The Ganymede Club Read Online Free PDF Page B

did she ask?
    He forced himself to smile and to ask in reply: "Now why do you want such an uninteresting piece of information? However, it is no secret. I am eighty-three years old. May I inquire as to the reason for your question? And what do you mean, how old am I really? "
    "Because you look old, but you don't seem it." She came close to him, her jeweled amethyst eyes staring into his. Strong young hands gripped his thin arms, specially treated to reduce their natural muscle fiber. "There's something about you, the way you look, the way you look at me. You don't act like an old man."
    Bad news. So much for safety and security. Julius felt his smile freeze on his face. "But I am old, my dear," he said gently. "Maybe it is you. Maybe there is something about you that makes me wish that I were not old, that I could be young again."
    If she treated it as a geriatric come-on and grabbed him, he would do his bit or die trying. Close-up, she smelled delicious. Mostly, though, he was just trying for a change of subject.
    He got one.
    "That's a very charming compliment." And then, before he could speak, she asked, "Have you lived on Mars your whole life?" Her question again unsettled him before he could gain his mental balance. He had just enough self-possession to make the quick calculation.
    "Hardly. Ms. Rinker, the first Mars colony was not established until forty-three years ago."
    She was staring at him with what seemed to be genuine astonishment. Didn't young people know any history any more?
    "At the time," he went on, "I was already forty years old. Like everyone else in the solar system, I was living on Earth. I came to Mars at the age of fifty-two."
    This last statement was, as it happened, absolutely true. But one more wild question and he would lose control.
    And here it came.
    "What does it feel like, being old?" Neely Rinker was standing closer, gazing into his eyes. "I can read about aging, and I can think about it, but I can't feel it."
    "Age is—shall we say?—not an unmixed blessing." Julius caught his breath and tried to smile again. "Your bones ache, your senses dim, you sleep fitfully, your desires exceed your energies. Everyone wants to live a long time. But no one would choose to be old."
    " That's what I needed to hear." Again, there came the tangential change of subject. She released her grasp on his arms and headed back to her chair. "Thank you, Dr. Szabo. What you just said is exactly what I had to know. I'm sorry, I've been wasting your time. When you are ready, I want to do the second calculation."
    "But the profile—are you sure that you can provide me with all the inputs?"
    "I already did. They are the same as before."
    "Your own parameters?" Julius was calm again, back with something he knew how to handle. "My dear, although the mortality computer works to provide us with probabilities, there is no indeterminacy or random element in its calculations. With the same profile, you will obtain exactly the same answer as before."
    "I understand that. I want to change just one of the assumptions. Suppose that everything about me is the same, except that I won't die of disease, or of general degeneration due to old age. Suppose that the only way I can die is from some kind of accident. What would my life expectancy be then?"
    "There is no way that the mortality computer can answer such a question. It does not contain suitable tables, or appropriate computational procedures." But even as Julius Szabo spoke, Danny Clay came chiming in. It wasn't a question for an actuary, but it was a natural for someone who could handle probability calculations in his sleep.
    Assume that the only way to die was from an accident. Suppose that the chance of avoiding such a fatal accident was a constant, P, the same every year. Start with a large population—say, a million people. Then the number living at the end of the first year would be a million times P. During the second year, of those remaining, a fraction of P would