First Horseman, The (8 page)

‘This,’ he boomed, ‘limits the cell to a finite number of divisions before it must die. Once the telomere is consumed … the cell is destroyed. The telomere is like the spring of a watch that is slowly unwound, except there is no key to wind it up again. The untold billions of telomeres in your body are the inbuilt timer of your life. When their cycles have run their course, just like the cell, you come to an inglorious end. As the telomeres shorten, so do we age. Telomeres in aggregate dictate your allotted span. They programme your mortality.’ He examined Jim’s face, which was mainly blank. ‘Do you see?’

‘Yes,’ said Jim. ‘Well, I sort of get your drift.’

‘Good,’ rumbled Cardini. ‘Telomere eukaryotic retranscriptase lengthens telomeres. Retranscript means “to write again”. You see? It is an enzyme that extends the telomeres in the chromosomes and in effect makes the cells young again.’

‘So how did that make the bruise on my face go so quickly?’

‘TRT, as I prefer to call it, creates a chronomatic reaction.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘It speeds up the biological processes in damaged tissues. Healing or growth can take place up to a hundred times faster. You are young and the dose was low so certain effects of TRT will not be so dramatic in your case.’

‘It seemed pretty dramatic to me.’

‘It is not possible, for example, to take forty years off your cells,’ he chuckled, ‘but in older people, well, TRT winds back the clock. It temporarily reverses the ageing process by amplifying the organism’s natural ability to repair and rejuvenate old cells.’

‘This is like a revolutionary medicine, right?’ said Jim, now perched on the very edge of his seat.

‘Yes.’

‘So why isn’t it all over the newspapers? Why haven’t you got a Nobel Prize? Why isn’t the whole world parked outside your door?’

Cardini stiffened. ‘Because no one knows about my discoveries.’

‘But why not?’

Cardini looked at him so fiercely that he almost shrank back in his seat. ‘There are problems.’

‘What problems?’

Cardini sighed, a low grumble that resonated in his chest. ‘There are seven billion people in this world, Jim, but before the discovery of penicillin there were just two billion. I believe that without that one compound there would still be just two billion people on this planet.’ He paused. ‘It is said that the average Indian peasant spends a quarter of their income on antibiotics and this expenditure on that medicine is responsible not just for their health but for their and their children’s very existence. Yet this miracle compound is terribly underestimated. People imagine that such drugs are simple things, like chocolates, and that, once discovered, they can be produced cheaply at will.’

Cardini stared at Jim, his eyes unblinking. ‘But when it was discovered, penicillin, for example, could only be produced in tiny amounts.’ He leant forwards. ‘The drug’s first subject was a policeman dying from a terrible infection behind his eye.’ Cardini interlaced his fingers. ‘The penicillin had been extracted from mould grown in racks of bedpans and when it was given to the dying man he began to recover. Yet even though the team at Oxford extracted as much as they could, even redistilling it from the patient’s own urine to eke it out, they did not have enough to save his life.”

Cardini sat back. ‘Soon he lapsed once more into a coma and died. It was fourteen years from the discovery of penicillin before there was enough to treat even ten people. It was yet another ten years before use was truly widespread. Even with such miraculous properties it took a generation for the compound to reach mankind en masse.’

‘Sorry, Chris, I don’t understand the problem.’

‘I can only make the tiniest amounts.’ He stared at Jim as if it was his fault. ‘It must seem perverse, particularly to your generation, but little has changed in chemistry in the last two or three decades. In computing, progress has been exponential, but in chemistry and medicine, it has been linear. A computer chip in the nineteen seventies may have had just a thousand transistors but now it has two billion. Meanwhile chemistry cannot make a molecule of ten thousand atoms, let alone a million.’

Cardini’s eyes bulged, apparently with fury.

‘When compared to the progress in electronics, chemists are working in the dark ages. We cannot even imagine creating proteins of any real complexity, let alone anything as complex as a simple cell. The best we can do is to modify existing life and have it do the biochemistry for us. The basic chemicals we call drugs are the simplest of compounds, perhaps a dozen or two elements glued together. Anything complex must be extracted from life itself, be it plant or animal. There is no real capacity to make anything but the simplest pharmaceuticals from scratch. We are little better than the primitives that stewed plants and drank the decoction thereof.’

