Intimations of Immortality

Each of Us Wants what Ponce de León wanted, and unless the road maps are all wrong, we are well on the way to finding it. Consider yourself in the year 1984--20 years older, 20 years more worn in your parts. Yet most of you is still likely to be in pretty good shape. We do not wear out all at once, like the wonderful one-hoss shay, but seriatim, like a hard-driven sports car. Well, replace the worn-out parts. You would not discard an XK-E because of a worn clutch; you would replace the clutch. By 1984, or some date in that approximate area, you will not put up with the wheeze of emphysema in your lungs, for all you need is a new set of lungs, or a graft of tissue in the old lungs, and magically the emphysema is gone. Hairline receding? Graft in new follicles--or stimulate the old, perhaps, with hormones, chemicals or some latter-day derivative of DNA. Wrinkles? Flabby muscles? These are chemical matters. We treat them with surgery now, if we treat them at all, but in a couple of decades chemistry should provide a way of rejuvenating the collagen and flushing out the calcium compounds that bring age. Want to get rid of fat? You would not put up with a burning mixture that left carbon deposits in your car's engine; you will not have to put up with a metabolic rate that deposits a spare tire of blubber around your waist. Your look can be young, your step can be sprightly. And your sexual powers? They need not stop at 45--or 65--or 105, for that matter; tissue transplants will rejuvenate old organs of every sort. This may not even be necessary; for the basis of most failing ardor is not physical but psychic, and the therapies that make you feel young and be young will remove the psychic obstacles to love.

You have, in fact, reason to hope that you will retain or regain a very great part of your optimum years of strength and vigor till the day you die--and, as a matter of fact, very possibly after. For the mere process of dying may in 1984 be no longer very important. (continued overleaf)

Is this a fantastic science-fiction story?

Science fiction has, of course, recurrently dreamed on subjects like these. There is no cataloging the number of stories that have dealt with reviving the dead, restoring youth, providing spare parts to replace worn-out organs. Edgar Rice Burroughs worked over the theme endlessly--Ras Thavas, his master Martian surgeon, who implanted old men's brains in young skulls and so gave them all but eternal life and vigor; his Barsoomian supermen, the kaldanes, who were themselves mere crawling heads but had bred headless bodies to bear them about. Whenever a kaldanes wanted to climb a mountain, fight a duel or make love, he attached his head to one of the brute bodies--they were called rykors--and got at it. Robert Heinlein gave us Lazarus Long, to whom centuries were merely an incident. In Down Among the Dead Men, William Tenn told us of men who were cobbled together out of spare parts, identityless "blobs" who were useful for routine work and as cannon fodder--and the same writer, in Child's Play, envisioned "Bild-a-Man" sets sold as children's toys for the future. It has, in fact, been a recurring theme in a dozen of my own stories--for example, The Reefs of Space, in which Jack Williamson and I described a "Body Bank" to which criminals and social undesirables were committed to serve as walking storehouses of spare organs, subject to a resection of whatever limb or light some worthier citizen might need to keep him going.

This is all science fiction, but it is not fantasy. (According to the rules of the game, the difference is that a science fiction story might come true, but a fantasy obviously can't.)

If you think that even science fiction is all too fantastic, think of what is going on in medicine right now. There is no fiction in the organ transplants that are being performed almost daily--or in the artificial organs that replace or supplement natural ones, or in the vaccines and antibiotics that take the fear out of ancient murderers like pneumonia and smallpox, or in the surgery that can build a new face on what is almost a bare skull, burned to the bone.

Not even the miracle of bringing the dead back to life is fiction anymore. Lev Landau, the Russian physicist, died in a mangling auto crash several years ago--died three more times in the hospital--and yet he now walks the streets of Leningrad, alive and well.

We set 1984 as a date when you yourself might have your life lengthened and strengthened out of all recognition, but that date might turn out to be a very bad guess. It may be much closer than that, as we shall see.

• • •

At this moment there are three billion people alive in the world. According to mortality tables, about a billion of these individuals will still be around in the year 2000 A.D. Five hundred million will survive a couple of decades beyond that; a few million will make the centenarian mark, living to the year 2064 A.D.; and a tiny handful, perhaps 50 or so of those breathing today, have a statistical probability of viewing the dawn of the 22nd Century.

