"The publication of The One-Hundred-Year-Old in the Culture of Today marks the date of another notable contribution to human understanding by the justly famous young doctor, Jules Farrar." The review grew more laudatory from paragraph to glowing paragraph. Dr. Farrar, re-reading it word by word, was inclined to smile at the adjective 'young'; he was fifty-eight and felt every day of it this smiling spring morning. He ran his hand back over his head smoothing the place where, twenty years ago, there had been hair. He looked up from the paper on his desk, through the glimmering sunlight at the row of dark green file cases banking the opposite end of the office, the first five now ticketed "closed" and the "closed" sign lying on top of the sixth, the 100-year case. He gazed on down the row—110, 120, 130, 140 and the rest—and sighed deeply. Futility washed over him, and an echo of the old story of the man who wrote his autobiography taking a year to write the doings of each day. The job would never be finished and the amusement of writing of youth was too far behind.
He quoted grimly from his own Sixty-Year-Old, "Among males at this time, the conviction, often amounting to panic, that the time for accomplishment is almost past begins to grow and obscure the comfortable mellowness of being in the midst of important activity." How could he have known so much at thirty and still have arrived at almost sixty without having solved anything, discovered anything new, done nothing but descriptive studies steadily for thirty-five years? And there were no excitements left—nothing but annoyances.
His office door now flew open with a crash against the 50-year file case, then was banged shut again and Bob Warner's white-jacketed body was leaning toward him over his desk.
"Two suicides at once, Dr. Farrar!" Dr. Warner was almost shouting at him, "and one last week and four others in the past year! They'll investigate us and upset the subjects and everybody. They'll get out of Block Nineteen and go poking around in genetics and new diseases and want to know where and why every cent is being spent and wind up trying to cut the staff or change the diets or some other stupidity." (Jules Farrar smiled wryly: there had been two Congressional Investigations at the hospital since he came, and Bob's description from hearsay was all too accurate.) "I tell you, Doctor, we've got to hush this up. Congress won't let us get away with firing a couple of floor nurses this time!" Ione Phillips was in Nineteen and much too pretty for a scapegoat. It wasn't his responsibility anyway. "What are we going to do, Doctor?"
"Saul Forsythe and Madame LePays," Jules Farrar's voice was low with concern, "How old were they? What was the matter?"
"Madame was 182 and Forsythe was a year or two older. There wasn't anything wrong that I know. They'd both been reading last night. He had the last volume of the Britannica and she had a little old book of poems—French poems."
"No animosities, no quarrels with other subjects?"
"No, no! They weren't very social types, you know; we haven't had much culture-pattern data on either of them for some time. It's not as if they were a great loss to the experiments," he added reassuringly. Mustn't get old Farrar upset.
The older doctor looked oddly at the younger. "There must be something wrong in Block Nineteen. We'll call a meeting of staff. You can't cover up this sort of thing, Doctor. Everybody probably knows it already. You know how nurses gossip. But we'd better talk to Daneshaw first. He's always sound on what's going on in Block Nineteen."