Young sighed. "There is that damned attitude again. Immortality
pays all debts. When a man is made immortal, he has received full
compensation for everything that he may endure. I have lived longer
than any man could be expected to live and still I am denied the
dignity of old age. A man's desires are few, and quickly sated, and
yet he is expected to continue living with desires burned up and blown
away to ash. He gets to a point where nothing has a value ... even
to a point where his own personal values are no more than shadows.
Gentlemen, there was a time when I could not have committed murder ...
literally could not have forced myself to kill another man ... but
today I could, without a second thought. Disillusion and cynicism have
crept in upon me and I have no conscience."
* * * * *
"There are compensations," Riggs said. "Your family...."
"They get in my hair," said Young disgustedly. "Thousands upon
thousands of young squirts calling me Grandsire and Ancestor and coming
to me for advice they practically never follow. I don't know even a
fraction of them and I listen to them carefully explain a relationship
so tangled and trivial that it makes me yawn in their faces. It's all
new to them and so old, so damned and damnably old to me."
"Ancestor Young," said Stanford, "you have seen Man spread out from
Earth to distant stellar systems. You have seen the human race expand
from one planet to several thousand planets. You have had a part in
this. Is there not some satisfaction...."
"You're talking in abstracts," Young cut in. "What I am concerned about
is myself ... a certain specific mass of protoplasm shaped in biped
form and tagged by the designation, ironic as it may seem, of Andrew
Young. I have been unselfish all my life. I've asked little for myself.
Now I am being utterly and entirely selfish and I ask that this matter
be regarded as a personal problem rather than as a racial abstraction."
"Whether you'll admit it or not," said Stanford, "it is more than a
personal problem. It is a problem which some day must be solved for the
salvation of the race."
"That is what I am trying to impress upon you," Young snapped. "It is a
problem that you must face. Some day you will solve it, but until you
do, you must make provisions for those who face the unsolved problem."
"Wait a while," counseled Chairman Riggs. "Who knows? Today, tomorrow."
"Or a million years from now," Young told him bitterly and left, a
tall, vigorous-looking man whose step was swift in anger where normally
it was slow with weariness and despair.
* * * * *
There was yet a chance, of course.
But there was little hope.
How can a man go back almost six thousand years and snare a thing he
never understood?
And yet Andrew Young remembered it. Remembered it as clearly as if it
had been a thing that had happened in the morning of this very day.
It was a shining thing, a bright thing, a happiness that was brand-new
and fresh as a bluebird's wing of an April morning or a shy woods
flower after sudden rain.
He had been a boy and he had seen the bluebird and he had no words to
say the thing he felt, but he had held up his tiny fingers and pointed
and shaped his lips to coo.
Once, he thought, I had it in my very fingers and I did not have the
experience to know what it was, nor the value of it. And now I know the
value, but it has escaped me--it escaped me on the day that I began
to think like a human being. The first adult thought pushed it just
a little and the next one pushed it farther and finally it was gone
entirely and I didn't even know that it had gone.
He sat in the chair on the flagstone patio and felt the Sun upon him,
filtering through the branches of trees misty with the breaking leaves
of Spring.
Something else, thought Andrew Young. Something that was not
human--yet. A tiny animal that had many ways to choose, many roads to
walk. And, of course, I chose the wrong way. I chose the human way. But
there was another way. I know there must have been. A fairy way--or a
brownie way, or maybe even pixie. That sounds foolish and childish now,
but it wasn't always.
I chose the human way because I was guided into it. I was pushed and
shoved, like a herded sheep.