“So you’d better be even more careful. We don’t both want to lose our chance of immortality, do we?”
They didn’t. As Susan hobbled into the big square building which was the Rebirth Institute she sighed gratefully at the thought that the next time she had to walk she’d be able to run if she liked.
Weygand picked up the phone. “Yes, this is Weygand of Musicosmos. Rebirth Institute? Yes, of course… Benjamin Rice? He could be on the staff here, but the name doesn’t ring a bell. Susan Sonnenburg named him as what?”
“We usually question people who were personal friends of our subjects,” the quiet, anonymous voice said. “Their own information about themselves is too subjective, of course. Miss Sonnenburg said this Benjamin Rice, Musicosmos, could help us.”
“Let’s see, it’s been three days since she went for Rebirth,” said Weygand. “How’s she coming?”
The anonymous voice seemed faintly surprised by the question. “As expected, Mr. Weygand. A routine case. No complications. Now, this Benjamin Rice—”
“Wait a minute. Could that be old Benny? Look, I’ll make inquiries and send over Rice, whoever he is, just as soon as I can. O.K.?”
“Thank you, Mr. Weygand.”
On the house phone Weygand called Personnel. “Who’s Benjamin Rice?” he asked.
Checking took less than a minute. “One of the caretakers, Mr. Weygand. Do you want his file?”
“No, that’s all, thanks.”
He rang Benny’s tiny office. “Benny? This is Weygand. The Rebirth Institute just called. Miss Sonnenburg left your name there. Seems they want to ask you some questions. Now don’t get worried, there’s nothing wrong. Just routine. Will you go over there right away? And Benny—”
He had just remembered, guiltily, that he had promised Susan to have an MC test run on Benny. He hadn’t forgotten; he had merely not remembered.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, and hung up. He’d call Walter Jennings of the testing bureau and Jennings would send for Benny when he was ready. In fact, just to make sure the matter didn’t slip his mind, Weygand picked up the house phone and called Jennings right away.
Benny took his coat from a hook and put it on slowly, thoughtfully. Something crawled inside of him at the thought of going to the Rebirth Institute. However, there was no help for it. He left a note in bold block letters on his table, OUT ON BUSINESS, and walked out.
Benny Rice was over a hundred years old, and sometimes in the Musicosmos Building he looked it. But as he walked to the Rebirth Institute—it didn’t occur to him to take a bus or cab, although the distance was two miles and either Musicosmos or the Institute would certainly have paid for the ride—he gradually straightened, his eyes brightened, his chest expanded, until by the time he had walked a mile he could have passed for fifty. Since the normal expectation of life these days was about one hundred seven, a man of fifty was quite young.
Physically, Benny was a remarkable specimen, so remarkable that to avoid notice at Musicosmos, where they knew exactly how old he was, he habitually moved a little more slowly and much more awkwardly than he might have done. Outside Musicosmos he was always prepared to pretend to be fifty if he could get away with it. He usually could. With luck, he had another forty years of life remaining to him.
The Institute from the outside was a cold, white, bare, impersonal building. Inside, the difference was startling. The furnishing and design suggested a luxury hotel rather than a hospital or a nursing home.
“Benjamin Rice?” said the smart blond receptionist. “That’s right, Dr. Martin wants to see you. He’s out in the gardens. Sammy here will take you to him.”
Sammy was a red-haired youth who didn’t talk. This puzzled Benny, for Sammy looked friendly and chatty. “What’s the matter, son?” he asked, as they emerged into the gardens behind the Institute. “Cat got your tongue?”
Sammy gave him a look so alive with intelligence and mischief that Benny expected a smart retort. But what Sammy said was: “Da-da.”
Benny understood then, and grimaced at his own dumbness. Sammy, of course, was one of the Reborn. He had all the intelligence he would ever have; he just hadn’t learned to talk yet.
The receptionist was probably another Reborn. Naturally, if the Institute had to keep people in their care for nearly four years, they’d put them to work.
