Read Ebook: What Shall It Profit? by Anderson Poul Emshwiller Ed Illustrator

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Ebook has 176 lines and 9611 words, and 4 pages

That was tough sledding. He couldn't follow the mathematics or the chemistry very far. No good popularizations were available. But a newsman got an ability to winnow what he learned. Radek didn't have to take notes, he'd been through a mind-training course; after an hour or so, he sat back and reviewed what he had gotten.

The living organism was a small island of low entropy in a universe tending constantly toward gigantic disorder. It maintained itself through an intricate set of hemostatic mechanisms. The serious disruption of any of these brought the life-processes to a halt. Shock, disease, the bullet in the lungs or the ax in the brain--death.

But hundreds of thousands of autopsies had never given an honest verdict of "death from old age." It was always something else, cancer, heart failure, sickness, stroke ... age was at most a contributing cause, decreasing resistance to injury and power to recover from it.

One by one, the individual causes had been licked. Bacteria and protozoa and viruses were slaughtered in the body. Cancers were selectively poisoned. Cholesterol was dissolved out of the arteries. Surgery patched up damaged organs, and the new regeneration techniques replaced what had been lost ... even nervous tissue. Offhand, there was no more reason to die, unless you met murder or an accident.

But people still grew old. The process wasn't as hideous as it had been. You needn't shuffle in arthritic feebleness. Your mind was clear, your skin wrinkled slowly. Centenarians were not uncommon these days. But very few reached 150. Nobody reached 200. Imperceptibly, the fires burned low ... vitality was diminished, strength faded, hair whitened, eyes dimmed. The body responded less and less well to regenerative treatment. Finally it did not respond at all. You got so weak that some small thing you and your doctor could have laughed at in your youth, took you away.

You still grew old. And because you grew old, you still died.

The unicellular organism did not age. But "age" was a meaningless word in that particular case. A man could be immortal via his germ cells. The micro-organism could too, but it gave the only cell it had. Personal immortality was denied to both man and microbe.

Could sheer mechanical wear and tear be the reason for the decline known as old age? Probably not. The natural regenerative powers of life were better than that. And observations made in free fall, where strain was minimized, indicated that while null-gravity had an alleviating effect, it was no key to living forever.

Something in the chemistry and physics of the cells themselves, then. They did tend to accumulate heavy water--that had been known for a long time. Hard to see how that could kill you ... the percentage increase in a lifetime was so small. It might be a partial answer. You might grow old more slowly if you drank only water made of pure isotopes. But you wouldn't be immortal.

Radek shrugged. He was getting near the end of his trip. Let the Institute people answer his questions.

The Four Corners country is so named because four of the old American states met there, back when they were still significant political units. For a while, in the 20th century, it was overrun with uranium hunters, who made small impression on its tilted emptiness. It was still a favorite vacation area, and the resorts were lost in that great huddle of mountains and desert. You could have a lot of privacy here.

Gliding down over the moon-ghostly Pueblo ruins of Mesa Verde, Radek peered through the windscreen. There, ahead. Lights glowed around the walls, spread across half a mesa. Inside them was a parkscape of trees, lawns, gardens, arbors, cottage units ... the Institute housed its people well. There were four large buildings at the center, and Radek noted gratefully that several windows were still shining in them. Not that he had any compunctions about getting the great Dr. Lang out of bed, but--

He ignored the public landing field outside the walls and set his boat down in the paved courtyard.

As he climbed out, half a dozen guards came running. They were husky men in blue uniforms, armed with stunners, and the dim light showed faces hinting they wouldn't be sorry to feed him a beam. Radek dropped to the ground, folded his arms, and waited. The breath from his nose was frosty under the moon.

"What the hell do you want?"

The nearest guard pulled up in front of him and laid a hand on his shock gun. "Who the devil are you? Don't you know this is private property? What's the big idea, anyway?"

"Take it easy," advised Radek. "I have to see Dr. Lang at once. Emergency."

"You didn't call for an appointment, did you?"

"No, I didn't."

"All right, then--"

"I didn't think he'd care to have me give my reasons over a radio. This is confidential and urgent."

The men hesitated, uncertain before such an outrageous violation of all civilized canons. "I dunno, friend ... he's busy ... if you want to see Dr. McCormick--"

"Dr. Lang. Ask him if I may. Tell him I have news about his longevity process."

