THE OLD ONES
By Betsy Curtis
They had outlived their usefulness on Earth
and society waited patiently for them to die. Thus it
was only natural for them to seek a new world....
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
December 1950
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Dr. Warner didn't usually burst into Dr. Farrar's office. Usually hepaced slowly up the hospital corridor, pulling down his glisteningwhite lastijac uniform, meditating on all the mistakes he might havemade during the past week, reluctantly turning the knob on the outerdoor, hesitatingly asking Miss Herrington if the doctor wished to seehim now, stepping humbly through the inner door into the presence. Butthis morning he burst in and slammed the inner door.
"Two this morning in Block Nineteen!" he blurted. "Two suicides atonce; Saul Forsythe and Madam LePays!"
Only a few minutes before, Dr. Farrar had been reading and sighing,sighing at the thought that there were no excitements left, onlyannoyances and minor gratifications.
"The publication of The One-Hundred-Year-Old in the Culture of Todaymarks the date of another notable contribution to human understandingby the justly famous young doctor, Jules Farrar." The review grew morelaudatory from paragraph to glowing paragraph. Dr. Farrar, re-readingit word by word, was inclined to smile at the adjective 'young'; he wasfifty-eight and felt every day of it this smiling spring morning. Heran his hand back over his head smoothing the place where, twenty yearsago, there had been hair. He looked up from the paper on his desk,through the glimmering sunlight at the row of dark green file casesbanking the opposite end of the office, the first five now ticketed"closed" and the "closed" sign lying on top of the sixth, the 100-yearcase. He gazed on down the row—110, 120, 130, 140 and the rest—andsighed deeply. Futility washed over him, and an echo of the old storyof the man who wrote his autobiography taking a year to write thedoings of each day. The job would never be finished and the amusementof writing of youth was too far behind.
He quoted grimly from his own Sixty-Year-Old, "Among males atthis time, the conviction, often amounting to panic, that the timefor accomplishment is almost past begins to grow and obscure thecomfortable mellowness of being in the midst of important activity."How could he have known so much at thirty and still have arrived atalmost sixty without having solved anything, discovered anything new,done nothing but descriptive studies steadily for thirty-five years?And there were no excitements left—nothing but annoyances.
His office door now flew open with a crash against the 50-year filecase, then was banged shut again and Bob Warner's white-jacketed bodywas leaning toward him over his desk.
"Two suicides at once, Dr. Farrar!" Dr. Warner was almost shoutingat him, "and one last week and four others in the past year! They'llinvestigate us and upset the subjects and everybody. They'll get out ofBlock Nineteen and go poking around in genetics and new diseases andwant to know where and why every cent is being spent and wind up tryingto cut the staff or change the diets or some other stupidity." (JulesFarrar smiled wryly: there had been two Congressional Investigations atthe hospital since he came, and Bob's description from hearsay was alltoo accurate.) "I tell you, Doctor, we've got to hush this up. Congresswon