'll never trust anyone again—"

But the screen had gone blank. He was talking to a spot as empty as his threat. He sank down in a chair, defeated.

The only way Ben had to measure the passage of time physically was the descent of the elevator three times a day to bring his meals. Newspapers and television were available as clues, but Ben could not be certain they were not delayed. But there was no light and dark, no sunrise and sunset, and Ben had the crazy feeling sometimes that the sun had stopped rising and setting, that everyone was living in. a hole like him because the earth had stopped spinning and everything was flying off the surface into space. And sometimes he wondered if his artificial days were really the way they seemed, if his jailors were mixing things up, switching papers and delaying broadcasts, serving him breakfast in the evening and dinner in the morning, just to confuse him. And then he knew that this was all fantasy his mind invented because it was starved for stimulation. Everything fit: the newspapers, the television shows and newscasts, the meals—why should they go to all the effort to switch things around and keep them consistent?

But he measured time mostly by the coming and going of trays on carts—the elevator descending, the doors opening, a guard pushing a cart into the control room, Locke selecting his meal and pushing the tray into Ben's cell...

Now it was dinner time, he thought, as he heard the elevator descending. He was reading a magazine and scarcely glanced up as he heard the elevator doors opening and the cart pushed out. The doors closed again, and Ben knew the guard had returned to the room far above.

"Ah," Locke said, removing his lunch from the tray, "yogurt, carrot juice, a green salad—that's what I call a meal fit for a king—who cares about his health. Right? If you cared about your health, you'd eat more sensibly. Everybody would. Right?"

Ben turned another page in his magazine. He wasn't interested in it, but it was better than paying attention to Locke. That only irritated him, and too many things irritated him.

He heard the door slide open and the rumble of the cart as Locke pushed it down the ramp. "Got your favorite tonight—pea soup," Locke said.

Ben didn't answer. He heard Locke's footsteps retreating. The door slid shut

Ben cast his magazine aside. Not much interested in food, he got up, walked to the cart, and looked at the food on the tray. He shrugged and picked up the plate of soup and put it on the table. He sat down and began to eat.

Suddenly he stopped as his spoon touched something foreign within the soup. He glanced quickly at Locke. The big man was reading a newspaper and spooning yogurt into his mouth.

With his spoon, Ben nudged out onto the rim of the soup plate a small slip of paper wrapped in plastic and weighted with a small metal washer. Ben cast another glance at Locke. He had not changed positions. Ben turned over the slip of paper. The paper had four words printed on it: "CART: UNDER MIDDLE SHELF."

Again Ben looked in Locke's direction and away. Locke still was preoccupied with his newspaper.

Ben slid his hand under the cart's middle shelf and explored it. Almost immediately he felt a metallic object, rather large, and about the shape of a revolver. It had a butt and a cylinder and a muzzle. It was a revolver. It was crossed by something clothlike and a little sticky. Of course—adhesive tape to hold it onto the shelf. Ben started to pull the revolver free.

Locke slapped the back of his hand against the newspaper he was holding, making a loud cracking sound. "What a crime!" he exclaimed.

Ben jumped and pulled his hand back.

Locke tapped the open newspaper. He looked at Ben. "Says here the American people spend six billion a year on drugs. You know why? Because they don't eat right—like you. 'You are what you eat.' That's an old saying, but it's as true as ever."

Locke went back to reading his newspaper. Ben snaked his hand under the cart again. He worked the gun free and brought it back into his lap, covered by his hand. He pushed it into his waist band behind his back. Then, as if finished with his meal, he pushed the soup dish away and then placed it noisily on the cart.

Locke looked up. "Finished?"

Ben nodded, picked up his cigarettes, shook one out, and waited.

Locke saw him, shook his head, and got up, holding his yogurt in one hand. He picked up a match and pressed the button for the sliding door. When it was open, he walked into the doorway and tossed the match to Ben.

Ben whipped the revolver out of his waistband, his finger finding the trigger as it targeted Locke.

Locke saw the gun and understood its implications. His eyes glanced right and left as he estimated his chances of leaping behind the safety of the door or into the control room.

"Don't try it," Ben said. "Not unless you want a bellyful of yogurt splattered all over the walls."

Locke didn't move.

"Into the room," Ben said.

As Locke moved forward, Ben moved cautiously to the side until their positions had been reversed. Now Ben was in the doorway.

"Take off your hat and toss it over here," Ben said. "Then take off your clothes."

Ben watched, his finger on the trigger, as the big man complied.

"Now lie face down on the bed with your hands behind you," Ben said.

Once more Locke estimated the distance between them and the tension of Ben's trigger finger. He lay down on the bed and put his hands behind him. "Don't be a fool," Locke said mildly. "You can't get out of here."

When the elevator returned for the empty dinner dishes a few minutes later, the scene in the one-time bomb shelter looked normal. The door to the prison room was shut. In the control room Locke was sitting in his chair reading his newspaper, his feet up on his table, his back to the elevator, his hat on the back of his head.

The elevator stopped. The doors opened. The guard stepped into the room, and the man with Locke's hat on the back of his head swiveled around to face him. It was Ben. He had a revolver in his hand. The revolver was pointed at the guard's belly.

The guard's hands shot up.

Ben motioned for the key to the elevator. It was still in the guard's hand. He tossed it but Ben did not make the mistake of reaching for it. He let it ring on the floor and moved forward to press the button that opened the door to the room in which he had been imprisoned. The door slid open. Ben motioned the guard toward the room and when he was in the doorway pushed him down the ramp. Locke was face down in the bed, tied with Ben's shirt and gagged with the pillow.

Ben pushed the button that controlled the door. It slid shut. Ben picked up the elevator key, pushed the dinner cart into the elevator, studied the control for a moment, and then pressed a button. The doors slid shut and the elevator started up.

When the doors opened again, Ben had a quick glimpse of the room he had seen through tear-blinded eyes days earlier. The two men who had fought with him outside the room were sitting at a table, playing cards. One of them had his jacket draped over an empty chair. A shoulder holster and a gun were slung on top of it. He was dropping a card face down on the table when the elevator doors opened,

"I'm gonna knock with four," he said. "From that look on your puss, you must be loaded."

He watched his partner, grimacing, begin to lay out his cards, and glanced toward the elevator.

"Hey!" he shouted. "That's not—!"

He made a dive for his gun. He was too late. Ben gave the food cart a shove. It sped across the floor like a miniature battering ram. Chairs, table, cards, and metal food covers flew through the air. The shoulder holster and gun landed on the floor. The guard spotted it, went for it again. Ben's trigger finger reacted. Two warning shots screamed off the floor into the wall.

The guards froze on their knees and silently, carefully, raised their hands. Ben motioned them to get to their feet. He shoved a chair at them.

"Empty your pockets!" he ordered.

Moving cautiously, the men put their change and wallets on the chair. Ben scooped up the change and put it into one pocket, shoved the wallets into another.

"Come on, buddy," one of the guards said, "we just got paid."

Ben waved his revolver at the elevator. "Complaint department's downstairs. Get in."

The two men got into the elevator. Ben reached in the elevator and pushed the button. The door closed. The elevator began to whir as it descended.

Ben turned quickly and started up the stairway. The outside door opened easily. The clearing and the grove were deserted. There were no guards—and no cars, either.