‘How do you make it?’

‘We take human blood and distil it.’

‘How much blood does it take to make the treatment you gave me?’

‘About thirty tons.’

‘Thirty tons of human blood?’ said Jim, nearly falling off the edge of his chair. ‘How the hell do you get it all?’

‘We take what we can from blood banks across the country as its age passes its mandated storage limit. We have access to about a thousand tons a year. Happily we do the medical profession a service in disposing of it for them but the supply is nowhere near enough for my work. Extraction from human blood is not the answer. To advance we must synthesise the drug, and we have not yet done that. Or, rather, I have not yet implemented it on anything but a minute scale.’

‘A thousand tons of human blood,’ said Jim. ‘How do you process it all? That’s twenty tons a week.’

‘There is a facility outside the city dedicated to it.’

‘Can I see it?’

‘Jim,’ said Cardini, sternly, ‘I must bring you back to my earlier point. We need to synthesise the compound. Extracting it from life is simply not a feasible long-term solution.’

‘What about blood from abattoirs? Cows and chickens, that kind of thing.’

‘Five million dollars would be the price for such a medicine. Five million for a single dose.’

Jim put a finger to his cheek. ‘It cost five million dollars to fix my eye?’

‘That was not a full dose,’ said Cardini, ‘but that is not the point. There is not enough biomass to produce the compound at scale in this manner. It is a drug beyond the reach of all but kings.’

‘I shouldn’t think kings get many black eyes,’ muttered Jim, who was now deep in thought.

‘Were you listening, Jim?’ said Cardini, somewhat plaintively.

‘Yes,’ said Jim, eyes glazed. ‘You need to find a way to synthesise it.’ He shook himself. ‘Have I missed something?’ He looked into Cardini’s face and saw the Wikipedia picture: a dark-haired middle-aged man with scary black eyes. ‘You’re eighty-one, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you look fiftyish.’

‘So I’m told.’

‘And that’s because you take your drug?’

Cardini lifted his head a little and peered down his nose at Jim. ‘Yes.’

‘And you’re emptying our blood banks to make enough for yourself.’

‘In effect,’ Cardini held up the finger of his right hand, ‘but not quite.’

‘Not quite?’

‘Jim,’ said Cardini, ‘the cost of this project is truly great and I have a patron who funds it. I help him in return. I have small amounts of serum surplus to requirements. It accrues, but is scant. I need further funding to take the next step.’

‘You could get that anywhere, surely.’

‘The world is run by old despots and maniacs. For their lives and the lives of their loved ones they would kill millions without hesitation. If I told the world of my discoveries, labs like mine would appear across the globe and humanity would be fed to them. Humanity would become Ouroboros.’ Cardini noted Jim’s blank look. ‘The snake that consumes its own tail.’

Images of Second World War death camps flashed through Jim’s mind. ‘You don’t believe that, do you?’

‘No doubt you read the papers.’

‘Yes.’

‘You see the monstrosities, the evil, the sickening violence? What is it all for? It is for material gain or glory.’ Cardini scowled. ‘Imagine the price some would be prepared to exact to be years younger again, to be, well, to be strong. Those people would stop at nothing.’ He leant forward on his desk, his hypnotic eyes riveting Jim to the spot. ‘I ask you to fund my project because you are young. You do not need the serum to be fit and healthy. You do not need the drug to be young. Not now and not for years.’

‘Right,’ said Jim. ‘I see.’

‘Of course I will supply you once there is a purpose, if we have not made the breakthrough needed by then to produce the serum as cheaply as the common aspirin. Twenty-eight is possibly a potential physical peak, but I have thought perhaps the early thirties is another period worth preserving.’

‘When I’m twenty-eight you can keep me at that age?’

‘The serum will do that.’

‘Keep me physically twenty-eight years old, no matter how many years go by?’

‘Indeed.’

Jim’s eyes bugged out. ‘For how long?’

‘You can be twenty-eight almost indefinitely.’

‘How long is “almost indefinitely”? Ten, twenty, thirty years?’

Cardini didn’t reply immediately – he seemed to be checking a mental calculation. ‘Three to four hundred years,’ he said slowly.

‘You’re bullshitting me, right?’

