Bancroft makes a bad pun, waits for the uproarious audience to regain control, then asks: And this revitalizer—just what does it do? Andy goes into a longwinded explanation, the gist of which is that the revitalizers stir up cytoplasm in animal cells and refresh them.
I see, cracks Bancroft; the pause every decade that refreshes. And then, after being refreshed, you have what as a result? “Oh,” muses Dandy, “you might say we have no fear of cancer or any degenerative disease. Besides that, by exposing ourselves to revitalizers at regular intervals throughout our lifetime and refreshing our body cells, we quintuple our life expectancy. We live five times longer than we should. That’s about what the revitalizer does, you might say,” says Dandy. Andy, after thinking a bit, agrees. “That’s about it.”
Pandemonium, and not mild. Newspaper extras in all languages, including the Scandinavian. Lights burning late at night in the U.N. Headquarters with guards twenty deep around the site.
When President of the Assembly Sadhu asked them why they’d never mentioned revitalizers before, they did the snail equivalent of shrugging and said the Betelgeuse IX equivalent of nobody ever asked them.
President Sadhu cleared his throat, waved all complications aside with his long brown fingers and announced, “That is not important. Not now. We must have revitalizers.”
It seemed to take the aliens awhile to understand that. When they finally became convinced that we, as a species, were utterly entranced with the prospect of two to four centuries of life instead of fifty or sixty years, they went into a huddle.
But their race didn’t make these machines for export, they explained regretfully. Just enough to service their population. And while they could see as how we might like and must obviously deserve to have these gadgets, there was none to ferry back from Betelgeuse.
Sadhu didn’t even look around for advice. “What would your people want?” he asked. “What would they like in exchange for manufacturing these machines for us? We will pay almost any price within the power of this entire planet.” A rumbling, eager “yes” in several languages rolled across the floor of the Assembly.
Andy and Dandy couldn’t think of a thing. Sadhu begged them to try. He personally escorted them to their spaceship, which was now parked in a restricted area in Central Park. “Good night, gentlemen,” said President of the Assembly Sadhu. “Try—please try hard to think of an exchange.”
They stayed inside their ship for almost six days while the world almost went insane with impatience. When I think of all the fingernails bitten that week by two billion people …