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he and Limila were bringing Tevann up to date con- cerning the expedition to Sisshain, a Tilaran woman Joined the group. Tevann stood, so the others did, also, as he said, "I would have you be of acquaintance with Uelein, my most needful person." He gave her their Jiames in turn, and she shook hands with each-except for Limila. Those two embraced; obviously they knew each other.

Everyone sat. Tevann poured klieta for Uelein; the rest continued eating. Barton studied the woman. She was shorter than average for Tilara, not much over Barton's own height, and slim even for her own race. Like livajj, she was one of the minority of Tilarans whose hair was a dark reddish-brown rather than black, and unlike the majority, she wore it cut short. It looked, he thought, like

fur.

Limila had backtracked the story a little, repeating in short form what Uelein had missed. Barton's attention roamed, and was brought back when Limila spoke his name. "Huh?"

"I asked you, Barton, if today will be all right for us to go to the medical place. I told you-on the ship, re- member?-that when we returned here, we would have to see as to the treatments for you, to stabilize metabolism and postpone aging."

"I-I'd forgotten all about that." And he had. In the shock of learning that Limila had lived perhaps eighty Earth-years and, due to Tilaran medical science, was still physically youthful. Barton's mind had more or less crawled in a hole and pulled it in after him. Now he spoke his fear. "They may not work on Earthani the way they do for you people." He shook his head. "I don't know-"

She gripped his shoulder and shook it. "But we must go and find out! Barton, you are not one to hide from risk."

While he was wondering why he couldn't find an answer, Myra Hake said, "Postpone aging? What's this about?"

Barton shrugged. "It gave me a jolt, I'll tell you. Limila, here-" He gestured, "You wouldn't believe her chrono- logical age if I wrote it in my own blood; the Tilarans hava some sort of longevity treatments. Limila says they mighr work for us, too. In fact, she only mentioned them by ac- cident, because she assumed we probably had the same thing." Talking about it made his mind work again;

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he turned to Limila. "All right; I suppose today's as good a day as any to see what we can find out,"

"Hold up a minute." Cheng leaned forward. "Taking your word that such treatments exist, how far does it go?

Have you thought ahead?"

Barton wasn't sure what he meant, but Limila said, "Why, of course you and Myra, and Abdul, must have the same opportunity. And-"

"And. yes," said Cbeng. "I-"

Abdul broke in. "For myself, I shall abstain from any such course, until my wife back on Earth can share it with me. I have no wish to stay young while she does^not."

"It's not just us," Cheng said. "If something like this hits Earth, what happens to the very delicate population balance?"

For seconds, everybody talked at once. Then Barton held up a hand and got some quiet. "This problem's go- ing to take some thinking, and I admit / haven't done any, yet." Now he thought, and said, "Add an arbitrary fifty years, say, to the average lifespan on Earth, and for the first fifty years, the ghost of Malthus is going to have a field day. After that, the death rate catches up again and things drift back to present normal. And there's ways to minimize the bulge. Maybe tie fertility restrictions to artificial longevity-make it an earned privilege, not a right." The overwhelming complications confused liis line of thought; he shook his head then, and said only. "Some thinking, I said? A lot of iti But there's time for that, as long as the word doesn't get out into the rumor factory.

And mainly, we don't know yet whether the Tilaran processes even work for our species."

Cheng nodded. "Ordinarily I take a dim view of the elitist concept of keeping secrets for the good of those left ignorant, but this makes twice this year that I'm forced to accept it as the lesser evil." Looking at Barton, whose eyebrows had raised, he said, "The other? The great ship, on Sisshain, of course."

"Oh, sure." Barton nodded agreement.

"Very well," Limila said. "Barton, can we leave here, do you think, within the hour?" Again he nodded. "Then I will call and arrange a meeting for us, at the medical place."

Umila drove the car; she knew where they were going 374.

and Barton didn't, and now there was no need for combat- style driving. She left the scattered settlement that con- tained Tevann's residence, and Barton soon realized they were headed back to the city adjoining the main space- port. When she pulled up and parked beside a building, Barton looked at it and recognized it; this was where Limda had gamed her transplanted breasts.

