for? No amount of money would stave off a nuclear warhead. At best, it would buy refuge for him and his, and the means to start over once the ashes had settled. For that, a million or two dollars were ample. Meanwhile, why not shut down his businesses hi the course of the next ten or a dozen years, then take a holiday for whatever time this civilization hung together? Didn’t he deserve it?
Did his comrades want that, though? They were so earnest hi their different ways, those three. And, of course, any day his renewed search might turn up others. Or anything else might happen.
The wind whooped. Suddenly Hanno laughed aloud with it. He ignored the stares he got. Maybe living through history had made him a touch paranoid. Yet he had also learned from it that every hour of freedom was a precious gift, to be savored in fullness and stored away where thieves could not break in and steal. Here half a beautiful afternoon and a whole evening had fallen into his hands. What to do with them?
A drink in the revolving bar on the Space Needle? The view of mountains and water was incomparable, and Lord knew ‘when the next clear day would happen along. No. This past interview had driven him too much into himself. He desired companionship. Natalia was still at work, pridefully and wisely declining to let nun support her. Tu Shan and Asagao were afar in Idaho, John Wanderer in the Olympics on one of his backpacking trips. He could drop into, say, Ernmett Watson’s for a beer and some oysters and general friendliness—no, the danger of meeting a self-appointed poet was too great. Jokes aside, he didn’t feel like chitchat with somebody he’d never see again.
That left a single possibility; and he hadn’t visited Gian-notti’s lab for quite a spell. Nothing spectacular could have happened there or he’d have been notified, but it was always interesting to get a personal progress report.
By the time of that decision, Hanno had reached the lot where he left the Buick registered to Joe Levine. He considered driving straight to his destination. Surely no one had put a tail on him. But accidents could happen, and sometimes did. Immortality made caution a habit. Moreover, he intended to end up with Natalia. Therefore he bucked through traffic to Levine’s place near the International District. It had parking of its own. In the apartment he opened a concealed safe and exchanged Levine’s assorted identification cards for Robert Cauldwell’s. A taxi brought him to a public garage where Cauldwell rented a space. Entering the Mitsubishi that waited, he returned to the streets.
He liked this tightly purring machine much better. Damn, it seemed only yesterday that Detroit was making the best cars for their price on earth.
His goal was a plain brick building, a converted warehouse, in a tight-industry section between Green Lake and the University campus. A brass plate on its door read RUFUS MEMORIAL INSTITUTE. Those who asked were told that Mr. Rufus had been a friend of Mr. Cauldwell, the shipowner who endowed this laboratory for fundamental biological science. That satisfied their curiosity. The work being done interested them much more, emphasizing as it did molecular cytology and the effort to discover what made living beings grow old.
It had been a plausible way for Cauldwell to dispose of his properties and retire into obscurity. Two magnate identities were more than Hanno could maintain after the government got thoroughly meddlesome. Tomek was pulling in the most money by then, and leaving less of a trail. Besides, this might offer a hope—
Director Samuel Giannotti was at his workbench. The staff was small though choice, administration was kept to an unfussy minimum, and he continued to be a practicing scientist. When Hanno arrived, he took time to shut down his experiment properly before escorting the founder to his office. It was a book-lined room as comfortably rumpled-look-ing as his large, bald-headed self. A swivel chair stood available for each man. Giannotti fetched Scotch from a cabinet, ice and soda from a fridge, and mixed mild drinks while Hanno charged his pipe.
“I wish you’d .give that foul thing up,” Giannotti said, settling down. His voice was amicable. The seat creaked to his weight. “Where’d you get it, anyway? From King Tutankhamen?”
“Before my time,” Hanno drawled. “Do you mind? I know you’ve quit, but I didn’t expect you’d take the Chris-ter attitude of so many ex-smokers.”
“No, in my line of work we get used to stenches.”
“Good. How’s that line go from Chesterton?”
