Once more, he couldn’t decide.

  Caxton had no time for more detailed examination, for a man arrayed very much as they were was rising from one of die chairs. He recognised Cassellahat.

  Cassellahat came forward, smiling. Then he slowed, his nose wrinkling. A moment later, he hastily shook hands with Blake and Caxton, then swiftly retreated to a chair ten feet away, and sat down rather primly.

  It was an astoundingly ungracious performance, somewhat alleviated after a moment by the man motioning them to sit down. Caxton settled into a couch near Blake, wondering.

  Cassellahat began, ‘About your friend, I must caution you. He is a schizoid type, and our psychologists will be able to effect only a temporary recovery. A permanent cure will require a longer period, and your fullest cooperation. Fall in readily with all Mr Renfrew’s plans, unless, of course, he takes a dangerous turn.

  ‘But now’ - he squirted them a smile - ‘permit me to welcome you to the four planets of Centaurus. It is a great moment for me, personally. From early childhood, I have been trained for the sole purpose of being your mentor and guide; and naturally I am overjoyed that the time has come when my exhaustive studies of the middle period American language and customs can be put to the practical use for which they were intended.’

  He didn’t look overjoyed. He was wrinkling his nose in that funny way Caxton had already noticed, and there was a generally pained expression on his face. But his words had shocked Caxton.

  ‘What do you mean,’ he asked, ‘studies in American? Was that the English language we heard on the radio?’

  ‘Of course,’ was the reply. ‘But the language has developed to a point where - I might as well be frank - you did have difficulty in understanding any complete sentence, didn’t you?’

  ‘But we got individual words,’ Blake said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Then it’s a matter of learning the new words?’

  ‘Well, that’s true.’

  They sat silent, Blake chewing his lower lip. It was Blake who finally said, ‘What kind of places are the Centaurus planets? You said something on the radio about the population centers having reverted to the city structure again.’

  ‘I shall be happy,’ said Cassellahat, ‘to show you as many of our great cities as you care to see. You are our guests, and two and a half million credits have been placed to your separate accounts for you to use as you see fit’ He broke off. ‘But if you have no more questions right now…’

  Blake and Caxton spoke practically together: ‘Just a minute, sir,’ said Caxton. ‘We’re loaded with questions,’ said Blake.

  The old man bowed his acceptance of the detainment, and remained seated. It was Caxton who asked the first question. ‘What,’ he said, ‘about prolongation of life?’

  ‘Twenty years,’ was the cautious reply, ‘over what you now have.’

  It required a little checking to make sure they were discussing the same ‘what you now have.’ But Cassellahat had learned his lesson about ‘middle America’. And he meant approximately age seventy for their time, and age ninety for his own.

  It seemed an unusually small increase. At first the disappointment of it was a shock, and then it was a puzzle. There had been so many hopes back there that medical science would shortly do something big in this area.

  It appeared the problem was that cells could only renew themselves a limited number of times; originally, between ten and thirteen times, approximately every six and a half to seven years. The improvement consisted of a discovery which made it possible to produce the maximum thirteen divisions in almost every person.

  But it was impossible to increase that basic maximum.

  The men from the past argued that their own journey of nearly five hundred years had surely broken that barrier. But apparently it was not so. Pelham’s suspended animation drug simply provided an enormous slowing down of the cellular processes, an explanation which also applied to people who lived a hundred or more years under normal circumstances.

  Though Blake had interspersed a question here and there during the disappointing discussion of life prolongation, now he held up his hand. He smiled. He said, ‘Peter, you’ve been asking Renfrew’s questions. Now I’ll ask your questions.’

  He turned to Cassellahat, still smiling. ‘Mr Caxton is our physicist, and I’m sure that he will be as interested as I in what I am about to ask you.’

  ‘Please stand back a little,’ said Cassellahat, ‘while you ask.’ He apologised as both men drew away. ‘I’ll explain in a few moments. But now, your questions, Mr Blake.’

