The Dwindling Years by Lester Del Rey (life books to read .txt) 📗

in the laboratories that housed their offices. If this kept on, he’d be missing the old days when he’d had a mansion and counted his wealth in possessions, instead of the treasures he could build inside himself for the future ahead. He was getting positively childish!

Yet he relished the feeling of having Dubbins drive his car. More than anything else, he’d loved being driven. Even after chauffeurs were a thing of the past, Harry had driven him around. Now he’d taken to walking, as so many others had, for even with modern safety measures so strict, there was always a small chance of some accident and nobody had any desire to spend the long future as a cripple.

“I’ll wait for you, sir,” Dubbins offered as they stopped beside the low, massive medical building.

It was almost too much consideration. Giles nodded, got out and headed down the hall uncertainly. Just how bad did he look? Well, he’d soon find out.

He located the directory and finally found the right office, its reception room wall covered with all the degrees Dr. Cobb had picked up in some three hundred years of practice. Giles felt better, realizing it wouldn’t be one of the younger men.

COBB APPEARED himself, before the nurse could take over, and led Giles into a room with an old-fashioned desk and chairs that almost concealed the cabinets of equipment beyond.

He listened as Giles stumbled out his story. Halfway through, the nurse took a blood sample with one of the little mosquito needles and the machinery behind the doctor began working on it.

“Your friend told me about the gray hair, of course,” Cobb said. At Giles’ look, he smiled faintly. “Surely you didn’t think people could miss that in this day and age? Let’s see it.”

He inspected it and began making tests. Some were older than Giles could remember—knee reflex, blood pressure, pulse and fluoroscope. Others involved complicated little gadgets that ran over his body, while meters bobbed and wiggled. The blood check came through and Cobb studied it, to go back and make further inspections of his own.

At last he nodded slowly. “Hyper-catabolism, of course. I thought it might be. How long since you had your last rejuvenation? And who gave it?”

“About ten years ago,” Giles answered. He found his identity card and passed it over, while the doctor studied it. “My sixteenth.”

It wasn’t going right. He could feel it. Some of the panic symptoms were returning; the pulse in his neck was pounding and his breath was growing difficult. Sweat ran down his sides from his armpit and he wiped his palms against his coat.

“Any particular emotional strain when you were treated—some major upset in your life?” Cobb asked.

Giles thought as carefully as he could, but he remembered nothing like that. “You mean—it didn’t take? But I never had any trouble, Doctor. I was one of the first million cases, when a lot of people couldn’t rejuvenate at all, and I had no trouble even then.”

Cobb considered it, hesitated as if making up his mind to be frank against his better judgment. “I can’t see any other explanation. You’ve got a slight case of angina—nothing serious, but quite definite—as well as other signs of aging. I’m afraid the treatment didn’t take fully. It might have been some unconscious block on your part, some infection not diagnosed at the time, or even a fault in the treatment. That’s pretty rare, but we can’t neglect the possibility.”

HE STUDIED his charts again and then smiled. “So we’ll give you another treatment. Any reason you can’t begin immediately?”

Giles remembered that Dubbins was waiting for him, but this was more important. It hadn’t been a joke about his growing old, after all. But now, in a few days, he’d be his old—no, of course not—his young self again!

They went down the hall to another office, where Giles waited outside while Cobb conferred with another doctor and technician, with much waving of charts. He resented every second of it. It was as if the almost forgotten specter of age stood beside him, counting the seconds. But at last they were through and he was led into the quiet rejuvenation room, where the clamps were adjusted about his head and the earpieces were fitted. The drugs were shot painlessly into his arm and the light-pulser was adjusted to his brain-wave pattern.

It had been nothing like this his first time. Then it had required months of mental training, followed by crude mechanical and drug hypnosis for other months. Somewhere in every human brain lay the memory of what his cells had been like when he was young. Or perhaps it lay in the cells themselves, with the brain as only a linkage to it. They’d discovered that, and the fact that the mind could effect physical changes in the body. Even such things as cancer could be willed out of existence—provided the brain could be reached far below the conscious level and forced to operate.

There had been impossible faith cures for millenia—cataracts removed from blinded eyes within minutes, even—but finding the mechanism in the brain that worked those miracles had taken an incredible amount of study and finding a means of bringing it under control had taken even longer.

Now they did it with dozens of mechanical aids in addition to the hypnotic instructions—and did it usually in a single sitting, with the full transformation of the body taking less than a week after the treatment!

But with all the equipment, it wasn’t impossible for a mistake to happen. It had been no fault of his ... he was sure of that ... his mind was easy to reach ... he could relax so easily....

He came out of it without even a headache, while they were removing the probes, but the fatigue on the operator’s face told him it had been a long and difficult job. He stretched experimentally, with the eternal unconscious expectation that he would find himself suddenly young again. But that, of course, was ridiculous. It took days for the mind to work on all the cells and to repair the damage of time.

COBB LED him back to the first office, where he was given an injection of some kind and another sample of his blood was taken, while the earlier tests were repeated. But finally the doctor nodded.

“That’s all for now, Mr. Giles. You might drop in tomorrow morning, after I’ve had a chance to complete my study of all this. We’ll know by then whether you’ll need more treatment. Ten o’clock okay?”

“But I’ll be all right?”

Cobb smiled the automatic reassurance of his profession. “We haven’t lost a patient in two hundred years, to my knowledge.”

“Thanks,” said Giles. “Ten o’clock is fine.”

