by Jerry
“Leah is right, you know,” Mike said. “A few years ago I visited the old age home. There’s only one left. You’d be surprised at the amount of suffering old people go through before they die; cancer, angina, broken bones, strokes, arthritis. Rejuvenation won’t work on extremely old bodies. Longevity has run out.”
“Why does it have to clip off five years?” worried Howard.
“It’s the old-age governor they found in the pituitary gland. They can turn it back, but the shock takes off about five years.”
“Oh, I know what’s in the medical articles,” Howard growled. “Remember, I’ve been through here twice before. But the Sun was so warm this morning. It was like seeing everything for the last time. I felt like sitting down and letting everything drift.”
“That’s a sure sign that you really need rejuvenating,” said Leah. “After it’s over you’ll be making me a golf widow again. Won’t he, Mike?”
“Of course. He’ll come out raring to go.”
Howard looked from Mike to Leah and back at Mike. Age was no match for youth. If love hadn’t started between them already, it would soon.
AT the end of the long room, a door opened and two nurses entered, starched and antiseptic.
“Your room is ready, Mr. Kent,” one nurse said.
Howard shuddered. “Everything is so horribly familiar. The pill to erase the worry, which doesn’t work. The cart you ride on which makes you feel like a carcass. The little bump as you enter the regeneration room. Then you get a hypodermic and crawl into a long boiler tank.”
“You’re just nervous, dear,” said Leah.
“A dismal, miasmic cloud settles on your mind and you decide you wouldn’t go through it again for anything in the world.” Mike put his arm around Leah as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “He’ll be all right, my darling.”
Howard looked at them and then turned wearily to the nurse. “I’m ready.”
The nurse walked down the long room with the stooped man and disappeared beyond the door.
“Did you tell him about us?” asked Mike.
“Of course not. What a man doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
“Are you Mrs. Kent?” asked the other nurse who had remained behind.
“Yes.”
“The doctor said to remind you that the fourth time is very dangerous,” the nurse said. “You’ll have five years and six months without it. But possibly only six months if it should be successful.”
“Better take the first offer, Leah,” said Mike.
Leah smiled. “I found a gray hair and a wrinkle this morning, love. Better six months of youth than a thousand years of old age.”
She went into his arms. “Don’t worry about what happens, love. You’ll have a lot of fun in the next seventy years.”
He kissed her and held her closely.
“I’ve got to go now,” she said. “I’m so grateful you were able to get the forged birth certificate.”
Her high heels tapped rapidly on the tile floor as she walked down the long room with the other nurse.
“Good luck, Mother,” he called after her.
1955
THE ANSWER
Philip Wylie
“FIFTEEN minutes!” . . . The loud-speakers blared on the flight deck, boomed below, and murmured on the bridge where the brass was assembling. The length of the carrier was great. Consonants from distant horns came belatedly to every ear, and metal fabric set up echoes besides. So the phrase stuttered through the ship and over the sea. Fifteen minutes to the bomb test.
Maj. Gen. Marcus Scott walked to the cable railing around the deck and looked at the very blue morning. The ship’s engines had stopped and she lay still, aimed west toward the target island like an arrow in a drawn bow.
Men passing saluted. The general returned the salutes, bringing a weathered hand to a lofty forehead, to straight, coal-black hair above gray eyes and the hawk nose of an Indian.
His thoughts veered to the weather. The far surface of the Pacific was lavender; the nearby water, seen deeper, a lucent violet. White clouds passed gradually—clouds much of a size and shape—with cobalt avenues between. The general, to whom the sky was more familiar than the sea, marveled at that mechanized appearance. It was as if some cosmic weather engine—east, and below the Equator—puffed clouds from Brobdingnagian stacks and sent them rolling over the earth, as regular and even-spaced as the white snorts of a climbing locomotive.
He put away the image. Such fantasy belonged in another era, when he had been a young man at West Point, a brilliant young man, more literary than military, a young man fascinated by the “soldier poets” of the first World War. The second, which he had helped to command in the air, produced no romanticists. Here a third war was in the making, perhaps, a third that might put an end to poetry forever.
