Part 6 (2/2)

Jets of flame leaped out of every window and door. The old building seemed to bulge outward and go _voom_. In half a second, it was a single leaping tulip of fire.

The firemen got there then, but it was a little late. Oh, they got Greco out--alive, even. But they didn't save a bit of the laboratory.

It was the third fire in Greco's career, and the most dangerous--for where previously only a few of the youthing demons had escaped, now there were vast quant.i.ties of both sorts.

It was the end of the world.

I knew it.

You know, I wish I had been right. I spent yesterday with Greco. He's married now and has a fine young son. They made an attractive family picture, the two healthy-looking adults, strong-featured, in the prime of life, and the wee toddler between them.

The only thing is--Greco's the toddler.

He doesn't call himself Greco any more. Would you, the way the world is now? He has plenty of money stashed away--I do too, of course--not that money means very much these days. His brain hasn't been affected, just his body. He was lucky, I guess. Some of the demons. .h.i.t the brain in some of their victims and--

Well, it's pretty bad.

Greco got the answer after a while. Both types of demons were loose in the world, and both, by and by, were in every individual.

But they didn't kill each other off.

One simply grew more rapidly, took over control, until it ran out of the kind of molecules it needed. Then the other took over.

Then the first.

Then the other again....

Mice are short-lived. It's like balancing a needle on the end of your nose; there isn't enough s.p.a.ce in a mouse's short span for balance, any more than there is in a needle's.

But in a human life--

Things are going to have to be worked out, though.

It's bad enough that a family gets all mixed up the way Greco's is--he's on a descending curve, his kid is on an aging curve, and Minnie--did I tell you that it was Minnie he married?--has completed her second rejuvenation and is on the way back up again.

But there are worse problems that that.

For one thing, it isn't going to be too long before we run out of s.p.a.ce. I don't mean time, I mean s.p.a.ce. _Living_ s.p.a.ce.

Because it's all very well that the human animal should now mature to grow alternately younger and older, over and over--

But, d.a.m.n it, how I wish that somebody once in a while would _die_!

--WILLIAM MORRISON

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