Ben eased himself out and let the door close gently behind him. He moved quickly into the trees. After a few yards they thinned out. Beyond was a rolling lawn broken here and there by trees and flower beds.

Ben couldn't see any guards, and he knew he didn't have the time to check their patterns of movement. He walked briskly across the lawn, expecting momentarily a hail from either side or a commotion to occur behind him.

Only the calls of birds broke the silence. Ben took a deep breath of free air, spiced with the scent of mown grass and dirt, as the brick wall came into sight.

A squirrel chattered in a tree.

Ben held himself back, trying to look like a guard in Locke's clothing, trying not to break into a run. On his right was a clump of shrubs. There were no trees; the groundskeepers knew better than to leave a tree near the wall. But the bushes would give a little concealment.

Ben edged into them, trying not to look conspicuous. In a moment he was almost out of sight. He breathed again, realizing that he had been holding his breath, and relaxed his tight muscles.

Then he made a leap for the top of the wall. The sharp pain in his hands reminded him of the broken glass, but he ignored it. He pulled himself up and went over the other side. He landed heavily and rolled down a slope into some bushes.

After a moment he got to his knees and then to his feet. Nothing seemed to be broken. He looked at his hands. They were cut badly. Blood was welling out of numerous slices in the palms and fingers, some of them deep, but none of them were spurting. He looked around for something to wipe them with, but there was nothing.

Gingerly, so as not to get blood on his clothing, he pulled up his shirt and tore strips from his undershirt.

By the time he had finished binding his hands the bleeding had almost stopped.

He felt a moment of gratitude for his efficient blood system. But it was only a moment. Then he started trotting away from the wall.

Ten minutes had passed since he had ascended in the elevator. He could expect not much more than that before the prisoners he had left behind would break out or attract the attention of someone outside.

But if he remembered correctly, over this hill was a well-traveled thoroughfare. On that highway he had seen several buses as he had driven toward Braddock's mansion. Or perhaps he could catch a taxi. Or if not a taxi he could hail down a passing motorist, if one would stop.

He paused briefly at the bottom of the hill to remove the bandages and wash his hands briefly in a stream. The bleeding had stopped completely. The cuts were closing. That would not be a problem.

It was a bus he caught. He changed from that to a taxi and then to another.

Still there was no alarm. The bomb shelter had been well built and its conversion into a prison had been well planned.

Chapter Fifteen

The crowded, modern world is a concrete jungle for fugitives. It is filled with forgotten men, and a man on the run can blend among them. It has dirty brick shelters, and a man can hide himself in them. Among the world's millions, a man can lose himself beyond discovery.

But what if a man must eat or pay for lodging? What if he must cash a check or take a job? He must have identification, and the computers begin their work.

And what if he has ties with the past that he cannot break. Along such fragile lines he can be traced.

To the computer every man is an individual.

The telephone in Braddock's study buzzed incessantly, and the button on his panel board lighted and blinked. Braddock put down his cup of coffee and pushed the button as he lifted the telephone to his ear.

"What's that?" he said, incredulous. "That's impossible! When?... You've got to get him back, and he must not be harmed. Do you understand? If he meets with any harm... How did it happen?... How did he get it?... What do you mean, you don't know?... If that man escapes—get him back, that's all!"

Braddock calmed himself. He glanced out the patio door. Janet was stretched out in the late afternoon sun.

"All right, it's happened," Braddock said. "We go on from here... Have you sounded the alarm?... Good... It's probably too late, but it's something... Alert the agency promptly! It's a good thing we had it set up. Have them cover every means of transportation out of town! Buses, airplanes, highways—yes, trains, too. Freight yards. Everything... Put a constant watch on Pearce and the girl... And his apartment, the hospital, the automotive works... I don't care what it costs... Money is meaningless, do you understand?... So are laws... I want wires tapped, rooms bugged, mail intercepted... Lease time on a computer and set up a team of technicians to feed data to it... No, better—get our own computer. Set it up—"

On the patio the barest hint of a smile turned up Janet's lips and was gone almost as quickly as it came.

Pearce picked at his food.

"No appetite?" Sylvia asked.

Pearce put down his fork. "It's not your cooking, Sylvia. The food is delicious. Under any other circumstances—but I can't stop thinking about what I've done—to Ben and to you."

Sylvia put down her fork and leaned toward the doctor. "It wasn't your fault. You told him. You tried to warn him."

"Oh, I tried to dissaude him from going along with it, from revealing himself to Braddock," Pearce said with mingled remorse and anger. "But did I try hard enough? I have the feeling that if the truth were known, perhaps secretly I wanted to see a research foundation set up. Was I glad he wouldn't let me talk him out of it? I think I was. I wanted—"

The telephone rang. Sylvia went to it, picked it up. "Hello?" she said.

At the other end of the line Ben was in a telephone booth in an airport terminal. Outside it was night, and the great winged jets came drifting down from the skies to land with a roar of reversed jets, or screamed off into the darkness.

"Sylvia," Ben said, his eyes searching the faces that passed his booth, watching the shadows, "I don't have long, so I've got to make this fast."

"Ben," Sylvia said. "Oh, Ben!"

Pearce started. Sylvia nodded at Pearce; she could barely contain her joy. "Yes, it's him. It's Ben."

She continued into the telephone. "Doctor Pearce is here. He kept saying you were alive, that I shouldn't give up hope, and I wanted so much to believe—oh, Ben, where are you?"

"At the airport," Ben said. "My plane leaves in a few minutes. I wanted you to know I'm all right, but I've got to get away—get away and stay away until Braddock is dead."

"Braddock?"

"He had me a prisoner in a bomb shelter underneath his house ever since I disappeared. Doctor Pearce will tell you why. He tried to tell me, but I wouldn't listen. Tell him it was true, all of it, and I can't stop hiding until Braddock is dead, because he won't give up while he's alive."

"I understand. He told me some of it. Where are you going?"

"Los Angeles. I wouldn't tell you that except that I expect Braddock's men to trace me there; if they should pick you up—tell them. Tell them anything. Everything. I don't want you hurt because of me."

"Let me come with you, Ben," Sylvia pleaded. "I can take the next plane out, meet you there."

"No," Ben said firmly. "If I had any real sense I'd tell you to forget about me. It isn't just me, dear, it's you. Anything that touches me is going to get hurt. I know that now."

"I love you, Ben," Sylvia said. "I've been worried so much I didn't think I could stand it. If you won't let me come with you, promise me you'll let me know where you are. Maybe in a few months I can follow you and we can be together."

"I'll write you care of General Delivery," Ben said. "But don't you pick it up. Perhaps Doctor Pearce has a trusted nurse or receptionist who would do it for you."

"Be careful, Ben. Please—"

Ben nodded as if she could see him. His eyes never stopped their restless search of the people outside. "I will. Good-bye, Sylvia..."

Slowly he hung up the telephone and then moved rapidly out of the booth and down the long terminal building, up a staircase to the second floor, down a quiet corridor with airline offices on either side, and a staircase to the main terminal floor again.

He moved through the gate to the door that opened into the night, just as the public-address system gave the last call for the Los Angeles flight. He was the last person up the movable stairs before the door was closed.

