Deathwatch

The old man's breathing was shallow now, dry and brittle, each breath an effort of no little significance. His head rested on the pillow like a dried and shriveled nut on a napkin.

The man standing at the foot of the bed stared impassively into indefinite space. His strong, unlined face showed no emotion—though there was a strange look, indeed, about his eyes, a deep, ageless resignation that seemed grossly out of place on a face that could be no more than 25.

The woman leaning her head on his shoulder had long, thick, honey-colored hair framing a young face wet with tears. Now and then a sob would wrack her body, and the man would stroke her hair with near-mechanical tenderness. He would pass his tongue slowly over his lips as if searching for words of comfort.

But there were no words and there was no comfort. The only sound in the room was the rasping breath of the old man in the bed sighing the dregs of his life away . . .

• • •

He smiled happily at his wife as she cuddled the newborn baby in her arms. He was, like all babies to all parents, a beautiful baby: weight, nine pounds; skin, ruddy; voice, excellent.

A son, he thought. My son. Secretly, he was relieved. While the doctors had assured them that there was no reason in the world why they could not have children, he had always had that inane, irrational feeling that he would never really be able to know that it was true until this moment, when he could actually reach out and touch his son.

He chucked the baby under the chin, and it cooed satisfactorily. All was right with the world . . .

Until a half hour later, when the doctor told him the truth about his child. The invisible but inescapable truth.

It took him (continued on page 192)Deathwatch(continued from page 121) a while to fully understand. And when he finally did, his first thought was: How will I tell her?

• • •

To his great relief and mystification, his wife took it better than he did. At least she seemed to. Or was it merely that built-in anesthetic that women seem to have that lets them blot out any tragedy that is far enough in the past or far enough into the indefinite future?

Whatever it was, he was grateful for it. Bad enough for a man to have to look ahead decades into the future and face the inevitable, to have to live with the thought of it long before the reality itself . . .

For a woman, let her just have her son.

He was a boy, just like any other boy, wasn't he? Like every other normal boy. He would learn to walk, to talk, to play with other children. He'd probably have the mumps, and maybe chickenpox, too. There'd be good report cards and bad ones, he'd come home with black eyes and skinned knees . . .

Not a monster. A boy like any other boy. A woman could forget. A woman could lose herself in just being a mother.

But for how long could he make himself feel like a father?

• • •

The mutation was called immortality, perhaps inaccurately, since it would take forever to know whether it was really possible to live forever.

Nevertheless, men and women began to be born who did not grow old and die.

Not that they were invulnerable; they simply did not age. A balance was struck in their systems at about the age of 20, and from that age on, the body renewed itself; nervous system, circulatory system, endocrine system, digestive system—all retained their youthful vigor indefinitely.

They were not supermen. They could succumb to the usual diseases. They were just as prone to accidents as other men. They were neither better nor wiser. The mutation, like most other successful mutations, was a narrow one—it produced otherwise ordinary human beings who would not age.

The why of the mutation was, of course, one of those basically unanswerable riddles of evolution. Why do men have no tails? Why do birds have wings? Why intelligence itself?

Immortality was just one more in nature's endless series of experiments. Like all the others, it was, in itself, neither a gift nor a curse. It was whatever men would make of it.

And what it would make of men.

• • •

He tried earnestly to be a good father. He was not gruff with his son—if anything, he was too gentle, for he could not look at that boyish face without a pang of regret, without a feeling of sadness.

He did try his best. He tried to be a companion to his son: fishing trips, camping, games—they did the usual father-son things together. And later on, he tried to be his son's confidant, to share his dreams and yearnings and trials. He tried as few fathers try.

But it all fell flat.

Because it was all mechanical, it was all hypocritical. For there was one thing he could not bring himself to try, there was one thing he could not bear.

He could not let himself love his son.

And though he would scarcely admit it, even to himself, he was relieved when his son graduated from college and took a job 3000 miles away across the continent. It was as if half of a great weight were lifted from his shoulders; as if a dagger that had been hanging directly over his head had been moved across the room.

His wife took it like all mothers take it—it hurt to have a continent between her son and herself, but the hurt would grow numb with time . . .

• • •

The immortality mutation bred true. It would be passed along from generation to generation like any other dominant gene. Two immortals could produce immortal children, just as two dark-haired people produce dark-haired children.

The immortals would breed as fast as ordinary men, and since youth and potency would be theirs forever, they would be able to produce an unlimited number of offspring in their millennial life spans.

Since the immortals, in the long run, could easily outbreed mortals, the entire human race would someday be heir to the gift of immortality. In the long run.

In the short run . . .

• • •

Their son wrote home, and when he did, the answering letters were invariably written by his mother and countersigned, unread, by his father.

There were trips home every year or so, visits that his mother waited eagerly for and that his father dreaded. There was no hostility between father and son, but there was no warmth either—neither genuine pleasure at meeting nor sorrow at parting . . .

He knew that he had closed his son out of his heart. It was a cold, calculating thing to do. He knew that, too.

But he knew that he had to do it, for the sake of his own sanity, to be a rock that his wife could lean on . . .

It was a sacrifice, and it was not without its cost. Something within him seemed to shrivel and die. Pity, compassion, love became academic, ersatz emotions to him. They could not move him—it was as if they were being described to him by somebody else.

And occasionally he found himself lying awake next to his sleeping wife, in the loneliest hours of the night, and wishing that he could cry at least one real tear.

Just one . . .

• • •

The laws of genetics are statistical—the coldest form of mathematics. A dominant gene, like the immortality gene, breeds more or less true. Immortality was dominant, death was becoming recessive.

But recessive does not necessarily mean extinct.

Every so often—and the frequency may be calculated by the laws of genetics—two dark-haired people produce a blond, two healthy people a diabetic, two ordinary people a genius or an immortal, two immortals . . .

• • •

The old man's breath was stilled now. His heart gave one last futile flutter and gave up the fight.

Now there were only two lives in the room, two lives that would go on and on and on and on . . .

The man searched his heart futilely for some hint of genuine pain, some real and human emotion beyond the bitterness that weighed him down. But it was an old bitterness, the bitterness between father and son that was the fault of neither . . .

The woman left his side and tenderly, with the tears streaming down her creamy cheeks, she stroked the white mane of the dead old man.

With a trembling sob, she pressed her soft smooth skin against the wrinkled leather of his cheek.

And, finally, after long cold decades, a dam within her husband burst, and the torrent of sternly suppressed love and sorrow flooded the lowlands of his soul.

Two lone and perfect tears escaped his still-impassive eyes as he watched his wife touch her warm young lips to that age-wrecked face.

And kiss their son goodbye.