I missed the television show on which it broke. I had gone to a side-street movie theater that night to see a revival of one of my favorite Chaplin pictures; and I’d never enjoyed the ostentatious greet-the-great hysterics of Celebrity Salon anyway. I hadn’t any idea of how long the M.C., Bill Bancroft, had waited to get Andy and Dandy on his program, and how much he was determined to make it count when the big night arrived.
Reconstructed and stripped of meaningless effusion, it went something like this:
Bancroft asked them if they weren’t anxious to get home to the wife and kiddies. Andy explained patiently, for perhaps the thirty-fourth time, that, since they were hermaphrodites, they had no family in any humanly acceptable sense. Bancroft cut into the explanation to ask them what ties they did have. Chiefly the revitalizer, says Andy politely.
Revitalizer? What’s a revitalizer? Oh, a machine they have to expose themselves to every decade or so, says Dandy. There’s at least one revitalizer in every large city on their home planet.
Bancroft makes a bad pun, waits for the uproarious audience to regain control, then asks: And this revitalizer—just what does it do? Andy goes into a longwinded explanation, the gist of which is that the revitalizers stir up cytoplasm in animal cells and refresh them.
I see, cracks Bancroft; the pause every decade that refreshes. And then, after being refreshed, you have what as a result? “Oh,” muses Dandy, “you might say we have no fear of cancer or any degenerative disease. Besides that, by exposing ourselves to revitalizers at regular intervals throughout our lifetime and refreshing our body cells, we quintuple our life expectancy. We live five times longer than we should. That’s about what the revitalizer does, you might say,” says Dandy. Andy, after thinking a bit, agrees. “That’s about it.”
Pandemonium, and not mild. Newspaper extras in all languages, including the Scandinavian. Lights burning late at night in the U.N. Headquarters with guards twenty deep around the site.
When President of the Assembly Sadhu asked them why they’d never mentioned revitalizers before, they did the snail equivalent of shrugging and said the Betelgeuse IX equivalent of nobody ever asked them.
President Sadhu cleared his throat, waved all complications aside with his long brown fingers and announced, “That is not important. Not now. We must have revitalizers.”
It seemed to take the aliens awhile to understand that. When they finally became convinced that we, as a species, were utterly entranced with the prospect of two to four centuries of life instead of fifty or sixty years, they went into a huddle.
But their race didn’t make these machines for export, they explained regretfully. Just enough to service their population. And while they could see as how we might like and must obviously deserve to have these gadgets, there was none to ferry back from Betelgeuse.
Sadhu didn’t even look around for advice. “What would your people want?” he asked. “What would they like in exchange for manufacturing these machines for us? We will pay almost any price within the power of this entire planet.” A rumbling, eager “yes” in several languages rolled across the floor of the Assembly.
Andy and Dandy couldn’t think of a thing. Sadhu begged them to try. He personally escorted them to their spaceship, which was now parked in a restricted area in Central Park. “Good night, gentlemen,” said President of the Assembly Sadhu. “Try—please try hard to think of an exchange.”
They stayed inside their ship for almost six days while the world almost went insane with impatience. When I think of all the fingernails bitten that week by two billion people …
“Imagine!” Trowson whispered to me. He was pacing the floor as if he full intended to walk all the way to Betelgeuse. “We’d just be children on a quintupled life scale, Dick. All my achievement and education, all yours, would be just the beginning! A man could learn five professions in such a life—and think what he could accomplish in one!”
I nodded, a little numb. I was thinking of the books I could read, the books I might write, if the bulk of my life stretched ahead of me and the advertising profession as just a passing phase at the beginning of it. Then again, somehow I’d never married, never had had a family. Not enough free time, I had felt. And now, at forty, I was too set in my ways. But a man can unset a lot in a century …
In six days the aliens came out. With a statement of price.
They believed they could persuade their people to manufacture a supply of revitalizers for us if—An IF writ very large indeed.
Their planet was woefully short of radioactive minerals, they explained apologetically. Barren worlds containing radium, uranium, and thorium had been discovered and claimed by other races, but the folk of Betelgeuse IX were forbidden by their ethics to wage aggressive war for territorial purposes. We had plenty of radioactive ore, which we used chiefly for war and biological research. The former was patently undesirable and the latter would be rendered largely unnecessary by the revitalizers.
So, in exchange, they wanted our radioactive elements. All of them, they stated humbly.
All right, we were a little surprised, even stunned. But the protests never started to materialize. There was an overwhelming chorus of “sold!” from every quadrant of the globe. A couple of generals here, a few militaristic statesmen there managed to raise direly pointing forefingers before they were whisked out of position. A nuclear physicist or two howled about the future of subatomic research, but the peoples of the earth howled louder.
“Research? How much research can you do in a lifetime of three hundred years?”
Overnight, the United Nations became the central office of a planet-wide mining concession. National boundaries were superseded by pitchblende deposits and swords were beaten into pickaxes. Practically anyone with a good, unable arm enlisted in the shovel brigades for two or more months out of the year. Comaraderie flew on the winds of the world.
Andy and Dandy politely offered to help. They marked out on detail contour maps the spots to be mined, and that included areas never suspected of radioactivity. They supplied us with fantastic but clear line drawings of devices for extracting the stuff from the ores in which it assayed poorly, and taught us the exact use of these devices, if not their basic principle.
They hadn’t been joking. They wanted it all.
Then, when everything was running smoothly, they buzzed off for Betelgeuse to handle their part of the bargain.
Those two years were the most exhilarating of my life. And I’d say everyone feels the same, don’t they, Alvarez? The knowledge that the world was working together, cheerfully, happily, for life itself. I put my year in at the Great Slave Lake, and I don’t think anyone of my age and weight lifted more pitchblende.
Andy and Dandy came back in two huge ships, manned by weird snail-like robots. The robots did everything, while Andy and Dandy went on being lionized. From the two ships, almost covering the sky, the robots ferried back and forth in strange, spiral aircraft, bringing revitalizers down, carrying refined radioactive elements aloft. No one paid the slightest attention to their methods of instantaneous extraction from large quantities of ore: we were interested in just one throbbing thought—the revitalizers.
They worked. And that, so far as most of us were concerned, was that.