Even after he got out of that dark and hateful house and got through
college by working part-time jobs and winning scholarships, even after
he’d piled up a mountain of academic achievements and had become a
respected man of science, Eric continued to half believe in hell and in
his own certain damnation. Maybe he even more than half believed.”
Suddenly Julio saw what was coming, and a chill as cold as any he had
ever felt sneaked up the small of his back. He glanced at his partner
and saw, in Reese’s face, a look of horror that mirrored Julio’s
feelings.
Still staring out at the verdant campus, which was as thoroughly
sun-splashed as before but which seemed to have grown darker, Easton
Solberg said, “You already know of Eric’s deep and abiding commitment to
longevity research and his dream of immortality achieved through genetic
engineering. But now perhaps you see why he was so obsessed with
achieving that unrealistic-some would call it irrational and
impossiblegoal. In spite of all his education, in spite of his ability
to reason, he was illogical about this one thing, in his heart he
believed that he would go to hell when he died, not merely because he
had sinned with his uncle but because he had killed his uncle as well,
and was both a fornicator and a murderer.
He told me once that he was afraid he’d meet his uncle again in hell and
that eternity would be, for him, total submission to Barry Hampstead’s
lust.”
“Dear God,” Julio said shakily, and he unconsciously made the sign of
the cross, something he had not done outside of church since he was a
child.
Turning away from the window and facing the detectives at last, the
professor said, So for Eric Leben, immortality on earth was a goal
sought not only out of a love of life but out of a special fear of hell.
I imagine you can see how, with such motivation, he was destined to be a
driven man, obsessed.”
“Inevitably,” Julio said.
“Driven to young girls, driven to seek ways to extend the human life
span, driven to cheat the devil,” Solberg said. “Year by year it became
worse. We drifted apart after that weekend when he made his
confessions, probably because he regretted that he’d told me his
secrets. I doubt he even told his wife about his uncle and his
childhood when he married her a few years later. I was probably the
only one. But in spite of the growing distance between us, I heard from
poor Eric often enough to know his fear of death and damnation became
worse as he grew older. In fact, after forty, he was downright frantic.
I’m sorry he died yesterday, he was a brilliant man, and he had the
power to contribute so much to humanity. On the other hand, his was not
a happy life. And perhaps his death was even a blessing in disguise
because . .
“Yes?” Julio said.
Solberg sighed and wiped one hand over his moonish face, which had
sagged somewhat with weariness. “Well, sometimes I worried about what
Eric might do if he ever achieved a breakthrough in the kind of research
he was pursuing. If he thought he had a means of editing his genetic
structure to dramatically extend his life span, he might have been just
foolish enough to experiment on himself with an unproven process. He
would know the terrible risks of tampering with his own genetic makeup,
but compared to his unrelenting dread of death and the afterlife, those
risks might seem minor. And God knows what might have,happened to him
if he had used himself as a guinea pig.”
What would you say if you knew that his body disappeared from the morgue
last night? Julio wondered.
25
ALONE They did not attempt to put the Xerox of the Wildcard file in
order, but scooped up all the loose papers from the cabin’s living-room
floor and dropped them in a plastic Hefty garbage bag that Benny got
from a box in one of the kitchen drawers. He twisted the top of the bag
and secured it with a plastic-coated wire tie, then placed it on the