Psi-High And Others

by Alan Edward Nourse

  They packed him naked into the street, hurried him into a three-wheeled ground car. Five minutes later he was herded out of the car into another building, and Barness, the Ironstone administrator, was glaring at him across the room.

  Odd things flashed through Carl’s mind. You seldom saw a Retread really get angry, but Barness was angry. The man’s young-old face (the strange, utterly ageless amalgamation of sixty years of wisdom, superimposed by the youth of a twenty-year-old) had unaccustomed lines of wrath about the eyes and mouth. Barness didn’t waste words. “What were you after down there?”

  “Armstrong.” Carl cut the word out almost gleefully. “And I got what I wanted, and there’s nothing you or Walter Rinehart or anybody else can do about it now. I don’t know what I saw in that report, but I’ve got it recorded in my eyes and in my brain now and you can’t touch it.”

  “You stupid fool, we can peel your brain,” Barness snarled.

  “Well, you won’t. You won’t dare.”

  Barness glanced at the officer who had brought him in. “Jack—”

  “Senator Dan Fowler won’t like it,” said Carl.

  The administrator stopped short, blinking at him. He took a slow breath. Then he sank down into his chair. “Fowler,” he said, as though dawn was just breaking.

  “That’s right. Dan Fowler sent me up here. I’ve found what he wants. You shoot me now, and when they probe you, Dan will know that I found it, and you won’t be around for another rejuvenation.”

  Barness looked suddenly old, and puzzled. “But what did he want?”

  “The truth about Kenneth Armstrong’s death. Not the World Hero, Died with His Boots on, and all that twaddle. Dan wanted the truth. Who killed him. Why this colony is grinding down from compound low to stop, and turning men like Terry Fisher into alcoholic bums. Why Ironstone is turning into a super-refined Birdie’s Rest for old men. But mostly who killed Armstrong, how he was murdered, who gave the orders. And if you don’t mind, I’d like my clothes back, I’m getting cold.”

  “And you got all that,” said Barness, wonderingly.

  “That’s right.”

  “But you haven’t read what you got, have you?”

  “Not yet. Plenty of time for that on the way back.”

  Barness nodded wearily, and tossed Carl his clothes. “Maybe you ought to read it tonight. It might just surprise you.”

  Golden’s eyes widened. Something in the man’s voice, some curious note of defeat and hopelessness, told him that Barness was not lying. “Really? In what way?”

  “Armstrong’s death wasn’t accidental; you’re right there. We lied to the press about that. But nobody murdered him, either. Nobody gave any orders, to anybody. Nobody wanted him dead. The reason Armstrong died was because he shot himself—quite of his own volition.”

  II

  “All right, Senator,” the young red-headed doctor said. “You told me you wanted it straight. That’s how you’re going to get it.” Moments before, Dr. Moss had been laughing and joking in pleasant banter. He wasn’t laughing now. “You’ve got six months, at the outside. Nine, if you went to bed tomorrow, retired from the Senate, and lived on tea and crackers. But from where I’m sitting I wouldn’t bet a plugged nickel that you’ll be alive a month from now. If you think I’m joking, you just try to squeeze a bet out of me.”

  Senator Dan Fowler took the black cigar from his mouth, stared at the chewed-up end for a moment, and put it back in his mouth. There was something exceedingly witty that he’d planned to say at this point in the examination, but now it didn’t seem too funny. If Dr. Moss had been some mealy-mouthed quack like some of the doctors Dan had seen, it would be easy. But Dr. Moss wasn’t. He was one of the very sharp, very competent, very human doctors the Hoffman Medical Center had been training in these past few decades, among the best doctors you could find in the world. Furthermore, Dr. Moss did not seem overwhelmingly impressed by the man sitting across the desk from him, senator or no senator, a fact which made Dan Fowler just a trifle uneasy. He looked at the doctor and scowled. “Garbage,” he said.

  The red-headed doctor shrugged. “Look, Senator, sometimes a banana is a banana. I know heart disease, and I know how it acts. I also know it kills people if they wait too long. And once you’re dead, no rejuvenation lab is going to bring you back to life.”

