The next moment, he began to convulse. He flopped to the floor among his own waste matter. His limbs began to twitch as if he were being electrocuted. Then, slowly at first, his face and torso began to wither, the fur buckling as if there were too much of it to cover him. Betsy let out a gasp of horror as Jimbo's skin lumped and crawled as if small creatures were moving under it. She rushed to give him a mercy-killing shot, but stopped, realizing it would make no difference. Jimbo was dead by the time she filled the needle.
What happened next defied belief, but made horrifying sense. Without the prophylactic protection of Elixir, the telomerase genes in the cells of Jimbo's body suddenly switched on, triggering a mad cascade. Multiplying at lightning speed, cancer cells oozed in bright red tissue mass from the orifices of Jimbo's body-ears, nose, mouth, and anus. From his penis a thin red worm extruded out of the urethra, coiling onto his belly. Simultaneously, a pulsing gorge swelled out of Jimbo's throat and enveloped his head.
Within minutes, cancer cells made up for months of forced dormancy. Cells that continued to grow and multiply long after the animal had died flowed like lava across his limbs and torso until any semblance of his original form was lost to a grotesque and throbbing red mass.
When it was over, Betsy turned to Chris and Quentin. "Are you satisfied now?" she shouted. "What we are doing is wrong, and that hideous spectacle was a warning. This is bad science. Bad!"
She then turned and left the lab.
"What do you mean a technical snag?"
"Well, a kind of… you know, side-effect."
"What kind of side-effect?"
Quentin was sweating, but trying to remain cool. "Well, the stuff kills the animals in withdrawal. I don't understand it-something at the DNA level."
Vince Lucas listened without expression and sipped his tea. He was dressed elegantly in a gray flannel sport coat, white shirt, and silk paisley tie. A fat gold Rolex peered out from his wrist. With his slick black hair and tan, he looked like an Italian movie star.
"We're working on it, but unless we eliminate it, it'll never be marketed."
They were sitting in the lounge of Boston's new Four Seasons Hotel. Seven months from now Quentin was scheduled to pay Vince Lucas the first $2 million he owed him for his loan-and his life-the same amount to be paid the following July 1. That was on top of the $5 million he had already wired Antoine for the apricots. Nine million dollars in debt and nothing to show but some hideous monkey carcasses.
"But I think there's something we can do."
Vince looked at him with those unreadable black eyes. "I'm listening."
"But it's not legal."
"Now we're home."
The waiter came with a second Chivas. Quentin took sip then explained. "I'm thinking a deep-pocket clientele would pay serious money for an endless supply of Elixir. People who like their privacy."
"Howard Hughes is dead."
"I mean your Consortium."
The suggestion hung in the air. Vince sipped his tea patiently.
"Well, I'm thinking that maybe you and Antoine can approach them with the idea… a chance to live indefinitely, and what they would pay for it."
Vince lay his glass on the table. "The Consortium is not a club for rich hermits," he said. "What happens when the kid who used to drive your limo meets you twenty years later and he's forty-five and you're the same? You tell him you're taking some secret youth potion?"
"By then we'll have worked the bugs out, and the stuff would be on the market. I mean in the meantime. Like, you know, now."
Vince thought that over. "How long to get the bugs out?"
"Three years, four the most."
"Sounds like a trap, if you ask me."
"How's it a trap?"
"Say the Consortium is interested. They'll want a guarantee they can still get the stuff without any hitches or sudden price inflation."
"We'll give them written guarantees."
"Enforced by what authorities?"
Quentin looked at him without an answer.
"Another thing: Say you run out of raw materials again, or the Feds find out you're dealing in illegal pharmaceuticals and shut you down. What happens to your clientele? It's not like some junkie's supplier runs dry and they can tap another. People want peace of mind."
"We can work out some foolproof trust."
"No such thing." Vince removed a single almond from the dish of nuts and chewed it, all the while turning something over in his head. "You say Elixir still works on the primates as long as they get a constant supply?"
"Yes."
"Before you go looking for takers, you might want to see if it works on real human beings. Otherwise nobody's interested."
"That's the problem. We can't just walk into a clinic and ask who wants to volunteer for a longevity study that ends in death."
"Volunteers can be appointed."
Quentin looked at him blankly as the words sunk in. "I see."
"The real problem is at your end-getting people to make the stuff without the FDA finding out."
"Subcontractors," Quentin said. He had already worked that out. Outside jobbers would manufacture the compound-and nobody would know its purpose, and nobody would ask questions. And no worry about protocol.
Vince nodded as Quentin explained. "What about your lab people? Any problems there?"
Quentin finished his drink and ordered a third. "That's something I think we should talk about."
Adam blew a bubble, and Wendy laughed joyously.
It was two days before Christmas, and she was bathing him in the kitchen sink, thinking how full of love she was for her baby boy, who was giddy with laughter as she rubbed the washcloth across his pink little body. It was a small moment among the millions of her life but one she wished she could freeze forever.
She knew, of course, the notion was silly. If you could freeze such moments, how would they remain blissful? Joy was an experience defined by contrasts to lesser moments. Besides, there would be others.
As she dressed Adam for bed, she felt Elixir coil around her mind like a snake. At moments like these, she understood its allure.
She could hear Chris's words: "The trouble with life is that it's 100 percent fatal."
And: "I've never died before, Wendy, and I don't want to learn how."
And: "Think how many books you could write if you had another fifty or hundred years. You could be the Dorothy Sayers of the twenty-first century.
There was almost no escaping it. One night a few weeks ago, they watched a rerun of The Philadelphia Story. Before a commercial break, a young, handsome Jimmy Stewart turned to twenty-two-year-old Katherine Hepburn and said, "There's a magnificence in you, Tracy that comes out of your eyes and your voice and the way you stand there and the way you walk. You're lit from within…" While Chris got up for another beer, he wondered aloud how painful it must be for the eighty-year-old Hepburn, now wrinkled and palsied, to see herself in reruns. She probably didn't watch them, he concluded. Wendy's response was that Kate Hepburn was supposed to grow old and die. Painful as it was, she had no doubt accepted that. As we all must.
It was a good response, like her usual caveats about tampering with Nature, or her old standby: "'Death is the mother of Beauty.'"
With Adam in her arms, Wendy felt that the Stevens line never made better sense. Such moments were beautiful because they didn't freeze. Besides, all the animals had died from withdrawal, which meant it would be years before human testing, maybe never. She could only hope.