Keeper of Dreams (19 page)

“Why all the secrecy?” Ryan asked Todd, laughing at a neurologist in a rather overdone fisherman’s outfit.

“To prevent the public from getting too much hope if the papers report that this meeting is taking place,” Todd answered.

“Why not? Why not a little hope?” Ryan asked.

“Why not a lot of heroin?”

Ryan looked coldly at Todd. “Dr. Halking, I find your despair disgusting.”

Todd looked back and smiled. “And I find your insistence on hope touchingly naive.”

The meeting went on. The reports varied between cautious negative statements and utter despair. Todd read Ryan’s and his report toward the end of the first day. “Except for the viral microscopy reports, all were slowly and deliberately doublechecked. My assistant wants me to assure you that the viral microscopy reports were hurried through the second check. That is true, because the meeting couldn’t wait and the computer
could
be made to work overtime.”

There was some laughter.

“However, we never found any discrepancy between first and second runs on any other tests, and we did carefully check and found no discrepancies on the first run of the viral microscopy tests, either. Therefore, I can safely conclude that there is no significant difference between contemporary blood samples and the blood samples prior to the Premature Aging Phenomenon, except such differences as reflect our conquest of certain well-known diseases, and these antibodies were not stimulated until long after the PAP was first noted. Ergo—not significant.”

There were some careful questions, easily answered, and they moved on. However jovial a presenter might be, the answer was always the same. No answers.

After the papers were presented, the data examined, the statistical results questioned and upheld, the heads of the projects gathered in one small room at the top of the old Hyatt Regency. Todd Halking and Val Lassiter arrived together. Only a couple of men were already there. On impulse, Todd walked to the chalkboard at one end of the room and wrote on it, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”

“Not funny,” Val said when Todd sat down next to him.

“Come on. They’ll die laughing.”

Val looked at Todd quizzically. “Get a grip, Todd,” he said.

Todd smiled. “I have a grip. If not on myself, then on reality.”

Everyone who came into the room saw the sign on the chalkboard. Some chuckled a little. Finally someone got up and erased the message.

The room was only half full. Todd got up and left the room, his aging bladder more demanding than it had been a few years—a few weeks!—before. He washed his hands afterward, and looked at himself in the mirror. He was haggard. His face cried out Death. He smiled at himself. The smile was ghastly. He went back to the room.

He was not yet seated when a military-looking man entered and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.” Everybody stood and applauded. The president walked in. No one could have recognized him from the publicity pictures. They all dated from his second campaign, and then he had not been bald.

“Well, you’ve done it,” the president said. “And within my term of
office. Thank you. The effort was magnificent. The results are remarkably thorough, I’m told by those who should know.”

The president coughed into a handkerchief. He sounded like he had pleurisy.

“And if you’re right,” he said. “
If
you’re right, the picture is pretty grim.”

The president laughed. Todd wondered why. But a few of the scientists laughed, too. Including Anne Hallam, the geneticist. She spoke. “To the dinosaurs things once looked grim, too. A million mammals chewing on their eggs.”

“The dinosaurs died out,” the president said.

“No,” Hallam answered. “Only the ones that hadn’t become birds or mammals or some more viable type of reptile.” She smiled at them all. Hope springs eternal, Todd thought. “It’s small comfort,” she went on, “but one thing this early aging has done: The species has shorter generations. We’re better able to adapt genetically. Whatever happens, when mankind gets out of this we will not be the same as we were when we went in.”

“Yes,” Todd said cheerfully. “We’ll all be dead.”

Anne looked at him in irritation, and several people coughed. But the mood of joviality the president had set at first was gone now. Val wrote on his notebook and shoved it toward Todd as the president started talking again.

“You’re speaking of aeons and species,” the president said. “I must think of nations and societies. Ours is dying. If what you say is true, in a few years it will be dead. The nation. The way we live. Civilization, if I may use the romantic word.”

Todd read Val’s note. It said: “Shut your mouth, you bastard, it’s bad enough already.”

Todd smiled at Val. Val glared back.

People were telling the president: It’s hardly that bleak, we weathered the worst already.

“Oh yes,” the president agreed. “We lasted through the depression. We adapted to the collapse of world trade. We made the transition from the cities back to the farms, we have endured the death of huge industry and global interreactions. We have adapted to having our population cut in half, in less than half.”

“What clever little adapters we are, Mr. President,” Todd said, aware that he was breaking protocol to interrupt the president, and not particularly giving a damn. “But tell me, has anyone figured out an adaptation to death? Odd, isn’t it, that in millions of years of evolution, nature has never managed to select for immortality.”

Val stood, obviously angry. “Mr. President, I suggest that Dr. Halking be asked to contribute constructively or leave this meeting. There’s no way we can accomplish anything with these constant interjections of pessimism.”

There was a murmur, half of protest, half of agreement.

“Val,” Todd said, “I’m only trying to be realistic.”

“And what do you think
we
are, dreamers? Don’t we know we’re all old men and doomed to die?”

The president coughed, and Val sat down. “I believe,” said the president, “that Dr. Halking will take this as a reminder that we are talking here as men of science, dispassionately. Impersonally, if you will. Now let’s review . . ..”

They went over the findings again. “Is there any chance,” the president asked again and again, “that you might be wrong?”

A chance, they all answered. Of course there’s a chance. But we have done the best our instruments will let us do.

“What if you had more sophisticated instruments?” he asked.

Of course, they said. But we do not have them. You’ll have to wait another generation, or two, or three, and by then the damage will be done. We’ll never live to see it.

“Then,” the president said, “we must get busy. Make sure your assistants and their assistants and their assistants as well know everything you know. Prepare them to continue your work. We can’t give up.”

