A Feast Unknown

I said, “The Nine will have to be satisfied with what they can get. You tell Hengist that you two sunk

Doc in the moat. If he insists that Doc be pulled out of the moat, then we’re in for it. Knowing the Nine as I do, I imagine that they’ll have to have positive evidence that he’s dead. We may have to buy some time with an accident for Hengist or whoever acts as agent for the Nine.”

“Oh, Jack!” Clio said. “More killings?”

“If we’re going to resign from the ranks of the immortals, we will do it now,” I said. “And we’ll have to drop out of sight swiftly. You know that’s increasingly difficult in this ever-narrowing world.”

Trish and Clio left to wheel the sleeping Doc into the hidden room. An hour later, Hengist entered.

He did not seem surprised that Caliban had died. Nor did he say anything about recovering the body. The next day, however, he notified us that the visit from one of the Nine had been cancelled. An agent, a Sir

Ronald Hawthorpe, would bring me instructions and also interrogate me.

After he left, I tried to walk into Doc’s room, but the pain between my legs discouraged this. I allowed Clio to wheel me in beside his bed. He was lying there with a stiff plastic collar around his neck.

Clio had done a professional job in doctoring his broken neck. He was flat on his back and staring up at the ceiling. Tears formed pools with a deep golden-green bottom in his eye sockets, and tears ran down his cheeks. Trish was crying also, but at the same time she was smiling.

“He hasn’t wept since he was a little child,” she said. “Not even when his mother died or his father died, did he weep. He must have an ocean down there, and I thought it would never come. Oh, I’m so happy!”

If he did not stop crying, she would not be so happy. He could be suffering a complete breakdown, or he could be on the road to a healthiness he had never had.

I said, “Doctor Caliban, why are you crying?”

He did not answer. I waited a while and then repeated my question. After another long period of silence, he said, in a choked voice, “I am crying for Jocko and Porky and for the other wonderful friends I had. I am crying for many people, for Trish especially, because she loves me and I gave her almost nothing back. And I am crying most of all, and I ca

Clio, always ready to be triggered with empathy, sniffled.

I said, “Then you must feel as I do, that you’ve suffered a strange sea-change, as it were?”

“I have,” he said.

“Perhaps,” I said, “we may be doing the Nine an injustice. Perhaps they knew that we would be all the better after having gotten through the effects of the elixir.”

“I doubt it very much,” Doc said. “They would not know exactly what the end-results would be. They must have gone through this themselves, though it’s been so long ago they may have forgotten. You must not forget that they put us through hell before we met and that they ordered us to kill each other afterwards. No, they are evil, evil!”

Clio said, “But won’t we go through something like that, too?”

“Nobody can say, except the Nine,” I replied. “And they’re not talking, of course. It may be that only those descended from the Old Stone Age people, those who have the genes for it, react to the elixir in this fashion. But we’ll never find out. The question now, Doc, is something only you can answer, though I can predict what your answer will be, I believe. Are you prepared to give up the elixir and fight the Nine?”

“Trish said she told you about my experiments. I think we’ll have the elixir ourselves some day. But whether we do or don’t, I am no longer obeying the Nine. And he who disobeys, you know, is their deadly enemy.”

I wheeled closer and took his hand. “They divided us, brother,” I said. “But united ...” I did not feel brotherly, as yet, and I suppose he did not. But this was a man I could admire and respect and the best ally anyone could want. The odds were greatly against us, but if any two could put up a better fight, I did not know them.

Clio gave him another shot, and he was soon asleep. Trish stayed behind to watch him adoringly for a while. Clio and I returned to the room, where I slowly and painfully got back into bed.

Clio sat down and looked at me for a long time. Then she said, “Trish told me about you two.”

“Oh?” I said.

My heart was beating faster than if I’d heard a leopard prowling in the African bush.

“When you two made love,” she said.

“We weren’t making love,” I said. “We were loving each other. Fucking passionately and lovingly.”

She reddened slightly. No matter how uninhibited her behavior, she still reacts to certain words.

“She said that nothing might have happened if you hadn’t been so concerned about being crippled by your aberration.”

“I did not explain to her why I was doing that,” I said. “But she was essentially correct. Although I think the same thing would have happened even if I was not concerned about my aberration.”

She did not go into a furious tirade or start weeping, as I had expected. She said, “The trouble with retaining complete youthfulness and its vigor is that a couple ca

We’re 80 and so should be weak and set in our ways and thoroughly accustomed to each, like a wheel in a rut. A wheel that doesn’t want to leave the rut. But we know each other to the last atom, and, while we love each other very much, we are youthful and we are begi

“So?” I said.

“So I think we’ll have to have some variety now and then. The little vacations in the caverns provided that, but those are gone.”

Suddenly, she stood up and bent over and threw her arms around me.

“What am I saying?” she cried. “I love you and only you! I really want no other man!”

She was sincere, and I loved her very much at that moment. I always love her, although there are some moments when the intensity is less. And, certainly, when I was in Trish, I was not thinking about

Clio. Fairness is fairness. She really did not want another man—as her permanent mate. But she was right.

Immortality has its prices, and it is impossible to confine yourself to one mate forever if you have the vigor of youth.

This problem would have to work itself out whichever way it would go. At the moment, we had more vital business to attend to. Hawthorpe arrived that afternoon and, after some formalities, got to the instructions.

First, we must get Caliban’s body up and remove the head and send it off to the Nine. Usually, the victor took the head himself, but since I would not be able to move for some time, that just could not be done. Hawthorpe would carry it to the Nine.

Second, I was to come to London as soon as I was able and not one second later. I would then be flown to Uganda and taken through the secret routes of the caverns. This time, I would not be blindfolded. After going through the ceremony of seating me, the Nine would hold a conference. This was the most serious meeting since 1945. Hawthorpe could not tell me much, but the discussion would be about the means used for solving the population problem.

The Nine did not intend to let the over-crowding and the pollution go on any longer. The only question was not when but how.

The Nine have a way with temptation.

For a minute, I visualized a world something like that into which I had been born but much better.

The jungles and the sava