  ‘What,’ Blake began, ‘makes the speed of light constant?’

  Cassellahat did not even blink. ‘Velocity equals the cube of the cube root of gd,’ he said, ‘d being the depth of the spacetime continuum, g the total toleration or gravity, as you would say, of all the matter in that continuum.’

  ‘How are planets formed?’

  ‘A sun must balance itself in the space that it is in. It throws out matter as a sea vessel does anchors. That’s a very rough description. I could give it to you in a mathematical formula, but I’d have to write it down. After all, I’m not a scientist. These are merely facts I’ve known from childhood, or so it seems.’

  Caxton interrupted, puzzled. ‘A sun throws this matter out without any pressure other than its … desire… to balance itself?’

  Cassellahat stared at him. ‘Of course not. The pressure involved is very potent, I assure you. Without such a balance, the sun would fall out of this space. Only a few bachelor suns have learned to maintain stability without planets.’

  ‘A few what?’ echoed Blake.

  Caxton could see that Blake had been jarred into forgetting the questions he had been intending to ask. Cassellahat’s words cut across that thought, as he said, ‘A bachelor sun is a very old, cooled Class M star. The hottest one known has a temperature of one hundred and ninety degrees F., the coldest forty-eight. Literally, a bachelor is a rogue, crotchety with age. Its main feature is that it permits no matter, no planets, not even gases in its vicinity.’

  Blake stood silent, frowning, thoughtful. Caxton seized the opportunity to carry on a train of ideas. ‘Your knowing all of this stuff without being a scientist interests me. For instance, back home, by 1979 every kid understood the rocket principle practically from the day he was born. Boys of eight and ten rode around in specially made toys, took them apart and put them together again. They thought rocketry, and any new development in the field was just pie for them to absorb.

  ‘Now, here’s what I’d like to know: what is the parallel here to that particular angle?’

  ‘The adeledicnander force,’ said Cassellahat. ‘I’ve already tried to explain it to Mr Blake, when we were talking via the radio, but his mind seems to balk at some of the most simple aspects.’

  Blake aroused himself, grimaced. ‘He tried to tell me that electrons think; and I won’t swallow it.’

  Cassellahat shook his head. ‘Not think; they don’t think. But they have a psychology.’

  ‘Electronic psychology!’ Caxton said.

  ‘Simply adeledicnander,’ Cassellahat replied. ‘Any child - ‘

  Blake groaned. ‘I know. Any child of six could tell me.’

  He turned to Caxton. ‘That’s why I lined up a lot of questions. I figured that if we got a good intermediate grounding, we might be able to slip into this adeledicnander stuff the way their kids do.’

  He faced Cassellahat again. But the older man held up his hand. ‘No more, Mr Blake. Future scientific questions should be addressed to authorities in each field, who, I assure you, are eager to meet you.’

  Caxton said, curiously, ‘All right, no more scientific questions. But what are the people like now?’ He enlarged on his thought: ‘when we left, we were at the tail end of a fifteen-year young peoples’ rebellion against the establishment - I say tail end, not because it was over, but it seemed to have leveled off about then. Stabilising the wins or something. Whatever became of that?’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ said Cassellahat reluctantly, ‘that I was never quite able to clarify in my own mind what that was all about - but you’ll be meeting people. Tomorrow, among other things, you will be on television. You can make up your own minds.’

  He stood up. ‘Before I depart,’ he said, ‘I must give you a warning. There has been an unexpected, uh, development. At the moment that we met, I was struck by an unpleasant odor emanating from you both. At least, it’s first impact on me was unpleasant, though now I am not so sure. But the problem involved needs to be studied. Until then you must be careful about close contact with human beings in this era. And this is definitely a relevant subject, for we landed several minutes ago.

  ‘And now,’ he finished, ‘for the time being, I shall leave you. You will spend this first night still on your ship while other arrangements are made. I hope you won’t mind if I wear a mask in the future in your presence. I wish you well, gentlemen, and-’

  He paused, glanced past Blake and Caxton, and said, ‘Ah, here is your friend.’

