Cities in Flight

“So now we add to that still another fact: that both penicillin and tetracycline are not only antibiotics—which makes them toxic to many bacteria—but antitoxins as well. Both of them neutralize the placental toxin that causes the eclampsia of pregnancy. Now, tetracycline is a broad-range antibiotic; is there such a thing as a broad-range antitoxin, too? Is the resistance to tetracycline that many different kinds of bacteria can develop all derived from a single counteracting substance? The answer, we know now, is Yes. We’ve also found another kind of broad-range antitoxin—one which protects the organism against many different kinds of antibiotics. I’m told that it’s a whole new field of research and that we’ve just begun to scratch the surface.

“Ergo: Find the broad-range antitoxin that acts against the toxins of the human body which accumulate after growth stops—as penicillin and tetracyline act against the pregnancy toxin—and you’ve got your magic machine-gun against degenerative disease. Pfitzner already has found that antitoxin: its name is ascomycin …. How’d I do?” he added anxiously, getting his breath back.

“Beautifully. It’s perhaps a little too condensed for MacHinery to follow, but maybe that’s all to the good—it wouldn’t sound authoritative to him if he could understand it all the way through. Still it might pay to be just a little more roundabout when you talk to him.” The girl had the compact out again and was peering into it intently. “But you covered only the degenerative diseases, and that’s just background material. Now tell me about the direct attack on death.”

Paige looked at the compact and then at the girl, but her expression was too studied to convey much. He said slowly: “I’ll go into that if you like. But your father told me that that element of the work was secret even from the government. Should I discuss it in a restaurant?”

Anne turned the small, compact-like object around, so that he could see that it was in fact a meter of some sort. Its needle was in uncertain motion, but near the zero-point. “There’s no mike close enough to pick you up,” Anne said, snapping the device shut and restoring it to her purse. “Go ahead.”

“All right. Some day you’re going to have to explain to me why you allowed yourself to get into that first fight with me here, when you had that Eavesdropper with you all the time. Right at the moment I’m too busy being a phony ecologist.

“The death end of the research began back in 1952, with an anatomist named Lansing. He was the first man to show that complex animals—it was rotifers he used—produce a definite ageing toxin as a normal part of their growth, and that it gets passed on to the offspring. He bred something like fifty generations of rotifers from adolescent mothers, and got an increase in the life-span in every new generation. He ran ’em up from a natural average span of 24 days to one of 104 days. Then he reversed the process, by breeding consistently from old mothers, and cut the life-span of the final generation way below the natural average.”

“And now,” Anne said, “you know more about the babies in our labs than I told you before—or you should. The foundling home that supplies them specializes in the illegitimates of juvenile delinquents—the younger, for our purposes, the better.”

“Sorry, but you can’t needle me with that any longer, Anne. I know now that it’s a blind alley. Breeding for longevity in humans isn’t practicable; all that those infants can supply to the project is a set of comparative readings on their death-toxin blood-levels. What we want now is something much more direct: an antitoxin against the ageing toxin of humans. We know that the ageing toxin exists in all complex animals. We know that it’s a single, specific substance, quite distinct from the poisons that cause the degenerative diseases. And we know that it can be neutralized. When your lab animals were given ascomycin, they didn’t develop a single degenerative disease—but they died anyhow, at about the usual time, as if they’d been set, like a clock, at birth. Which, in effect, they had, by the amount of ageing toxin passed on to them by their mothers.

“So what we’re looking for now is not an antibiotic—an anti-life drug—but an anti-agathic, an anti-death drug. We’re running on borrowed time, because ascomycin already satisfies the condition of our development contract with the government. As soon as we get ascomycin into production, our government money will be cut down to a trickle. But if we can hold back on ascomycin long enough to keep the money coming in, we’ll have our anti-agathic too.”