Ben sank back into his seat and sighed. The jet liner taxied toward the runway. He was relatively safe—for the moment. But for several hours he was immobilized. He could not dodge or hide. In a few hours Braddock could have men watching the arrival of every airplane at every terminal for which there had been a departing flight since his escape.

But there were buses, he thought, and trains and cars...

Surely Braddock would have expected me to take an automobile. He would predict I would do that, wouldn't he? Ben thought.

But he didn't know. Surely somewhere Braddock's resources must limit what he can do, Ben thought. Los Angeles is a big city. If I can make it there without being spotted, I should be able to hide for years. Long enough, anyway, for Braddock's rejuvenation to run its course.

When he got to Los Angeles, be joined the first clot of people who moved through the airplane door, but instead of proceeding down the extensible corridor he went through a doorway used by service personnel and down an open staircase to the concrete ramp and into a doorway in the terminal.

Eventually he found his way through service corridors out into the Los Angeles night. He bought a ticket for a terminal bus, waited in the shadows for it to arrive, and was the last one to get aboard. He got off at the first stop and took a bus to downtown Los Angeles. He walked the streets for several hours before he found what he was looking for.

The apartment house was only a little better than a tenement. A sign in a ground-floor window said, "Furnished room. Inquire within."

The manager was a beardy man in an undershirt.

"I want the furnished room," Ben said.

"Wanna see it?" the manager asked.

Ben shook his head. "I need a room, not a view."

The manager looked him over. "That'll be fifty a month—" he said, "—in advance."

Reluctantly Ben pulled his hands out of his pockets. He recalled the stewardess on the plane asking, "What's happened to your hands? Is there anything I can do?"

But he need not have worried. His hands were virtually healed and in the dim hallway nothing showed.

"Here's the first month," he said.

The manager gave him a key. "Second floor, top of the stairs."

Chapter Sixteen

What Is a life whose only aim is to avoid discovery?

It is a life of quick suspicions and endless distrusts, of seclusion broken only by forays into the open to take care of necessities...

It is a life whose only reality is the past.

Ben spent much of his time writing letters and reading them. All the letters were to the same person and all the answers were from her. He seemed to live by words handwritten on paper; nothing was real until he had set it down, and when he had mailed the letter it was as if he had sent off a piece of himself and he found himself hoping that she would like it. And her replies he read and reread until they became ragged and some of the words were rubbed off.

And the words came and went.

"I'm beginning to understand," Ben wrote, "what it's like to be alone, completely alone. I try as much as possible to go out only at night, and then I stay away from places where I might be spotted. Braddock will never give up. The only thing that keeps me going is knowing that sooner or later he's going to die. Then maybe you and I can start another life together somewhere."

And Sylvia wrote: "It seems you've been gone years instead of months, Ben. Like you, I'm alone most of the time. Dr. Pearce comes by occasionally but I think it's just to keep me company. He's a beaten man, Ben—he still feels everything that happened was his fault. Please, darling, I want to see you so badly. Won't you let me, if only for a day, a few hours? I'll be very careful. I don't even keep your letters. I read them four or five times—enough to memorize them—and then I burn them."

"Maybe we could talk on the telephone," Ben wrote. "The number you will call will be the number of pages in each letter you receive after this one. The last letter will give you the time at night when you are to make the call. Try to shake off anybody following you. Use a pay telephone. If the line is busy or I don't answer, call the next night at the same hour. Don't write anything down. Memorize it."

And the days passed, and the letters came and returned. And Ben would send an envelope to General Delivery and watch from a hidden corner as it was delivered and the postal clerk would take the mail and put it into the envelope and toss it into the sorting bin. Then Ben would watch the next delivery spot until he was sure no one was lurking nearby before he claimed the envelope.

Ben lurked near a pay telephone booth on a dark street corner. He watched the street both ways and the booth. He looked at his watch. The telephone rang. He jumped. He had planned it all and yet it surprised him when it happened.

He leaped to the booth and lifted the receiver.

"Ben?" came the distant, remembered voice from the past.

"Sylvia?"

"If you hear someone start to cry, it's me," Sylvia said. "Ben, I've missed you so..."

"I've missed you, too," Ben said huskily. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. Everything is fine, except that you're not here."

"Braddock hasn't bothered you?"

"I don't think he knows I'm alive," Sylvia said. "I felt kind of foolish, going all over town, dodging in and out of stores, sneaking up on this telephone like I was intending to strangle it. And nobody's around."

"Braddock knows. They're around."

"Are you sure?" Sylvia asked. '1 keep looking to see if someone is following me. I've even gone over the apartment, searching for listening devices, but there's nothing."

"Even a cradled telephone can be a bug," Ben said. "He wouldn't overlook you, Sylvia. He wouldn't overlook anything."

"But wouldn't I have seen someone by this time?" Sylvia asked.

"Not if they didn't want you to," Ben said, looking up and down the dark street. "Braddock could afford to change a man every block, every half hour."

"Ben," Sylvia asked, "how long will we go on like this?"

"As long as we have to," Ben said grimly.

"I've got to see you."

"Sylvia," Ben said, "don't you think I want to see you? My God, it's like an ache. But we can't take the chance. We're not taking risks with a few months or years; we're gambling with forever."

"If we were careful," Sylvia insisted, "if I made sure that no one followed me..."

"Let me think about it," Ben said.

"Please, Ben," Sylvia said.

"We'll wait another couple of months," Ben said firmly. "If they are watching—and they must be—maybe they'll be convinced by then that we're not in touch with each other, that we've done the sensible thing..."

The months passed like an injured cat dragging itself home to die. The letters continued with only the most oblique references to the plan, but their content became suffused with a kind of maddened impatience for the days to pass.

Occasionally Ben wondered about Braddock and his impatience. He read everything about the industrialist and his wealth and his miraculous recovery to health and his current seclusion. How desperate he must be growing, Ben thought, as the months pass and he grows older and there is no sign of Ben and his second rescue from the gates of death.

And yet, Ben thought, he does not panic. He does not cast away all discretion, spread Ben's story across the newspapers and the magazines and the television stations so that his network of agents would be multiplied by millions of volunteers.

He is patient, Ben thought, frighteningly patient, or he has given up, or he is already dead and they are covering up for financial reasons.

Two out of three isn't bad odds, he thought, and he included in his next letter the word "now."

Sylvia made a telephone call from a pay station near her apartment. A few hours later she looked down at the dining-room table where she had placed her purse and a dozen objects. Into the purse she stuffed a toothbrush, a hairbrush, and a bottle of perfume, and suddenly the purse was bulging. She looked longingly at the other articles—the gown, the slippers, the undergarments—and thought of what Ben had said:

"... But you'll have to be very careful. Under no circumstances should you give any indication you're going on a trip. Don't take anything, not even an overnight case. When you leave the house it should look as though you're simply going out as usual..."

Sylvia sighed and stuffed in a few small cosmetics and forced the clasp shut. She looked at it. It was not the loveliest purse in the world, but surely it would not arouse suspicions.

At the door she turned and looked one last time at the apartment. "Good-bye," she thought. "You've given me a good place to live. Here is where I fell in love with a wonderful man. Here is where I suffered through the agony of his death and felt the wonder of his resurrection. When will I see you again—and how will I feel then?"

