“That lovely lady was Desirée,” the DJ oozed. “Next up is Mandy. Mandy’s going to do two numbers for you. Don’t be shy, fellows. If you like what you see, come up and tip the ladies. They’re available for table dances and lap dances, too.”
A petite redhead wearing a push-up bra, lace panties, and stiletto heels took the stage. As soon as the song began, she unhooked the bra and let it fall, then slid down the panties and stepped out of them, snagging one heel briefly on the lace. I wondered when the striptease—the slow, tantalizing removal of layers of clothing—had been replaced by brutally efficient stripping. The gymnastic blonde, whom the DJ had called Desirée, sidled up to Sinclair and kissed him on the cheek. “Hi, doll,” he said. “Dr. Brockton, this is Melissa. Melissa, Dr. Brockton.”
“Hi,” she said, offering me a hand to shake. “That was very interesting, what you were saying this morning.”
“Oh, hell, not you, too.” Sinclair groaned. “Everybody loves this guy. What am I, chopped liver?”
“Aw, don’t get jealous on me,” she cajoled, kissing his cheek again. “You’re the one that’s out on a date with him.” She looked at me naughtily. “I hope you’re not the kind of guy who puts out on the first date.”
I felt myself turn crimson and was grateful for the darkness of the club. “Not to worry,” I said, unsure what to say next. Maybe,I didn’t recognize you without your clothes . Or,How’d you get so good at gymnastics? Or maybe,Doesn’t it bother you that strange men come in to stare at your body and don’t even clap or tip? I settled for the lame safety of, “Nice to meet you, Melissa.”
Sinclair nudged me. “Where you want to sit? Up by the stage?”
God forbid,I thought, but what I said—shouted, practically—was, “A booth, if that’s okay with you. Be a little easier to talk.”
He nodded. “Sweetheart,” he said to Melissa/Desirée, “could you excuse us for a few minutes? We need to talk a little shop.” She mimed a smooch at him, waved her fingertips at me, and sashayed away in her short dress and tall heels.
Sinclair led us to a booth in a far corner of the room, mercifully far from the stage. As soon as we were seated, a pretty brunette—not as young as the two twentysomething dancers—came to take our drink order. She wore a simple white blouse, a straight gray skirt that reached below her knees, and a pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses. Her hair was pinned back in a loose bun, skewered by a #2 wooden pencil. Despite how completely clichéd the costume was, I found the librarian-waitress far more attractive than I’d found either of the topless, gyrating dancers.
Sinclair ordered a scotch, a single-malt whose name I didn’t know and probably couldn’t pronounce. He lifted an eyebrow at me when I ordered a Diet Coke. “I don’t drink alcohol,” I explained across the table. “I have Ménière’s disease—occasional spells of vertigo—so I’m pretty careful to steer clear of dizziness.”
He nodded, looking slightly amused. “Think of all the money you’ve saved by not drinking. If I didn’t love scotch so much, I’d be a billionaire.” His gaze drifted from me to the redhead on stage, then back to me again. “Did you go hear Faust’s talk this afternoon?”
I nodded.
“What’d you think?”
“I thought it was interesting, especially the stuff about nanomaterials and tissue scaffolds for bone and cartilage. Sounds like five or ten years from now we’ll be able to limp into the doctor’s office and sprint out an hour later with a rebuilt knee.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” he said.
“You think Faust is overstating the potential?”
He shrugged. “I think he’s underestimating the difficulties. Guys like him always do. They think they’re smarter than the rest of us. Smart enough to fix anything, solve anything. Smart enough to cheat death.”
He picked at the edges of a fingernail. “You remember all the buzz about cryonics a few years back?
Deep-freeze your way to immortality?”
“Vaguely. Wasn’t it Ted Williams, the baseball great, who had his head cut off and frozen when he died?”
“Right. Theory is, the brain—and memory, and personality, all that shit—can be preserved in liquid nitrogen and then thawed out and revived and spiffed up in a few decades or centuries and grafted onto a cloned body. Give me a break.”
I smiled. “It does sound like they’re selling water from a high-tech Fountain of Youth, doesn’t it?”
“Faust’s given money to those guys,” Sinclair said, studying my reaction as he played that card. “He’s funneled research funding to Alcor, the outfit in Arizona that has Ted’s head on ice. He’s on their scientific advisory committee, too.”
He was probably gratified by my look of surprise. “Well, that’s certainly interesting,” I said. “Plant enough seeds, some of them bear fruit someday. Probably not the cryonic immortality seeds, but maybe carbon-fiber bone scaffolds.”
He shook his head.