Jack McDevitt - POLARIS

“That’s no reason,” rumbled Urquhart, “to compromise everything we’ve accomplished. Simply because we couldn’t resist the temptation. Our failure makes the point.”

“You’re right. The issues are too serious for that. Alex has said he’ll keep your secret. But I won’t. I see no compelling reason to protect you.”

“Then,” said Klassner, “you doom everybody.”

“You have a tendency to overstate things, Martin. You’re in a position to stop the ageing process. Or not. Either way, as you would have it, people will die. In large numbers.

“But if we make the treatment available, maybe we’ll learn to live with it. We survived the ice ages. And the Black Plague. And God knows how many wars. And thousands of years of political stupidity. We even picked a fight with the only other intelligent species we found. If we survived all that, we can survive this.”

“You don’t know that’s so,” said White. “This is different.”

“It’s always different. You know what’s wrong with you? The four of you? You give up too easily. You decide there’s a problem, and you think we have to arrange things so we don’t have to deal with it.” I looked over at Alex, whose face revealed nothing. “I say we put the Dunninger formula on the table where everybody can see it. And then we talk about it. Like adults.”

“No,” said White. Her eyes radiated a hunted look. “You really don’t understand.”

“No, I don’t. I can’t understand your giving in without a fight. I don’t want to live the rest of my life watching people die, knowing I had the means to save them.”

Lines showed up around Boland’s eyes and mouth. He literally looked in pain.

“I’ll go this far for you: We’ll be in touch with you within the next few days.

We’ll arrange to have one of you donate a blood sample. We’ll get it analyzed and let the chips fall. I’ll say nothing about where I got it. And I’ll say nothing about you or the Polaris. You can keep your reputations intact, and you can go on living happily for the next thousand years or so.

“Although I should tell you that if you’re as virtuous as you like to think, as I’d like to believe, you’ll reveal yourselves, admit to what you’ve done, and argue your case in the public forum.”

It wasn’t what they were expecting. Alex frowned and shrugged. I hope you know what you’re doing.

Well, it was, as they say, the old conversation stopper. One by one they got to their feet. Klassner hoped that after I had a chance to think things over, I’d reconsider.

White took my hand, pressed it, and bit her lip. She was close to tears.

Urquhart asked me not to do anything irrevocable until I’d had a chance to sleep on it. “When it starts,” Boland said, “when governments become oppressive about containing the birth rate, when we run out of places to live, when the first famines hit, it’s going to be your fault.”

They filed out, each of them sending silent signals to Alex, pleading with him, or directing him, to use his influence to get me to make sense. I watched them walk through the intensifying snow down to the pad and climb on board their skimmer.

They didn’t look back. The doors swung shut, and the aircraft lifted into the sky and disappeared quickly into the storm.

Alex asked me if I was okay.

Actually, I wasn’t. I’d just made what might have been the biggest decision in human history, and I most definitely was not okay.

“Nevertheless,” he said, “it was the right thing to do. We’ve no need of secret cabals.”

“You voted with them,” I said.

We were standing out on the deck, watching the snow splat against the windows.

He put his palm against the glass, feeling the cold. “I know,” he said. “It was the easiest way out. The least painful. But you’re right. This needs to be in the open.” He kissed me. “I suspect, though, that we’re going to find it’s a mixed gift.”

“Because we get too many people.”

“That, too.” He lowered himself into one of the chairs and put his feet up. “We might discover that when life goes on indefinitely, it’s not quite-” He struggled for the word. “-Quite as fulfilling. As valuable.”

Well, I thought that was nonsense, and I said so.

He laughed. “You’re a sweetheart, Chase.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“How about we go out and get something to eat?”

The storm was intensifying. We could no longer see the line of trees at the edge of the property. “Are you serious?” I said. “You want to go out in this? ”

“Why not?”

“No,” I said. “Let’s eat here. It’s safer.”

We had just finished when Jacob interrupted. “There is a news report that may be of interest,” he said. “Something exploded out over the ocean a few minutes ago. They don’t know what it is yet.”

God help me, I knew right away. So did Alex. “How far out, Jacob?” he asked.

“Fifty kilometers. Over the trench.” A deep part of the ocean. “The way they’re describing it, it must have been a pretty big blast.”

Damn.

“They’re saying no survivors.”

True to the end.

Whatever they used as an explosive device, it was pretty thorough. All the authorities ever found was a charred piece of one of the antigrav pods.

The interest in the Polaris generated by the anniversary events and the attack at Survey had subsided. Everything went back to normal.

We passed messages to several microbiologists that we had reason to believe that Dunninger had been on the right track. They assured us they’d look into it.

Morton College is still in operation. The Lockhart Foundation, which specializes in education for genius-level types, has taken it over.

I’ve always thought of that morning as if two separate conversations took place, one between Alex and the men, the other between Nancy White and me.

She looked young and vibrant and, in some ways, more than human. Or different from human. Maybe knowing you won’t grow old, at least for a very long time, does that for you, adds a certain sense of who and what you are, that you’ve stepped outside the ordinary run of mankind, and indeed of the natural world. Maybe at that point you become almost a neutral observer, sympathetic to humanity in the way that one might be sympathetic to a lost kitten, but nevertheless possessing the sure and certain knowledge that you are different in kind, and not simply in degree.

When the people you meet in daily life become temporary, transient, their significance must necessarily lessen. Jiggle the equipment in Shawn Walker’s skimmer so that he goes into orbit, and what is lost? Only a few decades. In the short term, he was dead anyhow. Is that how it is?

I’ve thought of it often, sitting on the big porch at the end of the day, before setting out for home. Nancy White was trying to tell me something that morning, something more than simply that she’d had to jettison everyone and everything she knew and start life over. I think she was trying to underscore what Alex said later, that the treatment would have been, at best, a mixed gift. That she had become something else.

Metahuman. The next stage. Whatever. Maybe it was the original Nancy White, locked up somewhere inside, trying to connect with me.

You know about the cemetery at the edge of the woods. You can’t get a good look at it unless you go up to the fourth floor. But there has never been a day, since the visit from Klassner and the others, that I haven’t thought about it. When I come in each morning, dropping down past the trees, my eyes are drawn to it, to its pale white markers, and its stone figures. Last stop. Terminal City. I’m a little more conscious of it than I used to be.