Sharp eyes went to Carl’s face. “What’s so ‘very strange’ about the colony?”
Carl Golden shrugged. “Hard to put a finger on it. This was my first look at Ironstone, I had nothing to compare it with. But there’s something wrong out there. I always thought the Mars colony was a frontier, a real challenge—you know, Man against the Wilderness, and all that Hard men, hard work, saloons jammed on Saturday night, the sort of place that could take Earthbound softies and toughen them up in two weeks, working to tame the desert—” His voice trailed off. “Well, there’s not much hard work going on, that I could see, and when a good man goes up there is just gets softer, not tougher. They’ve got a saloon, all right, but everybody just goes in there to get drunk and wish that something, somehow, sometime would happen. I met a guy named Fisher, must have been a top rate man when he went out there, five years ago. A real go-getter, leader type, lots of ideas and the guts to put them across. Now he’s got a hobnail liver and a very warm friendship with port wine and not much else. He came back home on the ship with me, hating Mars and everything up there, most of all himself. Something’s gone wrong up there, Dan. Maybe that’s why Armstrong took the route he did.”
The senator took a deep breath. “Not a man like Ken Armstrong. I used to worship him when I was a kid. You know, I was just ten years old when he came back to Earth for his second Retread.” He shook his head. “I wanted to go back to Mars with him. I actually packed up to run away, until dear brother Paul caught me and squealed to Dad. Imagine.”
“I’m sorry, Dan.”
The car whizzed off the freeway and began weaving through the residential areas of Arlington. Jean swung under an arched gate, stopped in front of a large greystone house of the sort they hadn’t built for a hundred years. Dan Fowler stared out at the gray November afternoon. “Well, then we’re really on thin ice at the Hearings. Nothing really solid at all. If I can’t prove that Rinehart has corrupted his job, we’re in trouble. Well, we’ve slugged out some tough ones before, and won. This may take some steamrollering, but we can manage it.” He turned to the girl. “Ill have to go over Carl’s report for anything I can find in it first. Meanwhile, get Dr. Schirmer on the line. Tell him I said if he wants his job as Chief Coordinator of the Hoffman Medical Center next year, he’d better have all the statistics there are on all rejuvenated persons, past and present, in my office by tomorrow morning at eight.”
Jean Fowler avoided her father’s eyes. “Dr. Schirmer’s waiting for you inside right now. He’s been here over an hour.”
“Here? What for?”
“He wouldn’t say. Nothing to do with politics, he said—
Something about Uncle Paul.”
Dr. Nathan Schirmer, chubby and nervous, was waiting in the library, sipping a brandy and pretending without success to appear interested in a Congressional Record on the tape-reader. He looked up, birdlike, as Dan Fowler strode in. Dan shook his hand like an old friend. “Good to see you, Nathan. Sit down, sit down. Wanted to chew the fat with you anyway, but what’s this about my brother?”
The doctor coughed into his hand. “Why—nothing, really. I mean nothing urgent. I just thought you’d want to know that Paul was in Washington this afternoon.”
“Of course he was. He was scheduled to go to the center—” Dan broke off short, whirling on Schirmer. “Wait a minute! There wasn’t a slip-up on his permit somehow?”
Dr. Schirmer looked blank. “Permit?”
“For rejuvenation, you idiot! He’s on the Starship Project, coordinating engineer of the whole works out there. He’s got a fair place on the list coming to him three ways from Sunday. MacKenzie put the permit through months ago, and Paul has just been fooling around clearing the decks out in Vegas so he could come in—”
The coordinator’s eyes widened. “Oh, there wasn’t anything wrong on our side if that’s what you mean. The permit was in perfect order, the doctors at the center were ready and waiting for him. That isn’t the trouble.”
“Then what is?”
The doctor flushed. “Well, I’ll be blunt. The trouble is, your brother refused. He flew all the way out here, right on schedule, just to laugh in our faces and tell us to go fly a kite. Then he got on the next jet back to Nevada. All in one afternoon.”