Dr. Martin looked no more than twenty, but he couldn’t be a Reborn. Rebirth wasn’t run like an exclusive social club. Although necessarily the Reborn had to be kept together to mature and reacquire the basic information which every intelligent citizen was assumed to possess, as soon as possible they were dispersed far and wide and mingled with the rest of society again. Martin wouldn’t be a Reborn because no young Reborn doctor would be encouraged or allowed to hide himself from the world in the Rebirth Institute. It would be like going back to the womb.
He looked up with a grin. “Benjamin Rice?”
“Everybody calls me Benny.”
“Sure. O.K., Sammy, you can go back to the desk.”
They were standing on a huge lawn on which scores of deckchairs were arranged in neat rows. Although there were no nurses and no supervisor except Martin, the scene looked normal enough at first, like any lawn in any rest-cure sanatarium. But then one noticed that all the occupants of the deck chairs were about fourteen, that they were all in the deep sleep of heavy sedation, and that they all, boys and girls, wore plain white smocks. The white smocks, like baby doll pajamas except that there was no attempt in cut or trimming to make them look attractive, were strangest of all, for it was obvious that no ordinary boys or girls of fourteen would consent to wear them if they had any choice in the matter.
Clear-skinned and healthy though they looked, these overgrown infants had minds as empty as a scarecrow’s pocket. The boys didn’t even know they were boys, nor the girls that they were girls.
“You work at Musicosmos, Benny?”
“I’m the caretaker.”
Martin seemed puzzled. “How did you get on with Miss Sonnenburg?”
“Swell, doctor. She was a fine lady. I was sorry when she came here.”
“Sorry? You wouldn’t want her to die, would you?”
“She was a fine lady,” said Benny vaguely.
Martin was more puzzled than ever. Susan had filled in Benny’s name on the reference sheets as a friend who could be consulted if necessary on her personality, behavior, and temperament. Martin had assumed that Benjamin Rice would be a colleague of Susan’s, a musician, writer, artist or something of that sort.
“Tell me about her,” Martin said encouragingly.
“She was always nice to me. She said I was nice to her, but I don’t know what she meant. Of course she couldn’t get around so well, not since she fell that time, and I helped her around, little things like that. They said she was a great pianist, but I wouldn’t know about that. All I know is, she was a fine lady.”
Martin was silent. It was obvious that Benny wasn’t going to be able to tell him anything useful. Presumably Susan Sonnenburg had entered Benny’s name as a joke, just as under “Other Activities” she had put down tiddleywinks.
It would be easy enough to find plenty of other people who had known Susan Sonnenburg well. The interesting thing was that Susan had elected to put down Benny’s name. Was it just a pointless and rather tasteless joke, or was there something back of this?
“How long did you know Miss Sonnenburg?” he asked idly.
“Just a year. No, a little less. I went to Musicosmos last September.”
So that was that. Martin discarded the idea that Sonnenburg and this old man had once been lovers, long ago. It was a pretty fantastic idea anyway.
Martin stood up. He’d have to find someone else to give some impressions of Sonnenburg for the case book. Benny was a nice old fellow, but not very bright.
“Would you like to see Miss Sonnenburg now?” he asked.
Benny took an involuntary step back. “No,” he exclaimed vehem
ently.
That was interesting. Could they have been lovers, long ago?
“She isn’t Sonnenburg any more. But if you liked her, Benny, I think you should see her now. She’s different, of course. Still, I think when you’ve seen her you won’t feel so bad about it. There’s a lot of happiness ahead of her.”
Unresisting, Benny was led across the lawn. Martin stopped beside a deck chair and pointed. Benny caught his breath.
The girl in the chair, in a deep, drugged sleep, was about fourteen, like all the others on the lawn. Her smooth, pretty face was vaguely reminiscent of Susan’s. It was full of intelligence and absolutely empty of experience. But for the intelligence in it and the hint of a sense of humor, it was the face of a beautiful idiot.
Rebirth was a convenient name for something which was nothing of the kind. People weren’t reborn, they were wiped clean and rapidly refurbished in a culture tank. The clocks of their lives were set back eighty years. They got new cells for old, youth for age. To pay for it they had to give up all they had ever known.