“Ten minutes! All personnel complete checks, take assigned stations for test!”
General Scott went across the iron deck on scissoring legs that seemed to hurry the tall man without themselves hurrying. Sailors had finished stringing the temporary cables which, should a freak buffet from the H-bomb reach the area, would prevent them from being tossed overboard. They were gathering, now, to watch. Marc Scott entered the carrier’s island and hastened to the bridge on turning steps of metal, not using the shined brass rail.
Admiral Stanforth was there—anvil shoulders, marble hair, feldspar complexion. Pouring coffee for Senator Blaine with a good-host chuckle and that tiger look in the corners of his eyes. “Morning, Marc! Get any sleep at all?” He gave the general no time to answer. “This is General Scott, gentlemen. In charge of today’s drop. Commands base on Sangre Islands. Senator Blaine——”
The senator had the trappings of office: the embonpoint and shrewd eyes, the pince-nez on a ribbon, the hat with the wide brim that meant a Western or Southern senator. He had the William Jennings Bryan voice. But these were for his constituents.
The man who used the voice said genuinely, “General, I’m honored. Your record in the Eighth Air Force is one we’re almost too proud of to mention in front of you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You know Doctor Trumbul?”
Trumbul was thin and thirty, an all-brown scholar whose brown eyes were so vivid the rest seemed but a background for his eyes. His hand clasped Scott’s. “All too well! I flew with Marc Scott when we dropped Thermonuclear Number Eleven—on a parachute!”
There was some laughter; they knew about that near-disastrous test.
“How’s everybody at Los Alamos?” the general asked.
The physicist shrugged. “Same. They’ll feel better later today—if this one comes up to expectations.”
The admiral was introducing again. “Doctor Antheim, general. Antheim’s from MIT. He’s also the best amateur magician I ever saw perform. Too bail you came aboard so late last night.”
Antheim was as quietly composed as a family physician—a big man in a gray suit.
“Five minutes!” the loud-speaker proclaimed.
You could see the lonely open ocean, the sky, the cumulus clouds. But the target island—five miles long and jungle-painted—lay over the horizon. An island created by volcanic cataclysm millions of years ago and destined this day to vanish in a man-patented calamity. Somewhere a hundred thousand feet above, his own ship, a B-111, was moving at more than seven hundred miles an hour, closing on an imaginary point from which, along an imaginary line, a big bomb would curve earthward, never to hit, but utterly to devastate. You could not see his B-111 and you would probably not even see the high, far-off tornadoes of smoke when, the bomb away, she let go with her rockets to hurtle off even faster from the expanding sphere of blast.
“Personally,” Antheim, the MIT scientist, was saying to General Larsen, “it’s my feeling that whether or not your cocker is a fawning type depends on your attitude as a dog owner. I agree, all cockers have Saint Bernard appetites. Nevertheless, I’m sold on spaniels. In field trials last aut
umn——”
Talking about dogs. Well, why not? Random talk was the best antidote for tension, for the electrically counted minutes that stretched unbearably because of their measurement. He had a dog—his kids had one, rather: Pompey, the mutt, whose field trials took place in the yards and playgrounds of Baltimore, Maryland, in the vicinity of Millbrook Road. He wondered what would be happening at home—where Ellen would be at—he calculated time belts, the hour-wide, orange-peel-shaped sections into which man had carved his planet. Be evening on Millbrook Road——
John Farrier arrived—Farrier, of the great Farrier Corporation. His pale blue eyes looked out over the ship’s flat deck toward the west, the target. But he was saying to somebody, in his crisp yet not uncourteous voice, “I consider myself something of a connoisseur in the matter of honey. We have our own apiary at Hobe Sound. Did you ever taste antidesma honey? Or the honey gathered from palmetto flowers?”
“Two minutes!”
