on paper,
and by the time they got through explaining it every damned soul on
the project was saying yes, it might fall apart at the launching. Why,
it's a standing joke with the workers. They call Keller "Old Jet
Propulsion" and always have a good laugh. But then, Keller and Stark
and Lijinsky should know what's what. They've all been rejuvenated,
and working on the ship for years." Fisher's voice was heavy with
anger.

Dan didn't answer. There didn't seem to be much _to_ answer, and he
just couldn't tell Fisher how it felt to have a cold blanket of fear
wrapping around his heart, so dreadful and cold that he hardly dared
look five minutes ahead right now. _We have a Monster on our hands--_

VII

He was sick when they reached Washington. The pain in his chest
became acute as he walked down the gangway, and by the time he found a
seat in the terminal and popped a nitro-tablet under his tongue he was
breathing in deep, ragged gasps. He sat very still, trying to lean
back against the seat, and quite suddenly he realized that he was
very, very ill. The good red-headed Dr. Moss would smile in
satisfaction, he thought bitterly. There was sweat on his forehead; it
had never seemed very probable to him that he might one day die--he
didn't _have_ to die in this great, wonderful world of new bodies for
old, he could live on, and on, and on. He could live to see the Golden
Centuries of Man. A solar system teeming with life. Ships to challenge
the stars, the barriers breaking, crumbling before their very eyes.
Other changes, as short-lived Man became long-lived Man. Changes in
teaching, in thinking, in feeling. Disease, the Enemy, was crushed.
Famine, the Enemy, slinking back into the dim memory of history. War,
the Enemy, pointless to extinction.

All based on one principle: Man must live. He need not die. If a man
could live forty years instead of twenty, had it been wrong to fight
the plagues that struck him down in his youth? If he could live sixty
years instead of forty, had the great researchers of the 1940's and
'50's and '60's been wrong? Was it any more wrong to want to live a
thousand years? Who could say that it was?

He took a shuddering breath, and then nodded to Terry Fisher, and
walked unsteadily to the cab stand. He would not believe what he had
seen at Starship Project. It was not enough. Collect the evidence,
_then_ conclude. He gave Fisher an ashen smile. "It's nothing. The
ticker kicks up once in a whi