And then she went through the doorway and shut the door behind her and thought about the future that awaited her in Los Angeles.

At the corner she caught a bus going downtown, bought a ticket to a movie and went in and then went out the side door, walked two blocks and hailed a taxicab. "Just drive around," she said.

"What, lady?" the driver asked, turning his weathered face to the rear.

"Just drive around," she repeated, flushing.

"Which direction shall I drive around?" he asked, wearily, twitching his mustache.

"East," she said.

"Make a plane reservation in advance, under another name," Ben had said, "but be careful going to the airport. Be sure that the cab you take is there by chance, not one that may have been planted, and have the cab drive around for a while so you can make sure you're not being followed."

Eventually Sylvia directed the cab to the airport, tipped the cab driver excessively, and walked into the terminal toward the ticket counter.

"Don't make any unusual withdrawals from your bank account," Ben's instructions had gone, "but save a little out of each paycheck and put it away in cash somewhere. Accumulate as much as you can—cash a small check here, pay for groceries with a check a little larger than necessary, and let it grow. Cash is the only thing that can't be traced."

"Oh, Ben," she had said, "are you sure all this is necessary?"

"Yes," he had said, "and if it isn't, why it hasn't hurt anything, has it?"

But she remembered the way the cab driver had looked at her and now the ticket clerk at the booth raised her eyebrows as Sylvia paid for her ticket in cash. But she took it and counted it, tapped it into a smooth sheaf of bills, and put it away in a drawer. "Here you are," she said, handing Sylvia a slick envelope with a thin sheaf of papers stapled inside. "Gate nine."

Sylvia did not go to the gate until the next to the last call for the flight was announced over the public address system. She sat until then sipping a cup of coffee in the restaurant, and then she made her way quickly to the gate, showed her ticket to the man in uniform, and, waved through, went out the doorway and across the concrete apron to the waiting airplane, her heart fluttering with every step, her breath coming more rapidly.

She did not notice a man sitting in a chair near gate nine. He was middle-aged and nondescript. He was reading a book. He was unnoticeable. But he looked up toward the gate as Sylvia passed and when she had ascended the stairway and the door had been closed without her leaving the airplane, and the jet had taken off into the afternoon sky, the man got up, crossed to a wall phone, dropped in a dime, and dialed, unhurriedly, methodically.

The trip was uneventful except for the way her pulse sped up when she thought about Ben and how each moment was racing them toward each other. But she tried not to think about it, tried to concentrate on the magazine the stewardess had given her. She found herself rereading paragraphs for the fifth or sixth time, not remembering anything it said, and finally gave up and looked out the window beside her, watching the land move by beneath the airplane like a giant relief map being pulled away.

Finally there was the bustle and confusion of the Los Angeles International Airport, the airport limousine service, the cab, and the moment when she stood outside the weather-beaten brick and peeling paint of the street and thought—oh, Ben!—and forgot the condition of the building and walked rapidly up the stairs to the second floor, looked at a numbered door, and stopped in front of it, her hand raised to knock.

But something made her stop and turn. A man was standing in the darkness of the hallway, looking at her. And then she saw that it was Ben, Ben changed a little, his eyes a little furtive, his expression a little gaunt, but Ben, her Ben, looking at her like a starving man looks at food. And he moved toward her, and took her in his arms, covered her lips with his, and she felt as if she were melting into him until they were one person...

Chapter Seventeen

"Help!" signals the stalled motorist on the freeway.

"Help!" says the upraised arms of the hold-up victim, the prostrate form of the stricken.

"Help!" says Kitty Genovese.

"Don't get involved!" says folk wisdom. "The world is made up of strangers. Who knows which is in the right, which in the wrong? Who knows whether you will be slugged, shot, sued, pursued, persecuted, terrorized? Why take the risk for a stranger?"

Why get involved? Even if it's a man who has the power to work miracles. Even if it's a man climbing a hill shaped like a skull of death.

The room was cheap and old, and the furniture was cheaper—an iron bed, a bureau, a battered wooden wardrobe, a mirror, a couple of chairs. But it was clean. The only object on the floor was a child's sand pail; it was filled with water now, and in the water was floating an empty champagne bottle. On the wall was a sign that said: "Welcome to Richards' Rendezvous."

Ben watched Sylvia brushing her hair, and the sight filled him with a great contentment and a great joy that seemed as if they were too big for his body to contain. Moved by them, by the womanliness and familiarity of this ordinary act, he went to her and kissed her again. Her hand caught in the act of brush-ing, she held the brush half-raised to her head and then allowed it to sink to her side.

At last Ben drew back a little. "I couldn't help it," he said.

Sylvia sighed. "I'm glad. Now if you could only cook—"

"You really want to go and get something to eat?" Ben asked.

He reached out and clicked off the wall switch beside the door. The room went dark. Sylvia eased herself out of his arms, went to the window, and put up the blind. The room was flooded with light.

"Eating was your idea," she said.

Ben moved toward her. "I changed my mind."

Sylvia avoided his grasp. "I'm hungry now."

Ben moved toward her again. "So am I."

"I mean food hungry," she said. She kissed him lightly, then longer. "I just lost my appetite for food," she said dreamily. "You really want to go out and eat?"

"That's what I asked you," Ben said.

"What did I say?" Sylvia asked.

"You were hungry."

"I lied," Sylvia said.

They looked at each otter. They were warm, happy, secure looks of two people in love, happy to be in love, sure of each other, sure they would be there for each other, forever...

"Well go out and eat," Ben said.

"But we shall hurry back," Sylvia added.

She turned to the mirror and put the final touches to her hair and makeup while Ben got his jacket out of the wardrobe and put it on. Then he watched her, pleased simply to look at her as if he needed no other satisfactions in life than this moment provided.

Sylvia frowned at her reflection. "I look terrible," she said.

"You look beautiful," Ben said.

She laughed. It was a womanly laugh, confident and warm. "I was hoping you'd say that."

She slid her arms into the coat that Ben was holding for her. He made a motion to grab her again and she scurried away from him toward the door.

In the hall, as Ben locked the door behind them, Sylvia looked over the stairway railing and turned back toward Ben, laughing. "I used to slide down railings when I was a kid."

Ben joined her. "I still do," he said, and he leaned over the railing to show her how he got quickly to the first floor. But he froze there, looking down and then looked quickly at Sylvia.

She looked over the railing.

Three men were coming up the stairs.

"Ben," she said, "are they—?"

"Come on," Ben said.

He took her arm and hurried her to the end of the landing and up the next flight of stairs to the third floor. He caught the handle of the first door he came to and tried to open it. The door was locked. He knocked. Again.

"Who's there?" a man asked from inside.

"A neighbor," Ben said. "I live downstairs. I need help. Let me in—please."

"I don't know you, mister," the man's voice said from behind the blank door. "I can't."

"I need help badly," Ben said. "I'm with a woman. There are some men after us."

"Mister, I got a wife and kid here," the voice said from inside. "I can't take a chance."

"Will you at least call the police?"

Ben heard the man say, "Call the police, honey."

"Ben," Sylvia said, "they're almost here!"

Ben looked over the railing, then grabbed Sylvia's hand and pulled her toward the next flight of stairs. At the top of it was a door. Ben tugged at it, but it was locked. He looked at it, twisted the knob of the lock, opened the door.