  “Oh hell! Who’s dying?” Fowler’s gray eyebrows knit in the old familiar scowl, and he bit down hard on the cigar. “Heart disease! So I get a little pain now and then—it never lasts long, and when it starts getting bad I’ll come in and take the full treatment. But I can’t do it now!” He spread his hands in a violent gesture. “I only came in here because my daughter dragged me. My heart’s doing fine. I’ve been working an eighteen-hour day for forty years now, and I can do it for another year or two.”

  “But you do have pain,” Dr. Moss said gently.

  “So? A little twinge, now and then.”

  “Like whenever you lose your temper. Whenever you run for a plane. Whenever anything upsets you.”

  “All right—a twinge.”

  “Which makes you sit down for ten or fifteen minutes when it comes on, and doesn’t go away any more with just one nitro tablet, you have to take two, and sometimes three—right?”

  Dan Fowler blinked. “All right, sometimes it gets a little bad—”

  “And it used to be only once or twice a month, but now it’s almost every day. And once or twice you’ve just blacked out for a while, and made your staff work like demons to cover for you and keep it off the TV, right?”

  “Say, who’s been talking to you?”

  “Really, Senator!”

  “Can’t even trust your own blood daughter to keep her trap shut” Fowler tossed his cigar butt down in disgust “It happened once, yes. That confounded Rinehart is enough to make anybody black out” He thrust out his jaw and glowered at Dr. Moss as though it were all his fault Then he grinned. “Oh, I know you’re right, Doc, it’s just that this is the wrong time. I can’t take two months out now. There’s too much to be done between now and the middle of next month.”

  “Oh, yes. The Hearings. Why not turn them over to your staff? They know what’s going on.”

  “Nonsense. They know, but not like I know. After the Hearings, fine. I’ll come along like a lamb. But not right now—”

  Dr. Moss reddened, slammed his fist down on the desk. “Senator, are you both blind and deaf? Or just plain stupid? Didn’t you hear me a moment ago? You may not live through the Hearings. You could go out, just like that any minute. But this is 2134 a.d., not the Middle Ages. It would be so utterly, hopelessly pointless to let that happen.”

  Fowler champed his cigar and scowled. “After the Retread was done I’d have to free-agent for a year, wouldn’t I?” It was an accusation.

  “You should. But that’s really only a formality. If you want to go right back to the same thing you were doing before you came to the center, that’s purely your option.”

  “Yes, if! But supposing I didn’t? Supposing I was all changed.”

  The young doctor looked at the man shrewdly. Dan Fowler was fifty-six years old and he looked forty. It seemed incredible even to Dr. Moss that this man could have done what he had done, and still look almost as young and fighting-mad now as he had when he started. Clever old goat too, but Dan Fowler’s last remarks bad lifted a veil. Moss smiled to himself. “You’re afraid of it, aren’t you, Senator?”

  “Of rejuvenation? Nonsense.”

  “But you are. You aren’t the only one, it’s a pretty frightening thing. Cash in the old model, take out a new one, just like a jet racer or a worn out talk-writer. Only it isn’t machinery, it’s your body, and your life.” Dr. Moss spread his hands. “It scares a man. Rejuvenation isn’t the right word, of course. Aside from the neurones, they take way every cell in your body, one way or another, and give you new ones. A hundred and fifty years ago Cancelmo and Klein did it on a dog, right in this building when the Hoffman Center was
new. They called it subtotal prosthesis. A crude job—I’ve studied their papers and films. Vat-grown hearts and kidneys, revitalized vascular material, building up new organ systems like a patchwork quilt, coaxing new tissues to grow to replace old ones. But they got a living dog out of it, and that dog lived to the ripe old age of thirty-seven years.”

  Dr. Moss pushed back from his desk, watching Dan Fowler’s face. “Then in 1992 Nimrock tried it on a Mercy Man here, and almost got himself convicted of murder because the man died. That was a hundred and forty-one years ago. While Nimrock’s trial was still going on, his workers completed the second job, and the man lived, and oh, did that jury fall over itself to have Nimrock set free!”