That is what the tables say. But if there is one thing sure about actuarial tables, it is that they have been uniformly wrong in every projection made since the beginning of this century, and every error has been in the same direction. We always live longer than statistics allow.

It is, in fact, a good betting probability that some of us, and perhaps a great many of us, may never have to die at all. Indeed, there are those who would say that some of the two million--odd persons who at this moment are holding this issue of Playboy in their hands will be around to greet the spring a thousand years from now--as healthy and happy as they are today, and maybe more so.

There are three ways in which we can make liars of the mortality tables. The first of them is the prolongation of life by removing some of the causes of death; and, of course, that battle is a lot more than half won right now. By the standards of any age but our own, we are all presented at birth with half a century more of life expectancy than our ancestors of a thousand years back. Barring war or accident, we're going to live a lot longer than we ever planned--longer than we had any reason to hope, and one hell of a lot longer than the world has any present way of making use of us.

This isn't something that may happen. It has happened already. The great bacterial killers of all previous ages have one by one been brought under control. For some, like syphilis and strep infections, we have cures; for others, like smallpox, we have preventive vaccines; most of the remainder we have legislated out of existence by removing the conditions that permitted them to occur, as we have controlled malaria by killing off mosquitoes. The viral infections are more stubborn, but they are also in retreat; at least one virus has already succumbed to a new. antibiotic, and that is a major breakthrough. What is left is mopping up. It is, indeed, rather rare to find a death from "natural causes" these days unless the cause of death is either something involving cancer or something to do with the heart. And although the struggle against these two classes of killers is filled with blighted hopes, it is also marked with partial successes, and there are very few doctors who don't feel optimistic that both will yet succumb to control. Barring violence, in short, the things we die of are the things our ancestors would have been delighted to live long enough to die of.

Even when we can do nothing about the ailment itself, we can often enough keep it from being fatal. We don't cure diabetes, but diabetics rarely die of their disease; insulin and other therapies make the disease irrelevant. Quite a few "dead" Americans are walking around right now, whose hearts had stopped, whose condition even a couple of years ago would have been the signal for the attending physician to put on his condoling face and reach for a fountain pen and a death certificate, but who now get around pretty well because a little transistorized gadget inside their chest wall keeps an "irreparable" heart beating. Nobody fixed the heart--we don't know how. All we know how to do is put a pacemaker in and keep it going. Less convenient, but still a "lifesaver," is the artificial kidney. The heart-lung machine can keep some patients breathing and technically "alive" about as long as their next of kin want to go on paying the electric bill. Uncounted thousands of polio victims have had their breathing done for them while their own lungs were unable to perform the task. Many of them will never be able to breathe in any other way, but they still live, read, talk, think, work and procreate.

Nor are we limited to mechanical appliances. In Ecuador early this year, a man blew his hand off with a grenade. A new hand was grafted from a corpse. Kidneys have been transplanted from one body to another almost beyond counting--244 of them to mid-1963, in England, France and the United States alone. Replacing damaged corneas with transplants from the dead is now almost as routine as an appendectomy.

If a transplant donor is not available, sometimes the plastic surgeon can build a new organ out of spare tissues from the victim's own body. In Belgium a war casualty was given a new penis--and this was not mere cosmetic surgery, for the Belgian married in 1950 and became a father, although not only the entire penis but much of the rest of the genitalia had been destroyed.

Technical problems make many of these hopeful procedures difficult or happenstance. Nerve tissue needs to be coaxed to regenerate; sometimes it doesn't, and the transplant may lack sensory connection to the host. Sometimes a newly transplanted organ fails because it is attacked and destroyed by the same disease that damaged its predecessor. The body itself is the worst enemy of the transplants. It resists them and tries to destroy them with its immune response, just as it destroys invading microorganisms. (continued on page 160)Immortality(continued from page 80) It is usually possible to knock out the body's immune response with radiation and drugs, but this presents a nice problem in judgment. Too much, and the body cannot protect itself against infection and the patient dies. Too little, and the body destroys the transplant. (The Ecuadorian wore his new hand for only a week before it had to be taken off again.)

