Other Times, Other Worlds by John D MacDonald

Author:John D MacDonald [MacDonald, John D]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0449140377
Publisher: Fawcett Gold Medal
Published: 1978-10-01T21:00:00+00:00

“Let me handle all tax matters, business angles and so on. You just take care of the research angle. Our first job is to pay off Uncle Sam on what you made last night, incorporate, and put the rest of it into the new corporations. We’ll set ourselves a minimal salary to begin with and boost it as the money begins to come in.”

Tomlinson was silent for a long time. He studied his folded hands.

“I must know that nothing will interfere with my work. It is important.”

“Maybe you could tell me in layman’s terms what the work is, Dr. Tomlinson. Then I could appreciate its importance.”

Eagerness crept into Tomlinson’s tone. “I began this line of research six years ago. As a pathologist the phenomenon of age has always fascinated me. I had done research in geriatrics, the study of old people, the study of how to help them physically. Take glandular secretions for example. We know that the flow of secretions from many organs diminishes in both quantity and quality as time passes. Once a duplicate of the flow from a young and healthy gland is injected into the aged patient there is often an almost miraculous increase in vitality. The endocrinologists have done a lot in that field. But basically it is superficial, as it does not get at the root cause of the slow degeneration of the glands and tissues and organs. It is a stopgap, the same way a salt-free diet is a stopgap in treating—say—congestive heart failure. The books talk about the ravages of time, yet a single cell, according to all growth and regeneration theories, should be almost eternal. Say that there is a time stream. Must all of us be carried immutably along that stream? Do you know what entropy is?”

Banth shrugged. “The standard example. The gas in a divided container, and then removed the division and though each molecule moves independently, they will never regain, even for a fraction of a second, their original positions all at once on each side of the nonexistent division.

“In its broader sense it refers to the continual, supposedly unalterable progress from order to disorder. Thus we can call it an attribute of time, as we know it. Or a byproduct of time. Thus my thinking began to be along the line of attempting to slow up that entropic progress in living tissue. I had no success. When you come up against a blank wall it is often good theory to try the exact opposite direction. Could entropy be speeded? I attacked that problem by an attempt to stimulate every gland and organ in a living organism to the same exact degree. I was clumsy at first. The interrelations are delicate. My laboratory animals died. Finally there was one experiment where there was quite a deviation from the control group. After the injection, what I term the master injection, the life span of the animals, which had the same hereditary and environmental factors, was decreased by one tenth. J performed the same experiment many times, keeping a frequency distribution on the life spans.

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