Psi-High And Others

Part One The Martyr

Four and one-half hours after Martian sunset, the-last light in the Headquarters Building finally flicked out.

Carl Golden stamped his feet against the cold, blowing into his cupped hands to warm them as he pressed back into the shadow of the doorway across from Headquarters. The night air bit his nostrils and turned his breath into clouds of gray vapor in the semidarkness. The atmosphere screens surrounding the Ironstone Colony on Mars kept the oxygen in, all right, but they could never keep the biting cold out. After this long vigil he was chilled to the bone and bored to the point of screaming, but when the light at last went out across the way, boredom vanished and warm blood prickled through his shivering legs.

He slid back tight against the coarse black stone of the doorway, peering intently across the road into the gloom. Who had been staying so late? The girl, of course. He’d thought so, but wasn’t sure until he saw her coming out, heard the faint chink of keys as she pulled the heavy door down on its counterweights behind her and locked it. A quick glance left and right, and she started down the frosty road toward the lights of the colony.

Carl Golden waited until she was out of sight. No briefcase; good, good. That was one loophole he had thought of while he stood there freezing. Not that anybody took any work home around here, but there was always a chance. His heart pounded as he forced himself to wait ten minutes more; then, teeth chattering in the cold, he ducked swiftly across the dark road to the low, one-story building.

Through the window he could see the lobby call-board. All the lights were dark. Good, again—no one remained in the lower levels. Headquarters ran by routine, just like everything else in this god-forsaken hole. Utter, abysmal, trancelike routine. The girl had been a little later than usual, but that was because of the supply ship coming in tomorrow, no doubt. Reports to get ready, supply requisitions to fill out, personnel recommendations to complete—

— and the final reports on Armstrongs death. Mustn’t forget that, Carl. The real story, the absolute, factual truth, without any nonsense. The reports that would go, ultimately, to Walter Rinehart and to no one else, just as all the other important reports from the Ironstone Colony had been going for so many years. Only this time Walter Rinehart was in for a surprise.

Carl skirted the long, low building, clinging to the black shadows of the side wall. Halfway around he came to the supply chute, covered with a heavy moulded-stone cover.

Now?

It had to be now, and this was the only way; it had taken four endless months here for him to discover that. Four months of this ridiculous masquerade, made all the more idiotic by the fact that every soul in the colony had accepted him for exactly what he pretended to be, and never once challenged him; not even Terry Fisher, who habitually challenged everything and everybody, even when he was sober! But the four months of play-acting had told on Carl’s nerves; they showed in his reactions, in the hollows under his sharp brown eyes. The specter of a slip-up, an aroused suspicion, was always in his mind, and he knew that until he had the reports before his eyes, there was nothing Dan Fowler could do to save him if he betrayed himself. The night he’d left Earth, Dan had shaken his hand and said, “Remember, lad, I don’t know you. Sorry it’s got to be that way, but we can’t risk it now.” And they couldn’t, of course. Not until they knew, for certain, who had murdered Kenneth Armstrong.

They already knew why.

The utter stillness of the place reassured him; he hoisted up the chute cover, threw it high, and worked his long legs and body into the chute. It was a steep slide downwards; he held his breath for an instant, listening, then let go. Blackness engulfed him as the cover snapped closed behind him. He went down fast, struck hard and rolled. The chute opened into the commissary in the third deep-level of the building; the place was as black as the inside of a pocket He tested unbroken legs with a sigh of relief, then limped around crates and boxes in the darkness to the place where the door ought to be.

In the corridor beyond there was some light—dim phosphorescence from the Martian night-rock lining the walls and tiling the floor. Carl walked swiftly, aware of the deafening clack-clack of his heels on the ringing stone. At the end of the corridor he tried the heavy door.

It complained, but it gave. Carl sighed his relief. It had been a quick, imperfect job of jimmying the lock; he had left it looking so obviously tampered with that he’d worried about it all day. But then, why would anyone test it? Unless they suspected a snake in their midst—

Through the door he stepped into a black room again, started forward as the door swung shut behind him. Then somewhere a shoe scraped, the faintest rustle of sound. Carl froze. His own trouser leg? A trick of acoustics? He didn’t move a muscle.

Silence. Then: “Carl?”

His pocket light flickered around the room, revealing a secretary’s cubbyhole, a typewriter. It stopped on a pair of trouser legs, a body, slouched down in the soft plastifoam chair, a sleepy face, ruddy and bland, with a shock of sandy hair and quizzical eyebrows.

“Terry! What are you doing here in the dark?”

“Waiting for you, old boy.” The man leaned forward, grinning up at him. “You’re late, Carl. Should have made it sooner than this, sheems—seems to me.”

Carl’s light moved past the man in the chair to the floor. The bottle was standing there, barely half full. “You’re drunk,” he said.

“Course I’m drunk,” Terry Fisher laughed. “You think I was going to sober up after you left me at that bar tonight? No thanks, I’d rather be drunk, any day of the week, around this dump.”

“Well, you’ve got to get out of here, go get drunk somewhere else.” Carl’s voice rose in bitter anger. Of all times, of all times—“Terry, how did you get in here? You’ve got to get out.”

The man looked up, no longer laughing. “So do you. They’re on to you, Carl. I don’t think you know that, but they are.” He leaned forward precariously. “I had a talk with Barness this morning, one of his nice ‘spontaneous’ chats, and he pumped the hell out of me and thought I was too drunk to know what he was doing. They’re expecting you to come here tonight—

Carl tugged at the drunken man’s arm in the darkness. “Get out of here, Terry, or so help me—”

Terry clutched at him. “Didn’t you hear me? They know about you. They know you’re no personnel supervisor. Barness thinks you’re spying for the Asian Bloc. They’re starting a Mars colony too, you know. Barness is sure you’re selling them information.”

“Barness is an ass,” Carl said.

“Of course, just like all the other Retreads they have running this place,” Terry said. “But Tm not an ass, and you didn’t fool me for two days.”

Carl gritted his teeth. How could Terry Fisher know? “For the last time—”

Fisher lurched to his feet. “Look, friend, they’ll get you if you don’t go. They can try you and shoot you right on the spot, and Barness will do it, too. I had to warn you that you’ve walked right into it, but you can still get away—” It was hateful but there was no other way. The drunken man’s head jerked up at the blow, and he gave a little grunt, then slid back down on the chair. Carl checked his pulse, then scrambled over his legs and headed for the vault door beyond. If they caught him now, Terry Fisher was right, they could shoot him on the spot. But give him five more minutes—The lock squeaked, and the vault door fell open. Inside he tore through the file cases, wrenched at the locker drawers in frantic haste, ripping the weak aluminum sheeting like thick tinfoil. Then he found the folder with KENNETH ARMSTRONG marked on the tab.

Somewhere above him an alarm went off, screaming a mournful note through the building. He threw on the light switch, flooding the room with whiteness, and started through the papers in the folder one by one. No time to read what the papers said, a one-second look at each sheet was enough. Retinal photos were hard to superimpose swiftly and keep straight, but that was one reason why Carl Golden was on Mars right now instead of sitting in some office back on Earth.

He scanned the last page, and threw the folder onto the floor. As he went through the door, he flipped out the light, raced with clattering footsteps down the corridor.

Lights caught him from both sides, slicing the blackness like hot knives. “All right, Golden. Stop right there.”

Dark figures came out of the lights, ripped his clothing off without a word. Somebody wrenched open his mouth, shined a light in, rammed coarse cold fingers into his throat. There was a smell of sweat, and harsh, angry whispers. Then: “All right, you snake, upstairs. Barness wants to see you.”

They packed him naked into the street, hurried him into a three-wheeled ground car. Five minutes later he was herded out of the car into another building, and Barness, the Ironstone administrator, was glaring at him across the room.

Odd things flashed through Carl’s mind. You seldom saw a Retread really get angry, but Barness was angry. The man’s young-old face (the strange, utterly ageless amalgamation of sixty years of wisdom, superimposed by the youth of a twenty-year-old) had unaccustomed lines of wrath about the eyes and mouth. Barness didn’t waste words. “What were you after down there?”

“Armstrong.” Carl cut the word out almost gleefully. “And I got what I wanted, and there’s nothing you or Walter Rinehart or anybody else can do about it now. I don’t know what I saw in that report, but I’ve got it recorded in my eyes and in my brain now and you can’t touch it.”

“You stupid fool, we can peel your brain,” Barness snarled.

“Well, you won’t. You won’t dare.”

Barness glanced at the officer who had brought him in. “Jack—”

“Senator Dan Fowler won’t like it,” said Carl.

The administrator stopped short, blinking at him. He took a slow breath. Then he sank down into his chair. “Fowler,” he said, as though dawn was just breaking.

“That’s right. Dan Fowler sent me up here. I’ve found what he wants. You shoot me now, and when they probe you, Dan will know that I found it, and you won’t be around for another rejuvenation.”

Barness looked suddenly old, and puzzled. “But what did he want?”

“The truth about Kenneth Armstrong’s death. Not the World Hero, Died with His Boots on, and all that twaddle. Dan wanted the truth. Who killed him. Why this colony is grinding down from compound low to stop, and turning men like Terry Fisher into alcoholic bums. Why Ironstone is turning into a super-refined Birdie’s Rest for old men. But mostly who killed Armstrong, how he was murdered, who gave the orders. And if you don’t mind, I’d like my clothes back, I’m getting cold.”

“And you got all that,” said Barness, wonderingly.

“That’s right.”

“But you haven’t read what you got, have you?”

“Not yet. Plenty of time for that on the way back.”

Barness nodded wearily, and tossed Carl his clothes. “Maybe you ought to read it tonight. It might just surprise you.”

Golden’s eyes widened. Something in the man’s voice, some curious note of defeat and hopelessness, told him that Barness was not lying. “Really? In what way?”

“Armstrong’s death wasn’t accidental; you’re right there. We lied to the press about that. But nobody murdered him, either. Nobody gave any orders, to anybody. Nobody wanted him dead. The reason Armstrong died was because he shot himself—quite of his own volition.”

“All right, Senator,” the young red-headed doctor said. “You told me you wanted it straight. That’s how you’re going to get it.” Moments before, Dr. Moss had been laughing and joking in pleasant banter. He wasn’t laughing now. “You’ve got six months, at the outside. Nine, if you went to bed tomorrow, retired from the Senate, and lived on tea and crackers. But from where I’m sitting I wouldn’t bet a plugged nickel that you’ll be alive a month from now. If you think I’m joking, you just try to squeeze a bet out of me.”

Senator Dan Fowler took the black cigar from his mouth, stared at the chewed-up end for a moment, and put it back in his mouth. There was something exceedingly witty that he’d planned to say at this point in the examination, but now it didn’t seem too funny. If Dr. Moss had been some mealy-mouthed quack like some of the doctors Dan had seen, it would be easy. But Dr. Moss wasn’t. He was one of the very sharp, very competent, very human doctors the Hoffman Medical Center had been training in these past few decades, among the best doctors you could find in the world. Furthermore, Dr. Moss did not seem overwhelmingly impressed by the man sitting across the desk from him, senator or no senator, a fact which made Dan Fowler just a trifle uneasy. He looked at the doctor and scowled. “Garbage,” he said.

The red-headed doctor shrugged. “Look, Senator, sometimes a banana is a banana. I know heart disease, and I know how it acts. I also know it kills people if they wait too long. And once you’re dead, no rejuvenation lab is going to bring you back to life.”

“Oh hell! Who’s dying?” Fowler’s gray eyebrows knit in the old familiar scowl, and he bit down hard on the cigar. “Heart disease! So I get a little pain now and then—it never lasts long, and when it starts getting bad I’ll come in and take the full treatment. But I can’t do it now!” He spread his hands in a violent gesture. “I only came in here because my daughter dragged me. My heart’s doing fine. I’ve been working an eighteen-hour day for forty years now, and I can do it for another year or two.”

“But you do have pain,” Dr. Moss said gently.

“So? A little twinge, now and then.”

“Like whenever you lose your temper. Whenever you run for a plane. Whenever anything upsets you.”

“All right—a twinge.”

“Which makes you sit down for ten or fifteen minutes when it comes on, and doesn’t go away any more with just one nitro tablet, you have to take two, and sometimes three—right?”

Dan Fowler blinked. “All right, sometimes it gets a little bad—”

“And it used to be only once or twice a month, but now it’s almost every day. And once or twice you’ve just blacked out for a while, and made your staff work like demons to cover for you and keep it off the TV, right?”

“Say, who’s been talking to you?”

“Really, Senator!”

“Can’t even trust your own blood daughter to keep her trap shut” Fowler tossed his cigar butt down in disgust “It happened once, yes. That confounded Rinehart is enough to make anybody black out” He thrust out his jaw and glowered at Dr. Moss as though it were all his fault Then he grinned. “Oh, I know you’re right, Doc, it’s just that this is the wrong time. I can’t take two months out now. There’s too much to be done between now and the middle of next month.”

