Part 1

SIXTY-YEAR EXTENSION

By ALAN E. NOURSE

_They told only half the story to Daniel Carter Griffin when he volunteered to die. They told him of the glories of life re-born; youth re-captured; love re-won; of Free Agenting around the cosmos. Of many things, they spoke about ... but never once did they mention the lurid second death._

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

It occurred to Griffin as he sat waiting in the office that he had forgotten what day it was.

It was a silly thing, and it upset him all out of proportion to its importance. At first it had been no more than a disturbing flicker in the back of his mind, an uneasy half-thought, not even consciously formed. He had been waiting for Cranstead for a quarter of an hour, and he hadn't been thinking very coherently about much of anything. His right arm was still a bit sore, but mostly he was aware of a curious feeling of strength and exhilaration as he eyed the cool gray walls of the office. But something bothered him, nibbling away deep in his mind; he crossed and uncrossed his legs, feeling a trifle impatient. And then, with a shiver, he realized that he didn't even know what the date was!

He pulled out his wallet with a frown, and searched for the pocket calendar he carried. He glanced at it, and then put it back with a grunt. It didn't help him a bit. He didn't even know what month it was, or even year, for sure. He leaned back, trying to remember what day it was, and his mind was abruptly flooded with the implications of the staggering thing he had done--

That they had done--

He stood up and threw open the door into the reception room. A girl sat typing at the desk. She typed on for a moment, then paused and looked up.

"How soon will he be ready?" Griffin asked, trying hard to keep the panic out of his voice.

The girl smiled professionally. "I'm sorry, Mr. Griffin. He won't keep you waiting long. Can I get you something to read?"

He shook his head. "No--I'll just wait. I'll tell you what you can do, though. You can tell me what date it is." Suddenly he felt very foolish.

"Certainly. This is the seventeenth of July."

He nodded, feeling slightly numb as he returned to his seat. The seventeenth of July! It had been December when he had come here. Or had it been a year ago last December. Or ten years ago? He couldn't remember. His broad forehead wrinkled into a frown as he tried to think. They had told him that his memory would be somewhat incoherent over the period that he was there, but he hadn't realized how helpless he would feel to have eight months of his life suddenly reduced to a jumbled series of unconnected events. And how could he straighten them out? He shook his head, the chill deepening in his chest. Maybe they never would be straightened out--

He stared at himself in the mirror that hung on the wall, more in the spirit of appraisal than curiosity. That first shock of looking at himself was behind him now; not that he could ever forget it as long as he lived, but he was no longer jolted by the face that peered out at him from the mirror, the short dark hair without trace of gray, the broad forehead, the heavy face--not a bad face, really, a curious, young-old face that looked like that of a twenty-year-old until one examined it closely, and then utterly defied age-identification with an infuriating complacency. His face, beyond doubt, but not the face he had seen in the mirror eight months ago. More like the face that had looked out at him from the mirror some thirty years before.

* * * * *

The office door banged open, and a tall, gray-haired man walked in, dropping a pile of papers on the desk. "Hello, Griff! Sorry to keep you waiting. Never can tell when you'll get stalled in a place like this." John Cranstead dropped easily into his chair behind the desk and eyed Griffin quizzically. "Feeling excited? Or just scared out of your shirt?"

"A little of both," said Griffin, uneasily. "I don't know quite how I feel."

Cranstead grinned, and popped his glasses out of his pocket. "Ah, well. Don't worry about it. Martha says you wondered what day it was."

Griffin flushed. "I couldn't remember it."

"You'd have been remarkable if you could," Cranstead chuckled. "It went pretty well with you. Eight months is almost dead minimum for a complete job. But then they told me you cooperated very well."

Griffin shrugged. "Naturally."

"Well, it's over now. As of--" he peered at his wrist watch for an instant, then jotted the time down on the top sheet of paper--"3:15 P.M., 17 July, 2173, I can no longer call you Dan Griffin. You're a Free Agent now. Or you will be." He picked up the paper, glanced at it, and handed it across the desk to Griffin. "Don't let it throw you," he said.

Griffin glanced down at the paper, with a terrifying feeling of unreality, as if this were all part of a very bad dream. They had told him, of course. They had explained it all very carefully. But then, they had told him so many things. At the top of the paper he saw the Hoffman Medical Center seal, and just below it, in heavy Gothic letters, he read:

CERTIFICATE OF DEATH

His eyes ran down the page to his own name. Daniel Carter Griffin, male, aged 53. Cause of death: Subtotal Prosthesis, Voluntary. And below that, somewhere near the bottom, a line marked "signature."

Griffin looked up at Cranstead's smiling face. "I'm supposed to sign this?"

"That's right. There are a few other forms to sign--legal claims papers for the Metropolitan Death Insurance Company, a few other customary papers--" He broke off with a smile. "Don't look so horrified. It's really not as paradoxical as it seems. After all, Dan Griffin _is_ quite dead. You'll certainly agree to that."

