Peter Hubbard looked at his old friend with the young face and the
young body and the eyes that were unhuman--but less so than before.
This was a frightful thing that had been done, and by and by he would
feel the full horror of it. Right now he was too numb to care. He felt,
as Emrys Shortmire must have felt on coming back to Earth, detached and
without interest. _But I've felt this way before_, he thought; _it's
because I'm old._
"Were you really satisfied with your bargain, Jan?" he asked, almost
casually.
"Not at first," the boy admitted, sinking down on the couch and
clasping his hands around his knees. So young, so graceful, and
so ... unnatural. "It seemed to me then that the Morethans had given me
youth and taken away humanity. Because, once I found I was physically
capable, I found I didn't really want the things I had craved so much
before."
"So they did trick you?" When all was said and done, Hubbard thought,
you could never trust an alien life-form, a foreigner.
"No, _no_! You still don't understand. The way I see it is that ...
certain elements in us may not mean anything to them. They don't know
they're there, so they wouldn't realize that anything got lost in ...
the process."
"Do you think, Jan," Hubbard asked slowly, "that the way you felt--or
didn't feel--might not have anything to do with the Morethans at all?
That, for all your young body, you are an old man and feel like an old
man?"
"Nonsense! I know what it is to feel like an old man, and I know what
it is to feel like a young man, and I--I felt like neither."
"When a man has lived a certain number of years," Hubbard said, knowing
that envy gave the truth relish, "he is an old man. Age is in the mind
and heart, not only in the body."
"That's a lie!" Then Emrys said, more calmly, "If that's so, why did
everything change when I met Megan? Because I found then that my
emotions had not been lost! I had a feeling for her that I'd never had
for another woman--not even for Alissa, I think. I hadn't imagined
there could be a woman like Megan in the world, so sweet and amiable
and completely feminine." He looked angrily at Hubbard. "You think I'm
sentimental, don't you?"
Hubbard tried to smile. "There's nothing wrong with sentiment." But
sentimentality was characteristic of an old man's love.
Emrys laughed and hugged his knees. He was overdoing the ingenuousness.
Of course he deliberately played the part of a boy young enough to
be his own great-great-grandson, because he was wooing a woman young
enough to be his own great-great-granddaughter. And Hubbard remembered
how he himself had attempted to move briskly before Nicholas Dyall.
Emrys Shortmire would not have the physical aches that he'd had as
a result, but could there be psychical aches? Could an old man ever
actually be young?
* * * * *
Emrys' face grew sober. "I've never touched her, Peter--really touched
her, I mean. She's not like other women, you know."
"I know," Hubbard said, remembering back to the time when he, too, had
been in love. Only the memory was not tender in him, because he had
married the girl and lived with her for nearly seventy years.
"Peter, you aren't listening!"
"I'm sorry," the old man said, waking from his reverie. "What were you
saying?"
"I said, do you think Megan would be willing to marry me, if she knew I
was older than her great-great-grandfather?"
But there was a more important question that Hubbard could no longer
refuse to face. "Jan, what did you give the Morethans in return for
what they gave you?"
"You haven't answered my question."
"I can't answer it, because I don't know the girl. But you can answer
mine, because you know what you gave the Morethans."
Emrys was silent for a moment; then he laughed. "I gave them my soul,"
he said lightly. "Like that fellow in the opera."
"I know that. What I'm afraid of is that it wasn't enough. In what form
did you give it to them, Jan?"
"You have no right to catechize me like that."