“Oh, yes. The Hearings. Why not turn them over to your staff? They know what’s going on.”

“Nonsense. They know, but not like I know. After the Hearings, fine. I’ll come along like a lamb. But not right now—”

Dr. Moss reddened, slammed his fist down on the desk. “Senator, are you both blind and deaf? Or just plain stupid? Didn’t you hear me a moment ago? You may not live through the Hearings. You could go out, just like that any minute. But this is 2134 a.d., not the Middle Ages. It would be so utterly, hopelessly pointless to let that happen.”

Fowler champed his cigar and scowled. “After the Retread was done I’d have to free-agent for a year, wouldn’t I?” It was an accusation.

“You should. But that’s really only a formality. If you want to go right back to the same thing you were doing before you came to the center, that’s purely your option.”

“Yes, if! But supposing I didn’t? Supposing I was all changed.”

The young doctor looked at the man shrewdly. Dan Fowler was fifty-six years old and he looked forty. It seemed incredible even to Dr. Moss that this man could have done what he had done, and still look almost as young and fighting-mad now as he had when he started. Clever old goat too, but Dan Fowler’s last remarks bad lifted a veil. Moss smiled to himself. “You’re afraid of it, aren’t you, Senator?”

“Of rejuvenation? Nonsense.”

“But you are. You aren’t the only one, it’s a pretty frightening thing. Cash in the old model, take out a new one, just like a jet racer or a worn out talk-writer. Only it isn’t machinery, it’s your body, and your life.” Dr. Moss spread his hands. “It scares a man. Rejuvenation isn’t the right word, of course. Aside from the neurones, they take way every cell in your body, one way or another, and give you new ones. A hundred and fifty years ago Cancelmo and Klein did it on a dog, right in this building when the Hoffman Center was new. They called it subtotal prosthesis. A crude job—I’ve studied their papers and films. Vat-grown hearts and kidneys, revitalized vascular material, building up new organ systems like a patchwork quilt, coaxing new tissues to grow to replace old ones. But they got a living dog out of it, and that dog lived to the ripe old age of thirty-seven years.”

Dr. Moss pushed back from his desk, watching Dan Fowler’s face. “Then in 1992 Nimrock tried it on a Mercy Man here, and almost got himself convicted of murder because the man died. That was a hundred and forty-one years ago. While Nimrock’s trial was still going on, his workers completed the second job, and the man lived, and oh, did that jury fall over itself to have Nimrock set free!”

As the doctor talked, Dan Fowler sat silent, chewing his cigar furiously. But listening—he was listening, all right. “Well, it was a crude process in those days,” Dr. Moss said. “Hit or miss. But in those days the Hoffman Center was barely getting organized as a great medical research complex. They were still using Mercy Men—paid medical mercenaries—for their experiments, and public opinion was fighting them like mad. With rejuvenation a success, they brought in the best researchers and clinical physicians the world had to offer, threw everything they had into it, with more financial support than they knew what to do with, and today there is nothing crude or haphazard about subtotal prosthesis.” He pointed to a bronze plaque hanging on the wall. “That’s on the wall of every examining room here in the Hoffman Center. You’ve seen it before; read it.”

Dan Fowler’s eyes went up to the plaque. A list of names. At the top words said, “These ten gave life to Mankind.”

Below it were the names:

“I know,” said Dan Fowler. “June 1, 2005. They were the first scientifically controlled volunteers.”

“Ten out of several thousand volunteers,” Moss amended. “Those ten were chosen by lot. Already people were dreaming about what subtotal prosthesis could do. Think of it, at a time when death by the age of eighty or ninety was still a virtual certainty, and very final too! To preserve the great minds, compound the accumulated wisdom of one lifetime with still another lifetime, and maybe another and another—the old Fountain of Youth dream, at last come true! So those ten people, representing ten great fields of study, volunteered to risk their lives. Not to live forever, just to see if rejuvenation really could preserve their minds in newly built bodies. All of them were old, older than you are, Senator. Some were sicker than you are, and believe me, every one of them was afraid. But seven of the ten are still alive today, a hundred and thirty years later. John Shaw died in a jet crash ten years after his first Retread. Tatum died of a neuro-toxic virus, because in those days we couldn’t do anything to rebuild neurones and brain tissue. Bevalaqua took his own life, for reasons unknown. The rest are still alive, vigorously and productively alive, after two more rejuvenations.”

“Fine,” said Dan Fowler. “I still can’t do it now.”

“That was just ten people,” Dr. Moss cut in. “It took five years to get ready for them, then. Today we can handle five hundred a year, but still only five hundred select individuals, to live on instead of dying. You have the incredible good fortune to be one of those chosen, and you’ve got the gall to sit there and tell me you don’t have the time for it!”

The senator rose slowly, lighting another cigar. “Doctor, it could be five thousand a year instead of five hundred. That’s why I don’t have the time. It could be fifteen thousand, fifty thousand. It could be, but it’s not. Senator Walter Rinehart has been rejuvenated twice already. He is one of the most corrupt politicians this nation has ever spawned, the chairman of the committee that makes the final irrevocable selection of just exactly who the lucky ones will be each year. Rinehart’s on the list, of course. I’m on the list because I’ve shouted so loudly and made such a stink for such a long time that the Criterion Committee didn’t dare leave me off. But you’re not on the list. Why not? You could be. Every productive individual in our society could be.”

Dr. Moss spread his hands. “I’m not beefing. The Criterion Committee does the choosing.”

“Rinehart’s criteria!” Dan Fowler exploded.

“But Rinehart doesn’t decide for himself. There all sorts of wise men and women on that committee, people trained in every area of knowledge, working themselves sick to pick out the best choices each year.”

Fowler looked at him. “Yes, working to pick out who shall live and who shall not live. Well, who is wise enough for that job? You don’t know very much about people, Doctor. Nor about politics. Who do you think set the figure at five hundred a year? The Hoffman Center? The committee? No. Rinehart set the number. Who has consistently maneuvered to hold down appropriations so the center couldn’t handle more than five hundred? Rinehart has, seven times, now. The committeemen are good people, but they want to live, too, and their chairman is a vulture. For decades he’s used the Criterion Committee as his own personal weapon. Built power with it. Got it in a strangle hold he never intends to let go.” The senator leaned across the desk, his eyes bright with anger. “I haven’t time to stop for a Retread now, because finally, at last, I can stop Walter Rinehart, if only I can live a few more weeks. I can break him, free the Criteron Committee from his control, or any one man’s control, now while there’s still a chance, and throw rejuvenation open to everybody instead of to five hundred chosen ones a year. I can stop Rinehart because I’ve dug at him and dug at him for twenty-nine years, and shouted and screamed and fought and made people listen, and now, finally, I have him boxed into a corner that he can’t get out of. And if I fumble now it’ll all be down the drain, finished, washed up. And if that happens, nobody will ever be able to stop him.”

There was silence in the little examining room. Then Dr. Moss spread his hands. “The Hearings are that critical, eh?”

“I’m afraid they are.”

“But why does it have to be your personal fight? Why can’t someone else do it?”

“Anyone else would fumble it. Anyone else would foul it up. Senator Libby fouled it up once, disastrously, years ago. Rinehart’s lived for a hundred and nineteen years, and he’s been learning new tricks every year. I’ve only lived fifty-six years so far, but I’m onto his tricks. I can beat him.”

“But why you?”

“Somebody’s got to do it. My card is on top.”

On the desk a telephone buzzed. Dr. Moss answered, then handed Dan the receiver. A moment later the senator was grinning like a cat, struggling into his overcoat and scarf. “Sorry, Doc. I know what you tell me is true, and I’m no fool. If I really have to stop, I’ll stop.”

“Tomorrow, then.”

“Not tomorrow. One of my lads is back from Ironstone Colony with the key to the whole thing in his head. We’ve got hard work to do tomorrow, but I think I can get the Hearings rescheduled a bit sooner, say next week. When they’re over with, I’ll be in, scout’s honor. Meanwhile, keep your eye on the TV. Ill be seeing you, lad.”

The door clicked shut behind him, leaving a faint blue cloud of cigar smoke in his wake. Dr. David Moss stared at it gloomily. “I hope so,” he said softly to himself, “I truly hope so.”

A white Volta two-wheeler was waiting for him outside. Jean Fowler drove off with characteristic contempt for the laws of gravity after her father had piled in. Carl Golden was there, looking thinner, more gaunt and hawklike than ever before, his brown eyes sharp under his shock of black hair. Dan clapped him on the shoulder, and shot a dark look at his daughter, relegating her to some private Fowler limbo, which was where she belonged and would remain until Dan got excited about something and forgot how she’d betrayed her ailing father to Dr. Moss, a matter of fifteen minutes at the most. Jean Fowler knew her father too well to worry about it. She squinted out the window at the afternoon traffic as the car squealed around the cloverleaf onto the Boulevard Freeway, its stabilizing gyros whining, and then buzzed across the river toward town. “Confound it, boy,” Dan was saying, “you could at least have flashed a signal that you were coming. Jean spotted you on the passenger list, and I had to do back-flips to get old MacKenzie to reschedule the Hearings for next week instead of two months from now.”

Carl scowled. “I thought the dates were all set.”

Dan chuckled. “They were. But it was you we had to wait for, and with you back with the true story on Armstrong why delay?” He didn’t mention the doctor’s urgent warning.

Carl Golden shook his head. “I don’t like the switch in dates, Dan.”

“Well, Dwight MacKenzie didn’t like it either, but he’s still setting the committee’s business calendar, and he couldn’t find a good solid reason why the Hearings shouldn’t be rescheduled. And I think our good friend Senator Rinehart is probably wriggling on the stick right now, just on the shock value of the switch. Always figure in the shock value of everything you do, my boy; it pays off more than you’d ever dream.”

“I still don’t like it. I wish you hadn’t done it.”

“But why? Look, lad, I know that with Ken Armstrong dead we had to change our whole approach. It’s going to be trickier, without him, but it might even work out better. The Senate knows what’s been going on between Rinehart and me. So does the President. They know elections are coming up next June. They know I want a seat on the Criterion Committee before elections, and they know that to get a seat I’ve got to unseat Rinehart. They know I’ve shaken him up, that he’s scared of me. Okay, fine. With Armstrong here to tell how and why he was chosen for Retread back in ’87, what he had to pay Rinehart to get the nod, we’d have had Rinehart running for his life—”

“But you don’t have Armstrong here,” Carl cut in flatly, “and that’s that.”

“No, I don’t, but believe me, before I get through with him, Rinehart’s going to wish I did. I needed Armstrong badly. Rinehart knew that, and had him taken care of. It was fishy, it stank from here to Mars, but Rinehart covered it up fast and clean. Well, it was wasted effort. With the stuff you got from the Ironstone Colony files we can charge Rinehart with murder, and the whole Senate knows his motive already. He didn’t dare let Armstrong testify.”

Carl was shaking his head sadly.

“Well, what’s wrong?”

“You aren’t going to like this, Dan, but I’m afraid Rinehart had nothing to do with Kenneth Armstrong’s death.”

Fowler gaped at him. “Nothing to do with it!”

“Nothing. Armstrong committed suicide.”

Dan Fowler sat back hard. “Oh, no.”

“Sorry.”

“Ken Armstrong? Suicided?” Dan shook his head helplessly, groping for words. “I—I—oh, Carl, you’ve got to be wrong. I knew Ken Armstrong.”

“No, I’m not wrong. There are plenty of things that are very strange about that Mars colony, but Armstrong’s death was suicide. Period. Even Barness couldn’t believe it at the time and still doesn’t know why.”

Sharp eyes went to Carl’s face. “What’s so ‘very strange’ about the colony?”

Carl Golden shrugged. “Hard to put a finger on it. This was my first look at Ironstone, I had nothing to compare it with. But there’s something wrong out there. I always thought the Mars colony was a frontier, a real challenge—you know, Man against the Wilderness, and all that Hard men, hard work, saloons jammed on Saturday night, the sort of place that could take Earthbound softies and toughen them up in two weeks, working to tame the desert—” His voice trailed off. “Well, there’s not much hard work going on, that I could see, and when a good man goes up there is just gets softer, not tougher. They’ve got a saloon, all right, but everybody just goes in there to get drunk and wish that something, somehow, sometime would happen. I met a guy named Fisher, must have been a top rate man when he went out there, five years ago. A real go-getter, leader type, lots of ideas and the guts to put them across. Now he’s got a hobnail liver and a very warm friendship with port wine and not much else. He came back home on the ship with me, hating Mars and everything up there, most of all himself. Something’s gone wrong up there, Dan. Maybe that’s why Armstrong took the route he did.”

The senator took a deep breath. “Not a man like Ken Armstrong. I used to worship him when I was a kid. You know, I was just ten years old when he came back to Earth for his second Retread.” He shook his head. “I wanted to go back to Mars with him. I actually packed up to run away, until dear brother Paul caught me and squealed to Dad. Imagine.”

