was the last man, there was no doubt of it. The very last of all.
He had not been in the pact, of course, but he would carry out the pact. It was melodrama, undoubtedly, but there are times, he told himself, when a little melodrama may be excusable.
He uncorked the bottle and swung around to face the room. He raised the bottle in salute—salute to the gaping, blackened frame that had held the painting, to the dead man on the floor, to the thing that mewed in a far, dark corner.
He tried to think of a word to say, but couldn’t. And there had to be a word to say, there simply had to be.
“Mud in your eye,” he said and it wasn’t any good, but it would have to do.
He put the bottle to his lips and tipped it up and tilted back his head.
Gagging, he snatched the bottle from his lips.
It wasn’t whisky and it was awful. It was gall and vinegar and quinine, all rolled into one. It was a brew straight from the Pit. It was all the bad medicine he had taken as a boy, it was sulphur and molasses, it was castor oil, it was—
“Good God,” said Frederick West.
For suddenly he remembered the location of a knife he had lost twenty years before. He saw it where he had left it, just as plain as day.
He knew an equation he’d never known before, and what was more, he knew what it was for and how it could be used.
Unbidden, he visualized, in one comprehensive picture, just how a rocket motor worked … every detail, every piece, every control, like a chart laid out before his eyes.
He could capture and hold seven fence posts in his mental eye and four was the best any human ever had been able to see mentally before.
He whooshed out his breath to air his mouth and stared at the bottle.
Suddenly he was able to recite, word for word, the first page from a book he had read ten years ago.
“The hormones,” he whispered. “Darling’s hormones!”
Hormones that did something to his brain. Speeded it up, made it work better, made more of it work than had ever worked before. Made it think cleaner and clearer than it had ever thought before.
“Good Lord,” he said.
A head start to begin with. And now this!
The man who has it could rule the Solar System.
That was what Belden had said about it.
Belden had hunted for it. Had torn this place apart. And Darling had hunted for it, too. Darling, who had thought he had it, who had played a trick on Nevin and Cartwright so he could be sure he had it, who had drank himself to death trying to find the bottle he had it in.
And all these years the hormones had been in this bottle on the mantel!
Someone else had played a trick on all of them. Langdon, maybe. Langdon, who had been given away as a pet to a thing so monstrous that even Cartwright had shrunk from naming it.
With shaking hand, West put the bottle back on the mantel, placed the cork beside it. For a moment he stood there, hands against the mantel, gripping it, staring out the vision port beside the fireplace. Staring down into the valley where a shadowy cylinder tilted upward from the rocky planet, as if striving for the stars.
The Alpha Centauri—the ship with the space drive that wouldn’t work. Something wrong … something wrong. …
A sob rose in West’s throat and his hands tightened on the mantel with a grip that hurt.
He knew what was wrong!
He had studied blueprints of the drive back on Earth.
And now it was as if the blueprints were before his eyes again, for he remembered them, each line, each symbol as if they were etched upon his brain.
He saw the trouble, the simple adjustment that would make the space drive work. Ten minutes … ten minutes would be all he needed. So simple. So simple. So simple that it seemed beyond belief it had not been found before, that all the great minds which had worked upon it should not have seen it long ago.
There had been a dream—a thing that he had not even dared to say aloud, not even to himself. A thing he had not dared even to think about.
West straightened from the mantel and faced the room again. He took the bottle and for a second time raised it in salute.
But this time he had a toast for the dead men and the thing that whimpered in the corner.
“To the stars,” he said.
And he drank without gagging.
Second Childhood
You did not die.
There was no normal way to die.
You lived as carelessly and as recklessly as you could and you hoped that you would be lucky and be accidentally killed.
You kept on living and you got tired of living.
“God, how tired a man can get of living!” Andrew Young said.
John Riggs, chairman of the immortality commission, cleared his throat.
“You realize,” he said to Andrew Young, “that this petition is a highly irregular procedure to bring to our attention.”
He picked up the sheaf of papers off the table and ruffled through them rapidly.
“There is no precedent,” he added.
“I had hoped,” said Andrew Young, “to establish precedent.”
Commissioner Stanford said, “I must admit that you have made a good case, Ancestor Young. Yet you must realize that this commission has no possible jurisdiction over the life of any person, except to see that everyone is assured of all the benefits of immortality and to work out any kinks that may show up.”
“I am well aware of that,” answered Young, “and it seems to me that my case is one of the kinks you mention.”
He stood silently, watching the faces of the members of the board. They are afraid, he thought. Every one of them. Afraid of the day they will face the thing I am facing now. They have sought an answer and there is no answer