  ‘Hi, there, fellows,’ Renfrew said cheerfully from the door, then wryly: ‘Have we ever been a bunch of suckers!’

  Afterward, Caxton had a shamefaced explanation to himself for what happened then. The trip had been too much, he told himself: For Gods sake, I’m not made of steel.… And besides, the sudden return to sanity of someone who minutes before had been a raving lunatic - who wouldn’t be slightly unbalanced by that?

  Whatever the reason that impelled him forward, he was the one that got to Renfrew first. He was the one who flung his arms around the man, and with tear-filled eyes hugged him.

  Presently, he realised what he was doing; and he drew back, and, in a belated attempt to twist what he had done, said, ‘And now I’m going to punch that fellow in the jaw for what he said.’

  But when he turned, Cassellahat was gone.

  Lying on his cot that night, Caxton couldn’t sleep. At first, he told himself it was the excitement…But suddenly he realised what was bothering him.

  I’ve been conned into a wrong thought. The truth is, what does it matter who got to Centaurus first? Renfrew has it all mixed up. This is not what our goal was — to be here before anyone else from Earth… . Specifically, Renfrew and he -Blake’s reason for coming was still unknown to Caxton - had set out for the future to locate their separate brands of immortality for themselves. What other men achieved meanwhile was fine - for them. What mankind accomplished during a period of five hundred years was great. But what good was that accomplishment to all the people who were in their graves?

  Caxton sat up on his hard bed, intending to rush forth and point out these logical truths to Renfrew and Blake. Quickly he lay back again. He had never, he realised, so much as hinted to the others his real motives for the journey. Ridiculous to reveal a clue at this late stage. Better - as he always had - to keep his thoughts to himself.

  His problem was still the same as it had been when he was in the Palace of Immortality. Presumably, all these billions of people now would also eventually be saved by the Possessors, in the sense that they would be picked up at age fourteen, or somewhere, and projected into a longer life in another probability world.

  As he had then, Caxton rejected that solution irritably as meaningless. With that decision, and analysis, he was able to sleep.

  XV

  Caxton awakened the next morning, and for a few moments, had the thought that he was still on the trip.

  Instantly he felt confused, for he couldn’t remember which return to consciousness this was. The next moment awareness came, memory came.

  His relief was brief. He got up. He put on his clothes - slowly.

  Standing there, he realised that what he saw ahead of him was a search for the Possessors that would be greatly handicapped by his present circumstances. The three of them would probably have to remain for a time in Centaurus, and when they got back to Earth, there would be more difficulties…. He suddenly remembered something his first wife had said to him: ‘For heaven’s sake, Peter, relax. Here we are making love, and I have the impression that you’ve already gone ahead mentally to some other experience, and that what you’re doing now doesn’t mean anything.’ It was true. He had been off in the distances of his mind, planning, scheming, nervously. Unquestionably, that kind of behavior in his past had contributed to her swift divorce suit.

  Somebody had once told Caxton that a woman would never let a husband go, short of his bludgeoning her away from him. But it was not true, Caxton realised. There were some men who a woman would presently flee from, and be glad to go. He smiled his pale smile, as it occurred to him that not every man could make the statement that he was the type that a woman presently fought to get away from.

  He quipped to himself: At least I’ve got that going for me. I can get out of messes that I get myself into because people are glad to see me depart. Maybe I can work the same thing here.

  With that possibility, he was abruptly more cheerful. Whereupon he opened the door and stepped out into the narrow corridor, and so into the control room. He found Blake and Renfrew already there.

  Blake saw him first. ‘I was just going to come and get you,’ he greeted Caxton. ‘We have a big medical checkup to go through, so get ready for a dull day.’

  Caxton said, ‘Oh!’

