Half Life (32 page)

The project would never really end, of course, no matter how solidly human survival was assured. If discovery ended, Maria felt strongly, there would be little point to survival. No fun.

And even if Belvew’s suggestion—or speculation, or guess, or wish—were to prove right, it was a long way from cause to cure. Could you really strain all the gold atoms out of the Earth environment?

She brightened. Maybe Titan could tell them the results of
that
…

Before Belvew had a usable report ready, a problem developed. The tissue analyses showed no more, and very little less, gold than samples from friends on Earth dating from two centuries earlier. They did show far smaller in other metals, platinum, iridium, and even barium; it looked just possibly as though Belvew could still be right in his basic idea, but that Ginger and the others must be wrong about which metal was involved. This caused several invocations, aloud and otherwise, of Rule X during the ensuing weeks.

It was Peter Martucci who finally suggested a testable two-stage process in which the heavy metal could catalyze the formation of new and different enzymes, so that even one metal atom could be responsible for an indefinitely large number of product molecules. This, of course, favored metals other than gold, which should have started eliminating humanity a lot earlier if it were the real cause…

Ginger had trouble forgiving him until
a
report from Earth, weeks later, told of a strong statistical probability that gold was probably guilty after all. Of course, testing was being continued…

So the work went happily on. No one on the staff was ever bothered by the fear that there might sometime be nothing left to do.

They were still being useful.

Maria was having all the fun she could manage, finding things out.

There were lots of questions still to answer. GO6 was established habit, and Rule X cropped up about as often as it ever had in friendly arguments.

The last
possible
question of course is “Why?” It is never, equally of course, the last
question
because it can always be asked again of any answer.

Maria, rationally and responsibly, had assumed that while Belvew’s idea was extremely plausible, it was also probably wrong and certainly incomplete.

But she was satisfied. The Titan crew would have plenty to keep them from boredom and morale loss, even if Belvew was right. Living on, and finding and assembling more pieces of the puzzle, would be much more fun than dying in Deep Sleep on the way back to Earth. After the several years they had spent in free fall, it would also be more fun than reaching the place.

Since some of the possible ailments which might claim members of the group were variations of Alzheimer’s syndrome, Status had plenty of reading and recitation material for the mentally young in its fiction banks; loss of competence was not a reason for a friend to become a specimen.

So far, not even Maria had read or listened to them; Baum and Lofting were the closest she usually came to juvenile literature.

Status was of course aware of the material and could start reciting from it without notice; but it was not conscious of it. He—It couldn’t even speculate about the likelihood that some time, with half or more of the group reduced to children, a particular phrase in his fiction memory might become a trite saying.

It could never, without careful explanation from a human being, recognize how the phrase would apply to the beings in its care. Presumably.

But the phrase did apply.

They lived happily ever after while they lived.