He came out through the doorway onto the roof of the building and helped Sylvia out after him. The roof was broad and littered with rubbish and cluttered with all kinds of objects: ventilators, chimneys, vent pipes, television antennas, an outdoor advertising sign, a pigeon coop.

Ben slammed the door shut behind them. He looked around the roof. Among the litter he spied a weather-beaten length of two-by-four. He started to pick it up, but the door started to open behind him. He threw himself against the door, and it slammed shut under his weight. He braced himself against the door and motioned to Sylvia to hand him the two-by-four.

She brought it to him. With the help of one hand of Ben's, she lodged it beneath the door knob. When it was secure Ben moved back. He turned to one of two kiosks which housed stairways leading down to something, perhaps to the street. He tried the door to the first of them. It was locked. He dashed to the second. The door to that one was locked also. He wrestled frantically with the knob, but the door would not yield.

The door through which they had emerged onto the roof was giving way as the men inside threw themselves against the door. Under the repeated jarrings, the two-by-four was slowly being dislodged.

Ben looked around desperately. There seemed to be no way off the roof. At least, not on this side. He took Sylvia's hand again and raced past the pigeon coop to the distant end of the roof.

He looked over the edge. There was nothing below but unbroken brick to the sidewalk and street. Ben left Sylvia and ran along the roof edge to the other side. There was no way down.

Ben looked at Sylvia. They were trapped. They both knew it "Maybe I can hold that door until the police—"

He didn't finish. As he started to move back toward the door, he saw that Adrian Locke was standing on the roof. Two other men were with him. They were looking at Ben.

"What do you say?" Locke yelled. "Come quiet?"

Locke waited for Ben's answer. When none came, he motioned his men forward. As they advanced warily from each side, Locke lagged behind, covering the center.

Ben and Sylvia retreated toward the edge of the roof. As they reached the edge, Ben turned around and looked down. The street looked far away. The view was dizzying.

Ben hesitated and then raised himself onto the ledge that surrounded the roof and balanced himself precariously upon it.

Locke's two men were close now, but they froze as they watched him. A little farther away by the pigeon coop, Locke stopped, uncertainly.

They stood there like a tableau, the only thing moving a light breeze which blew past them toward the street.

From the distance came the sound of a police siren getting closer.

Ben tensed himself. "You know why Braddock wants me, don't you, Locke?" He paused and judged from Locke's expression that the big man knew. "Then come and get me—and take the chance that I go over." He paused again to let the implications become clear. "And if I go over, you've had it with Braddoek. He'll never forget or forgive... Think about that, and make your move."

The wail of the siren grew closer.

One of Locke's men looked at Locke nervously. "We gotta get outa here. We broke enough laws already to get us sent up for twenty. And we ain't important enough for Braddock to worry about."

The siren was very close now. A muscle near Locke's eye twitched. His face firmed. He reached into his jacket and took a revolver out of a holster. He held it out at arm's length and aimed the gun at Sylvia.

"We go out of here together," Locke said to Ben, "or she gets it." He paused and glanced quickly at Ben and back again to Sylvia. "Make your move!"

The siren was very close now. Locke's hand shook.

"He's bluffing, Ben," Sylvia said.

Ben looked hard at Locke. Locke licked his lips. Ben started to get down from the ledge.

"No!" Sylvia said. "Don't give yourself up to these vultures!" And she turned to Locke. "The police will be here any moment... Go ahead and shoot!"

The siren was almost in the street below.

"We gotta get outa here," Locke's man repeated frantically.

Sylvia turned her back on Locke and moved away before Ben could stop her.

"Lady... !" Locke said, warning her, his hand shaken by a tremor. He chewed his lower lip.

"Sylvia!" Ben shouted. "Wait... !"

He saw it coming from the expression on Locke's face and lunged toward Sylvia. It was too late. The gun exploded, jerking in Locke's hand. The pigeons in the coop fluttered and flapped hysterically.

Sylvia spun slowly, shocked and suddenly intent upon the process beginning within her body which so short a time ago had been filled with love and life and now was sensing the approaching dissolution of death. Slowly she crumpled. Ben caught her before she reached the roof.

The siren descended the scale to a stop in the street outside. Locke looked at Ben and Sylvia and toward the door and then shook his head and turned and ran toward the stairs.

"Sylvia," Ben said, as if it were a word that summed up a world and all its implications, a world that was coming apart. "Sylvia..."

She opened her eyes. Her pupils were large, her eyes were stunned. She tried to talk but nothing came out.

Chapter Eighteen

Life is a condition few creatures surrender willingly.

The rat will fight when cornered.

The fox will run until exhaustion or the dogs overtake him.

The spy will sell his country and his comrades for a few hours more.

The old man will suffer untold indignities.

The waiting heart patient will secretly ask heaven why some young person with a healthy heart of the right kind does not have a fatal accident soon...

The police rushed them to the hospital in their waiting car, siren wailing, lights spinning overhead, down busy streets, across freeways. Ben held Sylvia's hand, watched her face, felt her pulse weaken, saw her eyelids darken...

"Please," he thought. "Please hurry. Please be in time. Please stay alive. Please live. Please..."

One of the officers was on the two-way radio, informing the dispatcher what had happened, telling him to have the emergency room ready at the hospital...

At last they were at the emergency doors, and everything was confusion. Ben trailed behind, suddenly out of everything, unable to find out what was happening, unable to help. Doors were shut in his face. People in uniform told him to sit down somewhere, that there was nothing to do but wait.

He waited. A detective came, hat on the back of his head, a skeptical look on his face, sharp questions on his lips. He looked down at a pad in his hands.

"You say you never saw any of these men before?" he said.

Ben shook his head.

"What were they after?" the detective asked. "What did they want?"

"I don't know," Ben said.

"In case you don't know it, buddy," the detective said, "there's a girl dying in there!"

The detective studied Ben. Ben had not responded to that approach either. He was completely despondent, beaten down.

Abruptly the detective changed his approach, "I'd like to help you," he said in a gentler voice. "I really mean that. But I can't if you won't tell me the truth."

Ben looked at him and was about to reply when the door opened on the other side of the corridor. Through the open door Ben could see Sylvia lying motionless in a hospital bed, a nurse close beside her. Ben came to his feet to go to her, but a doctor was coming out of the door and Ben stopped to wait for him with an expression of mingled apprehension and hope.

"There's a girl dying in there," the detective had said.

"You're the young man who was with her?" the doctor asked.

Ben nodded.

"We've done all we can," the doctor said. "The bullet went completely through, and we've patched her up as best we could. We've stopped the external bleeding, but I'll be frank with you. I don't think she's going to make it."

There's a girl dying in there.

Not just any girl. Ben Richards' girl. The girl who was going to live for two thousand years. Ben could not say anything. The thought of Sylvia dying was something his mind rejected. It couldn't happen.

There's a girl dying in there.

"We keep giving her blood and she keeps losing it," the doctor continued. He was a tall, middle-aged, balding man with a tired face. "She's bleeding internally, and there's no way we can get it stopped. She's gone into shock . , ."

