“Okay, I bought it. We worked out a valid test chamber on paper. Took four years to find out we couldn’t build such a device on Earth, but never mind that. Other things were getting stalled in the meantime. The colony plan for the ship—was it the best possible? Choosing the crew—what criteria, what qualifications? There was plenty of time—why not make sure it’s right? Don’t leave anything crude, if we can refine it a little first.”
Paul sighed wearily. “It snowballed. Keller and Stark backed Lijinsky to the hilt. There was trouble about money—I think you had your thumb in the pie there, getting it fixed for us, didn’t you? More refinement. Work it out. Details. Get sidetracked on some aspect for a few years, so what? Lots of time. Rejuvenation, and all that, talk about the Universalists beating Rinehart out and throwing the center open to everybody. And so on, and so on. And somewhere along the line I began to see that it just wasn’t true. The holdups, the changes, the digressions and snags and refinements were all excuses, all part of a big, beautiful, exquisitely reasonable facade that was completely obscuring the real truth. Lijinsky and Keller and Stark had changed.”
Dan Fowler snorted. “I know a very smart young doctor who told me that there aren’t any changes with rejuvenation.”
“Nothing physical, their bodies were fine. Nothing mental, either, they had the same sharp minds they always had. Just a subtle change in values. They’d lost something they’d had before. The drive that made them start Starship Project, the urgency, the vital importance of the thing—all gone. They didn’t have the push they once had. They began looking for the slow, easy way, and it was far easier to build and rebuild, and refine, and improve the Starship here on the ground than to throw that Starship out into space.”
There was a long, long silence. Dan Fowler sat gray-faced, staring at Paul, just shaking his head and staring. “I don’t believe it,” he said finally. “I’ve seen Lijinsky’s reports. There’s been progress, regular progress, month by month. You’ve been too close to it, maybe. Of course there have been delays, but only when they were necessary. The progress has gone on—”
“No, not so,” Paul said. He stood up, pulled out drawers, dragged out rolls of blueprints. “These are my own. They’re based on the working prints from Starship that we drew up ten years ago, scaled down to model size. I’ve tested them,
I’ve run tolerances, I’ve checked the math five ways and back again. I’ve tested the parts, the engine—model size. There is no flaw in these blueprints. They’re as perfect as they’ll ever get.”
Anger was blazing in Paul’s voice now, bitterness and frustration. “I could build this model and send it out to Alpha Centauri next week, and it would get there. The Starship Project is completed, it’s been completed for ten years now, but do you know what happened to these blueprints, the originals? They were studied, and thrown out in favor of refinements and modifications—”
“But I’ve read the reports,” Dan cried.
“Have you seen the Starship?”
“Well—no.”
“I didn’t think you had. You haven’t actually talked with Lijinsky and the other Retreads heading up the project, either. Well, it isn’t just here, Dan. It’s everywhere. There are only about 70,000 rejuvenated men alive in this hemisphere so far, but already the change is beginning to show. Go talk to the advertising people; there’s a delicate indicator of social change if there ever was one. See what they say. Whose policy on rejuvenation are they backing up in the government? Yours? Don’t kid yourself. They aren’t even backing Walter Rinehart. They’re backing ‘Moses’ Tyndall and his Abolitionist goon-squad, the crowd who go around preaching that rejuvenation is the work of the Devil. And they’ve given Tyndall enough of a push that he’s even getting you worried now. Then how about Roderigo Aviado and his Solar Energy Project down in Antarctica? Do you know what he’s been doing lately? You ought to find out, Dan. What’s going on in the Mars colony? You ought to find out. Have you gone to talk to any of the Noble Ten who are still rattling around? You ought to, you might get quite a jolt. And how about all the suicides in the last ten years? What do the insurance people say about that?”
Paul stopped, from lack of breath. Dan just stared at him. “Find out what you’re doing, Dan, before you push this universal rejuvenation idea of yours through. We’ve had a monster on our hands for years now without even knowing it. And now Big Dan Fowler has to play God and turn the thing loose on the world. Well, look before you plunge in.
It’s all here, if you’d just open your eyes to see it, but you’re so dead certain that you want life everlasting that you’ve never even bothered to look. Nobody’s bothered to look. And now it’s such a grand political bludgeon that nobody dares to look.”
Dan Fowler rose, walked over to the blueprints, ran his finger over the dusty paper. His face was old when he turned back to Paul. “You’ve believed all this for a long time, haven’t you?” he said.
“A long time,” said Paul.
“All the time I’ve been working like a dog to build up support for my universal rejuvenation program.”
Paul’s eyes flickered. “That’s right.”
“And you never said one word to me.” Dan shook his head slowly. “I didn’t know you hated me so much, but I’m not going to let you win this one, either, Paul. You’re wrong. And I’m going to prove that you’re wrong if it kills me.”
“Then try his home number,” Dan Fowler snarled into the booth telephone. He gnawed his cigar and fumed as long seconds spun by on the wall clock, then minutes. His fingers drummed the wall. “How’s that? Confound it, I want to speak to Dwight MacKenzie himself, not some flunky. What do you mean, he’s not in town? I saw him with my own eyes yesterday.”
Another wait, five minutes this time, then another voice, with profuse apologies but no Dwight MacKenzie. “All right, then track him down for me and have him call me back.” He reeled off the number of his private booth.
Carl Golden looked up as Dan came back to the cafeteria table and stirred up his half-cold coffee. “No luck?”
“Seems that MacKenzie has vanished. Convenient, eh?” Dan leaned back against the wall, glowering at Carl and Jean. Through the transparent walls of the glassed-in-booth, they could see the morning breakfast-seekers drifting into the place. “Well, you were surely right, lad. I should never have tampered with those Hearing dates in the first place. But Dwight will switch them back again to give us the time we need. MacKenzie is no ball of fire, but he’s always backed me up. We should hear from him pretty soon.” He bit off the end of a fresh cigar, assaulted it with a match.
“Dad, you know what Dr. Moss said—”
“Look, little girl, you’d better lay off,” Dan snapped. “I’ve got enough worries without having Dr. Moss on my back as well.” He sipped his coffee while both the young people picked at their breakfast with bleary early-morning resignation. Carl Golden needed a shave badly.
“Did you get any sleep on the way back?” he asked Dan.
Dan snorted. “What do you think?”
“I think Paul might be lying to you.”
Dan shot him a sharp glance. “Maybe, but I doubt it. Paul has always been fussy about the truth. He’s all wrong, of course—” (fresh coffee, not much hotter than the last)—“but I think he believes his tale.”