The faint eyes sparkled. Dead, near-dead or merely decrepit, this was a man who wanted to enjoy life. Minutes out of the tomb, he said: "No! Not young Tommy Welbourne!" "His grandson, sir," said the civilian. I had it just then--that face had watched me through a whole year of school. It had been in a frame at the front of the room, with half a dozen other faces. It had a name under it, which, try as I might, I couldn't recall; but the face was there all the same. It was an easy one to keep in mind--strong though sunken, ancient but very much alive. He was saying, in a voice as confident as any youth's, "Ah, Tommy, I've lived to see it! Tell me, have you been to Mars? What is on the other side of the Moon? And the Russians--what are the Russians up to these days?" The civilian coughed and tried to interrupt, but the figure on the stretcher went on heedlessly: "All those years gone--what wonders must we have. A tunnel under the Atlantic, I'll wager! And ships that fly a hundred times the speed of sound. Tell me, Tommy Welbourne! Don't keep an old man waiting!" * * * * * The civilian said reluctantly, but patiently, "Perhaps it will take a little explaining, sir. You see, there have been changes--" "I know it, boy! That's what I'm asking you!" "Well, not that sort of changes, sir. We've learned new virtues since your time--patience and stability, things of that sort. You see--" The interesting part was over and the glances of the others in the party reminded me that I didn't belong here. I stole off, but not before the man on the stretcher noticed me and made a sort of clumsy two-fingered salute of hail and farewell as I left. It was exactly like the gesture in his picture on that schoolroom wall, up next to the presidents and the greatest of kings. I found a staircase and climbed to another level of the boxlike clinic. The local peasants called the vaults "coolers" or "ice cubes." I suppose the reason had something to do with the fact that they were cool and rectangular, on the whole--perhaps because, like icebergs, the great bulk of the vaults was below the surface. But whatever you called them, they were huge. And the clinic at Anzio was only one out of hundreds scattered all over the world. It was all a matter of viewpoint. To me, the clinics were emblems of the Company's concern for the world. In any imaginable disaster--even if some fantastic plague struck the entire race at once--the affected population could be neatly and effectively preserved until medicine could catch up with their cures. To Rena, they were prisons big enough to hold the human race. It was time to find out which of us was right. I hurried through the corridors, between the tiers of sleepers, almost touching them on both sides. I saw the faint purplish gleam where Rena had spilled the fluid, and knelt beside the cocoon that held her father.