Why Call Them Back from Heaven

25

Two old men met in a park for a game of checkers.

"You hear the latest," asked one old codger, "about this Forever business?"

"You hear so much," said the other one, setting up the pieces, "that you hardly know what story to believe. They say now that if they get this immortality business worked out, you won't have to die at all. They'll just line everybody up, every blessed one of us, and jab us in the arm and then we'll get young again and we'll live forever. Won't that be something, now?"

The old codger shook his head. "That ain't what I had in mind. Got this direct. My nephew has a brother-in-law who works in one of them Forever labs and it was him that told it. I can tell you there are a lot of people who'll be in for a big surprise."

"What surprise?" the second asked, impatiently.

"Well, maybe that's not the word exactly. Maybe they won't be surprised. Hard to be surprised, I suppose, when you go on being dead."

"You're rambling on again," complained his partner. "Why can't you ever come right out and say what is on your mind?"

"I was just laying the foundation. Giving you the background."

"Well, get on with it so we can start this game."

"It seems," the old codger told him, "that they've found there is some sort of bacteria—I think that's what he said—some sort of bacteria that lives inside the brain and that this bacteria can go right on living when the body's frozen. The brain is frozen solid, but this bacteria isn't bothered whatsoever. It goes right on living, multiplying all the time, and eating at the brain." "I don't believe it," said the other. "You hear such stories all the time and I tell you, John, there ain't a lick of truth in any one of them. I wouldn't be surprised if them Holies don't start them stories just to befuddle us. If we got this bacteria in the brain, how come it don't eat up the brain while we are still alive?" "Well, that's just it," said John. "When we are alive, there's something in the brain—antibodies, would they be? — that hold them bacteria in check. But when the brain is frozen it can't make them antibodies and the bacteria run wild. I tell you, there are a lot of people in those vaults who have no brain at all, just an empty skull crammed full of bacteria."