“I’m sorry, Dan.”

The car whizzed off the freeway and began weaving through the residential areas of Arlington. Jean swung under an arched gate, stopped in front of a large greystone house of the sort they hadn’t built for a hundred years. Dan Fowler stared out at the gray November afternoon. “Well, then we’re really on thin ice at the Hearings. Nothing really solid at all. If I can’t prove that Rinehart has corrupted his job, we’re in trouble. Well, we’ve slugged out some tough ones before, and won. This may take some steamrollering, but we can manage it.” He turned to the girl. “Ill have to go over Carl’s report for anything I can find in it first. Meanwhile, get Dr. Schirmer on the line. Tell him I said if he wants his job as Chief Coordinator of the Hoffman Medical Center next year, he’d better have all the statistics there are on all rejuvenated persons, past and present, in my office by tomorrow morning at eight.”

Jean Fowler avoided her father’s eyes. “Dr. Schirmer’s waiting for you inside right now. He’s been here over an hour.”

“Here? What for?”

“He wouldn’t say. Nothing to do with politics, he said—

Something about Uncle Paul.”

Dr. Nathan Schirmer, chubby and nervous, was waiting in the library, sipping a brandy and pretending without success to appear interested in a Congressional Record on the tape-reader. He looked up, birdlike, as Dan Fowler strode in. Dan shook his hand like an old friend. “Good to see you, Nathan. Sit down, sit down. Wanted to chew the fat with you anyway, but what’s this about my brother?”

The doctor coughed into his hand. “Why—nothing, really. I mean nothing urgent. I just thought you’d want to know that Paul was in Washington this afternoon.”

“Of course he was. He was scheduled to go to the center—” Dan broke off short, whirling on Schirmer. “Wait a minute! There wasn’t a slip-up on his permit somehow?”

Dr. Schirmer looked blank. “Permit?”

“For rejuvenation, you idiot! He’s on the Starship Project, coordinating engineer of the whole works out there. He’s got a fair place on the list coming to him three ways from Sunday. MacKenzie put the permit through months ago, and Paul has just been fooling around clearing the decks out in Vegas so he could come in—”

The coordinator’s eyes widened. “Oh, there wasn’t anything wrong on our side if that’s what you mean. The permit was in perfect order, the doctors at the center were ready and waiting for him. That isn’t the trouble.”

“Then what is?”

The doctor flushed. “Well, I’ll be blunt. The trouble is, your brother refused. He flew all the way out here, right on schedule, just to laugh in our faces and tell us to go fly a kite. Then he got on the next jet back to Nevada. All in one afternoon.”

The vibration of the jet engines hung just at perception level, nagging and nagging at Dan Fowler, until he threw his papers aside with a snarl of disgust and peered angrily out the window at nothing.

The plane was high and moving fast. Far below was a tiny spot of light in the blackness. Pittsburgh, maybe, or Cleveland. Didn’t matter which. Jets went at such-and-such a speed; they left one place at such-and-such a time and arrived somewhere else so many hours or minutes later, and worrying didn’t move them any faster. He could worry, or not worry, it was all the same; he would be in Las Vegas at exactly the same time, to the second, either way. Then another half-hour taxi ride over dusty desert roads would bring him to the glorified Quonset hut his brother called home. And now X)an Fowler, that crafty old specialist in the art of getting the immovable to move when he wanted it to move, could not speed by one iota the process of getting there.

Dean had tried to call Paul from Washington, and received no answer. He had talked to the Las Vegas authorities, and to Starship Project Headquarters; he’d even talked to Lijinsky, who was running Starship, but nobody knew anything. The police said yes, they would check at Dr. Fowler’s residence, if he wasn’t out at the ship, and then call right back, but they hadn’t called back, and that was two hours ago. Meanwhile, Carl had chartered Dan a plane.

Now, staring out at the blackness, Dan clenched his fist, drove it into his palm again and again. Ten thousand devils take Paul! Of all miserable times for him to start playing games, acting like an idiot child! And the work and sweat Dan had gone through to get that permit for him, to buy it, beg it, steal it, gold-plate it. Of course the odds were good that Paul would have gotten it anyway without so much as a nod from Dan—he was high on the committee’s priority list, a key man on the Starship Project, which certainly rated top national priority. But with Rinehart heading the committee Dan couldn’t take a chance. He’d personally gone out on a limb, way out—the senator clenched his teeth in helpless frustration and anger, and felt a twinge of pain blossom in his chest, spread to his shoulder and arm. He cursed, fumbled for the bottle in his vest pocket. Confounded heart and confounded brother and confounded Rinehart—why did everything have to break the wrong way now? Of all times in his fifty-six years of life, why now?

All right, Dan. Cool off, boy. Relax. Shame on you. Why not quit being selfish just for a minute? Dan didn’t like the idea as it flickered through his mind, but then he didn’t like anything too much right then, so he hauled the thought back for a rerun. Big Dan Fowler, Senator Dan Fowler, Selfish Dan Fowler loves Dan Fowler, mostly.

Poor Paul.

The words had been pounding in his mind like words in an echo-chamber ever since he had seen Dr. Schirmer and heard what he had to say. Poor Paul. Brother Dan did all right for himself, he did; made quite a name for himself down in Washington, you know, a fighter, a real fighter. The Boy with the Golden Touch (mocking laughter from the wings). Everything he ever did worked out with him on top, somehow. Not Paul though. Paul was different. Smart enough, plenty going for him, but he never had Dan’s drive, Dan’s persuasiveness, Dan’s ruthlessness. Nothing but bad breaks for brother Paul, right down the line. Kinda tough on a guy, with a fireball like Dan in the family. Poor Paul.

Dan let his mind drift back, slowly, remembering little things, trying to pin down just when it was, what single instant in time, that he had stopped fighting Paul and started pitying him. It had been different, years before. Paul was always the smart one, then. He never had Dan’s build, or Dan’s daring, but he could think rings around him. Dan was always a little slow—never forgot anything he learned, but he was a slow study. Until he found out there were ways to get around that Dad and Mom had always favored Paul, babied him and protected him, and that was tougher to get around, but there were ways.

There was the night the prize money came from the lottery. How old was he then? Twelve? Thirteen? Paul was seventeen. Dan had grubbed up ten dollars polishing cars, and matched Paul’s ten to split a ticket down the middle. Never dreamed the thing would pay off, the National Tax Lottery was very new at that time. And then, to their stunned amazement, it did pay off, two thousand dollars cash, quite a pile for a pair of boys. Enough to buy the jet racer Dan had his heart set on. He’d been so excited tears had poured down his face, but Paul had said no. They would split the money fifty-fifty, just like the ticket, Paul had said. There were hot words, and pleading, and threats, and Paul had just laughed at him, until Dan got so mad he sailed into him with his fists. Bad mistake, that Paul was skinny, not much muscle, but he had five years on Dan, and a longer reach. Paul connected just once, a left jab that put Dan flat on his back with a concussion and a broken jaw, and that was that Or so it seemed, except that Dan had actually won the fight the moment Paul struck the blow. It was the broken jaw that did it, and then later the fight between Mom and Dad, with Dad saying, “But Mary, he asked for it!” And Mom responding tearfully, “I don’t care, that big bully didn’t have to mutilate him.” Of course Dan won. A dirty way to win, both the boys knew, but Dan got his racer on the strength of that broken jaw. The bone never healed quite right, the fracture damaged one of the centers of ossification, the doc had said, and later Dan became God’s gift to the political cartoonists with that heavy, angular jaw—a fighter’s jaw, they called it.

That fight started it From then on Dan knew he could beat Paul. He didn’t feel good about the way he’d beaten him, but it was a good thing to know he could. Couldn’t ever be sure of it, of course, had to keep proving it, over and over, just to be sure. The successes came, and he always let Paul know about them, chuckling with glee, while Paul sat quietly, learning to take it.

To take it? Or to fight back, ineffectually, and slowly come to hate him? Hard to say. There was the night Dan broke with the Universalist Party in New Chicago, at that hundred-dollar-a-plate dinner. He’d told them all, that night. The big boys in the party had cold-shouldered him and put Jack Libby up to run for mayor instead of Dan. Oh, he’d raised a glorious stink that night—he’d never enjoyed himself so much in his life, turning their whole lousy twisted machine over to the public on a silver platter. Cutting loose from the old crowd, appointing himself a committee of one to nominate himself on an Independent Reform ticket, campaign for himself, and elect himself. A whippersnapper of thirty-two. Paul had laughed at the blistering speech he’d given before he stomped out of the banquet hall. “You do get melodramatic, don’t you, Dan? Well, if you want to cut your own throat, that’s your affair.” Dan had exploded in rage, told Paul to watch what happened before he shot off his mouth, he might see a thing or two—and he saw a thing or two, all right. He remembered Paul’s face a few months later, when Libby conceded his defeat at 11:45 on election night, and Dan rode into office with a new crowd of people ready to help him clean up New Chicago as it hadn’t been cleaned up since the Two Weeks’ War. The sweetest bite of the whole victory pie had been the look on Paul’s face that night.

So they’d fought, and Dan had won and rubbed it in, and Paul had lost and hated him for it, until slowly, Dan’s attitude had subtly changed from “Okay, you wise guy, I’ll show you” to “Come on, Paul, quit floundering around and start doing something! Who needs engineers? You’ll starve to death,” and then finally, to “Poor Paul.”

How had it happened? Why?

Dan wondered, suddenly, if he had ever really forgiven Paul that blow to the jaw.

He shook himself, scowling into the blackness outside the plane. Okay, they’d fought it out, a game between brothers, only it never was a game, really. He knew how much he owed to Paul. He’d known it with growing concern for many years. And now if he had to drag Paul back to Washington by the hair, he’d drag the silly fool.

They didn’t look very much alike. There was a spareness about Paul, a tall, lean man, with large soft eyes that concealed their anger and a face lined with tiredness and resignation. A year ago, when Dan had seen him last, he had looked a young sixty, closer to forty-five. Now he looked an old, old sixty-one. How much of this was his illness Dan didn’t know. The pathologist at the Hoffman Center had said: “It’s not very malignant right now, but you can never tell when it’ll blow up, and it’s one of the new viral tumors that we can’t deal with just yet He’d better be scheduled for his Retread as soon as possible, if he’s got a permit.”

That was doubtless part of it, but part of it was just Paul. The house was exactly as Dan had expected (though he had never been inside this house since Paul had come to Starship Project fifteen years ago), stuffy, severe, rather gloomy; rooms packed with bookshelves, drawing boards, odds and ends of papers and blueprints and inks; thick, ugly furniture from the early 2000’s; a cluttered, improvised, helter-skelter barn of a testing lab, with modem equipment that looked lost and alien scattered among the mouldering junk of two centuries.

“Get your coat,” said Dan to his brother. “It’s cold outside. We’re going back to Washington.”

“Have a drink.” Paul waved him toward the sideboard. “Relax. Your pilot needs a rest.”

“Paul, I didn’t come here to play games. The games are over now.”

Paul poured brandy with deliberation, one for Dan, one for himself. “Good brandy,” he said. “Wish I could afford more of it.”

“Paul. You’re going with me.”

“Sorry, Dan.”

“Do you know what you’re saying?”

“Perfectly.”

“Paul, you don’t just say ‘Thanks, but I don’t think I’ll have any’ when they give you a rejuvenation permit. Nobody refuses rejuvenation. There are a million people out there begging for a place on the list. It’s life, Paul. You can’t just turn it down.”

“This is good brandy,” said Paul. “Care to take a look at my lab, by the way? Not too well equipped, but sometimes I can work here better than—”

Dan turned on his brother viciously. “I will tell you what I’m going to do,” he said, hitting each syllable. “I’m going to take you to the plane. If you won’t come, my pilot and I will drag you. When we get to Washington, we’ll take you to the Hoffman Center, if you won’t sign the necessary releases, I’ll forge them. I’ll bribe two witnesses who will swear in the face of death by torture that they saw you signing. I’ll buy the doctors that can do the job, and if they don’t do it, I’ll sweat them down until they will do it.”

He slammed the glass down on the table, heart pounding in his throat, pain creeping up his chest. “I’ve got lots of things on lots of people, and I can get things done when I want them done. People don’t fool with me in Washington any more, because when they do they get their fingers burned off at the knuckles. Paul, I knew you were stubborn but I didn’t think you were blockheaded stupid!”

Paul shrugged.

“You don’t think I could do it?” Dan roared.

“Oh, I suppose you could. But it’s a lot of trouble for such an unwilling victim. And I’m your brother, Dan. Remember?”

Dan Fowler spread his hands in defeat, sank down in the chair. “Paul, tell me why.”

“I don’t want to be rejuvenated.” As though he were saying, “I don’t want any sugar in my coffee.”

