“You see, Barron, what they tell me it’s all in the glands,” Benedict Howards said as the elevator finally stopped, down in what Jack Barron figured had to be a deep subcellar of the hospital.
Wouldn’t be surprised to see a Frankenstein Monster slimy-stone passageway, he thought, as the elevator door slid open and anticlimactically revealed an ordinary white-walled, windowless, fluorescent-lit hospital corridor.
“Endocrine balance, that’s what they call it, endocrine balance…” Howards continued babbling as the two guards, with their pistols conspicuous but holstered, led them out of the elevator and down the hall. Apparently the guards already had their orders, since Howards hadn’t spoken a word to them after they had left the hospital room, just kept babbling a lot of stuff about hormones and glands.
Barron was hardly listening. Howards’ abstracted, glazed eyes, the way he kept talking a blue streak, turning his head here, there, here, like a frightened bird, convinced him that Bennie was way ’round the bend. And, he thought, all this fucking medical jargon he obviously only half understands…
But that, Barron suddenly realized, that’s the kicker. If it were all a shuck, he wouldn’t know all this stuff unless he had memorized the whole set-spiel just to put me on, and then he’d be way smoother, Bennie’s not show biz enough to pull a con this subtle off. Which means…
It’s for real; at least it’s possible. Immortality. Maybe I really got it, he’s not putting me on? Immortal! I don’t feel any different but why should I, I’m young and I’m healthy, and if it’s true, I’ll never feel different, not now, not in half a million years…
Or will I? he wondered. Bennie’s sure different, more paranoid by the minute since this whole thing started. But maybe the whole Foundation schtick was a paranoid bag for openers, and the more money Bennie’s got, the longer he’s got to live, the more he’s got to be scared shitless to lose. Which puts him exactly where I want him.
But then why’s he so fucking sure he’s got me where he wants me?
All this screwing around… Then it flashed like cold fire through him: Howards’ been dying to make me immortal all along. And now I’ve been had? But how? He can’t touch me now, and I can walk all over him. The treatment… yeah, he got uptight every time I tried to find out what the fuck it was, and now he’s telling me and I’m not listening! And whatever it is, pretty safe bet it’s really been done to me. Listen, you prick, for chrissakes listen, isn’t this what you played all those games to hear?
“Man’s as old as his glands,” Howards was saying. “You could keep the hormone balance you had as a kid, you’d never stop growing… No, that’s wrong, I think… or… but that’s not important. Point is, you’re no older than your glands. Up to a point, a kid’s glands keep his body from aging, something about anabolism exceeding catabolism, whatever that means. Anyway, whatever it means, the moment it reverses you start to age, start dying, fading black… Way they explained it, normally a human being’s either growing or aging, never inbetween, depending on the balance of his glands. It’s like a clock at midnight—between one tick and the next it’s a different day, one tick you’re growing, next tick you’re aging. You keep growing, sooner or later it kills you, they told me, but I don’t really understand why… . But anyway, the moment your glands pass over that line, sometime in your teens, they say, you start to die. You see, Barron? You see? Immortality’s all in the tick.”
“Tick, schmick,” Barron finally said. “What’re you gibbering about?”
“You’re pretty dumb, Barron, can’t you see it? If it’s exactly twelve o’clock Tuesday night and you stop the clock right on the moment it stops being Tuesday, and before it can start being Wednesday you’re caught inbetween. Not growing, not aging. That smart-ass Palacci calls it ‘Homeostatic Endocrine Balance.’ Stop that gland ‘clock’ right between ticks and keep it there, balanced between growing and aging, and that’s immortality. That’s what we’ve got, way to take all the glands and keep ’em balanced what they call homeostatically forever. Forever! We got glands that’ll stay young forever, Barron. That’s why we’ll never die.”
Makes a kind of screwy sense, Barron admitted, fishing in his memory for two terms of Berkeley biology. “Anabolism and catabolism equal metabolism,” the meaningless phrase from some old gypsheet popped into his mind. But what the fuck did it mean? Lessee, metabolism’s like a biological checking account: anabolism is growth, catabolism’s decay—or the other way around? Anyway, in a kid, growth exceeds decay, so the account’s solvent. And in an adult it’s vice versa and you’re overdrawn, so you start to die. Yeah, but if you were just even, and could keep it that way, like Howards says, you’d be immortal! That all immortality is, tuning up the old glands in the shop the way they tune the Jag’s engine? But how do they do it?
“I think I dig now, Bennie,” he said. “Just out of curiosity, how do your boys do it—I mean, tinker with all those glands?”
Howards leered at him, and the cold words he spoke were somehow totally obscene: “Hard radiation and lots of it. An overload of radiation kept up for two days.”
Barron went cold. Radiation—a witch-word, like cancer. Overload of radiation for two days! But that means—
Howards laughed. “Take it easy, Barron, you’re not gonna die. I’m not dead, am I, and we’ve both had the same treatment. My boys found out something about some special kind of radiation—in big killing doses, it freezes the balance of the glands in this Homeostatic Endocrine Balance thing, if you catch ’em young enough…”
“But all that radiation, what’s it do to your body?”
Howards grimaced, his eyes seemed to glaze over as if he were running some dirty movie on the screen in his head; he muttered something crazy about niggers, then seemed to snap out of it as the guards halted outside a plain steel door.
“I never seen it, but they say it’s pretty awful,” Howards said. “Flesh starts to rot and fall off and the whole body breaks out in a million little cancers… but the glands are okay, if the quacks time it right. Better than—”
“You crazy fucker!” Barron howled, half-lunged at Howards, then stopped as the guards whipped out their pistols.
“Don’t foam at the mouth, Barron, no one said you were irradiated,” Howards said, caressing the knob of the steel door. He laughed. “I’ll show you why we’re both all right, be all right forever, and why I’ve got you right where I want you. I said you had glands that’ll stay young, keep you young forever…” Howards’ eyes were black pits of feral paranoid madness as he turned the doorknob and said, “… but when did I ever say they were yours?” And opened the door.
Beyond the door was what at first glance looked to be a pretty ordinary hospital ward: A long, narrow room, with a central aisle dividing two rows of about a dozen beds each, headboards set flush against either wall. At the far end of the room was a large complex of consoles facing a small desk behind which a white-smocked man sat, apparently monitoring them. To the right of the desk was another door.
But it was the occupants of the beds that made the room a chamber of grotesquerie, filling Barron with a disbelieving nauseous dread.