"I've seen the ward."
"America has millions of such people. Only a fraction of 'em in hospitals. Moms and pops, grandmas and grandpas, hanging on to the last, sick gristle of existence. Spoiling the lives of other millions of people. Taking their time and their energy. Absorbing funds that young kids desperately need. All for nothing. Wheedling and whining and complaining if everything isn't soft and easy for them. Reminding sons and daughters and grandchildren of their 'duty.' The duty to be enslaved by meaningless, useless senility. The food and the clothes, the beds and the service, the tax money, the energy, the topsoil, if you go for Vogt—and the metal—pours down their gullets and is worn out by their worn-out bodies—and not one single, solitary useful thing is accomplished."
"You're stealing my act," I said.
Tom laughed ruefully. "It's an easy act for a doctor to crib! Tell me, why in hell do people look forward so much to old age? Nine times out of ten, it's a mess. Even proud, independent people, when they get old, usually lose their pride and their independence—and go down begging for handouts."
"The best reason I can think of," I said, "is that they're disappointed in life as they've lived it up to middle age."
"The whole country grows older," Tom went on, after nodding to himself. "The American landscape will soon be cluttered with human antiques. Pension-seeking, vengeful, dogmatic, persecuting, bloc-voting, parasitic millions. An ocean of wasteful protoplasm—Old Men of the Sea—and old Women—riding on the backs of everybody. Is a thing like that humane?"
"It is richly sentimental."
"In the labs, thousands of my colleagues are sweating to bring it about. Studying the degenerative diseases. Trying to lick cancer and heart trouble and hypertension. Trying to lick aging itself—to keep the old, old indefinitely! Geriatrics—a whole science for the maintenance of second childhood! Sometimes, Phil, I actually think the world is as crazy as you say it is. Sometimes—when I run into a bright kid whose parents can't afford to have its legs straightened—and then when I visit my ward—I'd like to sweep the place clean with a Thompson gun and move in the kids who need it."
"There is the Townsend Plan," I offered. "Two hundred dollars a month for everybody who's old, if they spend it right away—and millions are too stupid to see the catch. In fifty years—Pensioned Old Age may be the great goal that progress and prosperity are today. Of course, there isn't enough stuff to go around, and there will never be, so two hundred bucks, if you gave it to the gaffers to spend, soon wouldn't buy a good-sized roast. But they may try for it."
Tom laughed somberly. "They are trying. You should see the pension literature in my ward. The letters they write. The voting they do. Should I shoot them? What the hell do you really believe about it?"