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hawking birth control products. No words, only sound and images. They'd finally gotten smart about that.
    Bodies pressed in close around Augie; ahead, someone snarled at someone who jostled someone else who took offense and clobbered someone else...suddenly everything came to a standstill around a boiling froth of people. Augie slipped sideways, breaking line, leaving a ripple of oaths behind him as he found the side of a building and skimmed alongside the ancient brick.
    That's when he heard the voice.
    "Youth pills!"
    He followed the sound to a doorway; a kid looked back at him. "Hey, mister--want youth pills?"
    Augie looked at the teenager and his proffered bottle, at the bulge of more bottles in his black apron and at its indecipherable script of a logo.
"
Jack's Place," the kid said, startling Augie with the casual way in which he said it. As if the kid--this society--took it for granted that he couldn't read. No big deal.
    The kid held out the bottle again, an impatient gesture. "Jackie K, you know?" he said. "Heya, you know someone elder? Take 'em while they're still legal."
    "Youth pills?" Augie looked out into the crowd, at the preponderance of older people there, and he jerked his chin at them. "Why aren't they taking 'em, you giving them out free?"
    "Moralists," said the kid, adding a little sneer. His eyes looked old.
How old?
Augie suddenly wondered, as his hand closed slowly around the bottle. "Painless," the kid offered, trying to read Augie's hesitation.
    Youth pills.
What could be better than that? He only needed a few--one for himself, one for his mother, one to analyze. And then he'd have all he needed to make his fortune. To walk away from the Historians and their airs. He tried to swallow his excitement. "Enough in there for two?"
    The kid grinned, too, as if Augie had passed some sort of initiation, become part of a secret. He nodded. "Three, even. We ought to have done this years ago, giving 'em out like this. Gotten people used to it, before the politics stepped in. It worked for the cloners. Just prepare yourself and take 'em, nothing fancy."
    And Augie nodded like he knew, but he didn't even wait for the kid to look away. He thumbed the recall switch and returned to the sterile implacability of the night-time travel room.
    #
    The janitor who went Forward and lived.
    The janitor who
changed the world.
    He'd done something no one else could or would--because of who he was, and not what he'd bothered to cram into his brain. God-bloody-damned
youth pills
!
    The kid in the apron would get his wish, all right--people would be long accustomed to these pills by the time he was born. Youth pills for everyone!
    But not before Augie. For once, Augie would be first.
    At home, he transferred the pill for his mother into a small self-sealer, laboriously copying the simple directions--for his mother had been through LitEd. She even owned books. But her disappointment with a son who hadn't followed her example would evaporate once she realized the tremendous import of what he'd done--of what he'd given her.
    He let himself into her closet of an apartment--just two floors down--and left the sealer on her bed, recording a short explanation at her message center.
To make you young again.
He wished he had more words, a way to make it sound important. Until now, the everyday words he knew had always seemed enough.
    He went back upstairs to stare at his own dose. There should be more fanfare, he thought. More recognition of the moment. If nothing else, he should be in Tolan's office, watching the look on her face as she realized--
    It's better this way.
Present the world with the deed accomplished--when it was too late to stop him, or to steal the credit.
Yeah. Much better this way.
Augie popped the pill into his mouth, swallowing it dry.
    Almost immediately, the vidphone rang: his mother. Her voice was a mixture of affection and impatience as she squinted at his hand-copied directions and asked him where on earth they'd