‘You see, Jim, this is why I keep my secret. The implications of my research are too great at this stage.’ He smiled. ‘Not a week goes by that an old professorial friend of mine does not die and pass for ever into the void. With their death, a treasury of knowledge is lost for good. It is as if a unique library is burnt alongside the cadaver.

‘Each of their threads must be relearnt and picked up by a new mind. Our progress is set back by most of the span of a life with every catastrophic death. Death makes our human progress just a slow crawl forward on hands and knees. I am the first scientist who can pursue his work beyond a few decades. I will continue to discover and build on my discoveries, with the weight and momentum of my knowledge as huge assets magnifying my abilities. With my faculties undiminished and growing, I may serve humanity for many generations more. The possibilities are revolutionary.’

He held out his giant hands as if he was cupping a large invisible ball.

‘I have extended a human boundary and I can use it to transcend the cruel evil of mortality. A lifetime of five hundred years is enough to overcome this tragic impediment. Our life span is the same limit that drives greed and war and hunger. With a life of five hundred years, human potential expands beyond imagining. The petty needs of a short life, which drive so much chaos and misery, disappear.’

‘It’s hard to take in,’ said Jim, rubbing the skin around his eye, which yesterday had been swollen and black. He thought of Stafford, his butler, best friend and ally. For a few million he could make the old man young again. He’d write that cheque on the spot. ‘What happens when you take the drug?’ he said. ‘I mean, it’s got to have nasty side effects, right?’

‘As long as you keep taking it, there are none, but the effects wear off so you have to remain medicated or the process is reversed. As the serum is metabolised, the ageing process begins again and accelerates. A balance needs to be maintained between rejuvenation and degeneracy. Sadly, the later the treatment starts, the less life can be extended. Perhaps I will live two hundred years more, but if you begin treatment at thirty you may live five hundred or perhaps a thousand more years. I hope to be able to widen the use of the technology so that, within fifty years, the serum will be one of a number of treatments. If I can discover these new solutions, I may go on for yet further centuries myself.’

Jim’s mind boggled. This was either the biggest lie he’d ever heard or the most amazing truth. Maybe the professor’s story was one big pile of bullshit – but he had the evidence of his own eye to prove that it wasn’t. And Cardini certainly didn’t look his actual age.

Jim jumped to his feet. ‘Can you take me to your factory?’

Cardini took a sharp breath. He looked at his watch, then back at Jim. ‘Yes, why not?’ He stood up, unfurling himself to his great height. ‘Then, I hope, you will believe me and become my benefactor.’ He looked down at Jim. ‘With your help we will be able to find a way of producing this panacea for all. Together we will make history. Together we can save the world.’ Cardini smiled, but not in a friendly way. The smile seemed to come from an internal pleasure that was hardly connected with Jim’s presence.

He walked up to Jim and patted him on the back. ‘Come on, let us go, you and I. Out to where the sky lies etherised as a patient upon a table.’

Jim wondered what he meant.

For all its speed and technical wizardry, the Veyron was a small car and the professor was crammed into the passenger seat. He struggled to buckle his seatbelt in the confined space. ‘Very good,’ he said, as it finally clicked into place.

Jim fired up the engine.

‘Turn left at the entrance,’ commanded Cardini, ‘then right at the main junction. After several miles I will point out the next turn.’

‘No problem,’ said Jim.

It wasn’t an elaborate route, and a little more than ten minutes later Cardini was indicating that Jim should pull into a road that entered some woodland. At a gate among the trees, Jim spoke into an intercom and it opened. Down a private track out of sight of the road lay a modern warehouse-style building, with a small office area embedded in the left side.

‘I will ask you to say little to the staff you meet,’ said Cardini. ‘They are technical employees and not apprised of the compound being extracted. They believe it to be a vital component of a highly poisonous nerve agent. The result of their work is completed by me in my lab so what is made here is an inert waxy fat, which I alone activate into the final compound. I hope you understand the need for total secrecy.’

‘OK. I’ll try not to put my foot in it.’

Cardini heaved himself out of the car and stretched his long arms upwards. ‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘I suspect in a few weeks’ time I’ll be in need of further treatment. My joints do not feel as young as they did last week. Such is the battle waged. Come,’ he said, dropping his arms, ‘let me show you.’