"Why not? Why not a little hope?" Ryan asked.
"Why not a lot of heroin?"
Ryan looked coldly at Todd. "Dr. Halking, I find your despair disgusting. "
Todd looked back and smiled. "And I find your insistence on hope touchingly naive. "
The meeting went on. The reports varied between cautious negative statements and utter despair. Todd read Ryan's and his report toward the end of the first day. "Except for the viral microscopy reports, all were slowly and deliberately doublechecked. My assistant wants me to assure you that the viral microscopy reports were hurried through the second check. That is true, because the meeting couldn't wait and the computer could be made to work overtime. "
There was some laughter.
"However, we never found any discrepancy between first and second runs on any other tests, and we did carefully check and found no discrepancies on the first run of the viral microscopy tests either. Therefore, I can safely conclude that there is no significant difference between contemporary blood samples and the blood samples prior to the Premature Aging Phenomenon, except such differences as reflect our conquest of certain well-known diseases, and these antibodies were not stimulated until long after the PAP was first noted. Ergo — not significant. "
There were some careful questions, easily answered, and they moved on. However jovial a presenter might be, the answer was always the same. No answers.
After the papers were presented, the data examined, the statistical results questioned and upheld, the heads of the projects gathered in one small room at the top of the old Hyatt Regency. Todd Halking and Val Lassiter arrived together. Only a couple of men were already there. On impulse, Todd walked to the chalkboard at one end of the room and wrote on it,"Abandon hope all ye who enter here. "
"Not funny," Val said when Todd sat down next to him.
"Come on. they'll die laughing. "
Val looked at Todd quizzically. "Get a grip, Todd," he said.
Todd smiled. "I have a grip. If not on myself, then on reality. "
Everyone who came into the room saw the sign on the chalkboard. Some chuckled a little. Finally someone got up and erased the message.
The room was only half full. Todd got up and left the room, his aging bladder more demanding than it had been a few years — a few weeks! — before. He washed his hands afterward, and looked at himself in the mirror. He was haggard. His face cried out Death. He smiled at himself. The smile was ghastly. He went back to the room.
He was not yet seated when a military-looking man entered and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States. " Everybody stood and applauded. The president walked in. No one could have recognized him from the publicity pictures. They all dated from his second campaign, and then he had not been bald.
"Well, you've done it," the president said. "And within my term of office. Thank you. The effort was magnificent. The results are remarkably thorough, I'm told by those who should know. "
The president coughed into a handkerchief. He sounded like he had pleurisy.
"And if you're right," he said. "If you're right, the picture is pretty grim. "
The president laughed. Todd wondered why. But a few of the scientists laughed, too. Including Anne Hallam, the geneticist. She spoke. "To the dinosaurs things once looked grim, too. A million mammals chewing on their eggs. "
"The dinosaurs died out," the president said.
"No," Hallam answered. "Only the ones that hadn't become birds or mammals or some more viable type of reptile. " She smiled at them all. Hope springs eternal, Todd thought. "It's small comfort," she went on, "but one thing this early aging has done: the species has shorter generations. We're better able to adapt genetically. Whatever happens, when mankind gets out of this we will not be the same as we were when we went in. "
"Yes," Todd said cheerfully. "We'll all be dead. "
Anne looked at him in irritation, and several people coughed. But the mood of joviality the president had set at first was gone now. Val wrote on his notebook and shoved it toward Todd as the president started talking again.
"You're speaking of aeons and species," the president said. "I must think of nations and societies. Ours is dying. If what you say is true, in a few years it will be dead. The nation. The way we live. Civilization, if I may use the romantic word. "
Todd read Val's note. It said, "Shut your mouth, you bastard, it's bad enough already. "
Todd smiled at Val. Val glared back.
People were telling the president: It's hardly that bleak, we weathered the worst already.
"Oh yes," the president agreed. "We lasted through the depression. We adapted to the collapse of world trade. We made the transition from the cities back to the farms, we have endured the death of huge industry and global interactions. We have adapted to having our population cut in half, in less than half. "
"What clever little adapters we are, Mr. President," Todd said, aware that he was breaking protocol to interrupt the president, and not particularly giving a damn. "But tell me, has anyone figured out an adaptation to death? Odd, isn't it, that in millions of years of evolution, nature has never managed to select for immortality. "
Val stood, obviously angry. "Mr. President, I suggest that Dr. Halking be asked to contribute constructively or leave this meeting. There's no way we can accomplish anything with these constant interjections of pessimism. "
There was a murmur, half of protest, half of agreement.
"Val," Todd said, "I'm only trying to be realistic. "
"And what do you think we are, dreamers? Don't we know we're all old men and doomed to die?"
The president coughed, and Val sat down. "I believe," said the president, "that Dr. Halking will take this as a reminder that we are talking here as men of science, dispassionately. Impersonally, if you will. Now let's review. "
They went over the findings again. "Is there any chance," the president asked again and again, "that you might be wrong?"
A chance, they all answered. Of course there's a chance. But we have done the best our instruments will let us do.
"What if you had more sophisticated instruments?" he asked.
Of course, they said. But we do not have them. You'll have to wait another generation, or two, or three, and by then the damage will be done. We'll never live to see it.
"Then," the president said, "we must get busy. Make sure your assistants and their assistants and their assistants as well know everything you know. Prepare them to continue your work. We can't give up. "
Todd looked around the table as everyone nodded sagely, lips pursed in the identical expression of grim courage. The spirit of man: We shall overcome. Todd couldn't bear it anymore. Like his bladder, his emotions could be contained for progressively shorter periods of time.
"For Christ's sake, do you call this optimism?" he said, and was instantly embarrassed that tears came unbidden to his eyes. They would dismiss him as an emotional wreck, not listen to his ideas at all. Sound clinical, he warned himself. Try to sound clinical and careful and scientific and impartial and uninvolved and all those other impossible, virtuous things.
"I have the cure to the Premature Aging Phenomenon," Todd said. "Or at least I have the cure to the misery. "
Eyes. All watching him intently. At last I have their attention, he thought.
"The cure to the misery is to go home and go to bed and stop trying. We've done all we can do. And if we can't cure the disease, we can live with it. We can adapt to it. We can try to be happy. "
But the eyes were gone again, and two of the scientists came over to him and dabbed at his eyes with their handkerchiefs and helped him get up from the table. They took him to another room, where he sat (guarded by four men, just in case) and sobbed.