Dubbins was still waiting, reading a paper whose headlined feature carried a glowing account of the discovery of the super-light missile and what it might mean. He took a quick look at Giles and pointed to it. “Great work, Mr. Giles. Maybe we’ll all get to see some of those other worlds yet.” Then he studied Giles more carefully. “Everything’s in good shape now, sir?”

“The doctor says everything’s going to be fine,” Giles answered.

It was then he realized for the first time that Cobb had said no such thing. A statement that lightning had never struck a house was no guarantee that it never would. It was an evasion meant to give such an impression.

The worry nagged at him all the way back. Word had already gone around the club that he’d had some kind of attack and there were endless questions that kept it on his mind. And even when it had been covered and recovered, he could still sense the glances of the others, as if he were Vincenti in one of the man’s more morose moods.

He found a single table in the dining room and picked his way through the meal, listening to the conversation about him only when it was necessary because someone called across to him. Ordinarily, he was quick to support the idea of clubs in place of private families. A man here could choose his group and grow into them. Yet he wasn’t swallowed by them, as he might be by a family. Giles had been living here for nearly a century now and he’d never regretted it. But tonight his own group irritated him.

He puzzled over it, finding no real reason. Certainly they weren’t forcing themselves on him. He remembered once when he’d had a cold, before they finally licked that; Harry had been a complete nuisance, running around with various nostrums, giving him no peace. Constant questions about how he felt, constant little looks of worry—until he’d been ready to yell at the boy. In fact, he had.

Funny, he couldn’t picture really losing his temper here. Families did odd things to a man.

HE LISTENED to a few of the discussions after the dinner, but he’d heard them all before, except for one about the super-speed drive, and there he had no wish to talk until he could study the final report. He gave up at last and went to his own suite. What he needed was a good night’s sleep after a little relaxation.

Even that failed him, though. He’d developed one of the finest chess collections in the world, but tonight it held no interest. And when he drew out his tools and tried working on the delicate, lovely jade for the set he was carving his hands seemed to be all thumbs. None of the other interests he’d developed through the years helped to add to the richness of living now.

He gave it up and went to bed—to have the fragment of that song pop into his head. Now there was no escaping it. Something about the years—or was it days—dwindling down to something or other.

Could they really dwindle down? Suppose he couldn’t rejuvenate all the way? He knew that there were some people who didn’t respond as well as others. Sol Graves, for instance. He’d been fifty when he finally learned how to work with the doctors and they could only bring him back to about thirty, instead of the normal early twenties. Would that reduce the slice of eternity that rejuvenation meant? And what had happened to Sol?

Or suppose it wasn’t rejuvenation, after all; suppose something had gone wrong with him permanently?

He fought that off, but he couldn’t escape the nagging doubts at the doctor’s words.

He got up once to stare at himself in the mirror. Ten hours had gone by and there should have been some signs of improvement. He couldn’t be sure, though, whether there were or not.

He looked no better the next morning when he finally dragged himself up from the little sleep he’d managed to get. The hollows were still there and the circles under his eyes. He searched for the gray in his hair, but the traitorous strands had been removed at the doctor’s office and he could find no new ones.

He looked into the dining room and then went by hastily. He wanted no solicitous glances this morning. Drat it, maybe he should move out. Maybe trying family life again would give him some new interests. Amanda probably would be willing to marry him; she’d hinted at a date once.

He stopped, shocked by the awareness that he hadn’t been out with a woman for....

He couldn’t remember how long it had been. Nor why.

“In the spring, a young man’s fancy,” he quoted to himself, and then shuddered.

It hadn’t been that kind of spring for him—not this rejuvenation nor the last, nor the one before that.

GILES TRIED to stop scaring himself and partially succeeded, until he reached the doctor’s office. Then it was no longer necessary to frighten himself. The wrongness was too strong, no matter how professional Cobb’s smile!

He didn’t hear the preliminary words. He watched the smile vanish as the stack of reports came out. There was no nurse here now. The machines were quiet—and all the doors were shut.

Giles shook his head, interrupting the doctor’s technical jargon. Now that he knew there was reason for his fear, it seemed to vanish, leaving a coldness that numbed him.

“I’d rather know the whole truth,” he said. His voice sounded dead in his ears. “The worst first. The rejuvenation...?”

Cobb sighed and yet seemed relieved. “Failed.” He stopped, and his hands touched the reports on his desk. “Completely,” he added in a low, defeated tone.

“But I thought that was impossible!”

“So did I. I wouldn’t believe it even yet—but now I find it isn’t the first case. I spent the night at Medical Center going up the ranks until I found men who really know about it. And now I wish I hadn’t.” His voice ran down and he gathered himself together by an effort. “It’s a shock to me, too, Mr. Giles. But—well, to simplify it, no memory is perfect—even cellular memory. It loses a little each time. And the effect is cumulative. It’s like an asymptotic curve—the further it goes, the steeper the curve. And—well, you’ve passed too far.”

He faced away from Giles, dropping the reports into a drawer and locking it. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you, of course. It’s going to be tough enough when they’re ready to let people know. But you aren’t the first and you won’t be the last, if that’s any consolation. We’ve got a longer time scale than we used to have—but it’s in centuries, not in eons. For everybody, not just you.”

It was no consolation. Giles nodded mechanically. “I won’t talk, of course. How—how long?”

Cobb spread his hands unhappily. “Thirty years, maybe. But we can make them better. Geriatric knowledge is still on record. We can fix the heart and all the rest. You’ll be in good physical condition, better than your grandfather—”

“And then....” Giles couldn’t pronounce the words. He’d grown old and he’d grow older. And eventually he’d die!