Chapter VI

Peter Hubbard looked at his old friend with the young face and the young body and the eyes that were unhuman--but less so than before. This was a frightful thing that had been done, and by and by he would feel the full horror of it. Right now he was too numb to care. He felt, as Emrys Shortmire must have felt on coming back to Earth, detached and without interest. But I’ve felt this way before, he thought; it’s because I’m old.

“Were you really satisfied with your bargain, Jan?” he asked, almost casually.

“Not at first,” the boy admitted, sinking down on the couch and clasping his hands around his knees. So young, so graceful, and so ... unnatural. “It seemed to me then that the Morethans had given me youth and taken away humanity. Because, once I found I was physically capable, I found I didn’t really want the things I had craved so much before.”

“So they did trick you?” When all was said and done, Hubbard thought, you could never trust an alien life-form, a foreigner.

“No, no! You still don’t understand. The way I see it is that ... certain elements in us may not mean anything to them. They don’t know they’re there, so they wouldn’t realize that anything got lost in ... the process.”

“Do you think, Jan,” Hubbard asked slowly, “that the way you felt--or didn’t feel--might not have anything to do with the Morethans at all? That, for all your young body, you are an old man and feel like an old man?”

“Nonsense! I know what it is to feel like an old man, and I know what it is to feel like a young man, and I--I felt like neither.”

“When a man has lived a certain number of years,” Hubbard said, knowing that envy gave the truth relish, “he is an old man. Age is in the mind and heart, not only in the body.”

“That’s a lie!” Then Emrys said, more calmly, “If that’s so, why did everything change when I met Megan? Because I found then that my emotions had not been lost! I had a feeling for her that I’d never had for another woman--not even for Alissa, I think. I hadn’t imagined there could be a woman like Megan in the world, so sweet and amiable and completely feminine.” He looked angrily at Hubbard. “You think I’m sentimental, don’t you?”

Hubbard tried to smile. “There’s nothing wrong with sentiment.” But sentimentality was characteristic of an old man’s love.

Emrys laughed and hugged his knees. He was overdoing the ingenuousness. Of course he deliberately played the part of a boy young enough to be his own great-great-grandson, because he was wooing a woman young enough to be his own great-great-granddaughter. And Hubbard remembered how he himself had attempted to move briskly before Nicholas Dyall. Emrys Shortmire would not have the physical aches that he’d had as a result, but could there be psychical aches? Could an old man ever actually be young?

Emrys’ face grew sober. “I’ve never touched her, Peter--really touched her, I mean. She’s not like other women, you know.”

“I know,” Hubbard said, remembering back to the time when he, too, had been in love. Only the memory was not tender in him, because he had married the girl and lived with her for nearly seventy years.

“Peter, you aren’t listening!”

“I’m sorry,” the old man said, waking from his reverie. “What were you saying?”

“I said, do you think Megan would be willing to marry me, if she knew I was older than her great-great-grandfather?”

But there was a more important question that Hubbard could no longer refuse to face. “Jan, what did you give the Morethans in return for what they gave you?”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“I can’t answer it, because I don’t know the girl. But you can answer mine, because you know what you gave the Morethans.”

Emrys was silent for a moment; then he laughed. “I gave them my soul,” he said lightly. “Like that fellow in the opera.”

“I know that. What I’m afraid of is that it wasn’t enough. In what form did you give it to them, Jan?”

“You have no right to catechize me like that.”

The old man’s voice was soft. “I think I have.”

Emrys was a long time in answering. When he finally spoke, his voice was flat and dead. “All right, I gave them the blueprints for the space-warp engines. What else did I have to give them in exchange?”

Hubbard expelled a long breath. He had answered this question for himself many minutes before. Still, the shock of confirmation was too great. All hope was gone now. “Perhaps you had a right to sell your own soul, Jan, but you had no right to sell humanity’s.” His good breeding held up all the way. This man had betrayed the whole of mankind, and so he, Peter Hubbard, reproached him gently for it. Though, come to think of it, what good would savage recrimination--or anything--do?

“But you don’t have to worry about it, Peter!” Emrys cried. “Listen, the Morethan technology is so alien, so different from ours, because it’s based on mental rather than physical forces, that it’ll take centuries before they can acquire the techniques they’ll need to build the engines. And they’ll have trouble getting the materials. We’ll both have been long in our graves by the time they’ll reach Earth.”

“And that makes it all right? It doesn’t matter to you what happens to your own home planet once you are dead?”

The young-looking face was flushed. “Why should it? Does Earth care what happens to me? During the plague, they cursed my name because I invented the star-engines. That’s the only time Earth remembered me.”