“’If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals it is the modern strengthening of minor morals,’” quoted Giannotti, who was a devotee. “Or else, later in the same essay, ‘It is the great peril of our society that all its mechanism may grow more fixed while its spirit grows more fickle.’ Not that I’ve often heard you worry about morals or the spirit.”
“I don’t worry aloud about the oxygen supply, either—”
“Obviously.”
“—or the other necessities of survival. It would annoy me less that we’re heading into a new puritanical era if the puri-tanism concerned itself about things that matter.” Hanno struck match to tobacco and drew the fire alight.
“Well, I worry about you. Okay, your body has recovered from traumas that would have finished off any of us ordinaries, but that doesn’t mean your immortality is absolute. A bullet or a swig of cyanide would kill you as easily as me. I’m not at all convinced your cells can stand that kind of chemical insult forever.”
“Pipe smokers don’t inhale, and for me cigarettes are faute de mieux.” Hanno’s brows knotted slightly. “Just the same ... do you have any solid scientific reason for what you said?”
“No,” Giannotti admitted. “Not yet.”
“What are you turning up lately, if anything?”
Giannotti sipped from his glass. “We’ve learned of some very interesting work in Britain. Fairweather at Oxford. It looks as though the rate at which cellular DNA loses methyl groups is correlated with lifespan, at least in the animals that have been studied. Jaime Escobar here is setting up to pursue this line of inquiry further. I myself will re-examine cells of yours from the same viewpoint, with special reference to glycosylation of proteins. On the QT, of course. I’d like fresh material from the four of you, blood, skin, biopsy sample of muscle tissue, to start new cultures for the purpose.”
“Any time you want, Sam. But what does this signify, exactly?”
“You mean ‘What might it signify, at a guess?’ We know little thus far. Well, I’ll try to sketch it out for you, but I’ll have to repeat stuff I’ve told you before.”
“That’s all right. I am a simon-pure layman. My basic thought habits were formed early in the Iron Age. Where it comes to science, I can use plenty of repetition.”
Giannotti leaned forward, caught up in his quest. “The British themselves aren’t sure. Maybe the demethylation is due to cumulative damage to the DNA itself, maybe the methylase enzyme becomes less active in the course of time, maybe something else. In any event, it may—at the present stage this is only a suggestion, you understand—it may result in deterioration of mechanisms that hitherto kept certain other genes from expressing themselves. Maybe those genes become free to produce proteins that have poisoning effects on still other cellular processes.”
“The checks and balances begin to break down,” Hanno said mutedly, through a cloud of blue smoke.
“Probably true, but that’s so vague and general a statement, practically a tautology, as to be useless.” Giannotti sighed. “Now don’t imagine that we have more than a single piece of the jigsaw puzzle here, if we have that much. And it’s a puzzle in three dimensions, or four, or n, with the space not necessarily Euclidean. For instance, your regeneration of parts as complex as teeth implies more than freedom from senescence. It indicates retention of juvenile, even fetal characteristics, not in the gross anatomy but probably on the molecular level. And that fantastic immune system of yours must tie in somehow, too.”
“Yeah.” Hanno nodded. “Aging isn’t a single, simple thing. It’s a whole clutch of different ... diseases, all with pretty much the same symptoms, like flu or cancer.”
“Not quite, I think,” Giannotti replied. They had been over the same ground more than once, but the Phoenician was right about his need for that. He must have won to a terrifying degree of knowledge about himself, Giannotti sometimes thought. “There does appear to be a common factor in the case of every mortal organism with more than a single cell—and maybe the unicellulars too, maybe even the prokaryotes and viruses—if only we can find what it is. Conceivably this demethylatibn phenomenon gives us a clue to it. Anyhow, that’s my opinion. I concede my grounds are more or less philosophical. Something as biologically fundamental as death ought to be in the very fabric of evolution, virtually from the beginning.”
“Uh-huh. Advantage to the species, or, I should say, the line of descent. Get the older generations out of the way, make room for genetic turnover, allow more efficient types to develop. Without death, we’d still be bits of jelly
