He felt healthy himself, and in fact he was healthy—even before the Paradisan treatments, he had always considered himself healthy. But his medical history, he knew, would have looked like a catalog of horrors to these people—influenza, mumps, cerebrospinal meningitis once, various rashes, dysentery several times (something you had to expect if you traveled). You took it for granted—all those swellings and oozings—it was part of the game. What would it be like to go back to that now?
Miss Sonnstein took him to the university, introduced him to several people, and left him there for the afternoon. Selby talked to the head of the English department, a vaguely hearty man named Quincy; nothing was said to suggest that he might be offered a job if he decided to remain, but Selby’s instinct told him that he was being inspected with that end in view.
Afterward he visited the natural history museum and talked to a professor named Morrison who was a specialist in native life-forms.
The plants and animals of Paradise were unlike anything on Earth. The “trees” were scaly, bulbous-bottomed things, some with lacy fronds waving sixty feet overhead, others with cup-shaped leaves that tilted individually to follow the sun. There were no large predators, Morrison assured him; it would be perfectly safe to go into the boonies, providing he did not run out of food. There were slender, active animals with bucket-shaped noses climbing in the forests or burrowing in the ground, and there were things that were not exactly insects; one species had a fixed wing like a maple seedpod—it spiraled down from the treetops, eating other airborne creatures on the way, and then climbed up again.
Of the dominant species, the aborigines, Morrison’s department had only bones, not even reconstructions. They had been upright, about five feet tall, large-skulled, possibly mammalian. The eyeholes of their skulls were canted. The bones of their feet were peculiar, bent like the footbones of horses or cattle. “I wonder what they looked like,” Selby said.
Morrison smiled. He was a little man with a brushy black mustache. “Not very attractive, I’m afraid. We do have their stone carvings, and some wall pictures and inscriptions.” He showed Selby an album of photographs. The carvings, of what looked like weathered granite, showed angular creatures with blunt muzzles. The paintings were the same, but the expression of the eyes was startlingly human. Around some of the paintings were columns of written characters that looked like clusters of tiny hoofprints.
“You can’t translate these?”
“Not without a Rosetta stone. That’s the pity of it—if only we’d got here just a little earlier.”
“How long ago did they die off?”
“Probably not more than a few centuries. We find their skeletons buried in the trunks of trees. Very well preserved. About what happened there are various theories. The likeliest thing is plague, but some people think there was a climatic change.”
Then Selby saw the genetics laboratory. They were working on some alterations in the immune system, they said, which they hoped in thirty years would make it possible to abandon the allergy treatments that all children now got from the cradle up. “Here’s something else that’s quite interesting,” said the head of the department, a blonde woman named Reynolds. She showed him white rabbits in a row of cages. Sunlight came through the open door; beyond was a loading dock, where a man with a Y-lift was hoisting up a bale of feed.
“These are Lyman Whites, a standard strain,” said Miss Reynolds. “Do you notice anything unusual about them?”
“They look very healthy,” said Selby.
“Nothing else?”
“No.”
She smiled. “These rabbits were bred from genetic material spliced with bits of DNA from native organisms. The object was to see if we could enable them to digest native proteins. That has been only partly successful, but something completely unexpected happened. We seem to have interrupted a series of cues that turns on the aging process. The rabbits do not age past maturity. This pair, and those in the next cage, are twenty-one years old.”
“Immortal rabbits?”
“No, we can’t say that. All we can say is that they have lived twenty-one years. That is three times their normal span. Let’s see what happens in another fifty or a hundred years.”
As they left the room, Selby asked, “Are you thinking of applying this discovery to human beings?”
“It has been discussed. We don’t know enough yet. We have tried to replicate the effect in rhesus monkeys, but so far without success.”
“If you should find that this procedure is possible in human beings, do you think it would be wise?”
She stopped and faced him. “Yes, why not? If you are miserable and ill, I can understand why you would not want to live a long time. But if you are happy and productive, why not? Why should people have to grow old and die?”
She seemed to want his approval. Selby said, “But, if nobody ever died, you’d have to stop having children. The world wouldn’t be big enough.”
She smiled again. “This is a very big world, Mr. Selby.”
Selby had seen in Claire Reynolds’s eyes a certain guarded interest; he had seen it before in Paradisan women, including Helga Sonnstein. He did not know how to account for it. He was shorter than the average Paradisan male, not as robust; he had had to be purged of a dozen or two loathsome diseases before he could set foot on Paradise. Perhaps that was it: perhaps he was interesting to women because he was unlike all the other men they knew.
He called the next day and asked Miss Reynolds to dinner. Her face in the tube looked surprised, then pleased. “Yes, that would be very nice,” she said.
An hour later he had a call from Karen McMorrow; she was free now to welcome him to the Cottage, and would be glad to see him that afternoon. Selby recognized the workings of that law of the universe that tends to bring about a desired result at the least convenient time; he called the laboratory, left a message of regret, and boarded the intercity tube for the town where Eleanor Petryk had lived and died.
The tube, a transparent cylinder suspended from pylons, ran up and over the rolling hills. The crystal windows were open; sweet flower scents drifted in, and behind them darker smells, unfamiliar and disturbing. Selby felt a thrill of excitement when he realized that he was looking at the countryside with new eyes, not as a tourist but as someone who might make this strange land his home.
They passed mile after mile of growing crops—corn, soybeans, then acres of beans, squash, peas; then fallow fields and grazing land in which the traceries of buried ruins could be seen.
After a while the cultivated fields began to thin out, and Selby saw the boonies for the first time. The tall fronded plants looked like anachronisms from the Carboniferous. The forests stopped at the borders of the fields as if they had been cut with a knife.
Provo was now a town of about a hundred thousand; when Eleanor Petryk had first lived there, it had been only a crossroads at the edge of the boonies. Selby got off the tube in late afternoon. A woman in blue stepped forward. “Mr. Selby.”
“Yes,”
“I’m Karen McMorrow. Was your trip pleasant?”
“Very pleasant.”
She was a little older than she had looked on the holotube, in her late fifties, perhaps. “Come with me, please.” No monorails here; she had a little impulse-powered runabout. They swung off the main street onto a blacktop road that ran between rows of tall maples.
“You were Miss Petryk’s companion during her later years?”
“Secretary. Amanuensis.” She smiled briefly.
“Did she have many friends in Provo?”
“No. None. She was a very private person. Here we are.” She stopped the runabout; they were in a narrow lane with hollyhocks on either side.