Caroline was flushed, smiling, and immensely gratified when she sat down again beside Humphrey. It is in such states of happy excitement that words pop out that are utterly different from what one really means, words that anyone but a cold-blooded scientist would have the decency to ignore. "Well?" said Caroline. "What do you think of us?" She stopped herself suddenly, and looked at Humphrey in blushing embarrassment, for such words are not fit to be heard by a psychoanalyst, much less by a forsaken lover.
"I think," said Humphrey, "You're both charming, and I hope we'll be friends. Why not bring your young man around to see me?"
"We go off on Friday, you know," said Caroline, still confused. "There's not a chance in the world before then."
"But you will when you get back?"
"Of course. We'd love to. But it won't be for two months at least."
"I can wait, "said Humphrey.
About a week before Alan and Caroline were due back from their honeymoon, Humphrey, who had been thinking a great deal while he waited, called up a man named Morgan. This was Albert Morgan, whose vocation it is to take the ambiguous and uncertain mutterings of scientists and transform them into clear, downright, and extremely thrilling articles for the weekly magazines. "Morgan," said Humphrey, "It's now three months since you last pestered me to give you some private information about Vingleberg's experiments."
Morgan explained why he had abandoned the attempt to get Humphrey to talk.
"If you think clams do that sort of thing," said Humphrey, "I can understand why your articles are so extremely inaccurate. But, anyway, I'm not a clam, and to prove it I'm calling you to say I've just had a letter from Vingleberg. It concerns some tests we started just before I left. Now, listen; I shall tell you nothing that's in the least confidential, because I know damned well I'll see it in all the headlines tomorrow morning. But if you want to hear about twenty very carefully chosen words . . ."
"Hold it!" said Morgan. "I'll be right over."
It was really remarkable what Morgan could do with twenty carefully chosen words. Or possibly Humphrey, being a guileless scientist, had been cozened into uttering twenty-five or even thirty. At all events the news broke, not in the headlines, it's true, but in very impressive articles on important pages, to the effect that stocky, balding, Viennese endocrinologist Vingleberg and Johns Hopkins' Humphrey Baxter had succeeded in isolating V.B. 282. And V.B. 282, it appeared, was neither more nor less than the glandular secretion that controls the aging of the tissues. And since we all have tissues, all aging, the promise in these paragraphs was seized on with avidity by all who read.
Meanwhile Caroline and Alan returned, and soon very soon they came round to Humphrey's apartment for a drink. He received them with the utmost cordiality, and asked them a thousand questions about themselves, all of which they answered fully and frankly, like people who had nothing to conceal. They were so anxious to give him all the information that might be of interest to him that neither of them observed his reactions very closely. Had they done so, they might have noticed that at certain answers, particularly from Caroline, his cruel and sensitive mouth tightened itself with that painful satisfaction with which a pathologist might regard the slide which tells him that his difficult diagnosis was right in every particular, and his best friend needs immediate surgery.
I do not wish to convey that the conversation of the newly married pair was entirely egotistical. Before a single hour had passed Caroline herself broached a new subject. "Humphrey, dear," she said, "we hear you've become famous. Is it true?"
"It's true if you've heard it," he replied. "That's what fame is."
"But is it true about eternal youth and all that?"
"My dear girl," said he, "I think you've got all the scientists beaten as far as eternal youth is concerned. You looked eighteen when I met you, and you were twenty-three. Now you're twenty-six . . ."
"Twenty-seven last week, Humphrey."
"And you still look eighteen."
"But I shan't always."
"I can't say I've noticed myself slowing up any," said Brodie. "But some of these youngsters from the West Coast . . ." He shook his head with the melancholy always induced in tennis players by a mention of the West Coast.
Humphrey ignored this interjection. His eyes were fixed on Caroline. "Of course you won't be young always," said he. "I imagine you'd hardly want to. Those people you see around, who never seem to mature, they belong to a particular frigid, inhibited, narcissistic type they're in love with themselves; they can't love anyone else; therefore they don't really live; therefore they don't get any older."
"Yes, yes. But this stuff you've discovered. . . ?"
"Oh!" said Humphrey. And smiling, he shook his head.
"It's not true then?" cried Caroline. Her disappointment would have moved a heart of stone.
"I told you it was all a lot of hooey," said Brodie.
"These journalists always omit to mention the snags," said Humphrey.
"And they wrote as if you'd really truly discovered it," lamented Caroline.
"It's completely untrue," said Humphrey. "It was Vingleberg, almost entirely."
"You mean it has been found," said Caroline, her face lighting up again.
"I didn't say so, to the newspaper men," said Humphrey. "However, they chose to take it that way." His tone suddenly became very cold and hard. "Now I want both of you to understand this. This is something no one in the world must know about."
"Oh, yes! Yes!"
"Do you understand that, Brodie?"
"You can rely on me."
"Very well," said Humphrey. He sat very still for a moment, as if conquering some final reluctance. Then he rose abruptly and went out of the room.
Caroline and Alan didn't even glance at each other. They sat there looking at the door through which Humphrey had disappeared, expecting him to return with a crucible or an alembic at the very least. Instead, he came back almost immediately, dangling a piece of very ordinary string.
He smiled at his guests. He gave the string a jerk or two, and in through the door, leaping, frisking, clapping its paws in hot pursuit, came a kitten. Humphrey enticed it right over to where Caroline was sitting, made it jump once or twice. Then he picked it up and handed it to her.
"It's sweet," said Caroline. "But . . ."
"It had a birthday last week," said Humphrey. "Five years old."
Caroline dropped the kitten as if it were hot. "I hope people will be able to overcome that sort of instinctive prejudice," said Humphrey, picking it up again and handing it back to her. "Before very long the world will have to get used to this sort of thing."
"But, Humphrey," said Caroline, quite agitated, "it's a dwarf or a midget or something."
"I assure you," said Humphrey, "that kitten is as normal as any kitten you've ever seen in your life."
"But what will happen to it? Will it go on forever?" And, as Humphrey shook his head: "Will it go off bang, or crumble into dust or something?"
"Almost surely heart failure," said Humphrey. "But only after forty years of glorious youth. That's two hundred for a human being. But remember this, both of you . . ." He paused impressively.
"Yes? Yes?"
"I went to Vienna," said Humphrey very slowly and clearly, "exactly three years and four months ago. This kitten is five years old. So you see it's Vingleberg's discovery."
"Oh, yes. Yes, of course. But they said in the papers it was human beings," said Caroline.
"I was helping Vingleberg adapt it to human beings."
"And you succeeded?"
"Remember you have promised not to mention this to a living soul. Yes, we succeeded. To a limited extent, that is."