“But you do have pain,” Dr. Moss said gently.
“So? A little twinge, now and then.”
“Like whenever you lose your temper. Whenever you run for a plane. Whenever anything upsets you.”
“All right—a twinge.”
“Which makes you sit down for ten or fifteen minutes when it comes on, and doesn’t go away any more with just one nitro tablet, you have to take two, and sometimes three—right?”
Dan Fowler blinked. “All right, sometimes it gets a little bad—”
“And it used to be only once or twice a month, but now it’s almost every day. And once or twice you’ve just blacked out for a while, and made your staff work like demons to cover for you and keep it off the TV, right?”
“Say, who’s been talking to you?”
“Really, Senator!”
“Can’t even trust your own blood daughter to keep her trap shut” Fowler tossed his cigar butt down in disgust “It happened once, yes. That confounded Rinehart is enough to make anybody black out” He thrust out his jaw and glowered at Dr. Moss as though it were all his fault Then he grinned. “Oh, I know you’re right, Doc, it’s just that this is the wrong time. I can’t take two months out now. There’s too much to be done between now and the middle of next month.”
“Oh, yes. The Hearings. Why not turn them over to your staff? They know what’s going on.”
“Nonsense. They know, but not like I know. After the Hearings, fine. I’ll come along like a lamb. But not right now—”
Dr. Moss reddened, slammed his fist down on the desk. “Senator, are you both blind and deaf? Or just plain stupid? Didn’t you hear me a moment ago? You may not live through the Hearings. You could go out, just like that any minute. But this is 2134 a.d., not the Middle Ages. It would be so utterly, hopelessly pointless to let that happen.”
Fowler champed his cigar and scowled. “After the Retread was done I’d have to free-agent for a year, wouldn’t I?” It was an accusation.
“You should. But that’s really only a formality. If you want to go right back to the same thing you were doing before you came to the center, that’s purely your option.”
“Yes, if! But supposing I didn’t? Supposing I was all changed.”
The young doctor looked at the man shrewdly. Dan Fowler was fifty-six years old and he looked forty. It seemed incredible even to Dr. Moss that this man could have done what he had done, and still look almost as young and fighting-mad now as he had when he started. Clever old goat too, but Dan Fowler’s last remarks bad lifted a veil. Moss smiled to himself. “You’re afraid of it, aren’t you, Senator?”
“Of rejuvenation? Nonsense.”
“But you are. You aren’t the only one, it’s a pretty frightening thing. Cash in the old model, take out a new one, just like a jet racer or a worn out talk-writer. Only it isn’t machinery, it’s your body, and your life.” Dr. Moss spread his hands. “It scares a man. Rejuvenation isn’t the right word, of course. Aside from the neurones, they take way every cell in your body, one way or another, and give you new ones. A hundred and fifty years ago Cancelmo and Klein did it on a dog, right in this building when the Hoffman Center was new. They called it subtotal prosthesis. A crude job—I’ve studied their papers and films. Vat-grown hearts and kidneys, revitalized vascular material, building up new organ systems like a patchwork quilt, coaxing new tissues to grow to replace old ones. But they got a living dog out of it, and that dog lived to the ripe old age of thirty-seven years.”
Dr. Moss pushed back from his desk, watching Dan Fowler’s face. “Then in 1992 Nimrock tried it on a Mercy Man here, and almost got himself convicted of murder because the man died. That was a hundred and forty-one years ago. While Nimrock’s trial was still going on, his workers completed the second job, and the man lived, and oh, did that jury fall over itself to have Nimrock set free!”
As the doctor talked, Dan Fowler sat silent, chewing his cigar furiously. But listening—he was listening, all right. “Well, it was a crude process in those days,” Dr. Moss said. “Hit or miss. But in those days the Hoffman Center was barely getting organized as a great medical research complex. They were still using Mercy Men—paid medical mercenaries—for their experiments, and public opinion was fighting them like mad. With rejuvenation a success, they brought in the best researchers and clinical physicians the world had to offer, threw everything they had into it, with more financial support than they knew what to do with, and today there is nothing crude or haphazard about subtotal prosthesis.” He pointed to a bronze plaque hanging on the wall. “That’s on the wall of every examining room here in the Hoffman Center. You’ve seen it before; read it.”
Dan Fowler’s eyes went up to the plaque. A list of names. At the top words said, “These ten gave life to Mankind.”
Below it were the names:
Martin Aronson, Ph.D.—Education
Thomas Bevalaqua—Literature and Art
Chauncey Devlin—Music
Frederick A. Kehler, M.S.—Engineering
William B. Morse, LL.D.—Law
Rev. John McFarlane—Philosophy and Theology
Jacob Prowsnitz, Ph. D.—History
John W. Shaw, M.D.—Medicine
Carlotta Sokol, Ph.D.—Sociopsychology
Harvey Tatum—Business
“I know,” said Dan Fowler. “June 1, 2005. They were the first scientifically controlled volunteers.”
“Ten out of several thousand volunteers,” Moss amended. “Those ten were chosen by lot. Already people were dreaming about what subtotal prosthesis could do. Think of it, at a time when death by the age of eighty or ninety was still a virtual certainty, and very final too! To preserve the great minds, compound the accumulated wisdom of one lifetime with still another lifetime, and maybe another and another—the old Fountain of Youth dream, at last come true! So those ten people, representing ten great fields of study, volunteered to risk their lives. Not to live forever, just to see if rejuvenation really could preserve their minds in newly built bodies. All of them were old, older than you are, Senator. Some were sicker than you are, and believe me, every one of them was afraid. But seven of the ten are still alive today, a hundred and thirty years later. John Shaw died in a jet crash ten years after his first Retread. Tatum died of a neuro-toxic virus, because in those days we couldn’t do anything to rebuild neurones and brain tissue. Bevalaqua took his own life, for reasons unknown. The rest are still alive, vigorously and productively alive, after two more rejuvenations.”
“Fine,” said Dan Fowler. “I still can’t do it now.”
“That was just ten people,” Dr. Moss cut in. “It took five years to get ready for them, then. Today we can handle five hundred a year, but still only five hundred select individuals, to live on instead of dying. You have the incredible good fortune to be one of those chosen, and you’ve got the gall to sit there and tell me you don’t have the time for it!”
The senator rose slowly, lighting another cigar. “Doctor, it could be five thousand a year instead of five hundred. That’s why I don’t have the time. It could be fifteen thousand, fifty thousand. It could be, but it’s not. Senator Walter Rinehart has been rejuvenated twice already. He is one of the most corrupt politicians this nation has ever spawned, the chairman of the committee that makes the final irrevocable selection of just exactly who the lucky ones will be each year. Rinehart’s on the list, of course. I’m on the list because I’ve shouted so loudly and made such a stink for such a long time that the Criterion Committee didn’t dare leave me off. But you’re not on the list. Why not? You could be. Every productive individual in our society could be.”