tea and crackers. But where I'm sitting I
wouldn't bet a plugged nickel that you'll be alive a month from now.
If you think I'm joking, you just try to squeeze a bet out of me."

Senator Dan Fowler took the black cigar from his mouth, stared at the
chewed-up end for a moment, and put it back in again. He had had
something exceedingly witty all ready to say at this point in the
examination; now it didn't seem to be too funny. If Moss had been a
mealy-mouthed quack like the last Doc he had seen, okay. But Moss
wasn't. Moss was obviously not impressed by the old man sitting across
the desk from him, a fact which made Dan Fowler just a trifle uneasy.
And Moss knew his turnips.

Dan Fowler looked at the doctor and said, "Garbage."

The red-headed doctor shrugged. "Look, Senator--sometimes a banana is
a banana. I know heart disease, and I know how it acts. I know that it
kills people if they wait too long. And when you're dead, no
rejuvenation lab is going to bring you back to life again."

"Oh, hell! Who's dying?" Fowler's grey eyebrows knit in the old
familiar scowl, and he bit down hard on the cigar. "Heart disease! So
I get a little pain now and then--sure it won't last forever, and when
it gets bad I'll come in and take the full treatment. But I can't do
it now!" He spread his hands in a violent gesture. "I only came in
here because my daughter dragged me. My heart's doing fine--I've been
working an eighteen hour day for forty years now, and I can do it for
another year or two--"

"But you have pain," said Dr. Moss.

"So? A little twinge, now and then."

"Whenever you lose your temper. Whenever anything upsets you."

"All right--a twinge."

"Which makes you sit down for ten or fifteen minutes. Which doesn't go
away with one nitro-tablet any more, so you have to take two, and
sometimes three--right?"

* * * * *

Dan Fowler blinked. "All right, sometimes it gets a little bad--"

"And it used to be only once or twice a month, but now it's almost
every day. And once or twice you've blacked clean out for a while, and
made your staff work like demons to cover for you and keep it off the
teevies, right?"

"Say, who's been talking to you?"

"Jean has been talking to me."

"Can't even trust your own daughter to keep her trap shut." The
Senator tossed the cigar butt down in disgust. "It happened once, yes.
That god damned Rinehart is enough to make anybody black out." He
thrust o