“He told us nothing that proves he is what he says he is.”
Charley thought about that. “He flew the Roswell saucer.”
“You flew the one we found in the Sahara, and you are not an alien. The fact is suggestive, but certainly not proof.”
Charley persisted. “I thought he was telling the truth,” she said.
“Or what he believes to be the truth. It will take more than stories to convince me.”
“He didn’t look happy tonight as he talked,” Charley observed. “I was watching his eyes. He chose his words carefully.”
“Liars often do,” Rip observed. “Or the mentally ill.”
“Or a man trying to avoid painful memories,” Charley shot back. After a bit she mused, “What would it be like to live a thousand years? To stay healthy and active and busy with life?”
“To outlive all the people you loved?” Rip continued the thought. “To watch everyone you care about age and die, one by one? He was never truly one of them. He was a stranger, different in a profound way. Ah, he avoided the disabilities and indignities of old age, so far, but at what cost?”
“If he is telling the truth,” Charley said.
“If,” Rip agreed.
“Douglas and Murkowsky are greedy men, sociopaths incapable of shame or remorse. They’ll be back.”
“Sleep, woman. We’ll need our strength tomorrow.”
Stretched out in Egg’s guest room, Solo could not sleep. He ran over the events of the day, his impressions of Egg, Rip and Charley, and then his mind began to replay memories of the old days, when he and his colleagues were first marooned. There was much he hadn’t told his listeners this evening. He didn’t tell them of the battles and the blood, the battle axes and swords, nor of his Viking days. Nor of the cold winters, the miserable little huts, the fleas and lice. People dying of wounds and disease. The struggles, the hopelessness.
Nor did he mention the woman.
He finally fell asleep and dreamed of her.
Egg Cantrell couldn’t sleep either. He sat on the edge of his bed with the light on, looking at the dark windows and thinking about Douglas and Murkowsky and all those people watching on television, all those people out there in the night who thought a Fountain of Youth pill would be a wonderful thing to have, or who would like to profit from it. He thought those two categories included just about everyone. Maybe he was the only exception alive on this small planet. What was Solo’s phrase? “This savage planet.”
The computer he had taken from Rip’s saucer was in its case beside his bed. The formula was in its memory. No one would believe him if he said it wasn’t.
Perhaps he should hide the darn thing.
Yet when Douglas or some other thug put a pistol to Rip or Charley’s head, he would tell them where it was. He knew that. They knew that.
He sighed and slowly put his clothes back on, then worked on getting his shoes laced. His ample middle always made shoes a chore.
Dressed, he stood and picked up the computer case. He tiptoed along the hallway and down the stairs. Eased open the front door and closed it softly behind him.
The president wasn’t having a quiet evening in the White House; far from it. A delegation from Congress arrived at midnight, threading their way through a mob that had gathered in Lafayette Square, across the street. The mob was unruly, waving signs and chanting about government perfidy.
When P. J. O’Reilly relayed the information about the mob, the president sighed. Life in a free society is often messy.
Yet when O’Reilly told him the congressional delegation was on the way over to see him, the president’s mood deteriorated dramatically. “What do those bastards want?”
“Three guesses,” O’Reilly answered blithely. Like the president, he too had been watching the media meltdown on every channel on television. People were sure the government knew about the Fountain of Youth drug; the elderly and sick were demanding answers. Politicians were spewing sound bites right and left, promising that they would get to the bottom of the government’s cover-up and that if the drugs could be manufactured commercially, they would be. And would be made available to every man and woman on the planet at reasonable prices subsidized by the government and private insurance companies. Eternal life, or its earthly equivalent, was just around the corner.
Consequently, when the two dozen legislators filed into the White House’s East Room at midnight, the president was in a foul mood. The congresspeople didn’t care. They started talking immediately.
Senator Blohardt spoke louder than the others. “We are getting enormous pressure from our constituents. They want those drugs and they want ’em now.”
“What drugs?”
“Antiaging, for sure,” the senator said as his colleagues nodded their concurrence, “and cures for cancer and diabetes, a slimming pill, and a real honest-to-God cure for limp dick. In other words, a cure for every human malady. All of them.”
“All.”
“Anything and everything anybody ever heard of, including the common cold. Our switchboards are jammed, e-mails have crashed the servers, and the telephones have melted down. Everyone wants some magic drug, and they want the government to stop lying and dithering and get it for them.”
“I see,” the president said, and indeed, being a career politician, he certainly did see. The elected representatives were facing a tidal wave of unprecedented proportions. Their political careers were on the line. Deliver or else. Well, if their political careers were on the line, so was the president’s. He would get nothing from a Congress fighting for political survival.
P. J. O’Reilly stepped in and tried to suavely tell the assembled delegation that the government had not mined the Roswell saucer’s computers and didn’t know any drug formulas. He was shouted down.
“If we didn’t, we should have. What are we going to tell the public? That the U.S. government is incompetent?”
“Why not?” the president muttered. The elected ones said that all the time, twenty times a day. Out loud, so they could all hear, he said, “The fact is the Roswell saucer was put under lock and key in Area Fifty-one because the Truman administration was afraid the public would react badly to flying saucers and aliens from space. Subsequent administrations didn’t even know the damn thing was out there in that desert, and even if they had, they wouldn’t have had the guts to tell the public flying saucers were real. It was the Cold War, for God’s sake — the American people had their plates full confronting Communism and worrying about nuclear war.”
“Be that as it may,” the Speaker of the House said, “the public believes in flying saucers now, and the people want the benefits of saucer technology. All of them. Cures for diseases, enhancement of human life, all of that.”
“All,” echoed the president.
“The electorate will not be denied. If this administration and this Congress can’t or won’t deliver, they’ll elect a president and Congress that can. It’s that simple.”
“If they are willing to wait for the next election,” the Senate minority leader said ominously. “From the tone of the messages my office is getting, they might not be willing to wait anywhere near that long. They want it now!”
The delegation left shortly thereafter. Despite the lateness of the hour, each and every one of the senators and congressmen and women in attendance held a press conference on the sidewalk in front of the White House. The president watched some of the circus on television. They had told the president, they said. They had delivered the messages from their constituents.
“This is one of those seminal events that will change people’s political affiliations for generations,” O’Reilly said. “Like the Great Depression. If we don’t act, the foundations of America will crack like a rotten egg. But if we play this right”—he rubbed his hands and grinned—“we’ll take all the marbles.”