Technical problems can be solved. There are new drugs such as Imuran, effective but selective in their action. There are new environmental techniques, such as the germ-free kidney-transplant facilities at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago. What is significant about the history of organ transplants is not that so many failed, but that so many succeeded. And because of these successes there is a large and growing list of "causes of death" for which we have found no cure--but which do not need to cause death anymore, because we can today provide substitute mechanisms, organic or inorganic.

And in a few more decades, this situation may prevail: Wear out a part? Stick in a new one. Wear out a lot of parts? Cheaper to trade in on a whole new body. Where do the extra parts come from? Grow them. On breeder bodies, if that turns out to be a good cost-accounting way: comatose creations with neither mind nor feeling, endlessly growing arms and eyes and kidneys that are harvested and marketed to "real" people. In production-line vats: "Here's plant number seven, that's all left feet. Down the line there you can see the robot sowers planting cellular seeds for the gonad bank."

Apart from life prolongation, the control of cellular division and immune responses has side implications that themselves are enormous. Control the body's immune responses and you can control, if you like, its present mechanisms for tolerating transplants. What transplants are those? Well, the metastasis of a cancer is a sort of transplant. So is the fertilization of an ovum by a sperm.

Control cell division by invoking the genetic code and you might be able to edit and rearrange a flesh-and-blood body as easily as you could edit a computer analog.

The point is that death is not a prime cause nor a fixed biological date, like the attainment of puberty. It is a consequence. It only happens when something else has happened first. We die because we have contracted a disease, or suffered some metabolic breakdown, or got in the way of a rifle bullet, or been thrown off a cliff. This stops the whole series of complex interactions among our cells and organs and what may be several thousand varieties of chemical substances, and we call that stoppage "death."

But one by one we are whittling away at each of these causes, and if we whittle them all away, will people still die?

This brings us to the second of the three ways in which we can outwit the mortality tables: the control of the aging process. Men do grow old. They have always done so--apparently they have always been able to grow just about as old as anyone does today; the maximum age man can reach does not seem to have been much increased, if at all, by modern science. There are pretty reliable reports of men living to age 140 or so in every age for the past 2000 years, and there are pretty reliable reports of men reaching the same age, and no more, today. A lot more of our people live to reach old age, of course. And our old sters are undoubtedly a lot livelier, being less crippled with gout, tumors, cataracts and the sequelae of a thousand infections and deficiencies. But senescence is measured in terms of calcification of the tissues, deposits in the arteries and such recherché items as the accumulation of phospholipides in the nerve cells, and all these things still happen no matter how much aureomycin is swallowed.

When Gulliver went to the isle of Luggnagg he met a horrible race of ancients called Struldbrugs. They did live forever. But they got older, and went right on getting older. It isn't likely that there would be very many eager customers for the sort of immortality that lets aging go on unchecked. Nobody wants to be a Struldbrug. Indeed, many of us would feel that death at the height of one's powers is a better deal than the prolonged geriatric twilight of the senior citizen. If we want anything more than a mere doubling of the life span, we are going to have to stop, or reverse, or at least slow down, the degenerative processes we call "aging." If we can do that, we can have centenarians--or multicentenarians--with the pink cheeks and riotous glands of a man of 25.

If we want to keep from growing old, the first step is to discover just what "growing old" is. It turns out the answer is rather simple. It is as though the human body were a sort of superautomated sawmill, set to the task of ripping and planing so many thousand board feet of lumber. It does its task, it completes what it was set to do--but, being a living thing, it cannot stop, and goes on to destroy itself.

