The hull plates were off again, lying in heaps on the ground in a mammouth circle. The ship was a skeleton, a long, gawky structure of naked metal beams. Even now in the bright floodlights a dozen men were scampering around the scaffolding, before Dan’s incredulous eyes, and he saw a huge beam coming off the body of the ship, being grappled by the crane and slowly, slowly lowered to the ground.
Ten years ago the ship had looked the same. As he watched, he felt a wave of hopelessness sweep through him, a sense of desolate, empty bitterness. Ten years—
His eyes met Terry Fisher’s in the gloom of the car, begging to be told it wasn’t so. Fisher shook his head.
Then Dan said: “I think I’ve seen enough. Take me back to the air field. You’d better come, too, Terry.”
Later, as the return jet speared east into the dawn, Terry Fisher said, “It was the same thing on Mars. The constant refining and super-refining of plans, the slowing down of everything, the subtle change in viewpoint. I went up there ready to beat the world barehanded, to work on the frontier, to build that colony and maybe even lead off to start another one. I actually worked out plans of my own for a breakaway colony. I figured we were going to need colony builders when we went on out to the stars.” He shrugged sadly. “Carl told you, I guess. They looked at my plans very carefully, and discussed them in council, and worked out alternatives, and polled the whole colony, and accepted volunteers for a planning committee, and then Barness decided that it was really too early to do anything about it. Maybe in another ten years. Too much work already, with just one colony. And there was too much work in a sense: frantic activity, noise, hubbub, confusion, fancy plans—all going nowhere. No drive, no real direction.” He shrugged again. “Pretty soon I saw that nothing was going to happen, my plan was just quietly going to die, like everything else on Mars.”
“Nobody saw it happening?”
“It wasn’t the sort of thing you could see. You could only feel it. It started when Armstrong came back to the colony, rejuvenated, to take over its development. Personally, I think Armstrong did finally see it. I think that’s why he suicided.”
“But the Starship,” Dan cried. “It was almost built, and there they were, tearing it down.”
“Ah, yes. For the twenty-seventh time, I believe. A change in the engineering thinking, that’s all. Keller and Lijinsky suddenly came to the conclusion that the whole thing might fall apart in midair at the launching. Can you imagine it? We’ve been building rockets for years, running them to Mars every two months! But they could pinpoint the flaw on paper, and prove it on the computers, and by the time they got through explaining it every soul in the whole administrative staff was going around saying yes, by golly, they’re right, it might fall apart at the Launching unless we make these changes. Why, it’s a standing joke among the workers there. They call Lijinsky Old Jet Propulsion and it’s always good for a laugh. But then, Keller and Stark and Lijinsky ought to know what they’re doing. They’ve all been rejuvenated, and have been working on the ship for years.” Fisher’s voice was heavy with anger.
Dan didn’t answer. There wasn’t anything to say, and he Just couldn’t tell Terry Fisher how it felt to have a cold blanket of fear wrapping around his heart, so dreadful and cold that he hardly dared look five minutes into the future right now, with Paul’s words echoing in his ears: we have a monster on our hands.
He was sick when they reached Washington. The pain in his chest became acute as he started walking down the gangway, and by the time he found a seat in the terminal and popped a nitro-tablet under his tongue he was breathing in deep, ragged gasps. He sat very still, trying to lean back against the seat, and suddenly he realized that he was very, very ill. The good red-headed Dr. Moss would smile in satisfaction, he thought bitterly. Sweat came out on his forehead; it had never seemed very likely to him that he might one day die. He didn’t have to die in this great, wonderful world of new bodies for old, he could live on, and on, and on. He could live to see the Golden Centuries of Man. A solar system teeming with life. Ships to challenge the stars, the barriers breaking, crumbling before their very eyes. Other changes, as short-lived Man became long-lived Man. Changes in teaching, in thinking, in feeling. Disease, the Enemy, was crushed. Famine, the Enemy, was slinking back into the dim memory of history. War, the Enemy, now made pointless to extinction.
All based on one principle: that Man should live if he could. He need not die. If a man could live forty years instead of twenty, had it been wrong to battle the plagues that struck him down in his youth? If he could live sixty years instead of forty, had the great researchers of the 1940s and ’50s and ’60s been wrong? Was it any more wrong now to want to live a thousand years? Who could say that it was?
Dan took a shuddering breath, nodded to Terry Fisher, and walked unsteadily to the cab stand. He would not believe what he had seen at Starship Project. It was not enough to draw any conclusions. Collect all the evidence, then con- elude. When Fisher took his elbow, he gave him an ashen smile. “It’s nothing. The ticker kicks up once in a while, that’s all. Let’s go see what Carl and Jean and the boys have dug up.
Carl and Jean and the boys had dug up plenty. The floor of Dan’s headquarters was covered with paper, carbons, punch cards and rubble. A dozen people were working here and there with tapes, typewriters, telephones, papers, program cards. Jean met them at the door, hustled them into the private offices in the back. “Carl just got here, too. He’s down eating. The boys outside are trying to make sense out of his insurance and advertising figures.”
“He got next to them okay?”
“Sure, but you were right, they didn’t like it.”
“What sort of reports?”
The girl sighed. “Most of the stuff is still being analyzed, which makes it hard to evaluate. The ad-men have to be figuring what they’re going to be doing in the next half-century, so that they’ll be there with the right thing when the time comes. But they don’t like what they see. People have to buy what the ad-men are selling, or the ad-men are out of business, and already they see a dangerous trend. People aren’t in such a rush to buy as they once were. They don’t have the same sense of urgency that they used to—” Her hands fluttered. “Well, as I say, it’s all up in the air. Analysis will be in by morning. The matter of suicides is a little more tangible: the rates are up, all over. But break it down into first-generation and Repeaters, and it’s pretty clear what’s happening.”
“Like Armstrong,” said Dan slowly.
Jean nodded. “Oh, here’s Carl now.”
Carl came in, rubbing his hands, and gave Dan a queer look. “Everything under control, Dan?”
Dan nodded. He told Carl about Tyndall’s proposition. Carl gave a wry grin. “He hasn’t changed a bit, has he?”
“Yes, he has. He’s gotten lots stronger.”
Carl scowled, and slapped the desk with his palm. “You should have stopped him, Dan. I told you that a long time ago, back when I first met you. He was aiming for your throat even then, trying to use me and what I knew about Dad to sell the country a pack of lies about you. He almost did, too. I hated your guts back then. I thought you were the rottenest man who had ever come up in politics, until you got hold of me and pounded some sense into my head. And Tyndall’s never forgiven you that, either.”