The girl who slightly resembled Susan wore a plain smock which made no concessions to sex. Her body, although barely nubile, was at least as beautiful as her face. She looked like a newlyborn child who somehow had the body of an adolescent, which was pretty near the truth.
Betty Rogers—Martin was careful not to mention her new name to Benny—had all the talent, capacity and intelligence of Susan Sonnenburg. Whether she would turn out to have the same personality was anybody’s guess. In a particular case, no one could say how much of the personality grew from heredity and how much out of environment, Betty and Susan had the same heredity, but environment was going to treat them very differently. Probably Betty would be happier than Susan and would accomplish less. But it was quite possible that Betty would accomplish even more.
“I thought she’d be a baby,” Benny said hoarsely.
Martin shook his head. “We could do that, but it’s unnecessary and even undesirable. We’ve improved on nature. In nature a child takes twenty years to grow up mentally and physically. We can teach them enough in four years. At eighteen, she’ll be in no way inferior to a girl who’s had a normal birth and childhood. We don’t take them back the other side of puberty because we have enough time as it is and this way we avoid a lot of emotional problems. It’s almost certain—”
His voice trailed away. He’d been talking as if Benny had turned out as he expected. The old man’s bewilderment showed he was wasting his time.
Martin led him back across the lawn. “Thanks for coming, Benny,” he said. “You’ve been a great help. I just want to talk to a few people like you who knew Miss Sonnenburg well. Now, maybe you can tell me who I should see next?”
“You should see Mr. Collini,” said Benny, proud to be consulted. “He’s a conductor. Miss Sonnenburg worked with him a lot.”
“Thanks, Benny. I’ll do that.”
On the way back to the Musicosmos Building, Benny slouched and looked his years.
Susan Sonnenburg was gone. The beautiful half-child half-woman he had seen was not Susan Sonnenburg and would never be Susan Sonnenburg.
But strangely enough, that hardly affected Benny and was not responsible for his depression. After all, Susan had been at an age where death at any moment was a possibility, approaching an age when death was a certainty. (Only five years younger than he was.) She was not more dead now than she would have been if she had actually died. By reckoning, she must be less.
When Benny got back to his single room that evening, he took out the two hundred fifty dollars Susan had given him, untouched so far, “Buy something that will remind you of me,” she had said.
He didn’t want to be reminded of her. There was no point in remembering her. The sensible thing was to put the money with the rest and forget where it came from.
He took a large envelope from behind the old-fashioned dressing table and looked in it. Two thousand dollars. He didn’t want or need more. Closing the envelope, he put it back. The money Susan had given him was still on the table.
Susan Sonnenburg was gone, finished. He would get rid of the money she had given him as quickly and completely as possible. Scatter it to the winds. Keep nothing of it, not as much as a book of matches from a night club.
Night club. He hadn’t been in one for twenty years. He wouldn’t end his life heartbroken if he never entered one again. Still, when you were trying to get rid of money without actually burning it—
From a cupboard he produced evening clothes which were cheap but well-cut, so well-cut that when he put them on they entirely ceased to look cheap. They also made him look younger—not in years as much as in spirit. A man of seventy dancing a jig looks much younger than a man of sixty in a bathchair. People might still estimate Benny’s age pretty accurately. Nevertheless, he would look less out of place with girls of twenty than many men half his age.
He was not unaware of this.
Whistling contentedly, if not particularly tunefully, as he dressed, he thought without regret about Susan. It was easy to get sentimental when people died or went for Rebirth, but the truth was that neither Susan nor anybody else for the last twenty years had ever come close to being a friend of his. He couldn’t allow that. He might allow women to fall in love with him, if they could and would; he couldn’t allow anyone, man or woman, to become a friend.
But Susan could have been a friend.
Ready for the pleasures of the evening, he had a good meal at a restaurant nearby, lingering over it. It wasn’t a big meal, but it was a well-chosen one, washed down by a bottle of Yugoslav Riesling.
