Bowhart must have known that much, saying what he did; because Doc wasn't at all offended—just airily nettled, like an ageless leprechaun pitied by an urchin.
"Oh?" he asked lightly. "In the past many a millionaire would have given more than a million for another week of life and vigor, and it was no sale. The value is a lot bigger; but it doesn't cost that, now—it doesn't cost anything except a little more growing up. What do you want to do, Bow? Drink beer, eat ice cream, make love? I can do all that, too. Someday you'll get it through your fuddled head that I'm still human. I think you're catching on already. Yes, the androids are leaving Earth; but you know that the process that makes them is still here. Every day there are more labs. Because people get hurt terribly, or wear out beyond reasonable repair. And what would you expect them to want to do then, just die?"
Doc wasn't just talking to slow minded Bowhart, but to all humanity that was like him. It was his final message. But there was another touch to it that wasn't in words. It was a cocky gentle air that maybe suggested the contrast of—say—eating a fine dinner, and then taking a long dive, unclothed, through the vacuum of space—both with equal relish.
Bowhart looked puzzled, and a bit sullen. Maybe he was beginning to catch on at last.
Well, we made that enormous jump across the light-years to the Sirian System. Seventy-nine years it took. I don't think that even an Xian ship could have done much better. There's no overdrive or time-travel in sight. Funny, isn't it—here, for once, nature resists us. But to avoid boredom there was the older idea of suspended animation—natural to the android, and capable of being induced in the older flesh by special anesthetics and chilling. My wife and our friends passed the first two years of the journey awake, to help operate the ship. The other seventy-seven years passed as a moment.
We found us a world just slightly smaller than the Earth, and young and beautiful. There was no native intelligence yet, comparable with the human. The valley in which we live is rich and lush, and it slopes down to the ocean. Like my dad and mother, Jan and I have a sturdy house of stone; cleared fields, and livestock descended from the animals and poultry brought out from Earth.
It's Mom's old rustic dream. It's even Cope's! It's an idyll.
A town is springing up fast nearby. It is one of the first colonial settlements of what may become a great Earthborn interstellar union.
Doc is in the town with Irma, building it, planning, full of goodwill for everyone. Scharber's normal-sized android body still sleeps in a special vault under the town hall. But who knows at what moment he and Kobolah may come?
Doc kids my folks and Jan; but especially he kids me: