Eternity uc, p.10
Eternity (UC), page 10
She looked at him emptily. "I was tired before they built the first pyramid along the banks of the Nile, before they molded the first adobe bricks for the tower of Babel."
"Haven't you ever considered suicide?"
"A thousand and more times, Alex. But I have the curse of life. All of my instincts demand that I live. I cannot reject them. Time and time "again I have made a firm decision to suicide, in some easy manner, such as an overdose of morphine… at the end of, say, twenty-five years. But then, when that time has expired, all my mind and body says, No, no. I am always healthy, Alex. If I had the excuse of pain and anguish, perhaps yes, but I have not."
"So you began life as a Cro-Magnon cave woman, living with dumb brutes and…"
"They weren't dumb brutes. If anything, the Cro-Magnons were probably more intelligent than the average modern man. For one thing, the stupid ones died. Nature did them in before they grew old enough to breed and have their genes reproduced in the next generation."
"If they were so smart, why didn't they invent such things as the wheel?"
"Because they had no use for the wheel at that stage. They were a hunting and gathering society, without domesticated animals. Before even a wheelbarrow makes sense, you've got to have something heavy to move around and fairly smooth ground to move it over. What you're confusing is accumulated knowledge and superior intelligence. You can have one without the other. I, for instance, have a great deal of accumulated knowledge, most of it useless, but I suspect that I am not especially intelligent. I've never had an I.Q. test. Possibly I'm afraid to find out the result, but I suspect I have an I.Q. of 90 or so."
"I'd think that after 25,000 odd years you'd have the wisdom of the ages."
"What wisdom of the ages? You sound like a damn Rosicrucian. We've accumulated more knowledge in the past half century than we did since Cro-Magnon times. Recently, man has been doubling his knowledge in less than every eight years. But it works both ways. He's also losing false knowledge at a fabulous pace. An education today has a half life of about the same time. Eight years. You graduate from college with a doctor's degree in physics. Eight years later, half of what you learned has become antiquated. Eight years later, half of the remaining has become old hat and you're on the trash heap as a physicist, unless you've been keeping up with the new developments. I once saw Benjamin Franklin when he was a man in his seventies, ambassador to France. He was considered one of the most wise men of the time. And was. Today, any graduate of high school knows more than Franklin ever did."
He chuckled. "You sound a little bitter."
She said wearily, "Here's an example of my wisdom, acquired down through the centuries. Back during the Middle Ages I studied alchemy for twenty years or so. I was determined to find out why I was living on and on. I thought that if I found the Elixir of Life and passed it to others, I might find companionship. I might be able to lose the centuries long, aching loneliness. So I studied alchemy under the most advanced scholars in Europe. Do you know how much of it I retain today? That is, how much of it is of use now?"
No.
"None of it. A lot of god-damned spells and incantations. Twenty years shot to hell. But bring it more up to date. Suppose I'd gone to some medical school a hundred years ago. Would you trust me to prescribe an aspirin tablet for you today? Obviously not."
He was being highly amused. "Well, at least I assume that you're as rich as Midas. All you had to do was put out at compound interest an ounce of gold with some banking house in the 14th Century. By now…"
"By now, I'd be as unaffluent as I actually am. Put an ounce of gold out at compound interest and come back in a century to collect and, first of all, the banking house probably no longer exists. But if it did, you'd have your work cut out collecting because you wouldn't be able to prove it was yours. But suppose you were able to prove your identity. You'd probably be arrested as a witch and wind up in one of the Inquisition's dungeons. That is, until quite recently. Nowadays there are other handicaps to an emortal getting rich. Suppose, for instance, I had accumulated $100,000 and wanted to invest it in the year 1900. What would I put it into? Railroads? They were the big thing then.
How rich would I be today, if I'd put my money into railroads? But suppose I had enough of the wisdom of the ages, as you called it, to see the coming of the automobile. Scores of auto companies were springing up. I can think of only two that came down to the present, Ford and Oldsmobile. Undoubtedly, I would have invested, instead, in Studebaker, Hudson, or possibly the Stanley Steamer."
He had to laugh aloud.
She pursued it. "Or suppose I had that $100,000 in the year 1945, right after the war. Playing it carefully, I might invest in the safest thing going, United States Treasury Bonds. They paid four or five percent in those days, didn't they? I'd net $5,000 a year, enough to live on fairly well in those days. What are those bonds worth today? The paper they're printed upon. It seems inflation reared its ugly head."
Alex said, "With 25,000 years to play with, sooner or later your luck would have to break."
"Ummm. So suppose in this day and age in the States I accumulated a million dollars. Then came the day I had to change my identity."
"Come again? Change your identity?"
"Physically, I appear to be about thirty years of age. Very well, when you're thirty you can present yourself as, say, eighteen, by dressing the right way, cutting your hair the right way, and carefully assuming the gawkiness of the late teenager. Then you can slowly age, altering your appearance just slightly each year. Finally, you can present yourself as, say, forty-five, but not much older before people begin to wonder. So you have to pack your things, including your million bucks and move to a new vicinity where you start out all over again as a teenager. Great. How do you explain the million bucks? Where do you tell the new community and eventually the Internal Revenue Service you got it? When they become suspicious and ask for your Social Security Card and later your proof of citizenship such as your birth certificate, what do you tell them?"
"Why not the truth?"
"And wind up in some institution being examined by a flock of beady-eyed doctors and scientists? They'd never let me out. Have you ever heard of Typhoid Mary? When they finally caught her, she spent her remaining years in sanitariums, hospitals, institutions, although she had committed no crime. It doesn't pay to be a freak in this society."
Alex said softly, "Why are you telling me all this, Lilith?"
It was her turn to laugh and it was sadly sour. "Why not?" she said. "Obviously, you don't believe me. I've never met anyone who believes me… Well, not all of it."
"To the contrary," he told her. "I believe every word."
"Clown," she said.
She pushed back the single sheet of bedclothes that covered them and swung her long legs out over the side of the bed. She was nude, breath-takingly, even though he was satiated with sex.
She said, "I'll have to go to work, darling." She headed for the chair where she had left her clothes the night before.
"What do you do?"
She sighed. "I'm the secretary of one of the doctors at the clinica."
"Oh, yes. The town hospital. What do they do there?"
She looked at him from the side of her eyes, even as she took up her underclothing. "It's a hospital," she said. "What in the hell do you think they do there?"
"I passed it yesterday. Seems quite large for a town this size. And there doesn't seem to be a surplus of patients."
She said evasively, "Some of the retirees, here in San Raphael, are quite wealthy. They endowed it. The nearest adequate medical facilities, otherwise, are in Guadalajara, or Mexico City. Too far, in case of emergency."
"I see. But what's the need for all that room? Do they carry on experiments, or something?"
"Experiments?" she said, still dressing, gracefully, beautifully, covering the limbs he remembered so well. She was lying and she wasn't very good at it. "Not as far as I know."
He left the subject, as she pulled her sweater over her head.
"You know," he said. "I still say you look like that bust of Nefertiti."
Her head emerged from the sweater and the sad smile was there.
"As a matter of fact," she told him, "I am… or was. That's where I learned my big lesson. Never give cause for large numbers of people to remember you."
"Oh, you posed for that supremely beautiful bust in the Berlin museum, eh? But what was this lesson you learned?"
"My husband, Amenhotep the Pharaoh, was a religious reformer. We left Thebes with all its temples and all its priests and built a new city further down the river. And Amenhotep built new temples to his monotheistic god. The old priests were powerless to stop him. He was Pharaoh. He was also crazy as a bedbug. Most religious reformers are. However, he died. And they came in all their wrath and tore the new city down and the new temples. And the new religion was destroyed." She hesitated. "Well, some of its elements were preserved by the Hebrews."
"The lesson you learned?" he prompted.
"Yes. For fifty years the priests sought me. Didn't you ever wonder why the tomb of Nefertiti was never found? What is the term we use these days? I went to ground. For half a century I hid as a peasant in the mud flats of Egypt. The lesson was, never become visible, maintain as low a profile as possible. Never surface. Never become prominent. Never become very wealthy. Live in such places as San Raphael, not New York, Paris, or Hollywood. Be plain. Don't even wear lipstick. If you are to survive, in this world, become as invisible as possible. Blend into the background."
She slid into her huaracha slippers, looked at him and tossed her head in amusement. "See? I'm the biggest liar since Hitler."
He twisted his mouth. "But I believe every word."
She grinned, puckishly. "Clown," she said again. "I think I'll have a quick breakfast down in the dining room. I'll see you later, darling. In the bar, about six?"
"Okay… Nefertiti."
For a moment her face was sad. She shook her head. "Lilith, these days. I have had many names in my time. Lilith I took in a bitter moment for a… jest. But for now, Lilith it is."
When she was gone, for a long time he looked at the door which she had closed after her.
He shook his head in rejection. "Poor thing," he said. And then, waxing philosophical, "Of all the human emotions possibly loneliness is the saddest."
He took a deep breath and got out of bed. Still talking aloud to himself, he said, "I suppose it's time for a confrontation."
He showered, shaved and dressed himself in his standard travel clothes, khaki pants and sports shirt, rather than in the dark garments of the night before. He walked over to the window and for a moment stared down into the patio of the Sierra Nevada. Should he pick up Nuscha and take her along? But no. That could come later. For the nonce, Gottlieb was the one to face. And, very possibly, it was just as well that no one else of all concerned knew about it.
He went out on the terrace, ascended the iron stairway to the roof and went to the slight parapet that separated the Sierra Nevada from the adjoining house occupied by the Austrian scientist. Buda was not at his sentry post where he stood watch during the night hdurs.
Buda, the heavy-set war dog who, as Alex had noted, unobtrusively lay at his master's feet watching all, even in a restaurant, and, when Werner Gottlieb arose to leave the room, trotted ahead and looked out the door, up and down, before the scientist left. Although in his time Alex Germain had owned many dogs he had never possessed a Vizsla but he had heard of them, some of the stories fantastic. For instance, that their combat instincts were such that they kept fighting after they were dead. He remembered an ex-Wehrmacht lieutenant telling him about being confronted with a Vizsla during the debacle of the last weeks of Hitler when the Nazis were falling back before the Red Army and abandoning Budapest. The fighting dog who had been with the partisans had taken at least a dozen 9mm slugs from the Schmeisser machine pistols of the lieutenant and a fellow officer. He kept coming and tore out the throat of the German captain before finally falling and still, to the very last, his eyes already glassy, the animal gave his final feeble efforts toward crawling at the lieutenant, who still stood there pumping high velocity slugs into the brute's body. The lieutenant, before the war, had been a veterinarian. He swore that the Vizsla couldn't possibly have been alive, by conventional medical standards, for the last minute or two in which he had continued the impossible fight.
Alex looked up and down the roof but nobody was in sight. He hadn't expected there to be. He slung a leg over the parapet and dropped the couple of feet to the roof beyond, which was slightly lower than that of the Sierra Nevada. The little room up against which Buda had been lying was obviously the entrance to a stairway leading below. The door was open, undoubtedly so that the dog could come and go.
He considered only a moment before entering and starting down. It was still early and he rather doubted that the professor's criada was yet on the scene. Mexican maids were not famed for beginning the day early. It went back to the period when the houses were unheated and the citizens stayed in bed until the sun was well up and providing warmth. Nor was it likely that she was a live-in maid. Not with a single male, no matter how aged. It simply wasn't done. She slept at home.