““why not? If I could only see why, if I knew what was going through your mind, maybe I could understand. But I can’t.” Dan looked up at Paul, pleading. “You’re needed, Paul. I had a tape from Lijinsky last month. Do you know what he said? He said he wished you’d come to Starship ten years sooner. Nobody knows that ship the way you do, you’re making it go. That ship can take men to the stars, now, with rejuvenation, and the same men can come back again to find the same people waiting for them when they get here. They can live that long, now. We’ve been tied down to seventy years of life, to a tight little universe of one sun and nine planets for thousands of years. Well, we can change that now. We can go out That’s what your work can do for us.” He stared helplessly at his brother. “You could go out on that ship you’re building, Paul. You’ve always wanted to. Why not?”

Paul looked across at him for a long moment. There was pity in his eyes. There was also bitterness there, and victory, long awaited, painfully won. “Do you really want me to tell you?”

“I want you to tell me.”

Then Paul told him. It took about ten minutes. It was not tempered with mercy.

It split Dan Fowler’s world wide open at the seams.

“You’ve been talking about the Starship,” said Paul Fowler. “All right, that’s a good place to start. I came to Star- ship Project, what was it, fifteen years ago? Sixteen, I guess. This was my meat. I didn’t work well with people, I worked with things, processes, ideas. I dug in hard on Starship. I loved it, dreamed it lived with it. I had dreams in those days. Work hard, make myself invaluable here, maybe I’d get rejuvenation, so that I could go on working. I believed everything you just said then. Alpha Centauri, Arcturus, Vega, anywhere we wanted to go, and I could go along! It wouldn’t be long, either. We had Lijinsky back with us after his rejuvenation, directing the project, we had Keller and Stark and Eddie Cochran—great men, the men who had pounded Starship Project into reality, took it out of the storybooks and made the people of this country want it badly enough to pay for it. Those men were back now, new men, rebuilt bodies, with all their knowledge and experience preserved. Only now they had something even more precious than life: time. And I was part of it, and I too could have time.”

Paul shook his head, slowly, and sank back into the chair. His eyes were very tired. “A dream, nothing more. A fantasy. It took me fifteen years to learn what a dream it was. Nothing at first, just a vague puzzlement, things happening that I couldn’t quite grasp. Easy to shrug off, until it got too obvious. Not a matter of wrong decisions, really. The decisions were right, but they were in the wrong places. Something about Starship Project shifting, changing somehow. Something being lost. Slowly. Nothing you could nail down, at first, but growing month by month.

“Then one night I saw what it was. That was when I equipped the lab here, and proved to myself that Starship Project was a dream.”

He spread his hands and smiled at Dan like a benign old schoolmaster at a third-grade schoolboy. That starship isn’t going to Alpha Centauri or anywhere else. It’s never going to leave the ground. I thought I’d live long enough to launch that ship and be one of its crew. Well, I won’t. That ship wouldn’t leave the ground if I lived a million years.”

“Rubbish,” said Dan Fowler succinctly.

“No, Dan. Not rubbish. Unfortunately, sometimes we have to quit dreaming and look facts in the face. Starship Project is dying. Our whole society is dying. Nimrock drove the first hail into the coffin a hundred and thirty years ago. Oh, if they’d only hanged him when his first rejuvenation attempt failed I But that would only have delayed it. We’re dying slowly right now, but soon it will be fast, very fast. And do you know the man who is getting ready to deal us our death blow?” He smiled sadly across at his brother. “You are, Dan.”

Dan Fowler sprang from his chair with a roar. “Paul, you’re sick! Of all the idiotic remarks I ever heard, I—I—oh, Paul.” He stood shaking, groping for words, staring at his brother.

“You said you wanted me to tell you.”

“Tell me what?” Dan took a trembling breath, and sat down, visibly fighting for control. “All right, all right, I heard what you said. You, must mean something, but I don’t know what. Let’s be reasonable. Let’s forget philosophy and semantics and concepts and all the frills for just a minute and talk about facts, huh? Just facts.”

“All right, facts,” said Paul. “Kenneth Armstrong wrote Man on Mars in 2028. He was fifty-seven years old then, and he hadn’t been rejuvenated yet. Fundamentally a good book, analyzing his first Mars colony, taking it apart right down to the ground, studies to show why it had failed so miserably, and why the next one could succeed if he could ever get up there again. He had foresight; with rejuvenation just getting started, he had a whole flock of ideas about overpopulation and the need for a Mars colony. He was all wet on the population angle of course, but nobody knew that then. He got Keller and Lijinsky all excited with the Starship idea. They admit it—it was Man on Mars that first started them thinking. They were both young then, with lots of fight in them—”

“Just stick to facts,” said Dan coldly.

“Okay. Starship Project got started, and blossomed into the people’s baby. They started work on the basic blueprints about sixty years ago. Everybody knew it would be a long job, costly, very costly, with so much to do before the building even began, but that was all right. The planning took over forty years and that was where I came in fifteen years ago. Building the ship. They were looking for engineers who weren’t eager to get rich. It went fine. We started to build. Then Keller and Stark came back from rejuvenation. Lijinsky had been rejuvenated five years before.”

“Look, I don’t need a course in history,” Dan exploded.

“Yes, you do,” Paul snapped. “You need to sit down and listen for once, instead of just shooting off your big mouth.” Paul Fowler rubbed his chin. “Okay, there were some changes made. I didn’t like the engine housing, I never had, so I went along with them a hundred percent on that. I was the one who had designed it, but even I had learned a few things since. And there were bugs. It made good sense, when you talked to Lijinsky. Starship Project was pretty important to all of us. Dangerous to risk a fumble on the first play, even a tiny risk. We might never get another chance. Lijinsky knew we youngsters were driving along on adrenalin and nerves, and couldn’t wait to got out there, but when you thought about it, what was the rush? Why risk a failure just to get out there this year instead of next? Couldn’t we take time to find a valid test for that engine at ultra-high acceleration before we put it back in? After all, we had time now—Keller and Stark just back with sixty more years to live- why the rush?

“Okay, I bought it. We worked out a valid test chamber on paper. Took four years to find out we couldn’t build such a device on Earth, but never mind that. Other things were getting stalled in the meantime. The colony plan for the ship—was it the best possible? Choosing the crew—what criteria, what qualifications? There was plenty of time—why not make sure it’s right? Don’t leave anything crude, if we can refine it a little first.”

Paul sighed wearily. “It snowballed. Keller and Stark backed Lijinsky to the hilt. There was trouble about money—I think you had your thumb in the pie there, getting it fixed for us, didn’t you? More refinement. Work it out. Details. Get sidetracked on some aspect for a few years, so what? Lots of time. Rejuvenation, and all that, talk about the Universalists beating Rinehart out and throwing the center open to everybody. And so on, and so on. And somewhere along the line I began to see that it just wasn’t true. The holdups, the changes, the digressions and snags and refinements were all excuses, all part of a big, beautiful, exquisitely reasonable facade that was completely obscuring the real truth. Lijinsky and Keller and Stark had changed.”

Dan Fowler snorted. “I know a very smart young doctor who told me that there aren’t any changes with rejuvenation.”

“Nothing physical, their bodies were fine. Nothing mental, either, they had the same sharp minds they always had. Just a subtle change in values. They’d lost something they’d had before. The drive that made them start Starship Project, the urgency, the vital importance of the thing—all gone. They didn’t have the push they once had. They began looking for the slow, easy way, and it was far easier to build and rebuild, and refine, and improve the Starship here on the ground than to throw that Starship out into space.”

There was a long, long silence. Dan Fowler sat gray-faced, staring at Paul, just shaking his head and staring. “I don’t believe it,” he said finally. “I’ve seen Lijinsky’s reports. There’s been progress, regular progress, month by month. You’ve been too close to it, maybe. Of course there have been delays, but only when they were necessary. The progress has gone on—”

“No, not so,” Paul said. He stood up, pulled out drawers, dragged out rolls of blueprints. “These are my own. They’re based on the working prints from Starship that we drew up ten years ago, scaled down to model size. I’ve tested them,

I’ve run tolerances, I’ve checked the math five ways and back again. I’ve tested the parts, the engine—model size. There is no flaw in these blueprints. They’re as perfect as they’ll ever get.”

Anger was blazing in Paul’s voice now, bitterness and frustration. “I could build this model and send it out to Alpha Centauri next week, and it would get there. The Starship Project is completed, it’s been completed for ten years now, but do you know what happened to these blueprints, the originals? They were studied, and thrown out in favor of refinements and modifications—”

“But I’ve read the reports,” Dan cried.

“Have you seen the Starship?”

“Well—no.”

“I didn’t think you had. You haven’t actually talked with Lijinsky and the other Retreads heading up the project, either. Well, it isn’t just here, Dan. It’s everywhere. There are only about 70,000 rejuvenated men alive in this hemisphere so far, but already the change is beginning to show. Go talk to the advertising people; there’s a delicate indicator of social change if there ever was one. See what they say. Whose policy on rejuvenation are they backing up in the government? Yours? Don’t kid yourself. They aren’t even backing Walter Rinehart. They’re backing ‘Moses’ Tyndall and his Abolitionist goon-squad, the crowd who go around preaching that rejuvenation is the work of the Devil. And they’ve given Tyndall enough of a push that he’s even getting you worried now. Then how about Roderigo Aviado and his Solar Energy Project down in Antarctica? Do you know what he’s been doing lately? You ought to find out, Dan. What’s going on in the Mars colony? You ought to find out. Have you gone to talk to any of the Noble Ten who are still rattling around? You ought to, you might get quite a jolt. And how about all the suicides in the last ten years? What do the insurance people say about that?”

Paul stopped, from lack of breath. Dan just stared at him. “Find out what you’re doing, Dan, before you push this universal rejuvenation idea of yours through. We’ve had a monster on our hands for years now without even knowing it. And now Big Dan Fowler has to play God and turn the thing loose on the world. Well, look before you plunge in.

It’s all here, if you’d just open your eyes to see it, but you’re so dead certain that you want life everlasting that you’ve never even bothered to look. Nobody’s bothered to look. And now it’s such a grand political bludgeon that nobody dares to look.”

Dan Fowler rose, walked over to the blueprints, ran his finger over the dusty paper. His face was old when he turned back to Paul. “You’ve believed all this for a long time, haven’t you?” he said.

“A long time,” said Paul.

“All the time I’ve been working like a dog to build up support for my universal rejuvenation program.”

Paul’s eyes flickered. “That’s right.”

“And you never said one word to me.” Dan shook his head slowly. “I didn’t know you hated me so much, but I’m not going to let you win this one, either, Paul. You’re wrong. And I’m going to prove that you’re wrong if it kills me.”

“Then try his home number,” Dan Fowler snarled into the booth telephone. He gnawed his cigar and fumed as long seconds spun by on the wall clock, then minutes. His fingers drummed the wall. “How’s that? Confound it, I want to speak to Dwight MacKenzie himself, not some flunky. What do you mean, he’s not in town? I saw him with my own eyes yesterday.”

Another wait, five minutes this time, then another voice, with profuse apologies but no Dwight MacKenzie. “All right, then track him down for me and have him call me back.” He reeled off the number of his private booth.

Carl Golden looked up as Dan came back to the cafeteria table and stirred up his half-cold coffee. “No luck?”

“Seems that MacKenzie has vanished. Convenient, eh?” Dan leaned back against the wall, glowering at Carl and Jean. Through the transparent walls of the glassed-in-booth, they could see the morning breakfast-seekers drifting into the place. “Well, you were surely right, lad. I should never have tampered with those Hearing dates in the first place. But Dwight will switch them back again to give us the time we need. MacKenzie is no ball of fire, but he’s always backed me up. We should hear from him pretty soon.” He bit off the end of a fresh cigar, assaulted it with a match.

“Dad, you know what Dr. Moss said—”

“Look, little girl, you’d better lay off,” Dan snapped. “I’ve got enough worries without having Dr. Moss on my back as well.” He sipped his coffee while both the young people picked at their breakfast with bleary early-morning resignation. Carl Golden needed a shave badly.

“Did you get any sleep on the way back?” he asked Dan.

Dan snorted. “What do you think?”

“I think Paul might be lying to you.”

Dan shot him a sharp glance. “Maybe, but I doubt it. Paul has always been fussy about the truth. He’s all wrong, of course—” (fresh coffee, not much hotter than the last)—“but I think he believes his tale.”

“Well, if he really believes it, I don’t like it. There’s too much of what he said that rings a bell somewhere.”

Dan clanked the cup down and swore. “He’s demented, that’s what he is! He’s waited too long for his Retread, and his brain’s starting to go. If his idea were true, why did he wait so long to tell somebody about it?”

“Maybe he wanted to see you hang yourself.”

“But I can only hang myself on facts, not on the paranoid delusions of a sick old man. No, Paul is wrong—he’s got to be wrong.” Dan broke off, staring across at Carl. “Look, boy, if he isn’t wrong, then we’re whipped, that’s all. And I’ve spent thirty years of my life perpetrating some kind of hideous fraud on the people of this country.”