From the first moment of conception the human body is programed to go through a certain series of set phases. In embryo it changes from simple cell to free blastocyte, from implanted precursor of a fetus to a sort of primitive, helpless, half-formed reptile, grows limbs and eyes, folds nervous tissue into a brain, deposits calcium as bones and elaborates hair and nails. Even after birth the process does not stop. Deciduous teeth appear, dissolve their roots back into the blood stream, fall out and are replaced. Bones lengthen and thicken--not as a tree grows its trunk, by piling layer on layer, but as we enlarge a building. As the bone gets larger in its outside dimensions, special bone-destroying cells called osteoclasts tunnel passages into it for new blood vessels and enlarge the hollows for marrow. In the first decade or so after birth the body prepares itself for puberty--the voice box thickens and the voice changes; breasts bud on a women and a beard on a man. Even when the body is mature--call it the 20s of a man's life--the programing is not over. There are horizons--set stages of development--remaining on the tape.

What happens when we cease to grow and begin to grow old is that the cells have run out of instructions. They have nothing left to do but begin to destroy themselves--or, at best, to allow themselves to be destroyed. But surely this can be controlled. If nature forgot to leave instructions, certainly we can find a way to fill the gap--return the osteoclasts to their mining into age-fragile old bones, bring new blood and new resilience as the brittle old calcium is replaced by new; dissolve back the roots of the second set of teeth and replace them with a third, a fourth, as many as we need--rebuild the frayed blood vessels of the heart and brain, sluice out their deposits of fat; reactivate the glands.

This is by no means a new idea, of course. In 1768 Lazzaro Spallanzani, observing that some frogs and lizards could grow back parts that had been lost, began to try to find out just how they did it in the hope that some way could be found to "obtain this advantage for ourselves." The search has not stopped; it has, in fact, proliferated into a hundred lines of research, and some of them have produced solid achievement. At places like Johns Hopkins and Cornell, the Medical University of Budapest and the Institute of Industrial Hygiene in Prague, scientists are taking apart and putting back together some of the body's most age-susceptible substances, for example, collagen, the protein which, as it grows older, helps produce the old man's aching joint and wrinkled skin. Folke Skoog at the University of Wisconsin and F. C. Steward at Cornell have managed to persuade matter from nongrowing parts of vegetables to grow complete new plants. Other workers are now attempting to repeat the process with animals. The technique involves the application of various materials, some with names like 6-furfurylamino-purine and 2-benzthiazolyloxyacetic acid, some as old-shoe as coconut milk. It is a long way from the test tube and the unnaturally grown carrot to rejuvenating collagen in the body and causing a man to regrow a defective spleen--but these are way stations on the trail, all the same.

Even if we can't yet restore youth to an aged body, it is worth while just to keep a body from becoming aged in the first place, which might well be an easier task.

We already know, for sure, that aging is not a mere matter of years. We know this, first, because every doctor has seen a patient whose calendar age is 70 or more but whose every measurable physical trait is that of a man of hale middle age, indicating that in some individuals aging occurs more slowly than in others. We know it, second, because there are those uncommon unfortunates, the prematurely aged--the 12-year-olds who die of senile degenerative diseases, the babes in arms who grow beards, pipe shrilly, rheum at the eyes and expire--indicating that in some individuals aging is wildly accelerated.

If the biological clock can run fast or slow by accident, there is a way to be found to make it run fast or slow by design. A thousand ways have been or are being tried--Bogomolets' extract of connective tissue, Hans Selye's "calciphylaxis," procaine therapy, hormones--and under certain conditions they seem at least sometimes to work. For example, inject a laboratory animal with pituitrin. Sometimes it will have no effect, but sometimes it will produce a greatly increased life span. It turns out that it can be predicted in advance whether the injections will lengthen the animal's life, simply by taking note of its age at the time of treatment. If the animal receives the injections before puberty, puberty is delayed and the animal lives longer. After the animal is mature the pituitrin has no effect.

Insects possess a secretion called "juvenile hormone" that somehow prevents the organism from developing into its adult from. Recently what seems to be the same hormone, or a close analog, has been found in mammalian tissue--in fact, in human beings. Does it serve the same function? If it does, can we get shots and remain virile all our lengthy lives?

