George went through the gamut sullenly. It was a little easier to take when Mara also fell for some of these creaking gags. All the same, it palled—like the goings on at some convention for dim Babbitts.
At last it ended. Having seen no other soul around but themselves, they came into a lounge furnished with Eastern luxuriousness. The chairs, the carpet, the divans were all deep and soft. It was many-colored and cheerful because bright sunlight smote in through the windows and made the silks and satins glow.
“The sun—out at last?” said George, wonderingly, and went to a window. It was as though the window were frosted: he couldn’t see the sky clearly—it was just a flat whiteness. In the center of it was a very bright but hazy disk, like the sun shining through a high mist.
Senilde said, thinly: “It’s my own private sun. Quite a small thing, really, but it’s perpetual and emits all the qualities of sunlight. You know, as I grow older I find I don’t want to do much else but bask in here in the sunlight. Apart from today, I’ve not been out of this room in years. It’s too dull out there under the clouds. I often regret I cut the planet off from the sun like that, because I made it rather a depressing place for myself.”
“What are you running on about now?” asked George, irritably. Mara sank into one of the divans, and a trick cushion squeaked under her. Senilde giggled fatuously.
George’s irritation intensified. He gripped Senilde’s shoulders and shook him. “See here, I want to know just what you’ve been getting up to on this planet. I want a detailed report, and no more monkey business. Don’t hold out on me, don’t think I can’t hurt you. I can. I’ll burn this house of yours to the ground. Where would you be then, you old sybarite, without your playthings and your sunlight and your soft cushions?”
One moment he was standing there bawling out Senilde and shaking him like a man emptying a sack. Next moment he was flat on his back on the carpet, with his mind cloudier than the sky.
He regained his senses gradually. Mara was lying near him, apparently unconscious. He crawled over to her. When he touched her, she raised herself on her elbows, looking dazed.
“Are you all right, lass?”
“I guess so. George, I thought he’d killed you. So I stabbed him clean through the heart. And then… I don’t know what happened then.”
A knife dropped onto the carpet between them. They looked up. Senilde stood over them. He’d closed his mouth and didn’t look quite so foolish. He said: “There’s your little toy back, my dear. I told you that sort of thing was useless. So many people have tried it at one time or another that it became tiresome. I discourage them with a gadget I wear which creates an electrical field at a touch and stuns anyone who touches me. Life’s so flat without a little fun.”
But he didn’t smile, and neither did they.
Senilde said: “Don’t ever threaten me again, George (silly name!) Don’t try to use violence on me or my possessions. It’ll never work and you may kill yourself. Everything I have is protected in some way. I’m a cautious man. Now I suggest you make yourselves comfortable, and I’ll tell you a story. My story. You’d never have gotten away from here without having to hear it, anyway. Every man needs an audience, and I’ve been without one for far too long…”
IV
NATURE MAKES many blunders,” Senilde said, “and one of them, I always thought, was that men should have to die. Simple cell creatures keep splitting in halves, and the halves in turn split, and so on. But the original portions still live. Any one of those creatures could truly be said to be potentially immortal. You can take a tissue of man or beast and keep it alive indefinitely in a suitable culture.
“Single protoplasmic cells or small groups of them survive. But if they grow into a large, multi-celled body, like that of a man, that large group dies. Why does it die? The only different factor is— size. The size of the group. Once a group grows beyond a certain size, it seals its own doom.”
“Critical mass,” George murmured.
“You know about atomic energy?” asked Senilde, mildly interested. “Yes, I suppose you would. Tell me, have you ever made any of those delightful atomic bombs?”
“Not personally,” said George.
“They were my favorite toys at one time. Such a spectacle! But one wearies even of that… My instruments tell me that they still go off in various parts of the planet sometimes, but I never bother nowadays to go out and look at them. I’ve still got a pretty large stock of them around somewhere… I think.”
“Our astronomers saw some of your explosions, I guess,” said George.
“Great atmospheric disturbances concentrated in various small spots. One in November, 1985. One in June, 1927—photographed at Mount Wilson. Another back in February, 1913.”
“Indeed?” said Senilde, indifferently.
Mara said: “I don’t know what you’re both talking about. Why don’t you keep to the subject, which was immortality?”
“I find these days a growing tendency of my mind to wander,” said Senilde.
“Where was I?”
Mara told him. He went on: “The reason, I found, was that the duration of life was directly linked to the permeability in that part of the living cell exposed to the radiations of the universe around it. As growth— that is, accumulation—proceeds, so the inner cells suffer a natural and inevitable decrease in that permeability. They’re entombed, choked, cut off from light, denied invigorating contact with exterior radiation.”
“I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Mara pouting. George said, thoughtfully: “Half a century or more ago, on Earth, a fellow named… er… Benedict—yes, H.M. Benedict—came to that conclusion after studying the senility of plants.”
“Did he go on from there?”
“How could he?”
“I did. Nature made an error in the colloidal degree of protoplasm. I corrected it. Just a matter of the injection into the bloodstream of a perpetual solvent, which, as it circulates, thins out the too dense, too clinging proteins. The cells of your body are specialists. Either they travel a fixed, confined circuit in your bloodstream or else they’re gummed immovably in place in your flesh and bones. Except the white blood corpuscles, that is.
“Fixity and specialization spell death. My body-cells are free, fluid, adaptable, amoeboid. When they feel the need to come to the surface, they do so. They move slowly—but they move. Also, they’re versatile and continually change their functions. I could make you immortal, too, if I chose to. But I shan’t. You are harmless, simple people. Why should I condemn you to the nightmare of boredom I endure?”
“Is it that bad?” asked George.
“Young man, I’ve tried every kind of pleasure a million times; from the common pleasures of sensuality to the rarer ones of labor and asceticism; intellectual pleasures and bodily pleasures; the pleasures of lust and power and humility and martyrdom. And I have exhausted them. My palate has lost nearly all sensation. Repetition of a pleasure does not increase the pleasure: it makes it pall. Looking back, I see that the happiest time of my whole life was when I was a child, absorbed in play. I seek in my sad way to recover some of that pleasure in the childish devices you deprecate. You should not be angry with me, but sorry for me.”
“I’m sorry for you,” said Mara.
But sorrow didn’t come so easily to George. What the hell did Senilde have to beef about? He hadn’t missed a thing.
“Mara, you have a sweet nature, besides being sensible and beautiful,” said Senilde. “You’re something rare. I don’t like people much. When you’ve lived as long as I have, you’ve lost all your illusions about people. Under the skin, most people have hard little hearts, and they’re aways dancing to the tune of self-interest.”