“Frankly,” Norton told him, “it’s the first time I ever ran across a thing I couldn’t fix. Ask me anything else you want to, senator, and I’ll rig it up for you.”
The senator sat stricken. “You mean you couldn’t—But, Norton, there was Dr. Carson and Galloway and Henderson. Someone took care of them.”
Norton shook his head. “Not I. I never heard of them.”
“But someone did,” said the senator. “They disappeared—”
His voice trailed off and he slumped deeper in the chair and the truth suddenly was plain—the truth he had failed to see.
A blind spot, he told himself. A blind spot!
They had disappeared and that was all he knew. They had published their own deaths and had not died, but had disappeared.
He had assumed they had disappeared because they had got an illegal continuation. But that was sheer wishful thinking. There was no foundation for it, no fact that would support it.
There would be other reasons, he told himself, many other reasons why a man would disappear and seek to cover up his tracks with a death report.
But it had tied in so neatly!
They were continuators whose applications had not been renewed. Exactly as he was a continuator whose application would not be renewed.
They had dropped out of sight. Exactly as he would have to drop from sight once he gained another lease on life.
It had tied in so neatly—and it had been all wrong.
“I tried every way I knew,” said Norton. “I canvassed every source that might advance your name for continuation and they laughed at me. It’s been tried before, you see, and there’s not a chance of getting it put through. Once your original sponsor drops you, you’re automatically cancelled out.
“I tried to sound out technicians who might take a chance, but they’re incorruptible. They get paid off in added years for loyalty and they’re not taking any chance of trading years for dollars.”
“I guess that settles it,” the senator said wearily. “I should have known.”
He heaved himself to his feet and faced Norton squarely. “You are telling me the truth,” he pleaded. “You aren’t just trying to jack up the price a bit.”
Norton stared at him, almost unbelieving. “Jack up the price! Senator, if I had put this through, I’d have taken your last penny. Want to know how much you’re worth? I can tell you within a thousand dollars.”
He waved a hand at a row of filing cases ranged along the wall.
“It’s all there, senator. You and all the other big shots. Complete files on every one of you. When a man comes to me with a deal like yours, I look in the files and strip him to the bone.”
“I don’t suppose there’s any use of asking for some of my money back?”
Norton shook his head. “Not a ghost. You took your gamble, senator. You can’t even prove you paid me. And, besides, you still have plenty left to last you the few years you have to live.”
The senator took a step toward the door, then turned back.
“Look Norton, I can’t die! Not now. Just one more continuation and I’d be—”
The look on Norton’s face stopped him in his tracks. The look he’d glimpsed on other faces at other times, but only glimpsed. Now he stared at it—at the naked hatred of a man whose life is short for the man whose life is long.
“Sure, you can die,” said Norton. “You’re going to. You can’t live forever. Who do you think you are!”
The senator reached out a hand and clutched the desk.
“But you don’t understand.”
“You’ve already lived ten times as long as I have lived,” said Norton, coldly, measuring each word, “and I hate your guts for it. Get out of here, you sniveling old fool, before I throw you out.”
Dr. Barton: You may think that you would confer a boon on humanity with life continuation, but I tell you, sir, that it would be a curse. Life would lose its value and its meaning if it went on forever, and if you have life continuation now, you eventually must stumble on immortality. And when that happens, sir, you will be compelled to set up boards of review to grant the boon of death. The people, tired of life, will storm your hearing rooms to plead for death.
Chairman Leonard: It would banish uncertainty and fear.
Dr. Barton: You are talking of the fear of death. The fear of death, sir, is infantile.
Chairman Leonard: But there are benefits—
Dr. Barton: Benefits, yes. The benefit of allowing a scientist the extra years he needs to complete a piece of research; a composer an additional lifetime to complete a symphony. Once the novelty wore off, men in general would accept added life only under protest, only as a duty.
Chairman Leonard: You’re not very practical-minded, doctor.
Dr. Barton: But I am. Extremely practical and down to earth. Man must have newness. Man cannot be bored and live. How much do you think there would be left to look forward to after the millionth woman, the billionth piece of pumpkin pie?
So Norton hated him.
As all people of normal lives must hate, deep within their souls, the lucky ones whose lives went on and on.
A hatred deep and buried, most of the time buried. But sometimes breaking out, as it had broken out of Norton.
Resentment, tolerated because of the gently, skillfully fostered hope that those whose lives went on might some day make it possible that the lives of all, barring violence or accident or incurable disease, might go on as long as one would wish.
I can understand it now, thought the senator, for I am one of them. I am one of those whose lives will not continue to go on, and I have even fewer years than the most of them.
He stood before the window in the deepening dusk and saw the lights come out and the day die above the unbelievably blue waters of the far-famed lake.
Beauty came to him as he stood there watching, beauty that had gone unnoticed through all the later years. A beauty and a softness and a feeling of being one with the city lights and the last faint gleam of day above the darkening waters.
Fear? The senator admitted it.
Bitterness? Of course.
Yet, despite the fear and bitterness, the window held him with the scene it framed.
Earth and sky and water, he thought. I am one with them. Death has made me one with them. For death brings one back to the elementals, to the soil and trees, to the clouds and sky and the sun dying in the welter of its blood in the crimson west.
This is the price we pay, he thought, that the race must pay, for its life eternal—that we may not be able to assess in their true value the things that should be dearest to us; for a thing that has no ending, a thing that goes on forever, must have decreasing value.
Rationalization, he accused himself. Of course, you’re rationalizing. You want another hundred years as badly as you ever did. You want a chance at immortality. But you can’t have it and you trade eternal life for a sunset seen across a lake and it is well you can. It is a blessing that you can.
The senator made a rasping sound within his throat.
Behind him the telephone came to sudden life and he swung around. It chirred at him again. Feet pattered down the hall and the senator called out: “I’ll get it, Otto.”
He lifted the receiver. “New York calling,” said the operator. “Senator Leonard, please.”