There is something to be said for the view that what we call "old age" is itself a disease, subject to the same sort of controls we use for other diseases. Curiously, it seems to be a disease that very seldom is fatal of itself. Last year the National Institute of Health spent $30,000,000 on research into aging, along some of the lines mentioned here and a great number of others. Perhaps one of these trails will lead to the means to immortality. Perhaps not. But there is every reason to expect that if not this trail, then another one; if not this year, then next--most certainly in some none-too-far future. The same processes that work on plants and lower animals can be made to work on men. The same forces that build the cell in the first place can be made to repair it later on. The only "why" to be answered is really this one: Why do the forces stop? When we know that, we will know how to keep them going.

Whatever that cause is--some enzyme reaction not yet charted, some failure of nutrition, some missing hormone or, most likely of all, a complex of many factors--when we find it we are almost home.

And if none of these promises are fulfilled, in defiance of all precedent and logic, then there is still reason for hope. We may find immortality in an unexpected place.

It may be that medicine and biology can't make us live forever. But medicine and biology are not the only sciences whose explorations are rushing faster and faster into uncharted space. It is possible that chemistry might do the job. Or some new subspecies of physics. Or--why not?--electronics.

And this brings us to the third way to beat the mortality tables, which we will define as the real thing. Previously we have talked about lengthening the life span and keeping from growing old. The kind of immortality we're talking about now is the kind in which you stay immortal--forever, or for as long as you yourself want--even if you happen to die once in a while.

Before we can discuss true immortality at all, we need to decide just what it is we are talking about. In other words, what do we want to keep alive? And what do we mean by "alive"?

In The Wizard of Oz, the Tin Woodman was not always tin. He was first a flesh-and-blood fellow named Nick Chopper, but one day his ax slipped and cut off his leg and he had to get a tin leg to replace it. Then he lost his other leg; then, careless fellow, he successively amputated both arms and his head and made mincemeat of his torso, and as each part was destroyed it was replaced until he was all tin. Question: Is the Tin Woodman still Nick Chopper?

The question isn't entirely fanciful. You may indeed lose some limbs or organs and have them replaced by prosthesis; you might even lose and replace quite a lot of them. Or you may simply eat, breathe and excrete, and change yourself that way. A few decades ago it was believed that every atom of the body was replaced every seven years. Although that isn't literally true (collagen and the calcium in an old man's bones migrate very slowly if at all), it might as well be true: you burn your fat and heal the cuts on your skin and your beard grows and is shaved and, all in all, there's not much left of the original physical "you" after a decade or so.

When we speak of immortality, then, we limit ourselves unnecessarily if we restrict ourselves to the eternal preservation of our present body, including freckles. The essential "you" isn't your body. It is what we will call your personality, your memory, or your mind. All we need to promise you in the way of a container to house this "you" is that it will be a satisfactory replacement for the body you now have, if not indeed the body itself. And considering the alternatives, perhaps the level at which it could be called "satisfactory" need not be set too high.

There is nothing particularly difficult about preserving some sort of segment of your personality. It happens all the time. We can do it crudely through book and legend--as Caesar and Christ are far more alive today than, say, that fellow down the block who got run over last year, old what's his-name. We can do it through motion pictures and taped voice, as when we watch a very living Marilyn Monroe strut across the late late screen, or listen to the voices of F.D.R. or J.F.K.

This may not be a very enticing sort of immortality, since its principal effect is on others and it cannot be said to do much for you.

We can do better than book, cairn, crypt or movie film, and it's worth looking to see how well we really can do it in the rather near future. Let us suppose we took a fair-sized computer--one, let us arbitrarily say, capable of a high degree of information storage, retrieval and manipulation; of decision making; of operations, in short, a thousand times more complex than today's 7094 Mark II. At the present exponential rate of progress, that would make it perhaps a 1974 model. Let us suppose further that we fill the computer's storage banks with a great deal of you. We read it Moby Dick and Treasure Island and we teach it the words of Nuts to the Bastard King of England, and Gaudeamus Igitur. We teach it the flavor of a vodka gimlet and the scent of the back of a pretty girl's neck, the feel of the clutch in a Sting Ray and the sounds of Mozart and Monk. We teach it, in short, everything you know, and we go on to set its instructions--to program it--to associate among all these things, so that a whiff of powder smoke brings back the memory of frosted fields and a good dog pointing a bird. We order it to dim and blur parts of its memory--so that it can have a fact "on the tip of its tongue," and maybe come out with it and maybe not--and instruct it further, when no stimulus presents itself, to hunt more or less at random among its stored memories. To go into reverie, in other words.

