They hadn’t been joking. They wanted it all.
Then, when everything was running smoothly, they buzzed off for Betelgeuse to handle their part of the bargain.
Those two years were the most exhilarating of my life. And I’d say everyone feels the same, don’t they, Alvarez? The knowledge that the world was working together, cheerfully, happily, for life itself. I put my year in at the Great Slave Lake, and I don’t think anyone of my age and weight lifted more pitchblende.
Andy and Dandy came back in two huge ships, manned by weird snail-like robots. The robots did everything, while Andy and Dandy went on being lionized. From the two ships, almost covering the sky, the robots ferried back and forth in strange, spiral aircraft, bringing revitalizers down, carrying refined radioactive elements aloft. No one paid the slightest attention to their methods of instantaneous extraction from large quantities of ore: we were interested in just one throbbing thought—the revitalizers.
They worked. And that, so far as most of us were concerned, was that.
The revitalizers worked. Cancer disappeared; heart disease and kidney disease became immediately arrested. Insects which were introduced into the square one-story lab structures lived for a year instead of a few months. And humans—doctors shook their heads in wonder over people who had gone through.
All over the planet, near every major city, the long, patient, slowly moving lines stood outside the revitalizers, which were rapidly becoming something else.
“Temples!” shouted Mainzer. “They look on them as temples. A scientist investigating their operation is treated by the attendants like a dangerous lunatic in a nursery. Not that a man can find a clue in those ridiculously small motors. I no longer ask what their power source can be. Instead, I ask if they have a power source at all!”
“The revitalizers are very precious now, in the beginning,” Trowson soothed him. “After a while the novelty will wear off and you’ll be able to investigate at your leisure. Could it be solar power?”
“No!” Mainzer shook his huge head positively. “Not solar power. Solar power I am sure I could recognize. As I am sure that the power supply of their ships and whatever runs these—these revitalizers are two entirely separate things. On the ships I have given up. But the revitalizers I believe I could solve. If only they would let me examine them. Fools! So terribly afraid I might damage one, and they would have to travel to another city for their elixir!”