“Maybe not from where you sit,” she gurgled.
George turned to Senilde. “As for you, you silly little fat fool, why don’t you be your age? How old are you, anyhow?”
“Let me see now—three thousand, maybe four thousand, years. My memory isn’t what it was. Venusian years, that is—slightly shorter than your own.”
George said, gruffly: “I don’t believe a word of it. Get me out of here.”
“By all means.” Senilde pressed a button. Liquid bubbled from small holes in the floor. It was a solvent which melted the gummy substance and freed George.
The tour continued. The whole house was full of fool tricks like that. There were door handles which came off in your hand, or stuck to it, or gave you an electric shock. Stairs which changed into smooth inclines and shot you to the bottom again. Flowers sprinkled with sneezing powder. Passages where the floor began to move backwards under your feet, whichever way you tried to go, so that you remained perpetually on the same spot.
George went through the gamut sullenly. It was a little easier to take when Mara also fell for some of these creaking gags. All the same, it palled—like the goings on at some convention for dim Babbitts.
At last it ended. Having seen no other soul around but themselves, they came into a lounge furnished with Eastern luxuriousness. The chairs, the carpet, the divans were all deep and soft. It was many-colored and cheerful because bright sunlight smote in through the windows and made the silks and satins glow.
“The sun—out at last?” said George, wonderingly, and went to a window. It was as though the window were frosted: he couldn’t see the sky clearly—it was just a flat whiteness. In the center of it was a very bright but hazy disk, like the sun shining through a high mist.
Senilde said, thinly: “It’s my own private sun. Quite a small thing, really, but it’s perpetual and emits all the qualities of sunlight. You know, as I grow older I find I don’t want to do much else but bask in here in the sunlight. Apart from today, I’ve not been out of this room in years. It’s too dull out there under the clouds. I often regret I cut the planet off from the sun like that, because I made it rather a depressing place for myself.”
“What are you running on about now?” asked George, irritably. Mara sank into one of the divans, and a trick cushion squeaked under her. Senilde giggled fatuously.
George’s irritation intensified. He gripped Senilde’s shoulders and shook him. “See here, I want to know just what you’ve been getting up to on this planet. I want a detailed report, and no more monkey business. Don’t hold out on me, don’t think I can’t hurt you. I can. I’ll burn this house of yours to the ground. Where would you be then, you old sybarite, without your playthings and your sunlight and your soft cushions?”
One moment he was standing there bawling out Senilde and shaking him like a man emptying a sack. Next moment he was flat on his back on the carpet, with his mind cloudier than the sky.
He regained his senses gradually. Mara was lying near him, apparently unconscious. He crawled over to her. When he touched her, she raised herself on her elbows, looking dazed.
“Are you all right, lass?”
“I guess so. George, I thought he’d killed you. So I stabbed him clean through the heart. And then… I don’t know what happened then.”
A knife dropped onto the carpet between them. They looked up. Senilde stood over them. He’d closed his mouth and didn’t look quite so foolish. He said: “There’s your little toy back, my dear. I told you that sort of thing was useless. So many people have tried it at one time or another that it became tiresome. I discourage them with a gadget I wear which creates an electrical field at a touch and stuns anyone who touches me. Life’s so flat without a little fun.”
But he didn’t smile, and neither did they.
Senilde said: “Don’t ever threaten me again, George (silly name!) Don’t try to use violence on me or my possessions. It’ll never work and you may kill yourself. Everything I have is protected in some way. I’m a cautious man. Now I suggest you make yourselves comfortable, and I’ll tell you a story. My story. You’d never have gotten away from here without having to hear it, anyway. Every man needs an audience, and I’ve been without one for far too long…”
IV
NATURE MAKES many blunders,” Senilde said, “and one of them, I always thought, was that men should have to die. Simple cell creatures keep splitting in halves, and the halves in turn split, and so on. But the original portions still live. Any one of those creatures could truly be said to be potentially immortal. You can take a tissue of man or beast and keep it alive indefinitely in a suitable culture.
“Single protoplasmic cells or small groups of them survive. But if they grow into a large, multi-celled body, like that of a man, that large group dies. Why does it die? The only different factor is—