However, in view of the fact that he didn't know whether or not Werner Gottlieb kept a gun in the house and might wing a shot or two at an intruder, he called out, not too very loudly, "Professor? Professor Gottlieb?"
There was no answer and he arrived at the second floor of the building without either seeing or hearing anything or anyone. Possibly the gerontologist was already down in his 19th-century study-cum-living room. Alex headed for the next stairway, down the hall a way. There was a door, half ajar, and intuitively for some reason unknown to him, he gave it a shove and peered in. Beyond was a bedroom, as he had expected.
Halfway between the door and the large bed was Buda, stretched out unconscious or dead.
On the bed was Professor Werner Manfred Gottlieb, or, at least, all that remained of him. The bed was literally soaked with blood. The professor, still in his old-fashioned flannel nightgown was sprawled, sickeningly, his head completely severed from his body. His eyes bulged, still depicting terror. His mouth was wide open and it seemed stuffed with small dried onions. But no, not onions. The stench in the air was that of garlic. The severed head was not the only mutilation. Through the trunk of the thin body, immediately below the rib cage, had been driven what looked like a heavy wooden stake of the type utilized to pin down circus or carnival tents.
Alex Germain's eyes bugged in absolute rejection of the scene.
"Mon Dieu!" he ejaculated in horror.
Interlude
The transceiver in the right hand drawer of his desk hummed and for a moment the old man had to orientate himself before realizing what it was. It had been months since he utilized it last.
He brought it forth, propped it up atop the papers on the surface of the desk and activated it. A face faded in upon the tiny screen.
He said, "Henry: I thought the arrangement was never to contact us unless there was emergency. In these days of electronic spying, who can say what new device might not trace our calls and locate us?"
He who had been addressed as Henry said, "It is an emergency, sir. But the device is almost surely safe. Our people in both Interpol and the Israeli Sherut Bitchon Klali, their internal security, vouch for it."
The sad looking, infinitely tired looking old man said, "What is the emergency, Henry?"
"Unfortunately, we do not have details. But from several sources we have found that something is up. The adversaries seem to have at last amalgamated and have come to a decision, a plan of action against the enclave."
"You have no idea what form this action might take?"
"No. We are working frantically upon it but as yet without success. However, we are convinced that you are in dire peril."
"You think we should dissolve the enclave and reorganize elsewhere? It has taken long years to organize our facilities. For the first time we have achieved suitable laboratories."
Henry shook his head in misery. "Sir, we don't know. It must be up to you to decide. However, there is every indication that already some of their elements are either on their way or have already arrived in San Raphael. He, or they, are professionals, utterly ruthless international hit men, to use the Yankee idiom. If strangers appear in town, beware of them, sir. From this end there is nothing we can do to intervene."
The old man gave a short, low laugh without humor. "And do you think that we, here, can do better?"
"Perhaps you should make immediate plans to evacuate. There is always the proposed base in Kenya."
The sad old man shook his head. "It would take years. And, seemingly, we are right on the verge of success. The professor is enthusiastic."
The other shook his head again. "We will keep in touch and immediately report if we come upon more information. Shalom Alekhem."
"Aleichem Sholem."
The face faded from the transceiver screen.
Chapter 4
Control of human aging is something that is going to happen. Unless we are slothful or overcome by disaster, it's probably going to happen within our lifetimes.—Alex Comfort No More Dying
1.
Alex Germain looked about the room bleakly. There was still horror in his eyes. There was nothing untoward that he could see save what was on the death bed. It was a most average Mexican bedroom. On the austere side, if anything. The bedroom of a Professor Werner Gottlieb who had little room in his scholar's life for frills.
A gleam near his feet caught his eye. Alex bent and picked up a spent cartridge. He fingered it and thought possibly it was still warm but that could be his imagination. His imagination was running riot just then. It was 7.65mm caliber. More often a European load than an American, and automatic, rather than a revolver.
He muttered, "When the autopsy is performed, sure as hell the bullet they find will be silver."