“But you can’t blame yourself if you didn’t know,” Jean Fowler protested.

“That’s what you think, kiddie. I’m not a meek, harmless little mouse like Dwight MacKenzie. I’ve got the loudest mouth in the Senate. I scream and shout and knock heads together and get things done, and when a man does it that way it’s his job to know what he’s doing. Well, now I don’t know. I think Paul’s wrong, but do you think I’d care to walk into the Hoffman Center for a Retread right now without being sure? Not on your life. Any more than I could walk into those Hearings next week. We’ve got to stop everything and find out right now and for certain, whether Paul’s wrong or not.”

He dragged a sheaf of yellow paper out of his pocket and spread it on the table. “I worked out a plan on the way back. We’ve got a tough job on our hands, more than we can possibly handle before next week. So number one job is to shift the Hearings back again. I’ll take care of that as soon as I can get MacKenzie on the wire.”

“What are you giving him for a reason?” Jean wanted to know.

“Anything but the truth. Doesn’t matter. MacKenzie is convinced I’m going to win at the Hearings, and he wants to be on the right side of the toast when it’s buttered. He’ll shove the date back to February 15. Okay, next we need a crew—a crowd of people who can do fast, accurate, hard work and not squeal if they don’t sleep for a month or so. Bob Sandborn is in Washington, he can handle statistics for us. Jack Torrelli has good contacts with the insurance people. In addition, we need a couple of good sharp detectives. Any ideas, Jean?”

“A couple. I’ll need time to reach them, though.”

“How much time?”

“A day or two.”

“Then get on it. We’ll have lots for them to do by tomorrow.” The Senator turned back to Carl. “I want you to hit Starship Project first.”

Carl shook his head. “Not me, there’s a better man for the job. Saw him last night, and he’s dying for something to do. Terry Fisher. He’ll know how to dig out what we want. He was doing it on Mars for five years.”

Dan frowned. “He was also on the bottle, Carl. We can’t take a risk like that.”

“There won’t be any risk. Terry drank to get away from what he found on Mars, that’s all. He’s not drinking now.”

“Well, if you say so. I’ll want to see the Starship setup, too, but I want it ready for a quick scan. Get hold of Fisher this morning and get him clearance papers for Nevada. You’d better tackle the ad men yourself then, while Torrelli hits Metro Insurance. Don’t waste time with underlings, go to the top and wave my name around like a flag. They won’t like it a bit, but they know I’ve got a string on Kornwall in Communications. We’ll have his scalp if they don’t play ball with us. All you have to do is make sure that they believe it.”

“What’s on Kornwall?”

“Kornwall has been fronting for ‘Moses’ Tyndall for years. That’s why Tyndall never bothered me too much, because I could have gotten him through Kornwall any time I wanted to. And the ad-men and Metro have everything they own sunk into Tyndall’s political plans.”

“I see,” Carl said, but his frown lingered. “If you’re sure.”

“Of course I’m sure. Don’t worry about it, lad. It’s okay.”

“I just hope you’re not underestimating John Tyndall.”

“Why?”

“I used to work for him, remember? And he doesn’t like you. He knows in the long run it’s going to be you or he, one or the other, who ride this rejuvenation issue right into the White House. Well, what happens if ‘Moses’ gets wind of this mess? Say that he finds out what your brother told you, or even finds out that you’re worried about something?”

Dan chewed his lip. “He could be a pain, all right.”

“He sure could. More than just a pain, and Kornwall wouldn’t be much help, either, if the news got out.”

“Well, it’s a risk we have to take, that’s all. We’ll have to be fast and quiet.” Dan Fowler pushed his coffee cup aside and jumped for the phone booth when the blinker began flashing. “This will get us started, at least. Jean, you keep somebody on the switchboard, and keep track of us all. When I get through with MacKenzie, I may be out of touch for a day or so. You’ll have to be my ears, and cover for me.” And to the phone: “Yes, yes. I was calling Dwight MacKenzie—” Pause. “Hello, Dwight? —What? Well, balls of fire! Where is he? Timagami—Ontario? An island!” He covered the speaker and looked at Carl. “He’s gone moosehunting.” Then: “Okay, so there isn’t any phone. Get me Eastern Sea-Jet Charter Service instead.”

Twenty minutes later Dan Fowler was in the air again, flying north into an evil-looking winter sky.

A long series of gray, flickering pictures, then, for Dan Fowler. A fast sandwich eaten on the plane as the Capitol’s pale sun was swallowed up. A gray sky, then almost black, temperature dropping, a gray drizzling rain. Cold. Wind bouncing the gray shape of the little ski-plane around like a stick in a stream. Gray news from the pilot: “Eight feet of snow up there, according to reports. Lake’s frozen three feet thick. Going to a rough ride, Senator.” A gray memory of Jean’s quick kiss before he climbed aboard, the sharp worry in her eyes—“Got your pills, Dad? Try to sleep. Take it easy. Give me a call about anything—” (Tough thing to do without any phones, but why tell her that? She’s already scared enough. Confounded heart, anyway.) A wobbly takeoff that almost dumped his stomach into his lap and sent the briefcase flying across the cabin. Then rain, and gray-black nothing out there as they headed north. Faster, man, can’t you get this crate to move a little? Sorry, Senator, nasty currents up here. Maybe if we go higher—

Time! Paul had said it was more precious than life, and now time ran screaming by in great deadly seeps, like a black-winged buzzard. And through it all, weariness, tiredness that Dan had never felt before. Not the weariness of years, nor of hard work, just a gray, heartsick, sense that time at last was running out on him. He should have rejuvenated months ago, then at least he’d have time. But now—what if Paul were right?

No rejuvenation for Dan Fowler now, of course. Not until Paul is proven wrong, a thousand times wrong. That was it, that was the real weariness that wasn’t time-weariness or body-weariness. Just mind-weariness. Weariness at the thought of wasted work, the wasted years—a wasted life. Unless Paul were proven wrong.

Angry at his grayness, Dan snapped on the little TV, searched for diversion. Wonderful pickup these days. News of the world brought to you by Atomics International, the fuel that will power the Starship. . the President returned to Washington today after three-week vacation conference in Calcutta with Chinese and Indian dignitaries. . full accord and a cordial ending to the meeting. . American medical supplies to be made available. . and on the home front, appropriations renewed for Antarctica Project. . solar energy in every home within a decade, according to Project Director Roderigo Aviado. . Special bulletin: huge Abolitionist rally last night in New Chicago as John “Moses” Tyndall returned to that city for the fifteenth anniversary of the movement he started there back in 2119. . cut to scene of wild, placard-waving crowd and a huge banner proclaiming DOWN WITH REJUVENATION THE DEVILS WORK . . . then back to Tyndall’s hawk face and strident voice lashing out at Senator Daniel Fowler’s universal rejuvenation program. . twenty-five hour work week hailed by Senator Rinehart of Alaska as a great progressive step for the American people. . Senator Rinehart, chairman of the all-powerful Criterion Committee, holding forth hope last night that improved rejuvenation techniques may enable the Hoffman Center to handle up to six hundred candidates a year within five years. . Dan snarled in disgust, cut Rinehart’s comforting, confidence-inspiring face off in mid-smile.

His ears popped and the plane was descending, then, into flurries of northern snow. He peered out at the whiter gloom below, a long stretch of white with blobs of black on either side, resolving into snow-laden black pines, a vast expanse of frozen, snow-covered lake, the slight jolt as the skis touched down. Taxiing across a cove of the lake, engines roaring, throwing up a whirlwind of powdery snow. And ahead, on the shore above the lake, a black blot of a house, with yellow window lights glowing warm and cheerful in the middle of this frozen wilderness.

Then Dwight MacKenzie, mouse-like, peering out into the gloom, startled eyes with streaks of fear in them, widening in recognition. MacKenzie throwing open the door, smiling, pumping Dan’s hand, a too-hearty greeting. “Dan I I couldn’t imagine who was coming in this snowstorm, hardly ever see anybody up here, you knbw. Come in, come in, you must be half frozen. What’s happened? Something torn loose down in Washington?” And more talk, more questions, tumbling over each other, but something wrong in the voice, no answers wanted, just talk to cover up surprise and fear and the one real question of why Dan Fowler should be dropping down out of the winter sky right then.

A huge lodge room, open beams, blazing fire in a mammoth fireplace at the one end, moose heads, a thick black bearhide on the floor. “I like to come up here a day or two before the others arrive for hunting,” MacKenzie was saying. “Does a man good to commune with his soul once in a while, eh? You a hunter, Dan? You ought to join us. Libby and Donaldson will be up tomorrow with a couple of guides. There’s always an extra rifle around. Ought to be good hunting this year.”

One chair near the fireplace, a book hastily thrown down beside it, Sextra Special, Cartoons by Kulp. Great book for soul-searching senators. Things were a little out of focus at first after the biting cold, but now Dan was beginning to see. One book, one chair, but two half-filled cocktail glasses at the sideboard—

Dan shook his head. “No thanks, Dwight, I have to get right back to the city. Tried to catch you before you left, nothing too urgent, but I wanted to let you know that I put you to all that trouble for nothing, switching the Hearing dates around. We don’t need the Hearings next week after all.”

Wariness in MacKenzie’s eyes. “Well! It wasn’t any trouble, Dan. No trouble at all. Next week was fine with everybody, better than the February date would have been, as a matter of fact. This way the committee can collect itself before Christmas holidays, ha, ha.”

“Well, it now seems that it wouldn’t be so good for me, Dwight. I’d much prefer the dates changed back to February again.”

A long silence while MacKenzie pursed his lips. “Well, now. That’s—awkward. You know, Dan, we really have to settle these things sooner or later. Can’t just shove dates around willy-nilly. And to change back at this late date—I just don’t know.”

“Don’t know! Why not? You call the meetings and set the agenda.”

The moose-hunter licked his lips. “Yes, but it isn’t just me that makes these decisions, Dan. Other people have to be consulted. It’s a little late to catch them now, you know. It might be pretty hard to do that.”

No more smiles from Dan. “Now look, you make the calendar, and you can change it.” Face getting red, getting angry—careful, Dan, those two cocktail glasses, watch what you say—“I want it changed back. And I’ve got to know right now.”

“But you told me you’d be all ready to roll by next week.”

No more caution—he had to have time. “Look, there’s no reason you can’t do it if you want to, Dwight. I’d consider it a personal favor—I repeat, a very great personal favor—if you’d make the arrangements. Believe me, I won’t forget it” What did the swine want, an arm off at the roots?

“Sorry,” said a deep voice from the rear door of the room. Walter Rinehart walked across to the glass on the sideboard. “You don’t mind if I finish this, Dwight?”

A deep breath from MacKenzie, like a sigh of relief. “Go right ahead, Walt. Drink, Dan?”

“No, I don’t think so.” It was Walter, all right. Tall, upright, dignified Walter, fine shock of wavy hair as white as the snow outside. Young-old lines on his face. Some men looked finer after rejuvenation, much finer than before. There had been a weakness in Walter Rinehart’s eyes and face before his first Retread. Not now. A fine man, the picture of mature wisdom and social responsibility. A man you could trust to guide the committee that decided whether you were going to be the one to live or die.

But inside, the mind was the same as it was before. Inside, no changes. Author of the Rinehart Criteria, back in the days when rejuvenation first became possible. Rinehart’s supporters compared that manifesto with the Gettysburg address, with Churchill’s “blood, sweat and tears” speech, with the Markheim Doctrine that had finally brought East and West to the end of the Cold War. The criteria to be used by an impartial committee in selecting those individuals most worthy, by service to mankind, to enjoy the fruits of the new rejuvenation process until such time as it could be available to all—Rinehart’s work. Some said it was a work of genius, and it secured Walter Rinehart a perpetual seat in the Senate, and chairmanship of the Criterion Committee. But other men, less impressed and more far-seeing—men like Dan Fowler- had insisted that Rinehart’s real intent was to set up a small, self-perpetuating “immortal elite” who would ultimately use their control over rejuvenation as a weapon to control the world.

No one had fought Rinehart harder or longer than Dan Fowler. The world knew that, but the world was not present in this secluded hunting lodge tonight.

Dan turned his back on Rinehart and said to MacKenzie, “I want the date changed.”

“I—I can’t do it, Dan.” An inquiring glance at Rinehart, a faint smiling nod in return.

Suddenly it dawned on Dan how badly he had blundered. MacKenzie was afraid. MacKenzie wanted another lifetime, one of these days. He had decided that Rinehart was the one who could give it to him. But worse, fax worse: Rinehart knew now that something had happened, something was wrong. “What’s the matter, Dan?” he said smoothly. “You need more time before the Hearings? Why? You had plenty of time before, but you threw it away, made poor Dwight here shift the dates right up under our noses. Now you want them changed back, all of a sudden. What happened, Dan? Hit a snag somewhere?”