They were looking at him sympathetically, Ben knew, the doctor and the detective, but he couldn't bring himself to do anything. He didn't want their sympathy. He rejected their sympathy. The only thing he wanted was for Sylvia to live, to hold Sylvia in his arms once more and shelter her from all the violence of the world.

"Give her my blood," he said.

The doctor looked at him.

"What are you staring at?" Ben asked. "I said give her my blood."

"I'm sorry," the doctor said. He looked around the hall as if he couldn't believe he was holding this conversation in this familiar hospital. "It's just that when your fiancee was conscious a while ago she said some very strange things... She pleaded for a transfusion of your blood. She seemed to feel that it had some remarkable healing power. Naturally I assumed she was delirious. And now you suggest I give her a transfusion of your blood..."

"We're wasting time," Ben said. "How long will it take?"

"We'd have to run some match tests," the doctor said, "then compatibility tests . , ."

"How long?"

"At least an hour. But look—"

"Let's get started," Ben said.

The whole affair had come full circle. Ben was stretched out flat on the padded hospital table, his bare left arm muscular and brown on the table beside him. The wide, flat band of a sphygmomanometer was tight around his bicep, and the inside of his elbow, where the veins were blue traceries, had been washed with soap and water, swabbed with alcohol, stained brown with iodine.

His eyes followed the quick efficiency of the technician. Her movements were as crisp as the white uniform.

She opened the left-hand door of the big old refrigerator and took a brown bottle from the second shelf. There was a handle at the bottom, fastened to the bottle by a metal band; it was raised now. Swishing below it was an inch of sodium nitrate. The rest was vacuum.

The technician broke the tab, stripped off the metal cap, exposing the rubber gasket. From a cardboard box beneath the table she pulled a few feet of plastic tubing. At each end it had a needle. One went into Ben's procaine-deadened vein. The other was thrust through the gasket into the bottle.

Dark red blood raced through the tube, spurted into the blood; the sodium citrate swirled pinkly. A moment later it was the color of grape juice, frothing at the top.

"Keep making a fist," the technician said, turning the bottle.

When the bottle was full, she closed a clamp on the tube and pulled the needle from the bottle. She placed a square of gauze and a strip of tape over the needle puncture in Ben's arm. She drained the blood that remained in the tubing into two test tubes and slipped them into pockets in a tiny cloth apron that she hung over the neck of the bottle.

The tubing and needles were tossed away. She pressed a strip of tape over the top of the bottle.

At the workbench by the window, the technician dabbed three blood samples onto two glass slides divided into sections marked A and B. She slipped the slides onto a light box with a translucent glass top; to one sample she added a drop of clear serum from a green bottle marked "Anti-A" in a commercial rack. "Anti-B" came from a brown bottle; "Anti-Rho" from a clear one.

She rocked the box back and forth on its pivots, Ben sat up, watching her. He would have told her to hurry, but he could see that she was working swiftly and expertly and an interruption would only slow her down.

Sixty seconds later the red cells of the samples marked A and B were still evenly suspended. In the third sample, the cells had clumped together visibly.

"You're O Neg all right," the technician said. "I guess they want this up in the emergency ward right away."

"Yes," Ben said. His voice was hoarse; it broke a little. "Yes," he said again.

The technician looked at him. "She's your fiancee, isn't she?"

"Yes," Ben said.

"Come on, then," she said.

They went up through the busy hospital, through its cushioned corridors filled with hope and fear and the shadow of death and the smell of alcohol and ether and sickness.

In her hand the technician carried the pint of whole blood—new life in a bottle. Within a few days the white cells would begin to die, the blood would decline in ability to clot. With the aid of refrigeration and the citrate solution, the red cells would last—some of them—for three weeks. After that the blood would be sent to the separator for the plasma, or sold to a commercial company for separation of some of the plasma's more than seventy proteins, the serum albumin, the gamma globulins...

But not this. It had an immediate use, the body of a slim girl who had a bullet hole in her body, who was going to die.

Sylvia lay on the hospital bed, her body scarcely denting the hard hospital mattress. Perspiration beaded her forehead. Her eyes were closed. Occasionally she moved her head from side to side. A nurse dabbed at her forehead with a piece of gauze. She looked down at Sylvia and shook her head.

The door opened. The doctor entered carrying a pint of blood. The nurse looked at him questioningly. He shrugged. A clamp was closed. The bottle of blood presently hanging from the metal T was taken down. A needle was removed from that bottle and placed in the new bottle. The doctor hung it from the T and opened the clamp again. The new blood began to flow into the girl's veins. The level of blood in the bottle dropped slowly.

Sylvia took a deep breath and then another.

Outside in the corridor Ben was sitting with his head in his hands, a strip of gauze white across the inside of his elbow. The detective was pacing the floor in front of him, puffing on a cigarette. He pushed the butt impatiently into a tall receptacle filled with sand.

"Look," he said. "I know how you feel, but I got a job to do. I can't wait around all day."

At the nurse's station a few feet away, a telephone rang.

"A few more minutes?" Ben asked the detective.

The detective looked at his watch. "Make it five. Then we head downtown."

"Lieutenant?" the nurse said. She was holding out the telephone toward him.

He walked to the station and picked up the phone. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I'm here with him now. Be leaving in a few minutes... Of course I got a statement from him... Whatta you mean, let him go? . , . No, I'm not gonna book him, I just wanted to bring him in for a few questions... Yeah... Okay."

He put the phone down hard and walked back to Ben. He looked down at Ben for a moment as if unable to figure it out. Finally he said, "They fust told me to let you go. Somebody downtown's pulling strings for you." His voice turned angry. "Whoever your friends are, I hope for your sake they are your friends. Good luck, pal."

In the hospital room, the bottle of blood was almost empty. Sylvia was breathing easier. The doctor was making an entry on Sylvia's chart. The nurse arranged the curtains on the window to soften the direct rays of the afternoon sun. She went to the bottle of blood to adjust it again and looked down at Sylvia.

"Such a pretty girl," she said softly. And then, "You know in this light it almost looks as though her color is coming back."

Sylvia's head began to move. She moaned softly. The doctor looked up and then exchanged a glance with the nurse. He put down the chart and moved to Sylvia's side.

"She does have more color," the doctor said. Gently the doctor lifted one of her eyelids. He took her pulse and then listened to her heartbeat. He shook his head in bewilderment. The nurse watched, trying to understand what was going on.

"Her pulse, her heartbeat," the doctor muttered. "Stronger. Much stronger."

Sylvia's head moved from side to side. Her eyelids fluttered. Her lips parted. "Ben... ?" she said. It was little more than a whisper.

She tried to lift her head, but the nurse gently restrained her.

"It's all right, Miss. You're safe. Your fiance is waiting outside."

Sylvia stared up at the nurse for a moment. Then her head sank back on the pillow. The doctor moved around the bed and lifted the cover. He examined the wound in Sylvia's side.

"Incredible!" the doctor muttered.

The doctor came out of Sylvia's room and walked to where Ben was sitting. As he approached, Ben got to his feet and waited for the best—or the worst.

"Ordinarily I'd hesitate before I'd make a statement like this," the doctor said, "but—I think she's going to be all right... A few minutes ago the hemorrhaging stopped, just like that. At the moment her blood pressure is still low, but her heartbeat is regular. It's almost as though some—I don't know what to call it—some force is speeding up the healing process. She's even awake now."

