This feeling of doubt and uncertainty, the feeling of lostness and nostalgia, spread throughout the ship. On the first leg of their journey the Families had had the incentive that had kept the covered wagons crawling across the plains. But now they were going nowhere, one day led only to the next. Their long lives were become a meaningless burden.
Ira Howard, whose fortune established the Howard Foundation, was born in 1825 and died in 1873-of old age. He sold groceries to the Forty-niners in San Francisco, became a wholesale sutler in the American War of the Secession, multiplied his fortune during the tragic Reconstruction.
Howard was deathly afraid of dying. He hired the best doctors of his time to prolong his life. Nevertheless old age plucked him when most men are still young. But his will commanded that his money be used to lengthen human life. The administrators of the trust found no way to carry out his wishes other than by seeking out persons whose family trees showed congenital predispositions toward long life and then inducing them to reproduce in kind. Their method anticipated the work of Burbank; they may or may not have known of the illuminating researches of the Monk Gregor Mendel.
Mary Sperling put down the book she had been reading when Lazarus entered her stateeoom. He picked it up. “What are you reading, Sis? ‘Ecclesiastes.’ Hmm . . . I didn’t know you were religious.” He read aloud:
“‘Yea, though he live a thousand years twice told, yet hath he seen no good: do not all go to one place?’
“Pretty grim stuff, Mary. Can’t you find something more cheerful? Even in The Preacher?’ His eyes skipped on down. “How about this one? ‘For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope-‘ Or . . . mnunm, not too many cheerful spots. Try this: ‘Therefore remove sorrow from thy heart, and put away evil from thy flesh: for childhood and youth are vanity.’ That’s more my style; I wouldn’t be young again for overtime wages.”
“I would.”
“Mary, what’s eating you? I find you sitting here, reading the most depressing book in the Bible, nothing but death and funerals. Why?”
She passed a hand wearily across her eyes. “Lazarus, I’m getting old. What else is there to think about?’
“You? Why, you’re fresh as a daisy!”
She looked at him. She knew that he lied; her mirror showed her the greying hair, the relaxed skin; she felt it in her bones. Yet Lazarus was older than she . . . although she knew, from what she had learned of biology during the years she had assisted in the longevity research, that Lazarus should never have lived to be as old as he was now. When he was born the program had reached only the third generation, too few generations to eliminate the less durable strains-except through some wildly unlikely chance shuffling of genes.
But there he stood. “Lazarus,” she asked, “how long do you expect to live?”
“Me? Now that’s an odd question. I mind a time when I asked a chap that very same question-about me, I mean, not about him. Ever hear of Dr. Hugo Pinero?”
“‘Pinero… Pinero.. .’ Oh, yes, ‘Pinero the Charlatan.'”
“Mary, he was no charlatan. He could do it, no foolin’. He could predict accurately when a man would die.”
“But- Go ahead. What did he tell you?”
“Just a minute. I want you to realize that he was no fake. His predictions checked out right on the button-if he hadn’t died, the life insurance companies would have been ruined. That was before you were born, but I was there and I know. Anyhow, Pinero took my reading and it seemed to bother him. So he took it again. Then he returned my money.”
“What did he say?”
“Couldn’t get a word out of him. He looked at me and he looked at his machine and he just frowned and clammed up. So I can’t rightly answer your question.”
“But what do you think about it, Lazarus? Surely you don’t expect just to go on forever?”
“Mary,” he said softly, “Fm not planning on dying. I’m not giving it any thought at all.”