The place still didn't look like a hospital, to Barton- an irregularly convex structure with concave sections dished in here and there, roughly two stories high, and finished in colors shading from pale blue-green near the entrance to a fluorescent orange at the top of the side he could see. As they left the car and walked into the build- ing, a broken corner to one side caught his attention and triggered memory. Same building, all right.

And inside, first what looked like a combined bedroom and living room, rather than any sort of lobby. And the curved narrow corridor, and the somewhat elastic door that took a good hard knock to make any sound. From inside it, someone said, "Be of entrance." And they went in.

Doctors are doctors. Barton decided, no matter where you find them. These two Tilarans, a man and a woman wearing smooth, green, tight-fitting jumpsuits of a sort, quizzed Limila as if Barton were deaf, mute, and incapa- ble of understanding. Well, th& last part was close to true;

their terminology was new to him' and there was no point in butting in and trying to learn it in a hurry.

So he kept his mouth shut and did what they told him.

He stripped, was scrubbed from the neck down with something that turned out to be a depilatory-among other things, probably-and submitted to the taking of ( a lot of samples from his goose-pimpled body. The place, he thought, could have used a little warming.

He was handed a pill and swallowed it, and went onto a calm, euphoric high that felt better than anything he'd ever got from black hash in Nam. Each touch of needle or scalpel made a delightful tingling that radiated from me spot in ripples that closed together in the middle of his head and left him shuddering with joy. One comer of his mind remembered that Tilara didn't have anesthesia.

"There is a drug," Limila had told him long ago, back on Earth. "Pain becomes ecstasy." It sure as hell did.

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He tried to keep track of what samples were taken, not all of them painful in any case. Blood, saliva, perspira- tion, semen, lymph, urine, spinal fluid, skin tissue, a snip of muscle, fluid from his left eyeball, the involuntary tears that came from his frantic fear (drug or no drug) when' they messed with his eye, wipings from his nose, from his ears. Something happening at the back of his thigh as he lay face down, and from the sound of it, the sample was probably bone marrow. A probing aE his rear, and he couldn't figure why they'd need to sample his feces. But be my guest. Then some twinges, here and there, that gave him no idea at all as to what was being

extracted.

Then they were done with him; be was taken to another

room and put to bed, flat on his back. The drug was wear- ing off, but he felt only minor pains from their invasions of his body. Limila leaned over him and said, "Until tomorrow at this time you must lie as still as you find possible. Otherwise, you may suffer very bad headaches, at the least I will sit with you, as much as I may, to re- mind you to avoid movement. But now, try to rest."

A whole damn day, stuck flat on his back with no advance warning? Why, he'd go nuts. He was still think- ing that way, a little outraged, when he realized he was

about to go to sleep.

When he woke, he was given his breakfast '*to drink through a bent plastic straw. In the food they must have put a lesser version of the drug, because Barton lay cheer- fully groggy for what had to be quite a few hours. Some- times, when he opened his eyes, Liroila was there;

sometimes it was a Tilaran he didn't know. When he woke with his head working more or less, though, Limila greeted him. "You are feeling better. Barton? Now it will be all right for you to move, for us to return to Tevann's."

Return to Tevann's? Just like that? Barton blinked once. "They figure the treatment won't work on me;

right?" * -^-^

Limila shook her head. "That is not the situation."

"Then what is? Don't I get a report?"

She told him, and then they went back to Tevann's

place.

"Here's how it is," said Barton, across the raised pool 376.

that set in the middle of the foot-well, a few decimeters below eye level. Around the perimeter of padded floor that served for seating, Myra and Cheng looked at him intensely, Abdul Muhammed with an air of total calm.

Tevann looked mildly interested, and Uelein as well.

Limila, of course, already knew what he'd say, and could correct him if he got it wrong- The colorful little creatures sporting in the pool, Tilaran equivalent of fish, would hardly care. Barton took another sip of a local distillation that came close to being bourbon but didn't quite make it, and said his piece.

"AU they guarantee," he said, "is mat if I try this option it won't kill me. Going to take them a while, I'm told, to tailor the various stuffs to my individual metabolism.

They have to do that with their own people, even, and this has to be trickier."