Time Enough for Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

mean it, Lazarus. Oh, I like to run things; I know it. I hope to lead the Families on their third Exodus. But I don’t expect to. However, I think my chances of putting together a viable colony—of young people, not over a hundred years old, two hundred at most—without the aid of the Foundation, are fairly good. But if I fail in that, too”—he shrugged—“migration will be the only worthwhile course open to me; Secundus will have nothing more to offer.” Weatheral added, “Perhaps I feel as you do, sir, in a minor way. I have no wish to be Chairman Pro Tem all my days. I’ve had almost a century of it; that’s enough. If I can’t put this over.”
    Lazarus was thoughtfully silent; Weatheral waited.
    “Ira, install that suicide switch for me. But tomorrow. Not today.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Don’t you want to know why?” Lazarus picked up the large envelope, his will. “If you convince me that you are going to migrate, come hell or high water and no matter what the Trustees do, I want to rewrite this. My investments and cash accounts here and there—if somebody hasn’t stolen them while my back was turned—add up to a nice piece of change. Possibly enough to make the difference between success and failure in mounting a migration. If the Trustees won’t back it with Foundation funds. And they won’t.”
    Weatheral said nothing. Lazarus glared at him. “Didn’t your mother teach you to say ‘Thank you’?”
    “For what, Lazarus? For giving me something after you’re dead and no longer need it? If you do this, it will be to tickle your vanity—not to please me.”
    Lazarus grinned. “Hell, yes. I ought to stick in a condition that you name the planet ‘Lazarus.’ But I would have no way to enforce it. Okay, we understand each other. And I think—Do you respect good machinery?”
    “Eh? Yes. As much as I despise machinery that doesn’t do what it is putatively designed to do.”
    “We still understand each other. I think I’ll leave the ‘Dora’—that’s my yacht—to you personally rather than to the Families’ chairman… if you lead a migration.”
    “Uh…you tempt me to thank you.”
    “Don’t. Just be good to her. She’s a sweet craft, she’s never known anything but kindness. She’ll make a fine flagship for you. With simple reoutfitting—specs for it in her computer—she’ll house a staff of twenty or thirty. And you can ground and reconnoiter in her, then lift off again—which your transports won’t be able to do, most likely.”
    “Lazarus… I don’t want to inherit either money or a yacht from you. Let them finish your rejuvenation—and come with us, man! I’ll step aside and you can boss. Or you can have no duties at all. But come!”
    Lazarus smiled bleakly and shook his head. “I’ve been on six such colonizing ventures to virgin planets, not counting Secundus. All to planets I discovered. Gave it up centuries back. Anything gets boring in time. Do you think Solomon serviced all his thousand wives? If so, what sort of job did he do on the last one?—poor girl! Find me something new to do and I might never touch that suicide switch and still give you all I’ve got for your colony. It ’ud be a fair swap…as this halfway rejuvenation is most unsatisfactory; I don’t feel well, yet I can’t die. So I’m stuck between the suicide switch and giving in for the full treatment…the donkey that starved to death between two piles of hay. But it would have to be new , Ira, not something I’ve done over and over again. Like that old whore, I’ve climbed the same stairs too many times; my feet hurt.”
    “I’ll think about the problem, Lazarus. I’ll give it hard and systematic research.”
    “Seven to two you can’t find anything I haven’t done.”
    “I’ll make a real try. You’ll lay off the suicide switch while I research it?”
    “No promises. Not once I get this will redrafted. Can you trust your chief legal eagle? May need some help…because