Anne’s father seemed both preoccupied and a little worried to be talking to Paige at all, but it nevertheless took him only one day to explain the basic reasoning behind the project vividly enough so that Paige could understand it. In another day of simple helping around the part of the Pfitzner labs which was running his soil samples-help which consisted mostly of bottle-washing and making dilutions—Paige learned the reasoning well enough to put forward a version of it himself. He practiced it on Anne over dinner.
“It all rests on our way of thinking about why antibiotics work,” he said, while the girl listened with an attentiveness just this side of mockery. “What good are they to the organisms that produce them? We assumed that the organism secretes the antibiotic to kill or inhibit competing organisms, even though we were never able to show that enough antibiotic for the purpose is actually produced in the organism’s natural medium, that is, the soil. In other words, we figured, the wider the range of the antibiotic, the less competition the producer had.”
“Watch out for teleology,” Anne warned. “That’s not
“Fair enough. But right there is the borderline in our thinking about antibiosis. What is an antibiotic to the organism it
“Right as rain. Go on, Paige.”
“So now we add to that still another fact: that both penicillin and tetracycline are not only antibiotics—which makes them toxic to many bacteria—but
“Ergo: Find the broad-range antitoxin that acts against the toxins of the human body which accumulate after growth stops—as penicillin and tetracyline act against the pregnancy toxin—and you’ve got your magic machine-gun against degenerative disease. Pfitzner already has found that antitoxin: its name is ascomycin …. How’d I do?” he added anxiously, getting his breath back.
“Beautifully. It’s perhaps a little too condensed for MacHinery to follow, but maybe that’s all to the good—it wouldn’t sound authoritative to him if he could understand it all the way through. Still it might pay to be just a little more roundabout when you talk to him.” The girl had the compact out again and was peering into it intently. “But you covered only the degenerative diseases, and that’s just background material. Now tell me about the direct attack on death.”
Paige looked at the compact and then at the girl, but her expression was too studied to convey much. He said slowly: “I’ll go into that if you like. But your father told me that that element of the work was secret even from the government. Should I discuss it in a restaurant?”
Anne turned the small, compact-like object around, so that he could see that it was in fact a meter of some sort. Its needle was in uncertain motion, but near the zero-point. “There’s no mike close enough to pick you up,” Anne said, snapping the device shut and restoring it to her purse. “Go ahead.”
“All right. Some day you’re going to have to explain to me why you allowed yourself to get into that first fight with me here, when you had that Eavesdropper with you all the time. Right at the moment I’m too busy being a phony ecologist.
“The death end of the research began back in 1952, with an anatomist named Lansing. He was the first man to show that complex animals—it was rotifers he used—produce a definite ageing toxin as a normal part of their growth, and that it gets passed on to the offspring. He bred something like fifty generations of rotifers from adolescent mothers, and got an increase in the life-span in every new generation. He ran ’em up from a natural average span of 24 days to one of 104 days. Then he reversed the process, by breeding consistently from old mothers, and cut the life-span of the final generation way
“And now,” Anne said, “you know more about the babies in our labs than I told you before—or you should. The foundling home that supplies them specializes in the illegitimates of juvenile delinquents—the younger, for our purposes, the better.”
“Sorry, but you can’t needle me with that any longer, Anne. I know now that it’s a blind alley. Breeding for longevity in humans isn’t practicable; all that those infants can supply to the project is a set of comparative readings on their death-toxin blood-levels. What we want now is something much more direct: an antitoxin against the ageing toxin of humans. We know that the ageing toxin exists in all complex animals. We know that it’s a single, specific substance, quite distinct from the poisons that cause the degenerative diseases. And we know that it can be neutralized. When your lab animals were given ascomycin, they didn’t develop a single degenerative disease— but they died anyhow, at about the usual time, as if they’d been set, like a clock, at birth. Which, in effect, they had, by the amount of ageing toxin passed on to them by their mothers.
“So what we’re looking for now is not an antibiotic—an anti-life drug—but an anti-agathic, an anti-death drug. We’re running on borrowed time, because ascomycin already satisfies the condition of our development contract with the government. As soon as we get ascomycin into production, our government money will be cut down to a trickle. But if we can hold back on ascomycin long enough to keep the money coming in, we’ll have our anti-agathic too.”
“Bravo,” Anne said. “You sound just like father. I wanted you to raise that last point in particular, Paige, because it’s the most important single thing you should remember. If there’s the slightest suspicion that we’re systematically dragging our feet on releasing ascomycin—that we’re taking money from the government to do something the government has no idea can be done—there’ll be hell to pay. We’re so close to running down our anti-agathic now that it would be heartbreaking to have to stop, not only heartbreaking for us, but for humanity at large.”
“The end justifies the means,” Paige murmured.
“It does in this case. I know secrecy’s a fetish in our society these days—but here secrecy will serve everyone in the long run, and it’s
“I’ll maintain it,” Paige said. He had been referring, not to secrecy, but to cheating on government money; but he saw no point in bringing that up. As for secrecy, he had no practical faith in it—especially now that he had seen how well it worked.
For in the two days that he had been working inside Pfitzner, he had already found an inarguable spy at the very heart of the project.
CHAPTER SIX: Jupiter V
THERE WERE three yellow “Critical” signals lit on the long gang-board when Helmuth passed through the gang deck on the way back to duty. All of them, as usual, were concentrated on Panel 9, where Eva Chavez worked.
Eva, despite her Latin name—such once-valid tickets no longer meant anything among the West’s uniformly mixed-race population —was a big girl, vaguely blonde, who cherished a passion for the Bridge. Unfortunately, she was apt to become enthralled by the sheer Cosmicness of It All, precisely at the moment when cold analysis and split-second decisions were most crucial.
Helmuth reached over her shoulder, cut her out of the circuit except as an observer, and donned the co-