  Perversely, after his long negative discussion with himself, Caxton realised that he was interested. ‘Maybe we can find a quick cure for the way we smell, and become attractive to women again.’

  The other two men brightened at those words; and so it was an interested trio that gingerly made their way out into the mental storeroom where their ship had landed, and so through a door into the same room where they had first met Cassellahat.

  Cassellahat and several other persons, both men and women, were waiting for them, and stood up as they entered.

  There was something about the way these people moved, a slowness, as if they had all the time in the world for what was now about to happen, that affected Caxton.

  Just like that, seeing them, sensing their thoroughness, Caxton’s curiosity faded.

  Here was another dull thud, it seemed to him.

  There were a few interesting things, however. Several machines had been brought into the room since the previous night. Cassellahat sat beside one of these and acted as an interpreter, and what he said were simple variations of ‘Mr Renfrew, they would like you to take off your clothes and lie down on that table.’ And later: ‘Now, you, Mr Blake.’ Finally, ‘Mr Caxton - your turn.’

  Although he had watched the others silently undress, when it came his turn Caxton was slightly embarrassed. He was not, Caxton decided, a man who approved of women doctors. The discovery rather amazed him, for from approximately age seventeen he had maintained a ceaseless vigil for available females: constantly seeking from likely prospects intimate personal relations which - it had always been his hope - would sooner or later include total disrobement and a skin-to-skin embrace. That had never embarrassed him. So why should this?

  But it did. He lay there uneasily, and watched unhappily as approximately a pint of his blood was removed. (The blood was handed out through a door, and taken off somewhere, presumably for lab tests.) One of the women doctors looked into his eyes through a lens arrangement, focusing a thin beam of light into the pupil. Every twenty or so seconds, she changed the color of the light, white to red to green, yellow, and so on. Finally, she seemed to have gained the information she wanted; she went to one of the machines, where a man questioned her closely in what was evidently a debriefing interchange.

  Another woman repeatedly inserted a needle into his arm or leg, or body, and squeezed one or another kind of discolored fluid into him each time. Surprisingly, he did not feel the needle pricks, which interested him, but he still cringed in anticipation at each injection thinking that this time it would be painful. The woman seemed not to notice. She was watching a series of dials, and presently she also went off to be debriefed by the man at the machine.

  It was a sort of instant information approach; and it had its own appeal for Caxton. These experts were not being given time to forget what they had observed. He was about to ask a question about it when he had a thought of his own which was not just a reaction. He spoke promptly to Cassellahat.

  ‘Be sure,’ said Caxton, ‘to inject us with the chemicals that will prolong our life expectancy to age ninety.’

  Cassellahat nodded gravely, but when he turned to his colleagues of the twenty-fifth century, he was smiling. And he continued to smile faintly as he ‘translated,’ if that was the right word, the instruction. It seemed to require a few moments for the others to comprehend his meaning. But suddenly they also were smiling, and several of them said something which Caxton almost, but not quite, understood.

  Cassellahat turned to the three men and explained that the injections would indeed be given. But for them not to be anxious, as there were other things that came first. He continued, with a smile, ‘Your question, Mr Caxton, struck one of our psychiatrists as having the implication that you felt yourself to be a visitor in a strange country who would be able to buy the local products only during the period of a short stay. Please be assured that you are now permanent residents of our era - unless you decide to take another journey using the Pelham drug; and there are reasons, which will be explained to you, why that is not a good idea.’

  A large, gleaming machine with an opening at one end was wheeled in, and once again the cycle ran its course: first Renfrew laid himself down in the movable, coffin-like container to which he was directed. As soon as his body was in a horizontal position, the container was rolled out of sight through the opening. He disappeared into the machine, except that his toes were visible, and at irregular intervals they wiggled.

  When the container was finally wheeled out of the machine, he sat up in it, breathed hard several times, and then said, ‘I’ll be damned!’ Blake was next to go in, and finally Caxton, who lay back, thinking: Well, they’re not going to get any alarm reaction out of me.