That was all. Back against the wall. The thought of bluffing it through, swallowing the December 15 date and telling them to drop dead flashed through his mind. He threw it out violently, his heart sinking. That was only a few days, and.he had weeks of work ahead of him. He needed more time, he had to have it—

Rinehart was grinning confidently. “Of course I’d like to cooperate, Dan. But I have some plans for the Hearings, too. You’ve been getting on people’s nerves, down in the city. There’s even been talk on the committee of revoking your rejuvenation permit.”

Your move, Dan. Oh, what a blunder! Why did you ever come up here? And every minute you stand there with your jaw sagging just tells Rinehart how tight he’s got you—do something, anything—

Well, there was a way. Would Carl ever understand it? No telling. Carl had begged him never to use it, ever, under any circumstances, and Carl had trusted him implicitly when he had promised that he wouldn’t. It would be an outright betrayal, but if Carl Golden were standing here in his shoes, what would he say? He’d say yes, go ahead, use it, wouldn’t he? He’d have to.

“I want the Hearings on February 15,” Dan said to Rinehart.

“Sorry, Dan. We can’t be tossing dates around like that Unless you care to tell me just why.”

“Okay.” Dan grabbed his hat angrily. “I’ll make a formal request for the change tomorrow morning, and read it on the TV. Then I’ll also announce a feature attraction that the people can look forward to when the Hearings begin. We weren’t planning to use it, but you seem to want both barrels right in the face, so that’s what we’ll give you.”

Walter Rinehart roared with laughter. “Another feature attraction? You do dig them up, don’t you? Ken Armstrong’s dead, you know.”

“Peter Golden’s widow isn’t.”

The smile faded on Rinehart’s face. He looked suddenly like a man carved out of gray stone. Dan’s whole body was shaking as he let the words sink in. “You didn’t think anybody knew about that, did you, Walter? That’s too bad. We’ve got the whole story on Peter Golden, the whole story. Took quite a while to piece it together, but we did it with the help of his son. Carl remembers his father before the accident, you see, quite well. His widow remembers him even before that. And we have some fascinating video tapes that Peter Golden made when he applied for rejuvenation, and later when he appealed the committee’s decisions. Some of the private interviews, too, Walter.”

“I gave Peter Golden forty more years of life,” Rinehart said.

“You crucified him,” said Dan, bluntly.

There was silence, a long silence. Then: “Are you selling?”

“I’m selling.” Cut out my tongue, Carl, but I’m selling.

“How do I know you won’t use it anyway?”

“You don’t know. Except that I’m telling you I won’t.”

Rinehart soaked that in with the last gulp of his drink. Then he smashed the glass on the stone floor. “Change the date,” he told MacKenzie. “Then throw this vermin Out of here.”

Back in the snow and darkness Dan tried to breathe again, and couldn’t quite make it. He had to stop and rest twice going down to the plane. Then he was sick all the way home.

It was early evening when the plane dropped him off in New York Crater, and picked up another charter. Two cold eggs and some scalding coffee, eaten standing up at the airport counter. Great for the stomach, but no time to stop. Anyway, Dan’s stomach wasn’t in the mood for dim lights and pale wine, not just this minute. Questions and recriminations howled through his mind. The knowledge that he had made the one Class A colossal blunder of his thirty years in politics, this last half-day. The miscalculation of a man! He should have known about MacKenzie, or at least suspected. MacKenzie was getting old, he wanted a Retread, and wanted it badly. Before, he had figured Dan to get it for him. Then something changed his mind, and he threw in with Rinehart.

Why?

Armstrong’s suicide, of course. Pretty good proof that even Rinehart hadn’t known it was a suicide. If Carl had brought back evidence of murder, Dan was certain to win, MacKenzie had thought. But evidence of suicide—that was far too shaky. Walt Rinehart had his hooks in too deep to be dislodged by that.

The loudspeaker blared the boarding signal for the Washington Jet. Dan gulped the last of his coffee, and found a visiphone booth with a scrambler in working order. Two calls. The first was to Jean, to line up round-the-clock guards for Peter Golden’s widow on Long Island. Jean couldn’t keep surprise out of her voice. Dan grunted and didn’t elaborate; just get them out there.

Then a call to Carl. He chewed his cigar nervously. Two minutes of waiting while they corralled Carl from wherever he was. Then: “Carl, I just saw MacKenzie. I found him hiding in Rinehart’s hip pocket.”

“Oh, oh.” Carl’s face on the screen looked desolate. “Dan, we’ve got to have time.”

“We’ve got it, but the price was very steep, son.”

Silence then as Carl peered at him. “Do you mean what I think you mean?”

“I’m afraid that’s what I mean.”

“I see.”

“Lad, I’ll try to make it up to you, somehow, I swear I will,” Dan said miserably. “I hated myself, but I was trapped. If I just hadn’t been in such a hurry, if I’d only thought it out, but I was trapped. It was an awful error, and every bit of it was my fault.”

“Well, don’t go out and shoot yourself over it,” Carl said.

“I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later. What about Mother?”

“Shell be perfectly safe. They won’t get within £ mile of her. Look, son, is Fisher doing all right?”

Carl nodded. “I talked to him an hour ago. He’ll be ready for you by tomorrow night, he thinks.”

“Sober?”

“Sober. And mad. He was the right guy for the job.” Worried lines deepened on Golden’s forehead. “Look, Dan, don’t worry about—the price. What about you? How did Rinehart take it?”

“It scared him. He’d almost forgotten, I think. You carry on, now. Everything’s going to be fine.” Dan rang off, scowling. He wished he was as sure as he sounded. It was Rinehart with his back to the wall, now, and Dan wasn’t too sure he liked that.

An hour later he landed in Washington, and Jean was dragging him into the Volta. “Dad, if you don’t get some sleep now, I’ll personally put you out with ether. You’re lolling yourself. Now shut up while I drive you home.”

A soft bed, darkness, escape. When had he slept last? He couldn’t remember, but it was like heaven, with no dreams to bother him.

He slept the clock around, over twenty-three hours, which he had not intended, and then caught the next night jet to Las Vegas, which he had intended. There was some delay with the passenger list after he had gone aboard. Somebody raising a howl with the disbursing officer, and the jet took off four minutes late. Dan slept again, fitfully.

Somebody slid down into the adjoining seat like a stealthy shadow. “Weill Good old Dan Fowler!”

A gaunt, frantic-looking man, with skin like cracked parchment across his high cheekbones, and a pair of Dracula eyes looking down at Dan. If Death walked in human flesh, Dan thought, it would look like John Tyndall.

“What do you want, ‘Moses’?”

“Just dropped by to chat,” said Tyndall. “You’re heading for Las Vegas, eh? Why?”

“I like the climate out there,” Dan said. “Look, if you want to talk, talk and get it over with.”

Tyndall lifted a narrow foot and gave the recline-button a sharp jab, dumping the senator back against the seat. “You’ve got something cooking, and I like the smell. I want my share, right now.”

Dan stared into the gaunt face, and burst out laughing. He had never actually been so close to John Tyndall before, and he did not like the smell, which had brought on the laugh, but he knew all about Tyndall. More than Tyndall himself knew, probably. He could even remember the early rallies Tyndall had led, feeding on the fears and suspicions and nasty rumors about rejuvenation that had grown up in the early days. It was evil, they had said. This was not God’s way, this was Man’s way, as evil as Man was evil. If God had wanted Man to live a thousand years, he would have given him such a body—

Or:

They’ll use it for a tool I A political football. They’ll buy and sell with it. They’ll make a cult of it, they’re doing it right now! Look at Walter Rinehart. Did you hear about his scheme? To keep it down to five hundred a year? They’ll make themselves a ruling class, an immortal elite, with Rinehart for their Black Pope. Better that nobody should have it—

Or:

Immortality, huh? But what kind? You hear what happened to Harvey Tatum? That’s right, the jet-car man, big business. He was one of that Noble Ten they’re always bragging about. But they say he had to have special drugs every night, that he had changed. That’s right, if he didn’t get these drugs, see, he’d go mad and try to suck blood and butcher children. Oh, they didn’t dare publish it, had to put him out of the way quietly, but my brother-in-law was down in Lancaster one night when—

All it really needed was the right man, and one day there was “Moses” Tyndall. Leader of the New Crusade for God. Small, at first. But the ad-men began supporting him, broadcasting his rallies, playing him up big. Abolish rejuvenation, it’s a blot against Man’s immortal soul. Amen. Then the insurance people came along, with money. (The ad-men and the insurance people weren’t too concerned about Man’s immortal soul—they’d take their share now, thanks—but this didn’t bother Tyndall too much. They were misguided, but they were on God’s side. He prayed for them.) So they gave Tyndall the first Abolitionist seat in the Senate, in 2124, just nine years ago, and the fight between Rinehart and Dan Fowler that was brewing even then had turned into a three-cornered fight.

Dan grinned up at Tyndall and said, “Go away, John. Don’t bother me.”

“You’re on to something,” Tyndall snarled. “What is your flunky Carl Golden nosing around the Tenner Agency for? Why the heat on Metro Insurance? Why the sudden bounding interest in Nevada? Two trips in three days, what are you trying to track down?”

“Why should I tell you anything, Holy Man?” The parchment face wrinkled unpleasantly. “Because it would be very smart of you if you did, that’s why. Rinehart’s out of it now. Washed up, finished, thanks to you.

Now it’s just you or me, one or the other. You’re in my way, and you’re going to be gotten out of my way when you’ve finished up Rinehart, because that’s when I’m really going to start rolling. Go along with me now and you won’t get smashed, Dan.”

“Get out of here,” Dan snarled, sitting bolt upright. “You gave the same story to Carl, a long time ago when he was with you, remember? Carl’s my boy now—do you think I’ll swallow the same bait?”

“You’d be smart if you did.” The man leaned forward. “I’ll let you in on a secret. I’ve had a—vision—you might say. There are going to be riots and fires and shouting, around the time of the Hearings. People will be killed. Lots of people—spontaneous outbursts of passion, of course, the great voice of the people rising against the Abomination. And against you, Dan. A few Repeaters may be taken out and hanged, and then when you have won against Rinehart, you’ll find people thinking that you’re really a traitor.”

“Nobody will swallow that,” Dan snapped.

“Just watch and see. I can still call it off, if you say so.” He stood up quickly as Dan’s face went purple. “New Chicago,” he said smoothly. “Have to see a man here, and then get back to the Capitol. Happy hunting, Dan. You know where to reach me.”

He strode down the aisle of the ship, leaving Dan staring bleakly at an empty seat.

Paul, Paul—

He met Terry Fisher at the landing field in Las Vegas. A firm handshake, clear brown eyes looking at him the way a four-year-old looks at Santa Claus. “Glad you could come tonight, Senator. I’ve had a busy couple of days. I think you’ll be interested.” Remarkable restraint in the man’s voice. His face was full of things unsaid. Dan caught it; he knew faces, read them like typescript.

“What is it, son?”

“Wait until you see.” Fisher laughed nervously. “I almost thought for a while that I was back on Mars.”

“Cigar?”

“No thanks. I never use them.”

The car broke through darkness across bumpy desert pavement. The men sat silently. Then a barbed wire enclosure loomed up, and a guard walked over, peered at their credentials, and waved them through. Ahead lay a long, low row of buildings, and a tall something spearing up into the clear desert night, two hundred yards away—the Starship itself. They stopped at the first building, and hurried up the steps.

Small, red-faced Lijinsky greeted them, all warm handshake and enthusiasm and unmistakable happiness and surprise. “A real pleasure, Senator! We haven’t had a direct governmental inspection for quite a while. I’m glad I’m here to show you around.”

“Everything is going right along, eh?”

“Oh, yes I Shell be a ship to be proud of. Now, I think we can arrange quarters for you, and in the morning we can sit down and have a nice, long talk.”

Terry Fisher was shaking his head. “I think the senator wants to see the ship note—isn’t that right, Senator?”

Lijinsky’s eyes opened wide, his head bobbing in surprise. Young-old creases on his face flickered. “Tonight? Well, of course, if you insist, but it’s almost two in the morning! We only have a skeleton crew working at night. Tomorrow you could see—”

“Tonight, if you don’t mind.” Dan tried to keep the sharp edge out of his voice. “Unless you have some specific objection.”

“Objection? No—” Lijinsky seemed puzzled, and a little hurt. But he bounced back: “Tonight it is, then. Let’s go.” There was no doubting the little man’s honesty. He wasn’t hiding anything, just surprised. But a moment later there was concern on his face as he led them out toward the towering scaffolds. “There’s no question about appropriations, I hope, Senator?”

“No, no. Nothing of the sort.”

“Well, I’m certainly glad to hear that. But I can’t help worrying. Sometimes our contacts from Washington are a little disappointed in the ship, you know.”

Dan’s throat tightened. “Why?”

“No reason, really. We’re making fine progress, it isn’t that. Yes, things really buzz around here; just ask Mr. Fisher about that. He was here all day watching the workers. But there are always minor changes in plans, of course, as we recognize more of the problems.”