  As the doctor talked, Dan Fowler sat silent, chewing his cigar furiously. But listening—he was listening, all right. “Well, it was a crude process in those days,” Dr. Moss said. “Hit or miss. But in those days the Hoffman Center was barely getting organized as a great medical research complex. They were still using Mercy Men—paid medical mercenaries—for their experiments, and public opinion was fighting them like mad. With rejuvenation a success, they brought in the best researchers and clinical physicians the world had to offer, threw everything they had into it, with more financial support than they knew what to do with, and today there is nothing crude or haphazard about subtotal prosthesis.” He pointed to a bronze plaque hanging on the wall. “That’s on the wall of every examining room here in the Hoffman Center. You’ve seen it before; read it.”

  Dan Fowler’s eyes went up to the plaque. A list of names. At the top words said, “These ten gave life to Mankind.”

  Below it were the names:

  Martin Aronson, Ph.D.—Education

  Thomas Bevalaqua—Literature and Art

  Chauncey Devlin—Music

  Frederick A. Kehler, M.S.—Engineering

  William B. Morse, LL.D.—Law

  Rev. John McFarlane—Philosophy and Theology

  Jacob Prowsnitz, Ph. D.—History

  John W. Shaw, M.D.—Medicine

  Carlotta Sokol, Ph.D.—Sociopsychology

  Harvey Tatum—Business

  “I know,” said Dan Fowler. “June 1, 2005. They were the first scientifically controlled volunteers.”

  “Ten out of several thousand volunteers,” Moss amended. “Those ten were chosen by lot. Already people were dreaming about what subtotal prosthesis could do. Think of it, at a time when death by the age of eighty or ninety was still a virtual certainty, and very final too! To preserve the great minds, compound the accumulated wisdom of one lifetime with still another lifetime, and maybe another and another—the old Fountain of Youth dream, at last come true! So those ten people, representing ten great fields of study, volunteered to risk their lives. Not to live forever, just to see if rejuvenation really could preserve their minds in newly built bodies. All of them were old, older than you are, Senator. Some were sicker than you are, and believe me, every one of them was afraid. But seven of the ten are still alive today, a hundred and thirty years later. John Shaw died in a jet crash ten years after his first Retread. Tatum died of a neuro-toxic virus, because in those days we couldn’t do anything to rebuild neurones and brain tissue. Bevalaqua took his own life, for reasons unknown. The rest are still alive, vigorously and productively alive, after two more rejuvenations.”

  “Fine,” said Dan Fowler. “I still can’t do it now.”

  “That was just ten people,” Dr. Moss cut in. “It took five years to get ready for them, then. Today we can handle five hundred a year, but still only five hundred select individuals, to live on instead of dying. You have the incredible good fortune to be one of those chosen, and you’ve got the gall to sit there and tell me you don’t have the time for it!”

  The senator rose slowly, lighting another cigar. “Doctor, it could be five thousand a year instead of five hundred. That’s why I don’t have the time. It could be fifteen thousand, fifty thousand. It could be, but it’s not. Senator Walter Rinehart has been rejuvenated twice already. He is one of the most corrupt politicians this nation has ever spawned, the chairman of the committee that makes the final irrevocable selection of just exactly who the lucky ones will be each year. Rinehart’s on the list, of course. I’m on the list because I’ve shouted so loudly and made such a stink for such a long time that the Criterion Committee didn’t dare leave me off. But you’re not on the list. Why not? You could be. Every productive individual in our society could be.”

  Dr. Moss spread his hands. “I’m not beefing. The Criterion Committee does the choosing.”

  “Rinehart’s criteria!” Dan Fowler exploded.

  “But Rinehart doesn’t decide for himself. There all sorts of wise men and women on that committee, people trained in every area of knowledge, working themselves sick to pick out the best choices each year.”

  Fowler looked at him. “Yes, working to pick out who shall live and who shall not live. Well, who is wise enough for that job? You don’t know very much about people, Doctor. Nor about politics. Who do you think set the figure at five hundred a year? The Hoffman Center? The committee? No. Rinehart set the number. Who has consistently maneuvered to hold down appropriations so the center couldn’t handle more than five hundred? Rinehart has, seven times, now. The committeemen are good people, but they want to live, too, and their chairman is a vulture. For decades he’s used the Criterion Committee as his own personal weapon. Built power with it. Got it in a strangle hold he never intends to let go.” The senator leaned across the desk, his eyes bright with anger. “I haven’t time to stop for a Retread now, because finally, at last, I can stop Walter Rinehart, if only I can live a few more weeks. I can break him, free the Criteron Committee from his control, or any one man’s control, now while there’s still a chance, and throw rejuvenation open to everybody instead of to five hundred chosen ones a year. I can stop Rinehart because I’ve dug at him and dug at him for twenty-nine years, and shouted and screamed and fought and made people listen, and now, finally, I have him boxed into a corner that he can’t get out of. And if I fumble now it’ll all be down the drain, finished, washed up. And if that happens, nobody will ever be able to stop him.”