Griffin nodded, signing the papers rapidly. "When do I get my name back?"

"At the end of your Free Agent period, if you want it back. Or any other name you choose. That's up to you." Cranstead smiled. "And of course, as a Free Agent you can use any name you like."

"I can't see what's wrong with the old one. I was quite happy with it."

Cranstead shrugged. "You may find yourself quite a different man now."

"Well, I don't feel any different." Griffin's voice had a sharp defensive edge, and his eyes were suddenly bright with anger. "I feel fine; just the same as I always felt. Why all this ridiculous rigmarole?"

Cranstead sighed. "Take it easy, Griff. How do you know how you feel? You haven't been outside the hospital walls since the prosthesis started. You haven't met anyone or reacted to anything other than carefully controlled hospital conditions. Don't be impatient. You don't know yet what you'll want because you're literally a new man. You've turned in your old worn out body for a new one. Give it a try before you get excited."

Griffin scowled. "But why this insinuation that things will be different? I remember my old life perfectly well. I liked it. I want to go back. Why make it so difficult?"

Cranstead tossed him a cigarette. "Look at it this way," he said. "If you hadn't come here to the Center for prosthesis, in about five years, give or take a little, that death certificate would have been valid in a very, very final sense. You'd have been gone and there'd have been no bringing you back. But you did come here to the Center, under your own steam, and submitted to a very thorough repair job; a repair job that will last you another sixty to eighty years, starting now--"

"All right, I know that," snapped Griffin. "I still don't see--"

Cranstead held up his hand. "Wait a minute--you don't quite realize that you may indeed be very dead to the world you knew before. The doctors can't predict the personality changes you may have undergone. Except for certain very broad limits, they can't predict how you'll act. So we have to protect you, as well as the world you left when you came here. The prosthesis is almost a total job--replaced organs, replaced vascular system, replaced glandular system, even some repaired nervous tissue. Some men come out almost exactly as they were before. But some come out vastly different--"

Griffin blinked and stared at the death certificate. "And this," he said slowly, "protects me."

"It makes the old Dan Griffin with the leaky heart and the bad kidneys legally dead. Just as the death insurance protects your wife and family. You can't be forced back into the old mold if you don't fit, so you're cut loose as completely as possible. You have a year to adjust; a year as a Free Agent, to go anywhere you wish and do anything you like. You no longer exist in the eyes of the law. If you go back to your old life, that's fine. And if you don't go back, and find yourself a new life, that's fine too. It's up to you."

Dan Griffin stood up, a coldness growing in his mind like nothing he had ever experienced; a sense of utter aloneness and total helplessness. "It's hard to get used to," he said softly. "I don't know what to think." He walked to the window and stared out at the city that spread out for miles, and saw the shadows of the tall Upper Level apartments falling across the busy curves of the throughways. "I just don't know--"

"We'll help you in any way we can," said Cranstead. "But nobody but yourself can influence your ultimate decision. You're a Free Agent. The decision must be yours."

"It's frightening," said Griffin.

John Cranstead gave him a long look. "It may be the most frightening thing in the world," he said.

II

He did not go home immediately.

He wasn't entirely sure why he didn't. He knew that he wanted to go home more than anything else. To go back to the house he had known for so long, back to the soft comfort of the old, heavy, carved furniture, back to the rows of books, and the neat paintings on the walls. And back to Marian, who would be waiting there for him. Oh, he wanted to go back, but somehow something held him, some cold, unreasoning core of apprehension that lay in his mind, whispering in his ear as he walked down the steps of the Hoffman Medical Center into the crush of traffic on the street below. His wrist still tingled from the needles that had stamped the small green bar there, indelibly. The mark was his passport, and he shivered as his mind echoed Cranstead's words back in the office. "You're free in every sense of the word. Go wherever you like, do anything you want to do. Deliberate criminality won't occur to you, and you'll be incapable of it if it does. We've seen to that. But otherwise, the ultimate decision is up to you--"

A cab skidded by and he hailed it. He settled back in the seat as the little car swept up into the heavy elevated traffic that moved down through the miles of curves and straightways into the center of the City. It was huge, this beehive that had spread down from Boston and up from Washington to engulf the entire Atlantic Seaboard, a place where he could lose himself for a little while, and maybe think things through before he went back to his home and to Marian. He stared from the window at the bright lights below--the Lower Level commercial traffic, speeding with its never-ending hum--the tattered sections of the Old City that lay below, half-hidden ruins of an age that few men could remember, or would want to remember if they could. The driver's voice broke in on his reverie, and he gave a little start.

"I said, where you goin', Mister?"

"Oh. Anywhere. I don't care." He hesitated for a moment. "I'm a Free Agent."

The driver nodded. "Mind if I pick up fares?"