To think.

(Do not object that no computer can do all of these things. No computer presently in being can, but we're talking about the 1974 model. The question of just what a computer can do in comparison with the human brain is very much up for grabs right now. The biggest computer contains about a million storage cells; the human brain, about ten billion neurons. If you accept this as a measure of the difference in complexity between them, then you must say that one brain equals 10,000 computers. However, that's only a part of the picture. The neuron operates in about a thousandth of a second, the storage cells operate in a millionth of a second--another way of putting it is to say that a given number of computer cells can do as much work as a thousand times as many neurons. This reduces the ratio to one brain equals ten computers--but this, too, is a gross oversimplification. There is reason to believe that one neuron can store more than one "bit" of information; but there is also reason to believe that it stores these "bits" rather wastefully by duplicating them in more than one place; in any event, we appear to use only a fraction of the brain's storage capacity. The kind of computer we specified is a thousand times more complex than any present model; that's as good a guess as any.)

Having done all this, we have something that's pretty durable. This stored quintessence of you can be made as permanent as a magnetic charge can be made to sustain its sign in a storage ring, which--with proper regenerating techniques--is a good healthy number of millenniums.

So you, or something like you, can talk back to your descendants for the next 50 generations or so. Granting that it, whatever "it" is, is virtually immortal, you say then, all the same, what is "it"?

Let's answer the question pragmatically, defining "it" in terms of what "it" can do. "It" can, for example, give the same responses to a stimulus you would give. "It" can answer a question in the terms you would use, make your errors, misspell the word "rhythm" as you always misspell it or forget, as you forget, the date of your best girl's birthday. "It" can like puns, and make them. "It" can be prejudiced against redheaded man, and insult them. "It" can even finish the novel you started in your senior year (computers already have written music after being taught to "be" composers--and the music sounded like something those composers would have composed), or answer a letter from that girl in San Francisco in terms that she would find perfectly acceptable.

Hooked up to a teletype, with the computer itself concealed from view, "it" could indeed carry on the same sort of Western Union correspondence you yourself carry on with your branch office in Texas. Given a large enough library of taped recordings of your voice--either to edit and play back, or to analyze and reconstitute--"it" could carry on a telephone conversation, not only with your words but in your voice.

And the person on the far end of the telephone line would have no way of knowing whether it was you or your stored personality in a computer that was talking.

But let's say that none of the foregoing plans appeal to you. Let's say that you don't want to be a collection of magnetic impulses in an I.B.M. machine, couldn't care less about whether your children might have their lives prolonged, don't relish the prospect of merely deferring the process of growing old. Let us say, in short, that you want action. You want to retain your own body and you want to retain it until you get good and ready to part with it, and you want to start now.

Well, we have something for you, too. A man named R. C. W. Ettinger last year privately published a book called Prospects of Immortality (an enlarged version will soon be published by Doubleday) setting forth a plan that does not require you to wait a single minute. Ettinger not only sets forth as a possibility, but advises as a smart practical matter, that you start working on immortality right now--today. And the kind of immortality he offers is in your own body, and it lasts forever.

Ettinger does, it is true, point out that there are certain problems not yet settled. The present techniques are quite crude; better ones are sure to be developed. Nevertheless, they have the very great advantage of existing at present. You don't have to wait for anything new to come out of the laboratories. If you happen to break your neck tomorrow (assuming you have made the necessary arrangements), you can greet the cessation of heartbeat with equanimity, aware that before you know it you'll be up and about again, as good as ever and maybe a little better. Because Ettinger's brand of Fountain of Youth doesn't have to be administered until you're already dead anyhow, so that you really haven't got a great deal to lose.

If this sounds like the wildest science fiction yet, be warned that some impressive names in biology and medicine are prepared to go along with what he says, and in fact the basic idea is so clearly reasonable that you can make your own judgement on whether it will work.