Todd looked around the table as everyone nodded sagely, lips pursed in the identical expression of grim courage. The spirit of man: We shall overcome. Todd couldn’t bear it anymore. Like his bladder, his emotions could be contained for progressively shorter periods of time.

“For Christ’s sake, do you call this optimism?” he said, and was instantly embarrassed that tears came unbidden to his eyes. They would dismiss him as an emotional wreck, not listen to his ideas at all. Sound clinical, he warned himself. Try to sound clinical and careful and scientific
and impartial and uninvolved and all those other impossible, virtuous things.

“I have the cure to the Premature Aging Phenomenon,” Todd said. “Or at least I have the cure to the misery.”

Eyes. All watching him intently. At last I have their attention, he thought.

“The cure to the misery is to go home and go to bed and stop trying. We’ve done all we can do. And if we can’t cure the disease, we can live with it. We can adapt to it. We can try to be happy.”

But the eyes were gone again, and two of the scientists came over to him and dabbed at his eyes with their handkerchiefs and helped him get up from the table. They took him to another room, where he sat (guarded by four men, just in case) and sobbed.

At last he was dry. He sat and looked at the window and wondered why he had said the things he had said. What good would it do? Men didn’t have it in them to stop trying. We are not bred for despair.

And yet we learn it, for even in our efforts to repair the damage done by premature aging, we are as blind as lemmings, struggling to go down the same old road to a continent that a million years before had sunk under the sea—yet the road could not be changed. The age of forty had its tasks; therefore we must strive to live to forty, however far away it might be now.

The meeting ended. He heard voices in the hall. The words could not be deciphered, but through them all was the tone of boisterous good cheer, good luck my friend and I’ll see you soon, here’s to the future.

The door to Todd’s private (except for the guards) room opened. Anne Hallam and Ryan came in, stepping quietly.

“I’m not asleep,” Todd said. “Nor am I emotionally discommoded at the moment. So you needn’t tiptoe.”

Anne smiled then. “Todd, I’m sorry. About the embarrassment to you. It happens to all of us now and then.”

Todd smiled back (thank God for a little warmth—how had she kept it?) and then shook his head. “Not then. Just now. Well, what did the meeting find out? Have the Chinese found a magic cure and only now are radioing the formula to Honolulu?”

Ryan laughed. “As if there
were
any Chinese anymore.”

Anne said, “We decided two things. First, we haven’t found the cure yet.”

“Astute,” Todd said, raising an imaginary glass to clink with hers.

“And second, we decided that there
is
a cure, and we will find it.”

“And while you were at it,” Todd asked, “did you decide that faster-than-light travel was possible, and declare that it would be discovered next week by two youngsters in France who by chance were walking in the field one day and plunged into hyperspace?”

“Not only that,” Anne said, “but one of the children immediately will follow a rabbit down a hole and find herself in Wonderland.”

“Blunderland,” Todd added, and Anne and Todd laughed together with understanding and mutual compassion. Ryan looked at them, puzzlement in his eyes. Todd noticed it. The younger generation still knows only life: Ah, youthful Caesar, we who are about to die salute you, though we have no hope of actually communicating with you.

“But there is a cause,” Anne insisted, “and therefore it can be found.”

“Your faith is touching,” Todd said.

“There’s a cause for everything, we don’t change overnight with no reason, or else nothing that any human being has ever called ‘true’ can be counted on at all. Will gravity fail?”

“Tomorrow afternoon at three,” Todd said.

“Only if there’s a cause. But sometimes—right now, with PAP—the cause eludes us, that’s all. Why did the dinosaurs die out? Why did the apes drop from the trees and start talking and lighting fires? We can guess, perhaps, but we don’t know; and yet there
was
a cause or there’s no reason in the world.”

“I rest my case,” Todd said. “My basket case, to be precise.”

Ryan’s face twisted, and Todd laughed at him. “Ryan, the nearly dead are free to joke about death. It’s only the living to whom death is tabu.”

“Maybe,” Anne Hallam said, leaning back in a chair (and the guards’ eyes followed her, because they watched everybody, guarded everybody), “maybe there’s some system, some balance, some ecosystem we haven’t discovered until now, a system that demands that, when one species or group gets out of hand, that species changes, not for survival of the fittest, but for survival of the whole. Perhaps the dinosaurs were destroying the
earth, and so they—stopped. Perhaps man was—no, we know man was destroying the earth. And we know we were stopped. Any talk of nuclear war now? Any chance of too much industry raping the earth utterly beyond of hope of survival?”

“And in a moment,” Ryan said, his mouth curled with distaste, “you’ll be mentioning the thought that God is punishing us for our sins. I, personally, find the idea ridiculous, and seeing two of our finest minds seriously discussing it is pathetic.”

Ryan got up and left. Anne smiled again (warmly!) at Todd, patted his hand, and left. After a few minutes, Todd followed.

A plane ride east.

Midnight at the airport. Nevertheless, a crowd bustling through. At one end of the terminal, a ragged old man was shouting to an oblivious crowd.

Todd and the others tried to pass him without paying attention, but he called to them. “You! You with the briefcases, you in the suits!” Ryan stopped and turned, and so they all had to. Todd was irritated. He was tired. He wanted to get home to Sandy.

“You’re scientists, aren’t you!” the man shouted. They didn’t answer. He took that for agreement. “It’s your fault! The earth couldn’t bear so many men, so many machines!”

“Let’s get out of here,” Todd said, and the others agreed. The old man kept calling after them. “Rape, that’s all it was! Rape of a planet, rape of each other, rape of life, you bastards!” People stared at them all the way out of the terminal.