Minnie came running in. I don't believe I told you about Minnie. She
was Greco's idea of the perfect laboratory assistant--stupid, old,
worthless to the world and without visible kin. She came in and stared
and set up a cackling that would wake the dead.
"Mister Hampstead!" she chortled. "My, but ain't you a sight!"
"Where's Greco?" I demanded, and pushed her out of my way.
In pajamas and bathrobe, I stalked down the stairs and into the room
that had once been a kitchen and now was Greco's laboratory.
"Look!" I yelled. "What about _this_?"
He turned to look at me.
After a long moment, he shook his head.
"I was afraid of that," he mumbled. "You were a towhead as a kid,
weren't you? And now you're a towhead again."
"But my hair, Greek! It's turned _white_."
"Not white," he corrected despondently. "Yellow. It's reverted to
youth--overnight, the way it happens sometimes. I warned you, Virgie.
I told you there were dangers. Now you know. Because--"
He hesitated, looked at me, then looked away.
"Because," he said, "you're getting younger, just like me. If we don't
get this thing straightened out, you're going to die of young age
yourself."
I stared at him. "You said that before, about yourself. I thought
you'd just tongue-twisted. But you really mean--"
"Sit down," he ordered. "Virgie, I told you that you were looking
younger. It wasn't just looks. It's the demons--and not just you and
me, but a lot of people. First Grand Rapids. Then when the hotel
burned. Plenty have been exposed--you more than most, I guess, ever
since the day you walked into my lab and I was trying to recapture
some that had got away. Well, I don't guess I recaptured them all."
"You mean _I_--"
He nodded. "Some of the demons make people younger. And you've got a
colony of them in you."
* * * * *
I swallowed and sat down. "You mean I'm going to get younger and
younger, until finally I become a baby? And then--what then, Greek?"
He shrugged. "How do I know? Ask me in another ten years. _Look at me,
Virgie!_" he cried, suddenly loud. "How old do I look to you?
Eighteen? Twenty?"
It was the plain truth. He looked no more than that. Seeing him day by
day, I wasn't conscious of change; remembering him from when we had
gone to school, I thought of him as younger anyway. But he was forty,
at the very least, and he didn't look old enough to vote.
He said, "I've had demons inside of me for six years. It seems they're
a bit choosy about where they'll live. They don't inhabit the whole
body, just parts of it--heart, lungs, liver. Maybe bones. Maybe some
of the glands--perhaps that' s why I feel so chipper physically. But
not my brain, or not yet. Fortunately."
"Fortunately? But that's wrong, Greek! If your brain grew younger
too--"
"Fool! If I had a young brain, I'd forget everything I learned, like
unrolling a tape backwards! That's the danger, Virgie, the immediate
danger that's pressing me--that's why I needed help! Because if I ever
forget, that's the end. Not just for me--for everybody; because
there's no one else in the world who knows how to control these things
at all. Except me--and you, if I can train you."
"They're loose?" I felt my hair wonderingly. Still, it was not exactly
a surprise. "How many?"
He shrugged. "I have no idea. When they let the first batch of rabbits
loose in Australia, did they have any idea how many there would be a
couple of dozen generations later?"
I whistled. Minnie popped her head in the door and giggled. I waved
her away.
"She could use some of your demons," I remarked. "Sometimes I think
she has awfully young ideas, for a woman who's sixty if she's a day."
Greco laughed crazily. "Minnie? She's been working for me for a year.
And she was eighty-five when I hired her!"
"I can't believe you!"
"Then you'll have to start practicing right now," he said.
It was tough, and no fooling; but I became convinced. It wasn't the
million dollars a year any more.
It was the thought of ending my days as a drooling, mewling infant--or
worse! To avert that, I was willing to work my brain to a shred.
* * * * *
First it was a matter of learning--learning about the "strange
particles." Ever hear of them? That's not my term--that's what the
physicists call them. Positrons. The neutrino. Pions and muons, plus
and minus; the lambda and the antilambda. K particles, positive and
negative, and anti-protons and anti-neutrons and sigmas, positive,
negative and neutral, and--
Well, that's enough; but physics had come a long way since the classes
I cut at Old Ugly, and there was a lot to catch up on.
The thing was, some of the "strange particles" were stranger than even
most physicists knew. Some--in combination--were in fact Greco's
demons.
We bought animals--mice, rabbits, guinea pigs, even dogs. We infected
the young with some of our own demons--that was simple enough,
frighteningly simple; all we had to do was handle them a bit. And we
watched what happened.
They died--of young age.
Some vital organ or another regressed to embryonic condition, and they
died--as Greco and I would die, if we didn't find the answer. As the
whole world might die. Was it better than reverting past the embryo to
the simple lifeless zygote? I couldn't decide. It was dying, all the
same. When an embryonic heart or liver is called on to do a job for a
mature organism, there is only one way out. Death.
And after death--the demons went on; the dog we fed on the remains of
the guinea pigs followed them to extinction in a matter of weeks.
Minnie was an interesting case.
She was going about her work with more energy every day, and I'll be
blasted if I didn't catch her casting a lingering Marilyn Monroe sort
of look at me when Greco's back was turned.
"Shall we fire her?" I asked El Greco when I told him about it.
"What for?"
"She's disrupting the work!"
[Illustration]
"The work isn't worth a damn anyhow," he said moodily. "We're not
getting anywhere, Virgie. If it was only a matter of smooth,
predictable rates--But look at her. She's picking up speed! She's
dropped five years in the past couple weeks."
"She can stand to drop a lot more," I said, annoyed.
* * * * *
He shrugged. "It depends on where. Her nose? It's shortened to about a
fifteen-year-old level now. Facial hair? That's mostly gone. Skin
texture? Well, I suppose there's no such thing as a too-immature skin,
I mean short of the embryonic capsule, but--Wait a minute."
He was staring at the doorway.
Minnie was standing there, simpering.
"Come here!" he ordered in a voice like thunder. "Come here, you!
Virgie, look at her nose!"