Ettinger puts forth only two major premises--one a fact, and the other a first-rate gambling bet.

Number one, the fact: At the temperature of liquid helium, no perceptible chemical activity whatsoever takes place in "human" time. That is, any substance--it can be a human body as well as anything else--can be stored at this temperature for "as long as you like" without undergoing any measurable decay. By "as long as you like" Ettinger means not merely years or centuries, but periods of a million years or more. By "any measurable decay" he was means that far less would happen in a thousand years under those conditions than now happens in the few seconds that may intervene between a drowned swimmer's being pulled out of the water and the application of artificial respiration that brings him back to life, as good as new.

Number two, the good gambling bet: As the chemists, biologists and doctors have spent the last century inventing cures, treatments and transplants for the majority of known diseases and losses of function, it is quite probable that they will go on doing so. So that at some time in the future, perhaps a hundred years from now, perhaps five hundred, but surely within the almost limitless time in which a body can be perfectly preserved at the liquid-helium temperature, substantially every possible present cause of death will be reparable or treatable. And by "every," Ettinger means death by senility, death by disease of all kinds and death by accident.

Putting these two propositions together, Ettinger's conclusion is that any prudent man, including you, should make arrangements now so that at the instant of his death his whole body is frozen as rapidly as possible down to the temperature of liquid helium and kept that way until science has (a) found the cure for whatever killed him and (b) worked out ways to repair any damage caused by the freezing itself.

Of course, freezing damage and even some decay damage will also ultimately turn out to be reversible. That is why Ettinger says you don't have to wait until ideal freezing equipment may be built into every hospital and police station. The better the equipment, the less damage, and therefore the surer you are of coming out of it and the shorter the time you'll have to spend at --270 degrees centigrade, waiting for medical science to be able to fix you up. On the other hand, with any luck at all, even severe damage may mean only that the waiting time will be a few decades or centuries longer--and you won't be aware of the passage of time anyway.

It is hard to gainsay Ettinger's basic propositions. For it is not merely a question of John Doe, cancer victim, at age 35 being tucked away in the Deepfreeze and then a century later being brought out and repaired to live the rest of his normal life. For what then happens to John Doe? Thirty years later he has a stroke. Back to the Deepfreeze. Fifty more years pass, and the repair of the small vessels of the brain becomes feasible and he is wheeled out once more. A few decades after that he "dies" again, of senile degenerative causes, and maybe this time he has a good deal longer to wait. But the favorable time factor is still working for him.

If the thing works at all, it works indefinitely. And unless John Doe Consciously decides, along about the year 4000 A.D., that enough is really enough and please don't bother next time, it is hard to see any point at which he will really, permanently die.

Naturally, freezing is not the only way in which a man can go into storage until his problem is curable--whatever his problem may be. We can learn to hibernate, like the hamsters, or estivate like the fish. It is at present a theoretical possibility in advanced studies in physics that sometimes, under certain quite remote circumstances, time itself can be made to stand still or run backward; and if so, it is also a possibility that a "stasis machine" can be built into which the patient can step and remain, locked in an interminable instant of time, until he's ready for rebuilding.

There is indeed one perfectly good way of stopping time for yourself, or at least of slowing it down as much as you like. It isn't recommended, if only because it is totally impractical in terms of both money and matériel. Anybody familiar with relativistic physics can tell you how to do it, but nobody can provide you with what you need to do it.

One of Einstein's predictions, that has since been borne out by observation and experiment, is that a body traveling at high speed will experience the rate of change we call "time" more slowly than a body at rest. The astronauts who circled the earth at 18,000 miles an hour are a few seconds younger than those of us born at the same time.

If they had gone a great deal faster--30 or 40 thousand times as fast--they would have aged still more slowly, until at something just below the speed of 186,000 miles per second (the velocity of light) they would seem, relative to us, to age almost not at all.

Of course, we have no rocket either available or in sight that can come anywhere near that velocity, and if we did, it would cost a very large dollar--a lot more than, for example, World War II. But the phenomenon itself is a fact. It is called time dilatation, and the theoretical understanding of it is quite clear. If you had exactly one hour to live, and could invoke the time-dilatation effect, you could stretch that one hour over a thousand earth-time years.