"Not in the least." Griffin shrugged himself back in the seat, staring out the window. Frightening, he'd said! It was paralyzing. He moved his arms, first one, then the other, feeling the remnants of the painful tightness under the smoothly-molded skin. Then his mind drifted back, and he tried to remember the days of sickness, trying to visualize physically how it had felt to be sick. He found that he couldn't remember. He was no longer sick, and the pain and fright and desperation were unpleasant memories, the first to be dulled, and hidden from sight, and larded over with the frosting of forgetfulness.

And yet he knew that he had been sick. He had been older then, just past fifty, and though he could not recreate those days in his mind, he knew that he had known he was sick for a long time, a growing awareness that health and youngness had somehow been left behind. There had been the gasping rests at the top of the stairs while he had waited for breath and energy to return; and the leaden tiredness at the end of the day that had made the evenings a gauntlet to be endured. And there had been those terrifying nights when he had awakened in a cold sweat, strangling in the darkness, with hardly the strength left to drag himself up into a sitting position; and then Marian, wide-eyed with fright, barely able to hold back the tears, packing pillows behind him as he sat gasping by the open window, wondering if this really might be the end. And then, later, the stabbing, excruciating pain that cut through his chest and down his arm, the vice-like wrenching pain that tore the breath from him, and almost life itself. Angina, the doctor had called it. Congestive failure. And he had sat there, by the window, and known that he was staring death in the face.

The pain he could not remember now, but the fear was sharp in his memory. And then there had been the day when old Doctor Barnez had come in to see him, and settled back in the chair, smiling at him, and said, "Griff, I think it's time you considered a repair job. A real repair job. Because you won't be with us long if you don't--"

He had grasped at it with the desperation that can be born only of staring death in the face, grasped at it as he stood literally in the valley of shadows. Oh, he had heard of prosthesis. He could even remember the bitter political battles that had raged. He could remember the attacks on it from the pulpit, and the rabble-rousing speeches of the men who used it as a football to carry them to power. But the laws were passed in spite of them, and many people had taken the step. And always Griffin had watched with desultory interest, and thought it a thing of the remote future, never applicable to a strong, active man like himself.

He stared out at the buildings, tall and proud in the gathering darkness. When the chips were finally down, he had agreed, Life was sweet. If it was within the power of medical techniques to restore it, could he scorn such a chance? Could anyone? For after all, it was the goal of hundreds of years of medical study. Gradually, over the years, medicine had leaped the low hurdles of disease, of microbes, and viruses, and creeping malignancies, and these had been the easy steps. At the end, they had moved against the real last enemies of man: old age, degeneration, the multitude of death's helpers which had held man to a hundred years of life. And then those hurdles had been crossed--

Griffin shook his head as the cab took another turn and sped deeper into the city. He had wanted a healthy body again. And they had promised him a healthy body. The prosthesis was almost total, the remodelling he could never have understood, the probing and repairing, the replacing and regrowing and relearning. And he had come forth with a healthy body, with his past life's full measure of memory and experience, and another sixty years in which to use it. He had thought that a healthy, whole body once more was all he could ever desire--

And now he wondered.

* * * * *

He knew now that he was going to see Dr. Barnez first, before he went anywhere else. He leaned over and gave the driver the address, and then settled back, waiting as the car reached the upper-level strips of the New City. He found the doctor's house, and waited in the small anteroom for a few moments. Then he saw the familiar, stooped figure, beaming at him from the door of the inner office. "Come in, Griff, come in!" he boomed. "Lord, man, what a change! You look like you never looked before. They treated you well over there--" The old doctor tossed him a cigar, and settled back, regarding him over silver-rimmed glasses. "Any regret, Griff? Even cigars you can have again now!"

Griffin shook his head, feeling the uneasiness nibbling again at his mind. "No--no regrets, nothing I can put my finger on--" He nipped the cigar, feeling suddenly foolish to take such relish in contemplating the acrid smoke of a dried-up weed.

"But a multitude of things you can't quite put your finger on, eh?" The old man was smiling.

Griffin nodded slowly.

"You'll find the readjustment troublesome at times. But as a Free Agent, it's infinitely easier." The old man paused. "You've seen Marian?"

Griffin flushed. "No. I haven't been home. I'm--I'm a little afraid to go."

"Don't be. Marian will be there."

"Oh, I don't mean that. It's just--I've been waiting so long, and hoping so much. I don't know what to expect of Marian, I'm afraid she'll be different, somehow--"

"_She_ won't be changed."

Griffin's eyes caught the old man's. "I know it. But what about me? I don't feel any different--"

Dr. Barnez held up a wrinkled, blue-veined hand. "It's to be expected, isn't it? You're not the same man you were. Your mind is intact, but there are many more things that make a man what he is than his mind, Griff. You've been changed in many ways--physical changes, chemical changes, endocrine changes. That's why you're a Free Agent. They've learned the hard way that they can't force the new form into the old mold. It just didn't work."