  There was silence in the little examining room. Then Dr. Moss spread his hands. “The Hearings are that critical, eh?”

  “I’m afraid they are.”

  “But why does it have to be your personal fight? Why can’t someone else do it?”

  “Anyone else would fumble it. Anyone else would foul it up. Senator Libby fouled it up once, disastrously, years ago. Rinehart’s lived for a hundred and nineteen years, and he’s been learning new tricks every year. I’ve only lived fifty-six years so far, but I’m onto his tricks. I can beat him.”

  “But why you?”

  “Somebody’s got to do it. My card is on top.”

  On the desk a telephone buzzed. Dr. Moss answered, then handed Dan the receiver. A moment later the senator was grinning like a cat, struggling into his overcoat and scarf. “Sorry, Doc. I know what you tell me is true, and I’m no fool. If I really have to stop, I’ll stop.”

  “Tomorrow, then.”

  “Not tomorrow. One of my lads is back from Ironstone Colony with the key to the whole thing in his head. We’ve got hard work to do tomorrow, but I think I can get the Hearings rescheduled a bit sooner, say next week. When they’re over with, I’ll be in, scout’s honor. Meanwhile, keep your eye on the TV. Ill be seeing you, lad.”

  The door clicked shut behind him, leaving a faint blue cloud of cigar smoke in his wake. Dr. David Moss stared at it gloomily. “I hope so,” he said softly to himself, “I truly hope so.”

  III

  A white Volta two-wheeler was waiting for him outside. Jean Fowler drove off with characteristic contempt for the laws of gravity after her father had piled in. Carl Golden was there, looking thinner, more gaunt and hawklike than ever before, his brown eyes sharp under his shock of black hair. Dan clapped him on the shoulder, and shot a dark look at his daughter, rele
gating her to some private Fowler limbo, which was where she belonged and would remain until Dan got excited about something and forgot how she’d betrayed her ailing father to Dr. Moss, a matter of fifteen minutes at the most. Jean Fowler knew her father too well to worry about it. She squinted out the window at the afternoon traffic as the car squealed around the cloverleaf onto the Boulevard Freeway, its stabilizing gyros whining, and then buzzed across the river toward town. “Confound it, boy,” Dan was saying, “you could at least have flashed a signal that you were coming. Jean spotted you on the passenger list, and I had to do back-flips to get old MacKenzie to reschedule the Hearings for next week instead of two months from now.”

  Carl scowled. “I thought the dates were all set.”

  Dan chuckled. “They were. But it was you we had to wait for, and with you back with the true story on Armstrong why delay?” He didn’t mention the doctor’s urgent warning.

  Carl Golden shook his head. “I don’t like the switch in dates, Dan.”

  “Well, Dwight MacKenzie didn’t like it either, but he’s still setting the committee’s business calendar, and he couldn’t find a good solid reason why the Hearings shouldn’t be rescheduled. And I think our good friend Senator Rinehart is probably wriggling on the stick right now, just on the shock value of the switch. Always figure in the shock value of everything you do, my boy; it pays off more than you’d ever dream.”

  “I still don’t like it. I wish you hadn’t done it.”

  “But why? Look, lad, I know that with Ken Armstrong dead we had to change our whole approach. It’s going to be trickier, without him, but it might even work out better. The Senate knows what’s been going on between Rinehart and me. So does the President. They know elections are coming up next June. They know I want a seat on the Criterion Committee before elections, and they know that to get a seat I’ve got to unseat Rinehart. They know I’ve shaken him up, that he’s scared of me. Okay, fine. With Armstrong here to tell how and why he was chosen for Retread back in ’87, what he had to pay Rinehart to get the nod, we’d have had Rinehart running for his life—”