Then he went to the Blue Moon. Before going to the bar he paused to watch the floor show for a few minutes. A magician with some electronic tricks in keeping with the Blue Moon’s cover charge was getting far less attention than he deserved. Some of his gadgets were radio-controlled. When he blindfolded himself he used radar. And all his animals were beautifully designed robots. Someone should have told him to be old-fashioned and put a few girls in the act.
There were two girls at the bar as Benny approached it, one in pink whose lines were uncertain and one in red who showed how the other’s ought to have gone.
“Hi,” said the girl in pink.
Benny’s smile for the pink girl was much brighter and friendlier than the look he gave the girl in red. Yet he made the situation clear in the nicest possible way, and the pink girl sighed philosophically.
“This is Marita,” she said. “Buy me a drink and I’ll blow.”
Marita didn’t look like what she was, any more than the top members of her profession throughout history had looked like what they were. Apart from fitting her like suntan, her gown was decent, and she looked intelligent.
When he arrived at the Musicosmos Building next day, nothing remained of the money Susan had given him except a slight hangover and a feeling of lassitude natural enough in a man of his age.
Jennings dropped a file on Weygand’s desk. “I did that test you asked me to do—on Benny Rice. Want to look at the results?”
“Not unless there’s anything interesting in them. Is there?”
“Depends what you call interesting.”
Jennings was a tall, untidy man who spent most of his life looking tired and disinterested, grinding along like a motor working on low voltage. Now and then, however, something would excite him. Immediately he would get the right voltage from somewhere and would sparkle like champagne.
His disillusionment arose out of the fact that few people understood or cared about his subject. He spent half his life explaining that his tests were meant to isolate potential. If somebody had an astronomical M.Q. of 185, that didn’t mean he’d be a great composer, or recording star, or conductor. It merely meant he had an M.Q. of 185. Other things being favorable, he might amount to something musically. Other things being exactly right, he must amount to something, if he started soon enough and on the right lines. Other things being in any way unfavorable, he’d m
ake a good bus driver or clerk.
“Well, is he a musical moron?” Weygand asked.
“Not quite that. A musical moron would have an M.Q. of 70-80. Benny’s 42—that makes him a musical imbecile.”
Weygand sighed. “Thanks, Jennings.”
“What was the idea, anyway?”
“Susan Sonnenburg wanted him tested. Feminine intuition, I guess.”
Jennings momentarily lost his harassed look and genuine enthusiasm came over him. “If Susan Sonnenburg requested it, I know what she was thinking about. Rebirth. She’d sensed that Benny wasn’t as dumb as he looks. And she was right.”
“You mean he’s a Rebirth prospect? With an M.Q. like that?”
The harassed, tortured look settled back on Jennings’ face. “President Fuller has an M.Q. of 61,” he said. “That doesn’t stop him being almost off the top end of the VTC scale.”
Weygand’s eyebrows indicated mild, not particularly interested surprise. “My M.Q. is the same as my VTC rating.”
“And you’re in a musical administration job.”
“So what?”
An expression of agony crossed Jennings’ face. Sometimes he wondered why he bothered.
“Want me to run a VTC test on Benny?”
“If he had a high rating, it would have been discovered long ago, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Then forget it. I’ve done all Susan asked me to do.”
But Jennings didn’t forget it. As he returned to his own department, he was mentally revising his assessment of Benny. Told nothing of the background, he had assumed the test had been requested because somebody thought Benny had musical ability. Well, he hadn’t—to put it mildly.
Jennings had known Susan Sonnenburg quite well—in one respect, better than anyone else. He knew her test ratings. M.Q., 141 (“Only 141?” Weygand had said once. “That just shows what your tests are worth, Jennings. She’s the greatest pianist in the world.” Jennings had tried to explain how an M.Q. of 141 or even less could be enough for someone of Susan’s intelligence and tenacity. You needed more than potential to achieve success in anything). I.Q., 155. Mechanical ability, 139. VTC, 198.
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