“Critical mass,” George murmured.
“You know about atomic energy?” asked Senilde, mildly interested. “Yes, I suppose you would. Tell me, have you ever made any of those delightful atomic bombs?”
“Not personally,” said George.
“They were my favorite toys at one time. Such a spectacle! But one wearies even of that… My instruments tell me that they still go off in various parts of the planet sometimes, but I never bother nowadays to go out and look at them. I’ve still got a pretty large stock of them around somewhere… I think.”
“Our astronomers saw some of your explosions, I guess,” said George.
“Great atmospheric disturbances concentrated in various small spots. One in November, 1985. One in June, 1927— photographed at Mount Wilson. Another back in February, 1913.”
“Indeed?” said Senilde, indifferently.
Mara said: “I don’t know what you’re both talking about. Why don’t you keep to the subject, which was immortality?”
“I find these days a growing tendency of my mind to wander,” said Senilde.
“Where was I?”
Mara told him. He went on: “The reason, I found, was that the duration of life was directly linked to the permeability in that part of the living cell exposed to the radiations of the universe around it. As growth— that is, accumulation—proceeds, so the inner cells suffer a natural and inevitable decrease in that permeability. They’re entombed, choked, cut off from light, denied invigorating contact with exterior radiation.”
“I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Mara pouting. George said, thoughtfully: “Half a century or more ago, on Earth, a fellow named… er… Benedict—yes, H.M. Benedict—came to that conclusion after studying the senility of plants.”
“Did he go on from there?”
“How could he?”
“I did. Nature made an error in the colloidal degree of protoplasm. I corrected it. Just a matter of the injection into the bloodstream of a perpetual solvent, which, as it circulates, thins out the too dense, too clinging proteins. The cells of your body are specialists. Either they travel a fixed, confined circuit in your bloodstream or else they’re gummed immovably in place in your flesh and bones. Except the white blood corpuscles, that is.
“Fixity and specialization spell death. My body-cells are free, fluid, adaptable, amoeboid. When they feel the need to come to the surface, they do so. They move slowly—but they
“Is it that bad?” asked George.
“Young man, I’ve tried every kind of pleasure a million times; from the common pleasures of sensuality to the rarer ones of labor and asceticism; intellectual pleasures and bodily pleasures; the pleasures of lust and power and humility and martyrdom. And I have exhausted them. My palate has lost nearly all sensation. Repetition of a pleasure does not increase the pleasure: it makes it pall. Looking back, I see that the happiest time of my whole life was when I was a child, absorbed in play. I seek in my sad way to recover some of that pleasure in the childish devices you deprecate. You should not be angry with me, but sorry for me.”
“I’m sorry for you,” said Mara.
But sorrow didn’t come so easily to George. What the hell did Senilde have to beef about? He hadn’t missed a thing.
“Mara, you have a sweet nature, besides being sensible and beautiful,” said Senilde. “You’re something rare. I don’t like people much. When you’ve lived as long as I have, you’ve lost all your illusions about people. Under the skin, most people have hard little hearts, and they’re aways dancing to the tune of self-interest.”
“George isn’t like that—he gives me food,” said Mara. Senilde didn’t hear; he was thinking about himself. He mused: “As a boy, I loved playing with toy soldiers and staging little wars. When I became a very bored immortal, I thought it could be fun to play those wars again—with people. For most people are just puppets. How easy it was to play on their fears, vanities, and power-lusts! I had a fine time inventing new weapons and methods of attack and defense, then watching the little men applying them—in the name of this or that. First, local wars, then national wars, then ideological wars, then one great planetary civil war. So you were looking for the white circle headquarters, George? This is it. And I’m the commander.”
“I presume this is the green triangle HQ, too?”