Ben sat down and leaned back, his eyes closing with relief. He took a deep breath.

The doctor looked at him, his eyebrows knitted together, his lips pursed. "I wonder if maybe in a few days—you might let us run some tests on you."

Ben stood up. "I don't know what this means to you, Doctor, but what it means to me is that my girl has a chance to live. I've had tests before. If you have any questions, I suggest you talk to Doctor Russell Pearce." He gave the doctor a quick address. "Right now, I'm going to see Sylvia."

The doctor did not try to stop Ben as he crossed the corridor and opened the door.

Sylvia was awake as Ben entered. The nurse was standing beside Sylvia's bed. Ben stared at her. The nurse looked down at Sylvia, decided she was all right, and left.

Sylvia would not look at Ben. "Hey," Ben said softly.

"Don't look at me," Sylvia said weakly. "I'm—I'm ashamed..."

Ben was overwhelmed. "Of what—turning your back on a gunman—to help me?"

"Ben," Sylvia said, "when I—when I knew—I was—dying—Ben—I didn't—care—what happened to you. I was so—afraid. I told—the doctor—about you—"

She was looking at him now, wanting him to know all the truth.

"Honey," Ben said, "I told him myself. It didn't matter. He'd have guessed."

"But now he knows," Sylvia said, "knows I told—the truth. Ben. He knows—about you. And I did it."

"No—" Ben began. "Don't—"

"You can't—" she said faintly, "you can't—trust—anybody—not even—me..."

She tried to speak again but she was too weak. Her head rolled to the side. She lost consciousness.

Ben looked down at her. He nodded as if he had made a decision and smiled faintly. It was a sad smile, half love, half regret. He leaned down and barely touched Sylvia's lips with his own. When he straightened up, he stared at her for a long moment, as if he were trying to memorize her features, and he turned and walked out of the room and down the busy corridors and out of the hospital...

Chapter Nineteen

A man's skills are what he learns.

A man's courage is what he is born with.

Sometimes the occasion comes when they are both tested.

Ben stopped as he emerged from the hospital entrance. His eyes searched the parking lot. Far to his right two men were apparently engaged in conversation. Some distance away a black sedan moved slowly across the parking lot toward him.

He scarcely noticed the red XKE which came to a stop in front of him until Janet Braddock said coolly, "I think you'd better get in."

Ben glanced at her but said nothing. The black sedan had stopped in the middle of the parking lot. One man remained at the wheel. Two men got out. One of them was Locke. As if this were the signal, the two men on his right ended their conversation and came toward him. The man who had been with Locke moved out to Ben's left. That left Locke alone in the center.

Ben's expression hardened.

"I said," Janet began, "I think you'd better—"

Ben opened the door of the XKE. "Move over," he said curtly.

Janet quickly moved from the driver's bucket seat into the other. Ben got in and threw the car into gear as he slammed the door. The tires screeched as the car took off.

It headed straight for Locke. Locke stared at it, horrified, almost fascinated into immobility, but at the last moment he dived aside.

The XKE hurtled on toward the exit of the parking lot.

Janet smiled and looked at Ben with a touch of admiration. "You almost got him," she said.

"I tried to," Ben said grimly.

"You got away once, thanks to me," Janet said. "Couldn't you stay away?"

"You put the gun—"

"Under the middle shelf," she finished.

"How did you know I was here?"

"I listen in on my husband's conversations," she said lightly.

Behind them the sedan swung around to pick up Locke. As he got into the big car, the XKE sailed out of the parking-lot exit. It turned sharply in the middle of the street and rocked on its wheels as it almost turned over. But the wheels grabbed and the sports car screeched down the street.

Fifteen seconds later the sedan followed, Locke sitting beside the driver.

Down city streets they raced, the sedan creeping up on the straightaway, the XKE gaining a few yards on the turns. The XKE made a quick turn onto a freeway and roared into a big lead. The sedan barely made the turn but made better speed on the freeway and began inching up.

Beside the freeway the town began to thin out.

"What's that up ahead?" Ben asked.

"A turnoff," Janet said.

"Open country beyond?"

"And a dirt road."

The XKE swung right and down and under and onto the dirt road with a sharp turn. The tires slipped and slid, found traction, and slammed the car forward.

Ben looked in the rear-view mirror. The sedan had less trouble with the turn onto the dirt road. Heavier, it bullied the dirt road into carrying it straight ahead. The sedan crept closer.

Janet looked at Ben, her arm draped leisurely over the back of the seat as though she were in a cocktail lounge. She smiled faintly, enjoying the whole experience.

The XKE bounced over ruts and potholes. Around it the countryside had become open. Only scrub, bushes, and occasionally a small, stunted tree were visible.

The sedan kept gaining. Ben could almost make out Locke's features.

Ben's mouth tightened. "How's your padding?" he asked.

"Serviceable, I'm told," Janet said.

"It's about to be road-tested."

He swung the car sharply. The XKE left the road and plunged down an embankment and into scrub. It had been bouncing before. Now it went berserk, bucking like a maddened mechanical mule.

Janet looked at Ben as she clung to the seat with one hand and braced herself against the dash with the other. She had begun to realize that Ben was willing to extend himself, the car, and everybody else to the limit—and his limit was his own death. She began to be afraid.

A towering clump of bushes loomed ahead of them. There was no way to avoid it. The XKE plunged into it without slowing. It disappeared. In a few moments it reappeared on the other side, trailing bushes behind it.

The sedan followed without hesitation.

Janet pulled her hands away from her face. She was still a little afraid to look.

Ahead loomed another obstacle—a stream.

"Can you swim?" Ben shouted.

"I can learn," Janet said.

The car plunged into the stream, the water up to the hub caps, its momentum carrying it across. Seconds later it was the sedan plowing in, its tires throwing up twin geysers on each side.

The XKE ran parallel to the bank for a short distance, then swung off onto a level stretch. Ben straightened the rear-view mirror and looked into it.

"I can't lose them," he said.

He looked out at the heaving, bucking countryside, searching for some way to get free of the pursuing black sedan and its deadly passengers.

Then he saw the stream again. It curved back between two rows of trees, but here it was deeper and wider—deep enough, perhaps, to drown an engine or mire a heavy car. But a lighter car could leap across from one bank to the other—maybe.

He swung past the stream and made a big circle, the sedan gaining on him as he turned.

"I'm going to try that jump," Ben said. "You want to get out?"

"Can you make it?" Janet asked.

Ben shrugged. "Never tried it."

By this time Janet was frightened, but she was not a complainer nor a quitter. "Let's go," she said.

The XKE was moving at 60. Ben slammed on tie brakes, deliberately sending the car into a skid which ended with the XKE's tires spinning crazily and the car moving backward. Then the tires found traction and the car shot forward, passing the sedan going in the opposite direction.

The sedan braked, skidded, and turned to follow the XKE.

Ben headed back toward the stream. The speedometer passed fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty... The car flew over some bumps and jarred on others.

Ben stared straight ahead. His expression was hard and determined; it held no concern for their success or their immediate fate.

Janet watched the ground rush past; her face held a mixture of fear and fascination, like a little girl on a roller-coaster ride. Unconsciously she raised one hand and put it gently on Ben's shoulder, barely touching him.