"His what?"

Radek spelled it out and watched the man go. Another one made some ungracious remark and frisked him with needless ostentation. A third was more urbane: "Sorry to do this, but you understand we've got important work going on. Can't have just anybody busting in."

"Sure, that's all right." Radek shivered in the thin chill air and pulled his cloak tighter about him.

"Viruses and stuff around. If any of that got loose--You understand."

Well, it wasn't a bad cover-up. None of these fellows looked very bright. IQ treatments could do only so much, thereafter you got down to the limitations of basic and unalterable brain microstructure. And even among the more intellectual workers ... how many Barwells were there, handling semi-routine tasks but not permitted to know what really went on under their feet? Radek had a brief irrational wish that he'd worn boots instead of sandals.

The first guard returned. "He'll see you," he grunted. "And you better make it good, because he's one mad doctor."

Radek nodded and followed two of the men. The nearest of the large square buildings seemed given over to offices. He was led inside, down a short length of glow-lit corridor, and halted while the scanner on a door marked, LANG, DIRECTOR observed him.

"He's clean, boss," said one of the escort.

"All right," said the annunciator. "Let him in. But you two stay just outside."

It was a spacious office, but austerely furnished. A telewindow reflected green larches and a sun-spattered waterfall, somewhere on the other side of the planet. Lang sat alone behind the desk, his hands engaged with some papers that looked like technical reports. He was a big, heavy-shouldered man, his hair gray, his chocolate face middle-aged and tired.

He did not rise. "Well?" he snapped.

"My name is Arnold Radek. I'm a news service operator ... here's my card, if you wish to see it."

"Pharaoh had it easy," said Lang in a chill voice. "Moses only called the seven plagues down on him. I have to deal with your sort."

Radek placed his fingertips on the desk and leaned forward. He found it unexpectedly hard not to be stared down by the other. "I know very well I've laid myself open to a lawsuit by coming in as I did," he stated. "Possibly, when I'm through, I'll be open to murder."

"Are you feeling well?" There was more contempt than concern in the deep tone.

"Let me say first off, I believe I have information about a certain project of yours. One you badly want to keep a secret. I've taped a record at my office of what I know and where I'm going. If I don't get back before 1000 hours, Central Time, and wipe that tape, it'll be heard by the secretary."

"No," said Radek. "Of course not. All I want is a few straight answers. I know you're quite able to lead me up the garden path, feed me some line of pap and hustle me out again--but I won't stand for that. I mentioned my tape only to convince you that I'm in earnest."

"You're not drunk," murmured Lang. "But there are a lot of people running loose who ought to be in a mental hospital."

"I know." Radek sat down without waiting for an invitation. "Anti-scientific fanatics. I'm not one of them. You know Darrell Burkhardt's news commentaries? I supply a lot of his data and interpretations. He's one of the leading friends of genuine science, one of the few you have left." Radek gestured at the card on the desk. "Read it, right there."

Lang picked the card up and glanced at the lettering and tossed it back. "Very well. That's still no excuse for breaking in like this. You--"

"It can't wait," interrupted Radek. "There are a lot of lives at stake. Every minute we sit here, there are perhaps a million people dying, perhaps more; I haven't the figures. And everyone else is dying all the time, millimeter by millimeter, we're all born dying. Every minute you hold back the cure for old age, you murder a million human beings."

"This is the most fantastic--"

"Let me finish! I get around. And I'm trained to look a little bit more closely at the facts everybody knows, the ordinary commonplace facts we take for granted and never think to inquire about because they are so ordinary. I've wondered about the Institute for a long time. Tonight I talked at great length with a fellow named Barwell ... remember him? A clerk here. You fired him this morning for being too nosy. He had a lot to say."

"Hm." Lang sat quiet for a while. He didn't rattle easily--he couldn't be snowed under by fast, aggressive talk. While Radek spat out what clues he had, Lang calmly reached into a drawer and got out an old-fashioned briar pipe, stuffed it and lit it.

"So what do you want?" he asked when Radek paused for breath.

"The truth, damn it!"

"There are privacy laws. It was established long ago that a citizen is entitled to privacy if he does nothing against the common weal--"

"And you are! You're like a man who stands on a river bank and has a lifebelt and won't throw it to a man drowning in the river."

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