He slammed the glass down on the table, heart pounding in his throat, pain creeping up his chest. “I’ve got lots of things on lots of people, and I can get things done when I want them done. People don’t fool with me in Washington any more, because when they do they get their fingers burned off at the knuckles. Paul, I knew you were stubborn but I didn’t think you were blockheaded stupid!”
Paul shrugged.
“You don’t think I could do it?” Dan roared.
“Oh, I suppose you could. But it’s a lot of trouble for such an unwilling victim. And I’m your brother, Dan. Remember?”
Dan Fowler spread his hands in defeat, sank down in the chair. “Paul, tell me why.”
“I don’t want to be rejuvenated.” As though he were saying, “I don’t want any sugar in my coffee.”
““why not? If I could only see why, if I knew what was going through your mind, maybe I could understand. But I can’t.” Dan looked up at Paul, pleading. “You’re needed, Paul. I had a tape from Lijinsky last month. Do you know what he said? He said he wished you’d come to Starship ten years sooner. Nobody knows that ship the way you do, you’re making it go. That ship can take men to the stars, now, with rejuvenation, and the same men can come back again to find the same people waiting for them when they get here. They can live that long, now. We’ve been tied down to seventy years of life, to a tight little universe of one sun and nine planets for thousands of years. Well, we can change that now. We can go out That’s what your work can do for us.” He stared helplessly at his brother. “You could go out on that ship you’re building, Paul. You’ve always wanted to. Why not?”
Paul looked across at him for a long moment. There was pity in his eyes. There was also bitterness there, and victory, long awaited, painfully won. “Do you really want me to tell you?”
“I want you to tell me.”
Then Paul told him. It took about ten minutes. It was not tempered with mercy.
It split Dan Fowler’s world wide open at the seams.
“You’ve been talking about the Starship,” said Paul Fowler. “All right, that’s a good place to start. I came to Star- ship Project, what was it, fifteen years ago? Sixteen, I guess. This was my meat. I didn’t work well with people, I worked with things, processes, ideas. I dug in hard on Starship. I loved it, dreamed it lived with it. I had dreams in those days. Work hard, make myself invaluable here, maybe I’d get rejuvenation, so that I could go on working. I believed everything you just said then. Alpha Centauri, Arcturus, Vega, anywhere we wanted to go, and I could go along! It wouldn’t be long, either. We had Lijinsky back with us after his rejuvenation, directing the project, we had Keller and Stark and Eddie Cochran—great men, the men who had pounded Starship Project into reality, took it out of the storybooks and made the people of this country want it badly enough to pay for it. Those men were back now, new men, rebuilt bodies, with all their knowledge and experience preserved. Only now they had something even more precious than life: time. And I was part of it, and I too could have time.”
Paul shook his head, slowly, and sank back into the chair. His eyes were very tired. “A dream, nothing more. A fantasy. It took me fifteen years to learn what a dream it was. Nothing at first, just a vague puzzlement, things happening that I couldn’t quite grasp. Easy to shrug off, until it got too obvious. Not a matter of wrong decisions, really. The decisions were right, but they were in the wrong places. Something about Starship Project shifting, changing somehow. Something being lost. Slowly. Nothing you could nail down, at first, but growing month by month.
“Then one night I saw what it was. That was when I equipped the lab here, and proved to myself that Starship Project was a dream.”
He spread his hands and smiled at Dan like a benign old schoolmaster at a third-grade schoolboy. That starship isn’t going to Alpha Centauri or anywhere else. It’s never going to leave the ground. I thought I’d live long enough to launch that ship and be one of its crew. Well, I won’t. That ship wouldn’t leave the ground if I lived a million years.”
“Rubbish,” said Dan Fowler succinctly.
“No, Dan. Not rubbish. Unfortunately, sometimes we have to quit dreaming and look facts in the face. Starship Project is dying. Our whole society is dying. Nimrock drove the first hail into the coffin a hundred and thirty years ago. Oh, if they’d only hanged him when his first rejuvenation attempt failed I But that would only have delayed it. We’re dying slowly right now, but soon it will be fast, very fast. And do you know the man who is getting ready to deal us our death blow?” He smiled sadly across at his brother. “You are, Dan.”
Dan Fowler sprang from his chair with a roar. “Paul, you’re sick! Of all the idiotic remarks I ever heard, I—I—oh, Paul.” He stood shaking, groping for words, staring at his brother.
“You said you wanted me to tell you.”
“Tell me what?” Dan took a trembling breath, and sat down, visibly fighting for control. “All right, all right, I heard what you said. You, must mean something, but I don’t know what. Let’s be reasonable. Let’s forget philosophy and semantics and concepts and all the frills for just a minute and talk about facts, huh? Just facts.”
“All right, facts,” said Paul. “Kenneth Armstrong wrote Man on Mars in 2028. He was fifty-seven years old then, and he hadn’t been rejuvenated yet. Fundamentally a good book, analyzing his first Mars colony, taking it apart right down to the ground, studies to show why it had failed so miserably, and why the next one could succeed if he could ever get up there again. He had foresight; with rejuvenation just getting started, he had a whole flock of ideas about overpopulation and the need for a Mars colony. He was all wet on the population angle of course, but nobody knew that then. He got Keller and Lijinsky all excited with the Starship idea. They admit it—it was Man on Mars that first started them thinking. They were both young then, with lots of fight in them—”
“Just stick to facts,” said Dan coldly.
“Okay. Starship Project got started, and blossomed into the people’s baby. They started work on the basic blueprints about sixty years ago. Everybody knew it would be a long job, costly, very costly, with so much to do before the building even began, but that was all right. The planning took over forty years and that was where I came in fifteen years ago. Building the ship. They were looking for engineers who weren’t eager to get rich. It went fine. We started to build. Then Keller and Stark came back from rejuvenation. Lijinsky had been rejuvenated five years before.”
“Look, I don’t need a course in history,” Dan exploded.
“Yes, you do,” Paul snapped. “You need to sit down and listen for once, instead of just shooting off your big mouth.” Paul Fowler rubbed his chin. “Okay, there were some changes made. I didn’t like the engine housing, I never had, so I went along with them a hundred percent on that. I was the one who had designed it, but even I had learned a few things since. And there were bugs. It made good sense, when you talked to Lijinsky. Starship Project was pretty important to all of us. Dangerous to risk a fumble on the first play, even a tiny risk. We might never get another chance. Lijinsky knew we youngsters were driving along on adrenalin and nerves, and couldn’t wait to got out there, but when you thought about it, what was the rush? Why risk a failure just to get out there this year instead of next? Couldn’t we take time to find a valid test for that engine at ultra-high acceleration before we put it back in? After all, we had time now—Keller and Stark just back with sixty more years to live- why the rush?