In the sedan Locke recognized what Ben was going to try. "Don't do it, you idiot!" he muttered. And then, to the driver, "No, not you."

Doing ninety, the XKE headed up a small incline leading to the stream. It reached the bank of the stream and kept going up, up, up. It hung in the air like some kind of car-shaped balloon. Then slowly it began to drop.

The car hit on the opposite side of the stream and slammed into the ground. The impact sent the body plunging down on the springs until it hit the tires. It bounced back into the air.

Ben wrestled with the wheel as it tried to jerk itself away. At this speed even a slight turn would send them rolling over.

And then once more there was traction. The car wove back and forth for a moment. Ben straightened it out, and it was moving forward again, shooting off over the meadow.

In the sedan Locke said, "Brakes! Brakes!" And the driver hit the brakes, but it was too late. The sedan which would never have made the leap the XKE had achieved plunged headlong into the stream and stopped. It sat there, wheels mired, motor dead and steaming.

Locke stared after the disappearing XKE with disgruntled admiration and shook his head. Like a man who must perform an unpleasant task, he reached for the car telephone. He dialed a number. He held the receiver to his ear. Somewhere there were clicks as relays searched out one telephone among millions, and then that one telephone began to ring. A hand like a claw reached out to pick up the telephone.

Eagerly a cracked voice said, "You've got him." Braddoek's face was expectant. His eyes were almost young again in the excitement of anticipation.

"No," Locke said. "I lost him."

Braddock's face collapsed into wrinkles, like soft, old leather allowed to drop and fold in upon itself. "Mr. Locke," he said venomously, "unless you're joking you'd better find yourself another job."

"I'm not joking," Locke said. "As for the job, I'm putting in for a raise. Otherwise, you see, I might just decide to go after this guy on my own. He might be worth even more to me—or somebody else. And as for jokes, here's one for you. Your wife is the one who helped him get away. She was waiting here for him—with a car. And I guess that means she was the one who smuggled the gun to him the other time. Opportunity and motive, as they say. See you back at the ranch, Mr. Braddock."

In Braddock's study, the telephone in his hand clicked as the connection was broken. A moment later came the dial tone. Shaking, Braddock tried to put the telephone back on the cradle, but his hand shook too much. Finally he dropped it. It clattered to the desk.

Braddock stared at his hands. They both were shaking. He turned them over and looked at the backs of them. The skin was like old parchment clinging to dry sticks, and the skin was spotted with brown patches. Underneath the skin the veins were puffy and purple.

Braddock laid the hands on the desk as if they were not part of him. His face was older than time, and his eyes were even older. They stared blindly into the darkening room.

Slowly he put his head down on the desk.

The telephone made a harsh, beeping noise.

Ben pulled the car up just short of a highway along which traffic moved in a steady flow. He rolled the window down and took a deep breath of the air that blew off the meadows. It had the smell of new-mown grass to it, tinged with salt from the sea. It was good to breathe it again.

He wiped the sweat from his forehead and leaned back in the bucket seat, suddenly exhausted.

Beside him Janet also was drained of energy and emotion. For her it had been an experience that was almost sexual.

"You didn't care if we got killed back there, did you?" she asked languidly.

Ben shrugged. "It's not when you die that matters but how you live. What happens to you now?"

"I wait," Janet said, "and hope I won't have to wait too long."

"You're not afraid of being disinherited?" Ben asked.

Janet shook her head. "It's all in a trust fund. What happens to you?"

Ben breathed deeply. "We head for the city, and I take off. If I can stay away from Braddock for the next six months, maybe I'll be all right..."

Janet was eyeing Ben with interest. It was, Ben knew, an interest that could be just monetary.

"Maybe," Ben said again.

He shrugged, threw the car into gear, and moved off toward the city.

Chapter Twenty

Civilization.

Look around you. It seems so solid, so enduring. Yet it is built on sand.

Things insubstantial hold it up. The pillars of civilization are made of faith, shared myths of proper ways to act and perceive and react, mutual agreements about what is real—like money and credit, love and family, law and international relations—and of basics like birth and death.

Challenge one of these and the whole structure totters; challenge more than one and it could topple.

Let some people drop out of the race for economic security. Civilization quivers! Throw rudeness into polite society. It shakes! Challenge sexual mores. It shivers! Approve violence. It shatters! Disrupt courts. It rocks!

Add a few years to the average lifespan of man and society groans under the readjustment. Our culture, our economic system, our food production, our civilization itself are based on the human life cycle: two decades spent in growing and learning, a few more producing wealth and progeny, a final one or two decaying before we die. Alter by just a little the balance between births and deaths—institute death control with better medicine and care—and populations will increase faster than food production can keep up. Everything changes: economics, morality, religion...

Add one more fact: immortality...

A voice made mechanical by electronics and large, echoing spaces announced, "Flight 27 for New York is now loading at Gate 43. Flight 27 for New York—Gate 43."

Ben stood at a counter writing on a piece of paper. Every few minutes he looked up and glanced warily around him, searching each face to see if he recognized it or was recognized, if any stayed nearby without good reason...

"Dear Sylvia," he wrote.

"You're getting well now. I wouldn't leave if I didn't know that. But you will get well, and even if I stayed we couldn't be together. They would take me away and put me in a prison and use me, and I couldn't stand that and I know you couldn't either.

"I've thought this over very carefully, Sylvia. I love you. I'll always love you. I'll always think about you. But I want you to forget about me. I dreamed of bringing life and hope to others. It didn't work out that way. I'm deadly to anyone near me.

"Even if Braddock wasn't after me, there'll be others now. That doctor who patched you up—he was asking questions. By this time he knows the truth. Braddock's right-hand man knows about me, too. And Braddock's wife knows. It's only a matter of time before other people find out.

"Dr. Pearce was right. I've got to ran far and fast, and keep running always. That will be my life from now on—run and hide and watch, and not stay anywhere too long for fear they will catch up...

"While I'm running I'm going to try to find my brother. Wherever he is, he's got to be warned, warned that Braddock is looking for him, waiting to throw him in a cage and drain him dry.

"There may be others like me. I hope there are others. It is a terrible thing to be the only immortal in a world of mortals and to have them look at you with dying eyes...

"Whatever happens to me finally, Sylvia—wherever I go—I want you to know I'm going to miss you. I'm going to miss you for as long as I live..."

Ben folded the letter, put it into an envelope, wrote an address on it, stamped it, and dropped it into a mail slot as he walked quickly toward gate 43, He didn't look back as he walked down the movable corridor into the jet plane.

The corridor pulled back. The jet engines started. The plane turned from the ramp, taxied to the runway, waited, and then, swinging onto the wide concrete strip, accelerated, hurtled, lifted, and climbed into the sky.

In a few monents it was gone.

And so it ends with a jet airplane taking from here to there a man who discovered within himself the power to work miracles and found that the world was not ready for him, with a girl in a wheelchair reading a letter with tears in her eyes, with a young woman driving a red XKE across a sprawling city, with a man of action mired in a muddy creek, with an old man doomed to death face down upon a desk...

But the old man raises his head, the man of action begins to order men into position, the man in the jet looks at the scars fading on his palms, and the end is the beginning...