• • •

There remains one rather odd and at present difficult-to-understand problem of aging, to which none of the foregoing has any application at all.

Something happens to old people that operates within the mind itself. Not the brain. Test a group of 20-years-olds and a group of 70-year-olds. Condition them to certain reflexes; instruct them to do a task faster or slower than normal; measure, in short, their adaptive capacity, and you will find that the older a person is, the less readily he can change, even when the physical mechanisms involved are unimpaired.

But "age," in this sense, is not really a matter of chronological years. For example, you can artificially age a 20-year-old in a week in the specific environment of a test situation. Give him nonsense lists to memorize each day for a week, for instance, and you will find that the week of repetitious memorizing has "aged" his learning ability. He cannot learn Sunday's list as rapidly or as well as he learned last Tuesday's.

It is this sort of aging that many persons intuit when they feel there has got to be some point at which a human being will die. Even if the biophysical organism remains shiny and new, the ghost within the cadaver will somehow grow old.

Psychologists would say that under conditions of immortality or near immortality these phenomena would become far more serious. What makes a man strive? The phenomenon of loss, say the psychologists (or some of them). Everything you do that is not under the control of the autonomic nervous system is motivated by loss, in this view. And if you lose "loss" because no one dies and nothing is irreplaceable, do you lose all motivation?

Fortunately, short-term aspects of this have turned up as practical problems all through human history, and so some modes of coping with them have been devised. It is possible to supply motivation as needed, at least for most of the traditional threescore and ten. It is hard to memorize repetitious lists; but if you are motivated because your boss will fire you if you don't, you can perform vastly better and longer than you are likely to in a university test room. Every combat soldier knows how vigorously he can be motivated by an enemy on the other side of a hedge. You might be the kind of fellow who can't normally keep awake past one A.M.--but the right girl can motivate you till dawn.

The essential motivations we have described are survival pressure, fear of death, and pleasure. Immortality all but eliminates the first two, although they can to some extent be replaced by surrogates. (Gladiatorial games? Even if a participant whose skull has been bashed in can be brought back to life, it would hardly be a pleasant experience or one lightly undertaken.) And to an extent death will always exist, if only as a rare chance. It is unlikely that the technology of 2064 A.D., or even of 20,000,064 A.D., could repair the damage caused by a plunge to the heart of a star.

Pleasure can be supplied readily, in a variety of attractive packages--as well as some not so attractive. A rather ghoulish package is, in fact, now available, as some work at McGill and elsewhere has shown. There exist in the anatomy of the brain certain "pleasure centers" that can be stimulated electrically, usually by surgically implanting a fine metallic probe, in the septal area. Put a little current through the probe, and you have cracked the sensory code for pleasure. The subject--usually a white rat, but the same effect has been observed in humans--tenses, freezes, shudders and looks for more. The electronic jolt becomes as good a reward for effort as a carrot or candy. So equip his cage that he can manipulate the switch that yields the current, and he will do it, and do it again, and go on doing it until he falls down in collapse from hunger and fatigue--and rouse only to begin doing it again.

This is pleasure almost as destructive as booze to a human alcoholic but, remember, the joy machine exists now in only a very crude form. In its more elaborate form as it might be built a century or so from now it is, in fact, among those optional accessories we offered for you-in-the-computer: a subjectively real mechanical reproduction of any sensation you wish.

For most of us, synthetics do not possess immediate appeal--at least not until we try them out and find them as good as the natural product or better. We might like our motivations really "real."

Real motivations will be there. If you can spend a decade on the Great Barrier Reef and six months on the Grand Prix circuit, a year composing motets and a lifetime (our present lifetime) out past Mars; if you can tour the future centuries and sample the cultures of Aldebaran--and have ample time for romance and mere loafing in between--there's motivation for a long, long time.

While there is work and pleasure and novelty and creative effort, and you have the mind and body to respond, you will be motivated--to ends no one now can possibly imagine.