Griffin sat forward, his eyes burning on the old man's face. "What's happened to the others, doctor? I want it straight."

Doctor Barnez shook his head. "Why torture yourself, Griff? Go home to Marian, see how you feel--"

"I want it straight."

The doctor shrugged. "All right. Some have gone back and stayed. But many haven't stayed. A great many."

"Where have they gone?"

"Who knows? They're dead as far as the world they left is concerned. Who knows where they've gone?"

"But I don't want to change! Can't you see that? I love Marian. She's been my life. For years she's been more to me than anything else. I wouldn't change that for life itself--"

The old doctor stood up, shaking his head. "You mustn't worry," he said gently. "Ultimately, the choice is yours. It will be you who stays, or leaves, in the end. Not Marian."

* * * * *

He opened the door of his house, and walked in, and found himself face to face with a total stranger.

She looked the same, of course. The same dark, beautiful eyes, the same finely molded face, the same tiny figure, kept amazingly slender and youthful over the years. Her hair was graying more than he had remembered, but it was the same Marian he had left, eight months before. And yet, he knew the moment that he saw her that something was gone, and could never be replaced, not in a thousand years of life.

Her lips trembled as she searched his face, and she said, "I'm glad you're back, Griff--" and he walked into the room like a ghost, moving about as though he were not really here at all, but seeing things in a strange, subtly distorted dream. The desk, with its perpetual litter just as he had left it; the honey barrel full of pipes, charred and scratched from years of use, still slightly fragrant from the last smoking. And there were the soft chairs, the worn carpet, the pictures on the walls. The same, fine, smooth architectural lines that had pleased him so when the house was built five years before; scientifically fitted to their personalities in a thousand subtle ways, as any house should be. He sat down gingerly, as though expecting to fall through into the dust beneath the house, and looked again at Marian, his lovely, wonderful Marian--for the house which had fit so well was a nightmare to his sensibilities now, garish and impossible--and a Marian he didn't know was waiting eagerly for him to speak.

And then he knew it was only a dream, his memories of the life before. He waited for the surge of excitement, waited for the eager words to come into his throat, the words telling her how very much he had missed her, what plans he had made for them--and his throat was dry, and no words came. He waited for the joy of returning to sweep through him, and it did not come. It was dead, as dead as the ashes in that last-smoked pipe.

He didn't say a word. He didn't have to, because he saw it in her eyes, wide heart-broken eyes. He looked at her, and all he felt was pity. He didn't even feel shame, though he felt he should. And he knew that words would only make it harder, would be whiplashes to make the wounds deeper and more vicious.

He picked up his hat, and brushed her cheek with his lips, and without a word he walked out through the door.

Marian had not changed, not in any way. The house was the same, kept in readiness, waiting for him. No, Marian hadn't changed.

It was he who had changed.

III

At first he felt only anger. The suspicion didn't come until later. It was a cold, amorphous anger, not directed toward anyone or anything, a wrenching, nonspecific sort of anger. He found a small place where he could eat, set down off the Upper Level throughway, and he ordered hot coffee and a little food, and then sank his head into his hands--

And the anger grew, as he thought of the horrible house that no longer fit, and of Marian, and himself with the strange young-old face that was not his face at all, but a ghost-face from the past that stared out of the mirror at him. They had warned him, of course. Told him, rather. It had not been a warning, for warning implies evil, and if there had been evil in what they had told him it had been well concealed. They had said that everything would be as he left it, that he could go back to his old life, if that was what he wanted, if that was where he belonged. They had told him all this, and it had had little meaning to him.

But it had meaning now, a thousand meanings that he could not understand. Because he had gone back, and discovered in the horror of a single look that it was wrong, that he no longer belonged. And it was then that he began to suspect that somehow, beyond his control and ken, he had become the victim of a terrible, cosmic joke.

Yet he was alive. He could not deny it. There was nothing wrong with his mind. He could think, he could remember, analyze. Just as they said, he could go back to the desk where he had worked so many years, and take over once again where he had left off.

But the place had repelled him. He shivered, and the suspicion deepened. They had said he could go back, if he wanted to, but he didn't want to. He couldn't even make a pretense of wanting to. There were other things to do, somewhere, more important things that had no part nor connection with the old Dan Griffin.

People were coming into the place now. They sat at tables nearby, and he could feel their eyes drift over him, curiously. How many times before had he watched these strange, drifting creatures with faces that belied their years, when they had chanced to cross his path? How often, before, had he seen the little green bar tattooed on a wrist, and looked at the face above it, and wondered, what is he doing? How does it feel to be a completely new man again, with a new life, and twelve months of freedom, complete freedom of movement, of inquiry, of thought. He wished that he had never wondered these things before.