“All right. We’re still ahead of him. Have you finished with the ad-men?”
“Oh, no. I just got back from a trip south. My nose is still cold.”
Dan’s eyebrows went up. “Antarctica? And how was Dr. Aviado? I haven’t seen any reports from his solar energy project for five years.”
“Yes you have, you just couldn’t read them. Aviado is quite a theoretician. That’s how he got his money and his Project, down there, with plenty of room to build his reflectors and his plates and his batteries, with nobody around to get hurt except a few penguins if something went wrong. And he’s done a real job of development down there since his rejuvenation.”
“Ah.” Dan glanced up hopefully.
“Now there,” said Carl, “is a real lively project. Solar energy into power on a utilitarian level. The man is a fanatic, of course, but with his plans and his plant he could actually be producing in another five years.” He looked bleakly at the senator.
“Could?”
“He could—except that he’s gotten sidetracked a bit,” said Carl.
Dan glanced at Terry Fisher. “How?”
“Well, his equipment is working fine, and he can concentrate solar heat from ten square miles onto a spot the size of a manhole cover. But he hasn’t started converting it to useful power yet.” Carl suddenly burst out laughing. “Dan, this! Will kill you. Billions and billions of calories of solar heat concentrated down there, and do you know what he’s doing with it? He’s melting a hole in the ice two thousand feet deep and a mile wide, that’s what”
“A hole in the ice!”
“Exactly. Conversion? Certainly, but first he wants to be sure his technique is perfect. So right now he and his whole crew are very busy trying to melt down Antarctica. And if you give him another ten years, he’s just liable to do it too!”
This was the last, most painful trip of all.
Dan didn’t even know why he was going, except that Paul had told him he should go, and he could not risk leaving a single stone unturned.
The landing in New York Crater had been rough, and Dan had cracked his elbow on the bulkhead; he nursed it now as he left the Volta on the deserted street of the crater city, and entered the low one-story lobby of the ground- scraper. The clerk took his name impassively, and he sat down to wait.
An hour passed, then another.
Then: “Mr. Devlin will see you now, Senator.”
Down in the elevator, fifteen—sixteen—seventeen stories. Above him was the world; here, deep below, with subtly efficient ventilators and shafts and exotic cubbyholes for retreat, a man could forget that a world even existed up above.
Soft lighting in the corridor, a golden plastic door. The door swung open, and a tiny old man blinked out.
“Mr. Chauncey Devlin?”
“Senator Fowler!” The little old man beamed. “Come in, come in. My dear fellow, if I’d realized it was you, I’d never have kept you so long.” He smiled, obviously distressed. “Retreat has its disadvantages, too, you see. Nothing is perfect but life, as they say. When you’ve lived for a hundred and ninety years, you’ll be glad to get away from people, and be able to keep them out, from time to time.”
In better light Dan stared openly at the man. A hundred and ninety years. It was incredible. He said as much.
“Isn’t it, though?” Chauncey Devlin chirped. “Well, I was a war baby! Can you imagine! Born in London in 1945. But I don’t even think about those horrid years any more. Imagine—barbarians dropping bombs on each other!”
A tiny bird of a man, three times rejuvenated, and still the mind was sharp, the eyes were sharp. The face was a strange mixture of recent youth and very great age. It stirred something deep inside Dan—almost a feeling of loathing. An uncanny feeling.
“My daughter and I, we’ve always known your music,” Dan said. “We’ve always loved it. Just a week ago we heard the Washington Philharmonic doing—”
“The eighth.” Chauncey Devlin cut him off disdainfully. They always do the eighth.”
“It’s a great symphony,” Dan protested.
Devlin chuckled, and bounced about the room like a little boy. “It was only half finished when they chose me for the big plunge,” he said. “Of course I was doing a lot of conducting then, too. Now I’d much rather just write.” He hurried across the long, softly lit room to die piano, came back with a sheaf of manuscript, “Do you read music? That is what I’ve been doing recently. Can’t get it quite right, but it’ll come, it’ll come.”
“Which will this be?” asked Dan.
“The tenth. The ninth was almost done when I was rejuvenated. I finished it during my year as Free Agent. Strictly a potboiler, I’m afraid. I thought it was pretty good at the time, but this one—ah!” He fondled the smooth sheets of paper. “In this one I could say something. Always before, it was hit and run, make a stab at it, then rush on to stab at something else, never time enough to do anything right. But not this one.” He patted the manuscript happily. “With this one there will be nothing wrong.”
“It’s almost finished?”
“Oh, no. Oh, my goodness no! A fairly acceptable first movement, but even that’s not what it will be when I’m finished.”
“I see. I—understand. And you’ve been working on follow long?”
“Oh, I don’t know—I must have it down here somewhere. Oh, yes. It was begun in April of 2057. Just seventy-seven years.”
They talked on, until it was too painful to continue. Dan thanked his host, and started back for the corridor and life again. He had never even mentioned why he had come, and nobody had noticed.
Chauncy Devlin, a tiny, perfect wax image of a man, so old, so wise, so excited and full of enthusiasm and energy and carefulness, working eagerly, happily—
And accomplishing nothing. Seventy-seven years. The picture of a man with a great mind, slowly grinding to a standstill!
And now Dan Fowler knew that he hadn’t really been looking at Chauncey Devlin at all. He had been looking at the whole human race.
February 15, 2135.
The day of the Hearings, to consider the charges and petition formally placed before the Senate by The Honorable Daniel Fowler, Independent Senator from the great state of Illinois. The long oval hearing room was filling early; the gallery above was packed by 9:05 in the morning. TV boys all over the place. The Criterion Committee members, taking their places in twos and threes, some old, some young, some rejuvenated, some not, sitting down at one end of the oval. Then the other senators—not the President, of course, but he’ll be well represented by Senator Rinehart himself, ah yes. Don’t worry about the President.
Bad news in the papers. Trouble in New Chicago, where so much trouble seems to start these days. Bomb thrown into the lobby of the Hoffman Medical Center out there, a bomb of all things I Shades of Lenin. Couple of people killed, and one of the doctors nearly beaten to death on the street before the police arrived to clear the mob away. Dan Fowler’s name popping up here and there, not pleasantly. Whispers and accusations, sotto voce. And “Moses” Tyndall’s network hookup last night—of course nobody with any sense listens to him, but did you hear that hall go wild?
Rinehart—yes, that’s him. Well, he’s got a right to look worried. If Dan can unseat him here and now, he’s washed up. According to the rules of the government, you know, Fowler can legally petition for Rinehart’s chairmanship without risking it as a platform plank in the next election, and then if the Senate votes him in after the Hearings, he’s got the election made. Dan’s smart. They’re scared to throw old Rinehart out, of course. After all, he’s let them keep their thumbs on rejuvenation all these years with his criteria, and if they supported him they got named, and if they didn’t, they didn’t get named. Not as simple as that, of course, but that’s what it boiled down to, let me tell you! But now, if they reject Dan’s petition and the people give him the election over their heads, they’re really in a spot Dan wants that chairmanship—