“Good man, Cranford. Go to him myself occasionally. You don’t mean that pretty little redhead he’s got running around his front office?” The senator was adept at getting people off unpleasant subjects.
“Yes, Moe. She told me. About you.”
“What! She has no business talking about other people’s lives!”
“She has been a fan of yours all her life. She was so broken up, she had to tell somebody.”
“Listen, boy. She didn’t tell you nothing. And you didn’t hear nothing. And you ain’t going to say nothing, either! You hear me, boy?”
“Anything you say, sir. I’m not your enemy.”
“I know that, boy. And old Lou is my best friend. It’s just that if word of this got around, my effectiveness in the Senate would be over.”
“I understand, Moe.”
“I doubt that. I’m afraid of dying… But it isn’t really that. Life hasn’t been worth much since my wife died. It’s just that I hate leaving when there’s so much to do.”
“No chance of an organ transplant?”
“Would be if it was only one organ. But Cranford says that just about every organ in my body is shot. Replacing any one of them would be too much of a strain on the rest. I guess that some people just grow old faster than other people.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way, Moe.”
“Growing old and dying is a natural part of life.” The senator was staring at the floor.
“So is shitting in the woods. But that doesn’t mean that we have to do it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Rejuvenation, Moe.”
“That work-was stopped. I helped stop it. I guess my sins are coming back to me.”
“So maybe dying would serve you right. But justice isn’t a fact of nature, either. Anyway, the work wasn’t stopped. It just went underground.”
“How could Heiny do that without being caught?”
“Motivation. He didn’t want to die, either. Look, Moe. I’ll keep your secrets if you’ll keep mine.”
“About Heiny? Why not? He didn’t break any laws. And knowing about it would just upset folks.”
“About rejuvenation. And about me. Moe, I’m not my grandson. I’m me.”
The senator stared at von Bork for thirty seconds. “You’ve got one hell of a lot of proving to do, boy!”
“Ask me some questions.”
“So I could be young again… Okay, I’m sold. Now, how do I find Heiny Copernick? And what does it cost?”
“You don’t find Mr. Copernick. And he doesn’t want your money. He wants your support.”
“Somehow I figured that that was coming. So Heiny wants to legitimize rejuvenation… ?” The senator was an old hand at making deals. “I can try, Lou. But even I don’t swing that much weight. Eighty-three percent of the federal budget goes to direct aid to individuals. If we had to support every oldster until he was a hundred, instead of seventy-two like now, we would have to more than double federal revenues. Which means doubling the taxes, and they are up to sixty-one percent of gross income already!”
“No. That’s a dead issue. You’re on the HEW appropriations committee. The next issue we’re interested in is tree houses. There must be no governmental regulations concerning them.”
“Tree houses? Genetically modified trees? I’ve heard of them. Nobody’s kicked up much of a fuss about them so far. Can’t be more than a dozen of them growing. Why? Is Heiny behind that one, too?”
“Not exactly. Let’s say he’s interested.”
“I’m your man, Lou. I mean, if all you want is for the government to keep hands off them.”
“That’s all.”
“Well, new technology shouldn’t be regulated, anyway. Say, what’s my constituency going to say about me looking like a kid?”
“You’re not going to look like a teenager, Moe. It would ruin your effectiveness. No, you’re about to have a spontaneous remission. You’ll grow a new set of organs, but that’s all. For the time being, at least.”
“For the time being?” the senator said.
“In ten or twenty years, when you’re ready, you can retire, officially. Then you can get the full treatment, be any age you want. You’ll still have to live near one of our centers, of course.”
“Why’s that?”
“It isn’t completely perfected yet. You’ll have to drop by once a month for a booster shot. But if you play ball with us for ten years, I’ll see to it that you get the full treatment. Then you can be any age you want.”
“Lou, you have a deal. As long as you don’t ask me to do anything that’s against my conscience. Where do I go to get this treatment? You know that I don’t have much time.”
“I’ll pick you up tomorrow afternoon. We have a facility right here, in Crystal City—a good spit from the Pentagon.”
“You built a facility here for me?”
“Moe, what makes you think that you’re the only aging congressman in need of our help?”
“Somehow I’ve got the idea that your tree houses are going to be left alone.” The senator laughed.
Later, on their way to Daisey’s party, the senator said, “Lou, if you could be any age you wanted to be, why did you want to look like a college kid?”
“The college girls, Moe. The pretty college girls.” Von Bork laughed.
Martin Guibedo sat at his microscalpel, making another tree. He was a marshmallow man, just five feet tall, and of considerable girth. His unruly hair and mustache were white and thick, and his wrinkled red face gave no hint of pain or doubt or sadness. Calloused hands moved over the controls with the agility of a competent surgeon of fifty. Actually, he was over ninety, and had seen most of his friends die.
“Ach! You’re going to be such a beauty, you!” he said to the yard-long strand of DNA, watching the assembly of a string of bases that would give this model a nine-foot bed.
In principle, the apparatus was simple. A tiny beaker contained a mixture of cytosine, inosine, thymine, adenine, and a few other chemicals in otherwise pure water. A long organic molecule was being slowly drawn from the beaker with the various bases attaching themselves randomly to its end. As each new base was drawn out, it was scanned by an X-ray resonance microscope, which identified the base and compared it against a model stored in the memory of a very large computer. When, by chance, it was the correct base, it was allowed to pass. When it was not, an X-ray laser sliced it off, and the end of the molecule was reinserted in the beaker to try again. The process was automatic, yet it required continuous monitoring, for one error in ten billion decisions could result in a monstrosity instead of a comfortable home.
“You’re just what my nephew Heiny wanted. And your lights are going to go on and off, and your synthesizer ain’t going to go spritzing beer all over the kitchen, so Heiny ain’t got to get into a bathing suit and chop it off with a boy scout axe, like he did last time. Ach. And it was such good beer, too!” Gnarled fingers danced on the controls.
He had been born in Leipzig in 1910, with an Italian-Catholic father and a Polish-Jewish mother. His father’s civil engineering work had caused the family to move often around Europe. Martin’s parentage and experiences had left him with an improbable accent, a profound disrespect for institutions, and an open contempt for governments.
“So beautiful you’re going to be, everybody’s going to love you. But why does Heiny want you so big?”
In a few hours he had sealed down the lid of a seed, planted it in a Dixie cup, and watered it.
“And this time, the absorption toilet is going to work!”
His only friend, relative, and contact with the world was his nephew, Heinrich Copernick. There was no blood tie between them—Guibedo’s wife had been Heinrich’s mother’s sister—but a deep and permanent bond had been forged between a thirty-year-old man and a five-year-old boy in the winter of 1940 in Germany. Guibedo was frostbitten and young Copernick was stunted and crippled by rickets by the time they got out of Europe, but they were the only members of two large families to survive.