Terry Fisher grimaced silently, and followed them into a small Whirlwind groundcar. The little gyro-car bumped down the road on its single wheels, down into a gorge, then out onto the flats. Dan strained his eyes, peering ahead at the spear of Starship gleaming in the distant night lights. Paragraphs from the last Starship Progress Report flickered through his mind, and a frown gathered as they came closer to the ship. Then the car halted on the edge of the building- pit and they blinked up and down at the scaffolded monster.

Dan didn’t even get out of the car. He just stared. The Progress Report had featured photos, projected testing dates, even ventured a possible date for launching, with the building of the Starship so near to completion. That had been a month ago. Now Dan stared at the ship and shook his head, uncomprehending.

The hull plates were off again, lying in heaps on the ground in a mammouth circle. The ship was a skeleton, a long, gawky structure of naked metal beams. Even now in the bright floodlights a dozen men were scampering around the scaffolding, before Dan’s incredulous eyes, and he saw a huge beam coming off the body of the ship, being grappled by the crane and slowly, slowly lowered to the ground.

Ten years ago the ship had looked the same. As he watched, he felt a wave of hopelessness sweep through him, a sense of desolate, empty bitterness. Ten years—

His eyes met Terry Fisher’s in the gloom of the car, begging to be told it wasn’t so. Fisher shook his head.

Then Dan said: “I think I’ve seen enough. Take me back to the air field. You’d better come, too, Terry.”

Later, as the return jet speared east into the dawn, Terry Fisher said, “It was the same thing on Mars. The constant refining and super-refining of plans, the slowing down of everything, the subtle change in viewpoint. I went up there ready to beat the world barehanded, to work on the frontier, to build that colony and maybe even lead off to start another one. I actually worked out plans of my own for a breakaway colony. I figured we were going to need colony builders when we went on out to the stars.” He shrugged sadly. “Carl told you, I guess. They looked at my plans very carefully, and discussed them in council, and worked out alternatives, and polled the whole colony, and accepted volunteers for a planning committee, and then Barness decided that it was really too early to do anything about it. Maybe in another ten years. Too much work already, with just one colony. And there was too much work in a sense: frantic activity, noise, hubbub, confusion, fancy plans—all going nowhere. No drive, no real direction.” He shrugged again. “Pretty soon I saw that nothing was going to happen, my plan was just quietly going to die, like everything else on Mars.”

“Nobody saw it happening?”

“It wasn’t the sort of thing you could see. You could only feel it. It started when Armstrong came back to the colony, rejuvenated, to take over its development. Personally, I think Armstrong did finally see it. I think that’s why he suicided.”

“But the Starship,” Dan cried. “It was almost built, and there they were, tearing it down.”

“Ah, yes. For the twenty-seventh time, I believe. A change in the engineering thinking, that’s all. Keller and Lijinsky suddenly came to the conclusion that the whole thing might fall apart in midair at the launching. Can you imagine it? We’ve been building rockets for years, running them to Mars every two months! But they could pinpoint the flaw on paper, and prove it on the computers, and by the time they got through explaining it every soul in the whole administrative staff was going around saying yes, by golly, they’re right, it might fall apart at the Launching unless we make these changes. Why, it’s a standing joke among the workers there. They call Lijinsky Old Jet Propulsion and it’s always good for a laugh. But then, Keller and Stark and Lijinsky ought to know what they’re doing. They’ve all been rejuvenated, and have been working on the ship for years.” Fisher’s voice was heavy with anger.

Dan didn’t answer. There wasn’t anything to say, and he Just couldn’t tell Terry Fisher how it felt to have a cold blanket of fear wrapping around his heart, so dreadful and cold that he hardly dared look five minutes into the future right now, with Paul’s words echoing in his ears: we have a monster on our hands.

He was sick when they reached Washington. The pain in his chest became acute as he started walking down the gangway, and by the time he found a seat in the terminal and popped a nitro-tablet under his tongue he was breathing in deep, ragged gasps. He sat very still, trying to lean back against the seat, and suddenly he realized that he was very, very ill. The good red-headed Dr. Moss would smile in satisfaction, he thought bitterly. Sweat came out on his forehead; it had never seemed very likely to him that he might one day die. He didn’t have to die in this great, wonderful world of new bodies for old, he could live on, and on, and on. He could live to see the Golden Centuries of Man. A solar system teeming with life. Ships to challenge the stars, the barriers breaking, crumbling before their very eyes. Other changes, as short-lived Man became long-lived Man. Changes in teaching, in thinking, in feeling. Disease, the Enemy, was crushed. Famine, the Enemy, was slinking back into the dim memory of history. War, the Enemy, now made pointless to extinction.

All based on one principle: that Man should live if he could. He need not die. If a man could live forty years instead of twenty, had it been wrong to battle the plagues that struck him down in his youth? If he could live sixty years instead of forty, had the great researchers of the 1940s and ’50s and ’60s been wrong? Was it any more wrong now to want to live a thousand years? Who could say that it was?

Dan took a shuddering breath, nodded to Terry Fisher, and walked unsteadily to the cab stand. He would not believe what he had seen at Starship Project. It was not enough to draw any conclusions. Collect all the evidence, then con- elude. When Fisher took his elbow, he gave him an ashen smile. “It’s nothing. The ticker kicks up once in a while, that’s all. Let’s go see what Carl and Jean and the boys have dug up.

Carl and Jean and the boys had dug up plenty. The floor of Dan’s headquarters was covered with paper, carbons, punch cards and rubble. A dozen people were working here and there with tapes, typewriters, telephones, papers, program cards. Jean met them at the door, hustled them into the private offices in the back. “Carl just got here, too. He’s down eating. The boys outside are trying to make sense out of his insurance and advertising figures.”

“He got next to them okay?”

“Sure, but you were right, they didn’t like it.”

“What sort of reports?”

The girl sighed. “Most of the stuff is still being analyzed, which makes it hard to evaluate. The ad-men have to be figuring what they’re going to be doing in the next half-century, so that they’ll be there with the right thing when the time comes. But they don’t like what they see. People have to buy what the ad-men are selling, or the ad-men are out of business, and already they see a dangerous trend. People aren’t in such a rush to buy as they once were. They don’t have the same sense of urgency that they used to—” Her hands fluttered. “Well, as I say, it’s all up in the air. Analysis will be in by morning. The matter of suicides is a little more tangible: the rates are up, all over. But break it down into first-generation and Repeaters, and it’s pretty clear what’s happening.”

“Like Armstrong,” said Dan slowly.

Jean nodded. “Oh, here’s Carl now.”

Carl came in, rubbing his hands, and gave Dan a queer look. “Everything under control, Dan?”

Dan nodded. He told Carl about Tyndall’s proposition. Carl gave a wry grin. “He hasn’t changed a bit, has he?”

“Yes, he has. He’s gotten lots stronger.”

Carl scowled, and slapped the desk with his palm. “You should have stopped him, Dan. I told you that a long time ago, back when I first met you. He was aiming for your throat even then, trying to use me and what I knew about Dad to sell the country a pack of lies about you. He almost did, too. I hated your guts back then. I thought you were the rottenest man who had ever come up in politics, until you got hold of me and pounded some sense into my head. And Tyndall’s never forgiven you that, either.”

“All right. We’re still ahead of him. Have you finished with the ad-men?”

“Oh, no. I just got back from a trip south. My nose is still cold.”

Dan’s eyebrows went up. “Antarctica? And how was Dr. Aviado? I haven’t seen any reports from his solar energy project for five years.”

“Yes you have, you just couldn’t read them. Aviado is quite a theoretician. That’s how he got his money and his Project, down there, with plenty of room to build his reflectors and his plates and his batteries, with nobody around to get hurt except a few penguins if something went wrong. And he’s done a real job of development down there since his rejuvenation.”

“Ah.” Dan glanced up hopefully.

“Now there,” said Carl, “is a real lively project. Solar energy into power on a utilitarian level. The man is a fanatic, of course, but with his plans and his plant he could actually be producing in another five years.” He looked bleakly at the senator.

“Could?”

“He could—except that he’s gotten sidetracked a bit,” said Carl.

Dan glanced at Terry Fisher. “How?”

“Well, his equipment is working fine, and he can concentrate solar heat from ten square miles onto a spot the size of a manhole cover. But he hasn’t started converting it to useful power yet.” Carl suddenly burst out laughing. “Dan, this! Will kill you. Billions and billions of calories of solar heat concentrated down there, and do you know what he’s doing with it? He’s melting a hole in the ice two thousand feet deep and a mile wide, that’s what”

“A hole in the ice!”

“Exactly. Conversion? Certainly, but first he wants to be sure his technique is perfect. So right now he and his whole crew are very busy trying to melt down Antarctica. And if you give him another ten years, he’s just liable to do it too!”

This was the last, most painful trip of all.

Dan didn’t even know why he was going, except that Paul had told him he should go, and he could not risk leaving a single stone unturned.

The landing in New York Crater had been rough, and Dan had cracked his elbow on the bulkhead; he nursed it now as he left the Volta on the deserted street of the crater city, and entered the low one-story lobby of the ground- scraper. The clerk took his name impassively, and he sat down to wait.

An hour passed, then another.

Then: “Mr. Devlin will see you now, Senator.”

Down in the elevator, fifteen—sixteen—seventeen stories. Above him was the world; here, deep below, with subtly efficient ventilators and shafts and exotic cubbyholes for retreat, a man could forget that a world even existed up above.

Soft lighting in the corridor, a golden plastic door. The door swung open, and a tiny old man blinked out.

“Mr. Chauncey Devlin?”

“Senator Fowler!” The little old man beamed. “Come in, come in. My dear fellow, if I’d realized it was you, I’d never have kept you so long.” He smiled, obviously distressed. “Retreat has its disadvantages, too, you see. Nothing is perfect but life, as they say. When you’ve lived for a hundred and ninety years, you’ll be glad to get away from people, and be able to keep them out, from time to time.”

In better light Dan stared openly at the man. A hundred and ninety years. It was incredible. He said as much.

“Isn’t it, though?” Chauncey Devlin chirped. “Well, I was a war baby! Can you imagine! Born in London in 1945. But I don’t even think about those horrid years any more. Imagine—barbarians dropping bombs on each other!”

A tiny bird of a man, three times rejuvenated, and still the mind was sharp, the eyes were sharp. The face was a strange mixture of recent youth and very great age. It stirred something deep inside Dan—almost a feeling of loathing. An uncanny feeling.

“My daughter and I, we’ve always known your music,” Dan said. “We’ve always loved it. Just a week ago we heard the Washington Philharmonic doing—”

“The eighth.” Chauncey Devlin cut him off disdainfully. They always do the eighth.”

“It’s a great symphony,” Dan protested.

Devlin chuckled, and bounced about the room like a little boy. “It was only half finished when they chose me for the big plunge,” he said. “Of course I was doing a lot of conducting then, too. Now I’d much rather just write.” He hurried across the long, softly lit room to die piano, came back with a sheaf of manuscript, “Do you read music? That is what I’ve been doing recently. Can’t get it quite right, but it’ll come, it’ll come.”

“Which will this be?” asked Dan.

“The tenth. The ninth was almost done when I was rejuvenated. I finished it during my year as Free Agent. Strictly a potboiler, I’m afraid. I thought it was pretty good at the time, but this one—ah!” He fondled the smooth sheets of paper. “In this one I could say something. Always before, it was hit and run, make a stab at it, then rush on to stab at something else, never time enough to do anything right. But not this one.” He patted the manuscript happily. “With this one there will be nothing wrong.”

“It’s almost finished?”

“Oh, no. Oh, my goodness no! A fairly acceptable first movement, but even that’s not what it will be when I’m finished.”

“I see. I—understand. And you’ve been working on follow long?”

“Oh, I don’t know—I must have it down here somewhere. Oh, yes. It was begun in April of 2057. Just seventy-seven years.”

They talked on, until it was too painful to continue. Dan thanked his host, and started back for the corridor and life again. He had never even mentioned why he had come, and nobody had noticed.

Chauncy Devlin, a tiny, perfect wax image of a man, so old, so wise, so excited and full of enthusiasm and energy and carefulness, working eagerly, happily—

And accomplishing nothing. Seventy-seven years. The picture of a man with a great mind, slowly grinding to a standstill!

And now Dan Fowler knew that he hadn’t really been looking at Chauncey Devlin at all. He had been looking at the whole human race.

February 15, 2135.

The day of the Hearings, to consider the charges and petition formally placed before the Senate by The Honorable Daniel Fowler, Independent Senator from the great state of Illinois. The long oval hearing room was filling early; the gallery above was packed by 9:05 in the morning. TV boys all over the place. The Criterion Committee members, taking their places in twos and threes, some old, some young, some rejuvenated, some not, sitting down at one end of the oval. Then the other senators—not the President, of course, but he’ll be well represented by Senator Rinehart himself, ah yes. Don’t worry about the President.