The count-down was the hardest part of a weapons test. What went before was work—sheer work, detailed, exhausting. But what came after had excitements, real and potential, like hazardous exploring, the general thought; you never knew precisely what would ensue. Not precisely.
Tension, he repeated to himself. And he thought, Why do I feel sad? Is it prescience of failure? Will we finally manage to produce a dud?
Fatigue, he answered himself. Setting up this one had been a colossal chore. They called it Bugaboo—Operation Bugaboo in Test Series Avalanche. Suddenly he wished Bugaboo wouldn’t go off.
“One minute! All goggles in place! Exposed personnel without goggles, sit down, turn backs toward west, cover eyes with hands!”
Before he blacked out the world, he took a last look at the sky, the sea—and the sailors, wheeling, sitting, covering their eyes. Then he put on the goggles. The obsidian lenses brought absolute dark. From habit, he cut his eyes back and forth to make certain there was no leak of light—light that could damage the retina.
“Ten seconds!”
The ship drew a last deep breath and held it. In an incredibly long silence, the general mused on thousands upon thousands of other men in other ships, ashore and in the air, who now were also holding back breathing.
“Five!”
An imbecile notion flickered in the general’s brain and expired: He could leap up and cry “Stop!” He still could. A word from Stanforth. A button pressed. The whole shebang would chute on down, unexploded. And umpteen million dollars’ worth of taxpayers’ money would be wasted by that solitary syllable of his.
“Four!”
Still, the general thought, his lips smiling, his heart frozen, why should they—or anybody—be doing this?
“Three seconds . . . two . . . one . . . zero!”
Slowly, the sky blew up.
On the horizon, a supersun grabbed up degrees of diameter and rose degrees. The sea, ship, praying sailors became as plain as they had been bare-eyed in full sun, then plainer still. Eyes, looking through the inky glass, saw the universe stark white. A hundred-times-sun-sized sun mottled itself with lesser whiteness, bulked up, became the perfect sphere, ascending hideously and setting forth on the Pacific a molten track from ship to livid self. Tumors of light more brilliant than the sun sprang up on the mathematical sphere; yet these, less blazing than the fireball, appeared as blacknesses.
The thing swelled and swelled and rose; nonetheless, instant miles of upthrust were diminished by the expansion. Abruptly, it exploded around itself a white lewd ring, a halo.
For a time there was no air beneath it, only the rays and neutrons in vacuum. The atmosphere beyond—incandescent, compressed harder than steel—moved toward the spectators. No sound.
The fireball burned within itself and around itself, burnt the sea away—a hole in it—and a hole in the planet. It melted part way, lopsided, threw out a cubic mile of fire this way—a scarlet asteroid, that.
To greet the birthing of a new, brief star, the regimental sky hung a bunting on every cloud. The mushroom formed quietly, immensely and in haste; it towered, spread, and the incandescent air hurtled at the watchers on the circumferences. In the mushroom new fire burst forth, cubic miles of phosphor-pale flame. The general heard Antheim sigh. That would be the “igniter effect,” the new thing, to set fire, infinitely, in the wake of the fire blown out by the miles-out blast. A hellish bit of physics.
Again, again, again the thorium-lithium pulse! Each time—had it been other than jungle and sea; had it been a city, Baltimore—the urban tinder, and the people, would have hair-fired in the debris.
The mushroom climbed on its stalk, the ten-mile circle of what had been part of earth. It split the atmospheric layers and reached for the purple dark, that the flying general knew, where the real sun was also unbearably bright.
Mouths agape, goggles now dangling, the men on the bridge of the Ticonderoga could look naked-eyed at the sky’s exploded rainbows and seething prismatics.
“Stand by for the blast wave!”
It came like the shadow of eclipse. The carrier shuddered. Men sagged, spun on their bottoms. The general felt the familiar compression, a thousand boxing gloves, padded but hitting squarely every part of his body at once.
Then Antheim and Trumbul were shaking hands.
“Congratulations! That ought to be—about it!”
It for what? The enemy? A city? Humanity?
“Magnificent,” said Senator Blaine. He added, “We seem O.K.”
