“A permanent dictatorship,” Dennison said.
“Yes. A permanent, benevolent rule by small, carefully chosen elite corps, based upon the sole and exclusive possession of immortality. It’s historically inevitable. The only question is, who is going to get control first?”
“And you think you are?” Dennison demanded.
“Of course. Our organization is still small, but absolutely solid. It is bolstered by every new invention that comes into our hands and by every scientist who joins our ranks. Our time will come, Dennison! We’d like to have you with us, among the elite.”
“You want me to join you?” Dennison asked, bewildered.
“We do. Our organization needs creative scientific minds to help us in our work, to help us save mankind from itself.”
“Count me out,” Dennison said, his heart beating fast.
“You won’t join us?”
“I’d like to see you all hanged.”
Mr. Bennet nodded thoughtfully and pursed his small lips. “You have taken your own serum, have you not?”
Dennison nodded. “I suppose that means you kill me now?”
“We don’t kill,” Mr. Bennet said. “We merely wait. I think you are a reasonable man, and I think you’ll come to see things our way. We’ll be around a long time. So will you. Take him away.”
Dennison was led to an elevator that dropped deep into the Earth. He was marched down a long passageway lined with armed men. They went through four massive doors. At the fifth, Dennison was pushed inside alone, and the door was locked behind him.
He was in a large, well-furnished apartment. There were perhaps twenty people in the room, and they came forward to meet him.
One of them, a stocky, bearded man, was an old college acquaintance of Dennison’s.
“Jim Ferris?”
“That’s right,” Ferris said. “Welcome to the Immortality Club, Dennison.”
“I read you were killed in an air crash last year.”
“I merely—disappeared,” Ferris said, with a rueful smile, “after inventing the immortality serum. Just like the others.”
“All of them?”
“Fifteen of the men here invented the serum independently. The rest are successful inventors in other fields. Our oldest member is Doctor Li, a serum discoverer, who disappeared from San Francisco in 1911. You are our latest acquisition. Our clubhouse is probably the most carefully guarded place on Earth.”
* * * *
Dennison said, “Nineteen-eleven!” Despair flooded him and he sat down heavily in a chair. “Then there’s no possibility of rescue?”
“None. There are only four choices available to us,” Ferris said. “Some have left us and joined the Undertakers. Others have suicided. A few have gone insane. The rest of us have formed the Immortality Club.”
“What for?” Dennison bewilderedly asked.
“To get out of this place!” said Ferris. “To escape and give our discoveries to the world. To stop those hopeful little dictators upstairs.”
“They must know what you’re planning.”
“Of course. But they let us live because, every so often, one of us gives up and joins them. And they don’t think we can ever break out. They’re much too smug. It’s the basic defect of all power-elites, and their eventual undoing.”
“You said this was the most closely guarded place on Earth?”
“It is,” Ferris said.
“And some of you have been trying to break out for fifty years? Why, it’ll take forever to escape!”
“Forever is exactly how long we have,” said Ferris. “But we hope it won’t take quite that long. Every new man brings new ideas, plans. One of them is bound to work.”
“Forever,” Dennison said, his face buried in his hands.
“You can go back upstairs and join them,” Ferris said, with a hard note to his voice, “or you can suicide, or just sit in a corner and go quietly mad. Take your pick.”
Dennison looked up. “I must be honest with you and with myself. I don’t think we can escape. Furthermore, I don’t think any of you really believe we can.”
Ferris shrugged his shoulders.
“Aside from that,” Dennison said, “I think it’s a damned good idea. If you’ll bring me up to date, I’ll contribute whatever I can to the Forever Project. And let’s hope their complacency lasts.”
“It will,” Ferris said.
* * * *
THE escape did not take forever, of course. In one hundred and thirty-seven years, Dennison and his colleagues made their successful breakout and revealed the Undertakers’ Plot. The Undertakers were tried before the High Court on charges of kidnapping, conspiracy to overthrow the government, and illegal possession of immortality. They were found guilty on all counts and summarily executed.
Dennison and his colleagues were also in illegal possession of immortality, which is the privilege only of our governmental elite. But the death penalty was waived in view of the Immortality Club’s service to the State.
This mercy was premature, however. After some months the members of the Immortality Club went into hiding, with the avowed purpose of overthrowing the Elite Rule and disseminating immortality among the masses. Project Forever, as they termed it, has received some support from dissidents, who have not yet been apprehended. It cannot be considered a serious threat.
But this deviationist action in no way detracts from the glory of the Club’s escape from the Undertakers. The ingenious way in which Dennison and his colleagues broke out of their seemingly impregnable prison, using only a steel belt buckle, a tungsten filament, three hens’ eggs, and twelve chemicals that can be readily obtained from the human body, is too well known to be repeated here.
THE LEECH
The leech was waiting for food. For millennia it had been drifting across the vast emptiness of space. Without consciousness, it had spent the countless centuries in the void between the stars. It was unaware when it finally reached a sun. Life-giving radiation flared around the hard, dry spore. Gravitation tugged at it.
A planet claimed it, with other stellar debris, and the leech fell, still dead-seeming within its tough spore case.
One speck of dust among many, the winds blew it around the Earth, played with it, and let it fall.
On the ground, it began to stir. Nourishment soaked in, permeating the spore case. It grew—and fed.
* * * *
Frank Conners came up on the porch and coughed twice. “Say, pardon me, Professor,” he said.
The long, pale man didn’t stir from the sagging couch. His horn-rimmed glasses were perched on his forehead, and he was snoring very gently.
“I’m awful sorry to disturb you,” Conners said, pushing back his battered felt hat. “I know it’s your restin’ week and all, but there’s something damned funny in the ditch.”
The pale man’s left eyebrow twitched, but he showed no other sign of having heard.
Frank Conners coughed again, holding his spade in one purple-veined hand. “Didja hear me, Professor?”
“Of course I heard you,” Micheals said in a muffled voice, his eyes still closed. “You found a pixie.”
“A what?” Conners asked, squinting at Micheals.
“A little man in a green suit. Feed him milk, Conners.”
“No, sir. I think it’s a rock.”
Micheals opened one eye and focused it in Conners’ general direction.
“I’m awfully sorry about it,” Conners said. Professor Micheals’ resting week was a ten-year-old custom, and his only eccentricity. All winter Micheals taught anthropology, worked on half a dozen committees, dabbled in physics and chemistry, and still found time to write a book a year. When summer came, he was tired.
Arriving at his worked-out New York State farm, it was his invariable rule to do absolutely nothing for a week. He hired Frank Conners to cook for that week and generally make himself useful, while Professor Micheals slept.
During the second week, Micheals would wander around, look at the trees and fish. By the third week he would be getting a tan, reading, repairing the sheds and climbing mountains. At the end of four weeks, he could hardly wait to get back to the city.