But what sort of man is he? You must judge for yourself. In condensing this memoir to manageable length I have omitted many verified historical incidents (the raw data are available to scholars at the Archives)-but I have left in lies and unlikely stories on the assumption that the lies a man tells tell more truth about him-when analyzed-than does "truth."
It is clear that this man is, by standards usual in civilized societies, a barbarian and a rogue.
But it is not for children to judge their parents. The qualities that make him what he is are precisely those needed to stay alive in a jungle-or on a raw frontier. Do not forget your debt to him both genetic and historic.
To understand our historic debt to him it is necessary to review some ancient history-part tradition or myth, and part fact as firmly established as the assassination of Julius Caesar. The Howard Families Foundation was established by the will of Ira Howard, who died in 1873. His will instructed the trustees of the foundation to use his money to "prolong human life." This is fact.
Tradition says that he willed this in anger at his own fate, for he found himself dying of old age in his forties-dead at forty-eight, a bachelor without progeny. So none of us carries his genes; his immortality lies only in a name, and in an idea-that death could be thwarted.
At that time death at forty-eight was not unusual. Believe it or not, in those days the average age at death was about thirty-five! But not from senility. Disease, starvation, accident, murder, war, childbirth, and other violences cut down most humans long before senility set in. But a human who passed all these hurdles still could expect death from old age sometime between seventy-five and one hundred. Very few reached one hundred; nevertheless every population group had its tiny minority of "centenarians." There is a legend about "Old Toni Parr" who is supposed to have died in 1635 aged one hundred and fifty-two years. Whether or not the legend is true, probability analysis of demographic data of that era shows that some individuals must have lived a century and a half. But they were few indeed.
The Foundation started its work as a prescientific breeding experiment, as nothing was then known of genetics: Adults of long-lived stock were encouraged to mate with others like them, money being the inducement.
Unsurprisingly the inducement worked. Equally unsurprisingly this experiment worked, as it was an empirical method used by stockbreeders for centuries before the science of genetics came into being: Breed to reinforce one characteristic, then eliminate the culls.
The Families' Archives do not show how the earliest culls were eliminated; they simply show that some were eliminated from the Families-root and branch, all descendants-for the unforgivable sin of dying of old age too young.
By the Crisis of 2136 all members of the Howard Families had life expectancies in excess of one hundred and fifty years, and some had exceeded that age. The cause of that crisis seems unbelievable-yet all records both from inside and from outside the Families agree on it. The Howard Families were in extreme danger from all other humans simply because they lived so "long." Why this was true is a matter for group psychologists, not for a record-keeper. But it was true.
They were seized and concentrated in a prison camp, and were about to be tortured to death in an attempt to wrest from them their "secret" of "eternal youth." Fact-not myth.
Here the Senior comes into the story. Through audacity, a talent for lying convincingly, and what would seem to most people today a childish delight in adventure and intrigue for its own sake, the Senior brought off the greatest jailbreak of all time, stealing a primitive starship and escaping right out of the Solar System with all of the Howard Families (then numbering about 100,000 men, women, and children).
If this seems impossible-so many people and just one ship-remember that the first starships were enormously bigger than the ones we now use. They were self-sustaining artificial planetoids intended to remain in space for many years at speeds below that of light; they had to be huge.
The Senior was not the only hero of that Exodus. But in all the varied and sometimes conflicting accounts that have come down to us, he was always the driving force. He was our Moses who led his people out of bondage.
He brought them home again three-quarters of a century later (2210)-but not into bondage. For that date, Year One of the Standard Galactic calendar, marks the opening of the Great Diaspora...caused by extreme population pressure on Old Home Terra, and made possible by two new factors: the Libby-Sheffield Para-Drive as it was known then (not a "drive" in any true sense, but a means of manipulating n-dimensional spaces), and the first (and simplest) of effective longevity techniques: new blood grown in vitro.
The Howard Families caused this to happen simply by escaping. The short-lived humans back on Terra, still convinced that the long-lived families possessed a "secret," set about trying to find it by wide and systematic research, and, as always, research paid off serendipitously, not with the nonexistent "secret" but with something almost as good: a therapy, and eventually a sheaf of therapies, for postponing old age, and for extending vigor, virility, and fertility.
The Great Diaspora was then both necessary and possible.
The Senior's great talent (aside from his ability to lie extemporaneously and convincingly) seems always to have been a rare gift for extrapolating the possibilities of any situation-then twisting it to suit his own purposes. (He calls it: "You have to have a feeling for what makes the frog jump." Psychometrists who have studied him say that he has an extremely high psi talent expressed as "forerunners" and "luck"-but what the Senior has to say about them is less polite. As a record-keeper, I refrain from opinion.)
The Senior saw at once that this benison of extended youth, although promised to everyone, would in fact be limited to the powerful and their nepots. The billions of helots could not be allowed to live beyond their normal pan; there was no room for them-unless they migrated to the stars, in which case there would be room for each human to live as long as he could manage. How the Senior exploited this is not always clear; he seems to have used several names and many fronts. His key corporations wound up in the hands of this Foundation, then were liquidated to move the Foundation and the Howard Families to Secundus-at his behest, he having saved "the best real estate" for his relatives and descendants. Sixty-eight percent of those then living accepted the challenge of new frontiers.
Our genetic debt to him is both indirect and direct. The indirect debt lies in the fact that migration is a sorting device, a forced Darwinian selection, under which superior stock goes to the stars while culls stay home and die. This is true even for those forcibly transported (as in the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth centuries), save that the sorting then takes place on the new planet. In a raw frontier weaklings and misfits die; strong stock survives. Even those who migrate voluntarily still go through this second drastic special selection. The Howard Families have been culled in this fashion at least three times.