“Good thing too,” a voice laughed. “A dozen of the best sets of brains in America, right in this one spot.”
The general thought about that. Two of the world’s leading nuclear physicists, the ablest member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a senator wise for all his vaudeville appearance, an unbelievably versatile industrialist, the Navy’s best tactician. Good brains. But what an occupation for human brains!
Unobtrusively he moved to the iron stairs—the “ladder.” Let the good brains and the sight-seers gape at the kaleidoscope aloft. He hurried to his assigned office.
An hour later he had received the important reports.
His B-111 was back on the field, “hot,” but not dangerous; damaged, but not severely; the crew in good shape. Celebrating, Major Stokely had bothered to add.
Two drones lost; three more landed in unapproachable condition. One photo recon plane had been hit by a flying chunk of something eighteen miles from ground zero and eight minutes—if the time was right—after the blast. Something that had been thrown mighty high or somehow remained aloft a long while. Wing damage and radioactivity; but, again, no personnel injured.
Phones rang. Messengers came—sailors—quick, quiet, polite. The Ticonderoga was moving, moving swiftly, in toward the place where nothing was, in under the colored bomb clouds.
He had a sensation that something was missing, that more was to be done, that news awaited—which he attributed again to tiredness. Tiredness: what a general was supposed never to feel—and the burden that settled on every pair of starred shoulders. He sighed and picked up the book he had read in empty spaces of the preceding night: Thoreau’s Walden Pond.
Why had he taken Thoreau on this trip? He knew the answer. To be as far as possible, in one way, from the torrent of technology in mid-Pacific; to be as close as possible to a proper view of Atomic-Age Man, in a different way. But now he closed the book as if it had blank pages. After all, Thoreau couldn’t take straight Nature, himself; a couple of years beside his pond and he went back to town and lived in Emerson’s back yard. For the general that was an aggrieved and aggrieving thought.
Lieutenant Tobey hurried in from the next office. “Something special on TLS. Shall I switch it?”
His nerves tightened. He had expected “Something special” on his most restricted wire, without a reason for the expectation. He picked up the instrument when the light went red. “Scott here.”
“Rawson. Point L 15.”
“Right.” That would be instrument site near the m
ission school on Tempest Island.
“Matter of Import Z.” Which meant an emergency.
“I see.” General Scott fell almost relieved. Something was wrong; to know even that was better than to have a merely mystifying sense of wrongness.
Rawson—Maj. Dudley Rawson, the general’s cleverest Intelligence officer, simply said, “Import Z, and, I’d say, general, the Z Grade.”
“Can’t clarify?”
“No, sir.”
General Scott marveled for a moment at the tone of Rawson’s voice: it was high and the syllables shook. He said, “Right, Raw. Be over.” He leaned back in his chair and spoke to the lieutenant, “Would you get me Captain Elverson? I’d like a whirlybird ride.”
The helicopter deposited the general in the center of the playing field where the natives at the mission school learned American games. Rawson and two others were waiting. The general gave the customary grateful good-by to his naval escort; then waited for the racket of the departing helicopter to diminish.
He observed that Major Rawson, a lieutenant he did not know and a technical sergeant were soaked with perspiration. But that scarcely surprised him; the sun was now high and the island steamed formidably.
Rawson said, “I put it through Banjo, direct to you, sir. Took the liberty. There’s been a casualty.”
“Lord!” The general shook his head. “Who?”
“I’d rather show you, sir.” The major’s eyes traveled to the road that led from the field, through banyan trees, toward the mission. Corrugated-metal roofs sparkled behind the trees, and on the road in the shade a jeep waited.
The general started for the vehicle. “Just give me what particulars you can——”
“I’d rather you saw—it—for yourself.”
General Scott climbed into the car, sat, looked closely at the major.
He’d seen funk, seen panic. This was that—and more. They sweated like horses, yet they were pallid. They shook—and made no pretense of hiding or controlling it. A “casualty”—and they were soldiers! No casualty could——
