  T he world was topsy-turvy, and in the middle of it Minnie disappeared, talking hysterically about reporting us to the authorities. I don't mind admitting that I was worried. And the experiments were not progressing. The trouble seemed to be that the two varieties of demons—the aging and the youthing—were not compatible; if one took up residence in a given section of an organism, the other moved out. The more numerous destroyed the weaker; there was no balance. We tested it again and again in the mice and there was no doubt of it. So far, only the youthing demons were free. But when Minnie left us, it was only a matter of time. Our carriers—from Grand Rapids and from the hotel—had spread to California and the East Coast, to the North and to the South, throughout the country, perhaps by now through the world. It would be slower with the aging demons—there was only one of Minnie—but it would be equally sure. Greco began drinking heavily. "It's the end," he brooded. "We're licked." "No, Greek! We can't give up!" "We have to give up. The demons are loose in the Earth, Virgie! Those people in the headlines—they'll die of young age. So will others—even plants and animals, and bacteria, as the demons adapt to them. And then—why not? The air. The rocks, the ocean, even the Earth itself. Remember, the entropy of the Universe is supposed to tend to a maximum not only as a whole, but in each of its parts taken in isolation. The Earth's evolution—reversed. Spottily, and maybe that's worse, because some parts will evolve forward and others reverse, as is happening in my own body. Heaven help the world, Old Virgie! And not just the Earth, because what can stop them from spreading? To the Moon, the other planets—out of the Solar System, for that matter; to the other galaxies, even. Why not? And then—" "GRECO." An enormous tinny voice, more than human, filled the air. It came from outside. I jumped a foot. It sounded like the voice of a demon; then I got a grip on myself and understood. It was a loudspeaker, and it came from outside. "GRECO. WE KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE. COME ON OUT!" I had a stabbing sensation of familiarity. "The police!" I cried. "Greco, it's the police!" He looked at me wearily and shook his head. "No. More likely the F.B.I." ell, that was it. I got out—I didn't wait for permission from the Greek. I stopped at the door, and three searchlight beams hit me right in the eye. There were cars all around the laboratory, but I couldn't see them, not after those lights went on. I froze, stiff; wanting to make sure they understood (a) that I wasn't Greco and (b) that I didn't have a gun. They understood, all right. But they let me out. They put me in one of the cars, with a slim gray-eyed young man in a snap-brimmed hat sitting politely and alertly beside me, and they let me watch; and what happened after that wasn't funny at all. Greco didn't come out They shouted at him over the loudspeaker and eventually he answered—his voice little and calm, coming out of nowhere, and all he said was, "Go away. I won't come out. I warn you, don't try to force your way in." But he knew they wouldn't listen, of course. They didn't. They tried force. And he met it in novel ways with force of his own. The door had locked itself behind me; they got a fence post for a battering ram, and the post burst into flame. They found an L-beam from an old bed frame and tried that, and they were sorry they had done it; the thing melted in the middle, splattering them with hot drops of steel. The polite, alert young man beside me said, not so polite any more, "What's he doing, you? What sort of fancy tricks has he got in there?" "Demons," I said crazily, and that was a mistake, but what else was I to do? Try to explain Maxwell's equations to a Fed? They were trying again—there were fifteen or twenty of them, at least. They went for the windows, and the windows dissolved and rained cherry-red wet glass on them. They tried again through the open frames when the glass was gone, and the frames burst into fire around them, the blue smoke bleached white in the yellow of the flame and the white of the searchlights. They tried singly, by stealth; and they tried in clusters of a dozen, yelling. I t was hopeless—hopeless for everybody, because they couldn't get in and the Greek could never, never get out; for go away they wouldn't. Not even when, with poof and a yellow flare, the gas tank of one of the cars exploded. All that happened was that the man in the snap-brimmed hat and I leaped out, real quick; and then all the cars went up. But the men didn't leave. And then the guns began to go off without waiting for anyone to pull the trigger; and the barrels softened and slumped and spattered to the ground. But the men still had bare hands, and they stayed. The Greek got wild—or lost control, it was hard to tell which. There was a sudden catastrophic whooshing roar and, wham, a tree took flame for roots. A giant old oak, fifty feet tall, I guess it had been there a couple of centuries, but Greco's demons changed all that; it took flame and shot whistling into the air, spouting flame and spark like a Roman candle. Maybe he thought it would scare them. Maybe it did. But it also made them mad. And they ran, all at once, every one of them but my personal friend, for the biggest, openest of the windows— And leaped back, cursing and yelling, beating out flames on their clothes. Jets of flame leaped out of every window and door. The old building seemed to bulge outward and go voom. In half a second, it was a single leaping tulip of fire. The firemen got there then, but it was a little late. Oh, they got Greco out—alive, even. But they didn't save a bit of the laboratory. It was the third fire in Greco's career, and the most dangerous—for where previously only a few of the youthing demons had escaped, now there were vast quantities of both sorts. It was the end of the world. I knew it. Y ou know, I wish I had been right. I spent yesterday with Greco. He's married now and has a fine young son. They made an attractive family picture, the two healthy-looking adults, strong-featured, in the prime of life, and the wee toddler between them. The only thing is—Greco's the toddler. He doesn't call himself Greco any more. Would you, the way the world is now? He has plenty of money stashed away—I do too, of course—not that money means very much these days. His brain hasn't been affected, just his body. He was lucky, I guess. Some of the demons hit the brain in some of their victims and— Well, it's pretty bad. Greco got the answer after a while. Both types of demons were loose in the world, and both, by and by, were in every individual. But they didn't kill each other off. One simply grew more rapidly, took over control, until it ran out of the kind of molecules it needed. Then the other took over. Then the first. Then the other again.... Mice are short-lived. It's like balancing a needle on the end of your nose; there isn't enough space in a mouse's short span for balance, any more than there is in a needle's. But in a human life— Things are going to have to be worked out, though. It's bad enough that a family gets all mixed up the way Greco's is—he's on a descending curve, his kid is on an aging curve, and Minnie—did I tell you that it was Minnie he married?—has completed her second rejuvenation and is on the way back up again. But there are worse problems that that. For one thing, it isn't going to be too long before we run out of space. I don't mean time, I mean space. Living space. Because it's all very well that the human animal should now mature to grow alternately younger and older, over and over— But, damn it, how I wish that somebody once in a while would die! —WILLIAM MORRISON |
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