Vitals

Vitals
Greg Bear

Scientist Hal Cousins is close to discovering the key to immortality but someone has already found it and will kill him to keep it secret. Vitals is a tense technothriller in the best Michael Crichton tradition.A mile and a half below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, scientist Hal Cousins, frightened of the dark and no friend of God, is looking for the fountain of youth. The Nobel Prize doesn't interest him. Hal is in longevity research for the long haul, the really long haul. 'Angels' (rich businessmen keen to live a thousand years) fund him. Hal finds what he is searching for: xenos, the single-celled tramps of the sea floor, each one as big as a clenched fist. But then the pilot of his sub goes berserk. Hal barely survives; the xenos don't. The pilot kills himself. Five other scientists in related fields die violently in the space of a week. Hal discovers a trail of death stretching back over decades, from Stalin's Russia to present-day Manhattan. Another epidemic of murder by superbly trained killers has been triggered by what Hal nearly discovered…From the bottom of Russia’s Lake Baikal to a billionaire’s bionic house built into the cliffs of the Californian seashore, from the darkest days of the reign of Joseph Stalin in Russia to the capitalist free-for-all of modern America, the edge of immortality is the most dangerous place to be.

Vitals

Greg Bear

For Poul Anderson,

my friend, who decided

long ago not to

Our bodies are made of cells. Mitochondria are the parts of our cells that generate the energy-rich molecules we use every instant of our lives.

Billions of years ago, mitochondria were bacterial invaders, parasites of early cells. They joined forces with their hosts; now they are essential.

‘My mitochondria compose a very large proportion of me. I cannot do the calculation, but I suppose there is almost as much of them in sheer dry bulk as there is the rest of me. Looked at in this way, I could be taken for a large, motile colony of bacteria, operating a complex system of nuclei, microtubules, and neurons, for the pleasure and sustenance of their families, and running, at the moment, a typewriter.’

– Lewis Thomas, ‘Organelles as Organism’, 1974

‘We love Comrade Stalin more than Mommy and Daddy. May Comrade Stalin live to be one hundred! No, two hundred! No, three hundred!’

– Song sung by Soviet children, early 1950s

Learn to live well, or fairly make your will;

You’ve played, and loved, and ate, and drunk your fill:

Walk sober off; before a sprightlier age

Comes tittering on, and shoves you from the stage:

Leave such to trifle with more grace and ease,

Whom Folly pleases, and whose Follies please.

Alexander Pope, Imitations of Horace

Table of Contents

Cover Page (#u7149ef84-711a-5f1c-9579-0d81ffcff657)

Title Page (#u777069aa-affa-5f01-bb4f-5abafb67dd98)

Epigraph (#u2e652a99-7e62-5875-9e68-f56fe9aac27f)

PART ONE HAL COUSINS (#u0b5207ef-f1cd-5079-8e26-71ecd207d612)

CHAPTER ONE San Diego, California May 28 (#u6ea37e54-cc8e-52c1-b13d-e26949ae3fa0)

CHAPTER TWO The Juan de Fuca Trench June 18 (#u23854aae-5745-5039-a44d-6c1b8928d235)

CHAPTER THREE (#ua2a77b61-be70-5661-8150-8fd42ae25ef1)

CHAPTER FOUR (#u1745407c-b782-50f2-8801-cb9eb720e6bf)

CHAPTER FIVE (#u7e15a54a-679d-5461-9e33-50ec4fa87ead)

CHAPTER SIX (#ucf919d56-6ca0-5180-bcf8-4b7062934093)

CHAPTER SEVEN (#ua4eb69d1-469f-536c-91ce-da55c6d4671e)

CHAPTER EIGHT (#udbf571ff-50f8-5ced-8cc8-e98165238f0d)

CHAPTER NINE (#u10df954c-529e-5078-83fc-d9341142825d)

CHAPTER TEN (#u68db3f0a-5ba7-5a5f-a5f4-e821652f0782)

CHAPTER ELEVEN (#u2372de5f-94da-5dd2-b672-8bb4d6443119)

CHAPTER TWELVE Seattle, Washington (#u045b23dd-c8ea-571b-962c-fe6c8fd5368f)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#u0ffaf7f8-3663-5f03-98b5-6e3658ffe5e9)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#ufea3ab65-03a7-5832-a0f0-06d05af522a3)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#uaba2cb61-fb54-53f4-9b3c-5244b5b68d61)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#ufd8f19a5-bdf6-5976-a7c6-92a81babc7d6)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Coral Gables, Florida June 27 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER NINETEEN Berkeley, California July (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE San Francisco (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Thuringia, California (#litres_trial_promo)