“These are not natural phenomena,” he assured me; “they are the crowning achievements of medical science. A thousand years ago the serum of longevity was perfected. It is injected every two years and not only provides immunity from all diseases but insures the complete restoration of all wasted tissue.
“But even in good there is evil. As none grew old and none died, except those who met with violent death, we were faced with the grave dangers of overpopulation. To combat this, birth control became obligatory. Children are permitted now only in sufficient numbers to replace actual losses in population. If a member of a house is killed, a woman of that house is permitted to bear a child, if she can; but after generations of childlessness there is a constantly decreasing number of women who are capable of bearing children. This situation we have met by anticipating it.
“Statistics compiled over a period of a thousand years indicate the average death rate expectancy per thousand people; they have also demonstrated that only fifty percent of our women are capable of bearing children; therefore, fifty percent of the required children are permitted yearly to those who wish them, in the order in which their applications are filed.”
“I have not seen a child since I arrived in Amtor,” I told him.
“There are children here,” he replied, “but, of course, not many.”
“And no old people,” I mused. “Could you administer that serum to me, Danus?”
He smiled. “With Mintep’s permission, which I imagine will not be difficult to obtain. Come,” he added, “I’ll take some blood tests now to determine the type and attenuation of serum best adapted to your requirements.” He motioned me into his laboratory.
When he had completed the tests, which he accomplished with ease and rapidity, he was shocked by the variety and nature of malignant bacteria they revealed.
“You are a menace to the continued existence of human life on Amtor,” he exclaimed with a laugh.
“I am considered a very healthy man in my own world,” I assured him.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Twenty-seven.”
“You would not be so healthy two hundred years from now if all those bacteria were permitted to have their way with you.”
“How old might I live to be if they were eradicated?” I asked.
He shrugged. “We do not know. The serum was perfected a thousand years ago. There are people among us today who were of the first to receive injections. I am over five hundred years old; Mintep is seven hundred. We believe that, barring accidents, we shall live forever; but, of course, we do not know. Theoretically, we should.”
He was called away at this juncture; and I went out on the veranda to take my exercise, of which I have found that I require a great deal, having always been athletically inclined. Swimming, boxing, and wrestling had strengthened and developed my muscles since I had returned to America with my mother when I was eleven, and I became interested in fencing while I was travelling in Europe after she died. During my college days I was amateur middleweight boxer of California, and I captured several medals for distance swimming; so the inforced inactivity of the past two months had galled me considerably. Toward the end of my college days I had grown into the heavyweight class, but that had been due to an increase of healthy bone and sinew; now I was at least twenty pounds heavier and that twenty pounds was all fat.
On my one hundred feet of veranda I did the best I could to reduce. I ran miles, I shadow boxed, I skipped rope, and I spent hours with the old seventeen setting-up exercises of drill regulations. Today I was shadow boxing near the right end of my veranda when I suddenly discovered the girl in the garden observing me. As our eyes met I halted in my tracks and smiled at her. A frightened look came into her eyes, and she turned and fled. I wondered why.
Puzzled, I walked slowly back toward my apartment, my exercises forgotten. This time I had seen the girl’s full face, looked her squarely in the eyes, and I had been absolutely dumbfounded by her beauty. Every man and woman I had seen since I had come to Venus had been beautiful; I had come to expect that. But I had not expected to see in this or any other world such indescribable perfection of coloring and features, combined with character and intelligence, as that which I had just seen in the garden beyond my little fence. But why had she run away when I smiled?
Possibly she had run away merely because she had been discovered watching me for, after all, human nature is about the same everywhere. Even twenty-six million miles from earth there are human beings like ourselves and a girl, with quite human curiosity, who runs away when she is discovered. I wondered if she resembled earthly girls in other respects, but she seemed too beautiful to be just like anything on earth or in heaven. Was she young or old? Suppose she were seven hundred years old!
I went to my apartment and prepared to bathe and change my loincloth; I had long since adopted the apparel of Amtor. As I glanced in a mirror that hangs in my bathroom I suddenly understood why the girl may have looked frightened and run away—my beard! It was nearly a month old now and might easily have frightened anyone who had never before seen a beard.
When Danus returned I asked him what I could do about it. He stepped into another room and returned with a bottle of salve.
“Rub this into the roots of the hair on your face,” he directed, “but be careful not to get it on your eyebrows, lashes, or the hair on your head. Leave it there a minute and then wash your face.”
I stepped into my bathroom and opened the jar; its contents looked like vaseline