Bad news in the papers. Trouble in New Chicago, where so much trouble seems to start these days. Bomb thrown into the lobby of the Hoffman Medical Center out there, a bomb of all things I Shades of Lenin. Couple of people killed, and one of the doctors nearly beaten to death on the street before the police arrived to clear the mob away. Dan Fowler’s name popping up here and there, not pleasantly. Whispers and accusations, sotto voce. And “Moses” Tyndall’s network hookup last night—of course nobody with any sense listens to him, but did you hear that hall go wild?

Rinehart—yes, that’s him. Well, he’s got a right to look worried. If Dan can unseat him here and now, he’s washed up. According to the rules of the government, you know, Fowler can legally petition for Rinehart’s chairmanship without risking it as a platform plank in the next election, and then if the Senate votes him in after the Hearings, he’s got the election made. Dan’s smart. They’re scared to throw old Rinehart out, of course. After all, he’s let them keep their thumbs on rejuvenation all these years with his criteria, and if they supported him they got named, and if they didn’t, they didn’t get named. Not as simple as that, of course, but that’s what it boiled down to, let me tell you! But now, if they reject Dan’s petition and the people give him the election over their heads, they’re really in a spot Dan wants that chairmanship—

How’s that? Can’t be too long now. Look there, Tyndall Just came in, Bible and all! Let’s see if he’s got any tomatoes in his pockets. Ol’ “Moses” really gets you going—ever listen to him talk? Well, it’s just as well. Damn, but it’s hot in herein the rear chamber, Dan mopped his brow, popped a pill under his tongue, puffed savagely on the long black cigar. “You with me, lad?”

Carl nodded.

“You know what it means.”

“I don’t care what it means. I’m with you. There’s your buzzer, better get in there.” Carl turned back to Jean and the others around the 80-inch screen, set deep in the wall. Dan put his cigar down, gently, as though he planned to be back to smoke it again before it went out, and then walked through the tall oak doors.

The murmur in the gallery above rose to a roar of applause as he was recognized, and suddenly someone was on his feet, and then another, and the whole gallery rose in a standing ovation. Dan waved and took his seat, grinned across at Senator Libby, leaned his head over to drop an aside into Parker’s ear. Rinehart sat with a face of stone as the applause died and a gavel banged and the president of the Senate said, “Will the clerk please read the charges and petition that concern this chamber this morning,” and then the charges, read off in a droning nasal voice—

— Whereas the criteria for selection of candidates for subtotal prosthesis, first written by the Honorable Walter Rinehart, senator from the great state of Alaska, have been found to be inadequate, outdated, and utterly inappropriate to the use of this life-sustaining technique that is now possible—

— And whereas that same Honorable Walter Rinehart has repeatedly used these criteria, not in the just, honorable, and humble way in which such criteria must be regarded, but rather as a tool and weapon for his own furtherance and for that of his friends and associates—

Dan waited, patiently, as the voice droned on. Was Rinehart’s face whiter than before? Was the hall quieter now? Maybe not, but wait for the petition—

— The Senate of the United States of North America is formally petitioned that the Honorable Walter Rinehart should be dismissed from his seat as chairman of the Criterion Committee, and that his seat should be yielded to the Honorable Daniel Fowler, senator from the great state of Illinois and author of this petition, who has pledged himself before God to seek, through this committee in any and every way possible, the extension of the benefits of subtotal prosthesis to all the people of this land and not to a chosen few—

Screams, hoots, catcalls, wild applause, all from the gallery. None below—senatorial dignity forbade. And then Dan Fowler stood up (an older Dan Fowler than most of them seemed to remember) and requested the floor. And they listened, incredulous, as the familiar, rasping voice rose in the hall: “You have all heard the charges which have been read. I now stand before you, formally, in order to withdraw them.”

Slowly then, measuring every word, he told them. He knew that words were not enough, but he told them. “Only 70,000 men and women have undergone the process, at this date, out of over five hundred million people on this continent, yet already it has begun to sap our strength. We were told that no changes were involved, and indeed we saw no changes, but changes were there. The suicides of men like Kenneth Armstrong did not just happen. There are many reasons that might lead a man to take his life in this world of ours—selfishness, self-pity, hatred of the world or of himself, guilt, bitterness, resentment—but it was none of these that motivated Kenneth Armstrong. His death was the act of a bewildered, defeated mind, for he saw what I am telling you now and knew that it was true. He saw Starships built and rebuilt, and never launched. He saw colonies dying of lethargy, because there was no longer any drive behind them. He saw brilliant minds losing sight of goals and drifting into endless inconsequential digressions, lifetimes wasted in repetition, in re-doing and re-writing and re-living. He saw what I too can see: a vicious downward spiral which can only lead to death for all of us in the last days.

“That is why I withdraw the charges and petition of this Hearing. This is why I reject rejuvenation, and declare that it is a monstrous thing which we must not allow to continue. That is why I now announce that I personally will nominate the Honorable John Tyndall, senator from the great state of Los Angeles, for President in the elections next spring, and will pledge him my support, my political organization, my experience, and my every personal effort to see that he wins that election.”

It seemed there would be no end to it, when Dan Fowler had finished. “Moses” Tyndall sat staring as the blood drained out of his sallow face; his jaw gaped, and he half- rose from his chair, then sank back with a ragged cough, staring at the senator as if Dan had been transformed into a snake. Carl and Terry were beside Dan in a moment, clearing a way back to the rear chambers, then down the steps of the building to a cab. Senator Libby intercepted them there, his face purple with rage, Dwight MacKenzie, bristling and indignant, in his wake. “You’ve lost your mind, Dan, you’ve simply—”

“I have not. I am perfectly sane.”

“But Tyndall! Hell turn Washington into a grand revival meeting, hell—

“Then we’ll cut him down to size. He’s my candidate, remember. Hell play my game if it pays him well enough. But I want an Abolitionist administration, and I’m going to have one.”

Libby was shaking his head. “There isn’t a sane man in the country who’ll support you. You’ll be whipped so badly you’ll never win another election.”

Dan ground out his cigar under his heel, and started down the steps. “Fine. Then I’ll fight it after I’m beaten. And when it comes to a fight, I’m no slouch.”

In the cab he stared glumly out the window, his heart racing, his whole body shaking in reaction now. “You know what it means,” he said to Carl for the tenth time.

“Yes, Dan, I know.”

“It means no rejuvenation, for you or for any of us. It means proving something to people that they just don’t want to believe, it means cramming it down their throats if we have to. It means taking away their right to keep on living.”

“I know all that.”

“Carl, if you want out, you, or anybody, now—the time.”

“Correction. Yesterday was the time.”

“Okay then. We’ve got work to do.”

Up in the offices again. Dan was on the phone immediately. He knew politics, and people, like the jungle cat knows the whimpering creatures he stalks. He knew that it was the first impact, the first jolting blow that would win for them. Everything had to hit right. He had spent his life working with people, building friends, building power, banking his resources, investing himself. Now the time had come to cash in his investment.

Carl and Jean and the others worked with him—a dreadful afternoon and evening, fighting off the newsmen, blocking phone calls, trying to concentrate in the midst of bedlam. They labored to set up a work schedule, listing names, outlining telegrams, drinking coffee, as Dan swore at his dead cigar like old times once again, and grinned like a madman as the plans slowly developed and blossomed. The snowball was rolling.

Then the phone jangled, and Dan reached out for it, and it was that last small effort that did it. A sledge-hammer blow, from deep within him, sharp agonizing pain, a driving hunger for the air that he just couldn’t pull into his lungs. He let out a small, sharp cry, and doubled over with pain. They found him seconds later, still clinging to the phone, his breath so faint as to be no breath at all.

He regained consciousness hours later. He stared about him at the straight lines of the ceiling, at the hospital bed and the hospital window. Dimly he saw Carl Golden, head drooping on his chest, dozing at the side of the bed.

There was a hissing sound, and he raised a hand, felt the oxygen mask over his mouth and nose. Even with that help, every breath was an agony of pain and weariness.

He was so very tired. But slowly, through the fog, he remembered. Cold sweat broke out on his forehead, drenched his body. He was alive. Yet he remembered clearly the thought that had exploded in his mind in the instant the blow had come. I’m dying. This is the end—it’s too late now. And then, cruelly, Why did I wait so long?

He struggled against the mask, sat bolt upright in bed. “I’m going to die,” he whispered, then caught his breath. Carl sat up, smiled at him.

“Lie back, Dan. Get some rest.”

Had he heard? Had Carl heard the fear he had whispered? Perhaps not. He lay back, panting, as Carl watched. Do you know what I’m thinking, Carl? I’m thinking how much I want to live. People don’t need to die—wasn’t that what Dr. Moss had said? It’s such a terrible waste, he had said.

Too late, now. Dan’s hands trembled. He remembered the senators in the oval hall, the people in the gallery, the brave words he had shouted. He remembered Rinehart’s face, and Tyndall’s, and Libby’s. He was committed now. Yesterday, no. Now, yes.

Paul had been right, and Dan had proved it.

His eyes moved across to the bedside table. A telephone. He was still alive, Moss had said that sometimes it was possible even when you were dying. That was what they did with your father, wasn’t it, Carl? Brave Peter Golden, who had fought Rinehart so hard, who had begged and pleaded for universal rejuvenation, waited and watched to catch Rinehart red-handed, to prove that he was corrupting the law and expose him. Simple, honest Peter Golden, applying so naively for his rightful place on the list, when his cancer was diagnosed. And then the auto accident, never definitely linked to Rinehart, but no real accident either. Peter Golden had been all but dead when he had finally whispered his defeat, begging for help and giving Rinehart his pledge of perpetual silence in return for life. They had snatched him from death, indeed. But he had been crucified all the same. The life they had given him had been a living death, which was why in just a few short months he had quietly withdrawn and curled up and died once and for all, in spite of his rejuvenation, loathing himself for his betrayal of all he believed in. And you watched it all, didn’t you, Carl? You and your mother watched him die, inch by inch, and couldn’t find a way to help him. Rinehart had stripped him of everything and found a coward and traitor underneath.

Coward? Why? Was it wrong to want to live? Dan Fowler was dying. Why must it be he? He had committed himself to a fight, yes, but there were others, young men, who could fight. Men like Peter Golden’s son.

But you’re their leader, Dan. If you fail them, they will never win.

Carl was watching him silently, his lean dark face expressionless. Could the boy read his mind? Was it possible that he knew what Dan Fowler was thinking? Carl had understood before. It had seemed sometimes that Carl understood Dan far better than Dan did. He wanted to cry out to Carl now, spill over his dreadful thoughts, but he knew he could not do it.

There was no one to run to. He was facing himself now. No more cover-up, no deceit. Life or death, that was the choice. No compromise. Life or death, but decide now. Not tomorrow, not next week, not in five minutes—

Now.

And there was the flaw, the one thing that even Paul hadn’t known, perhaps the universal flaw: that given the choice, a man will choose life. That life is too dear, that a man loves life—not what he can do with life, but life itself for its own sake—too much to choose to die. There was no choice, not really. A man will always choose life, as long as the choice is really his. Dan Fowler knew that now.

It would be selling himself, as Peter Golden did. It would betray Carl, and Jean, and all the rest. It would mean derision, and scorn, and oblivion for Dan Fowler.

Sorry. But that was the way it had to be—

Had to be?

The pain began again in his chest.

He looked at the telephone on the bedside stand. An easy aim’s length away. Reach out, pick up the receiver, a single call to Dr. Moss. So easy—

As easy as crossing back across the gulf from Death. That flaw—universal? Maybe not. There were others, throughout history, who had chosen the other path when the cause was great enough. Martyrs, all of them. But what comfort to be a living traitor?

He looked again at the telephone as the pain swelled up, almost overwhelmed him. His hand moved toward it, almost involuntarily. “Carl. Carl! Help me! Hold my hand back!”

“Gently, Dan.” Carl held his hand.

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I know. But I don’t need to hold your hand, do I? Not yours—”

The pain swept higher and this time did not stop. “No, lad, not mine,” Dan breathed, as Carl felt the tension in his arm relax, and his hand go limp. And in the last flickering instant before the darkness, “Thank you, lad.”

Jean Fowler came into the room moments later as Carl Golden wept, silently and fearlessly. She stared at Dan, gray on the bed, and then at Carl. One look at Carl’s face and she knew too.

Carl nodded slowly. “I’m sorry, Jean.”

She shook her head, tears welling up. “But you loved him so.”

“More than my own father.”

“Then why didn’t you make him call?”

“He wanted to be immortal. Always, that drove him. Greatness, power, all the same. Now he will be immortal, because he knew we needed a martyr in order to win. Now we will win. The other way, he knew we would surely lose, and he would live on and on and on and die every day.” He turned slowly to the bed and brought the sheet up gently. “Maybe this is better, who can say? This way he will never die.”

Together they left the quiet room.