Psi-High And Others Page 6

  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—

  XI

  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 Mar
s. 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.

  XII

  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, tha
t’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!”

  XIII

  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.