Aging -- Fiction; Older men -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories
Yet he relished the feeling of having Dubbins drive his car. More than
anything else, he’d loved being driven. Even after chauffeurs were a
thing of the past, Harry had driven him around. Now he’d taken to
walking, as so many others had, for even with modern safety measures so
strict, there was always a small chance of some accident and nobody had
any desire to spend the long future as a cripple.
“I’ll wait for you, sir,” Dubbins offered as they stopped beside the
low, massive medical building.
It was almost too much consideration. Giles nodded, got out and headed
down the hall uncertainly. Just how bad did he look? Well, he’d soon
find out.
He located the directory and finally found the right office, its
reception room wall covered with all the degrees Dr. Cobb had picked up
in some three hundred years of practice. Giles felt better, realizing it
wouldn’t be one of the younger men.
* * * * *
COBB APPEARED himself, before the nurse could take over, and led Giles
into a room with an old-fashioned desk and chairs that almost concealed
the cabinets of equipment beyond.
He listened as Giles stumbled out his story. Halfway through, the nurse
took a blood sample with one of the little mosquito needles and the
machinery behind the doctor began working on it.
“Your friend told me about the gray hair, of course,” Cobb said. At
Giles’ look, he smiled faintly. “Surely you didn’t think people could
miss that in this day and age? Let’s see it.”
He inspected it and began making tests. Some were older than Giles could
remember—knee reflex, blood pressure, pulse and fluoroscope. Others
involved complicated little gadgets that ran over his body, while meters
bobbed and wiggled. The blood check came through and Cobb studied it, to
go back and make further inspections of his own.
At last he nodded slowly. “Hyper-catabolism, of course. I thought it
might be. How long since you had your last rejuvenation? And who gave
it?”
“About ten years ago,” Giles answered. He found his identity card and
passed it over, while the doctor studied it. “My sixteenth.”
It wasn’t going right. He could feel it. Some of the panic symptoms were
returning; the pulse in his neck was pounding and his breath was growing
difficult. Sweat ran down his sides from his armpit and he wiped his
palms against his coat.
“Any particular emotional strain when you were treated—some major upset
in your life?” Cobb asked.
Giles thought as carefully as he could, but he remembered nothing like
that. “You mean—it didn’t take? But I never had any trouble, Doctor. I
was one of the first million cases, when a lot of people couldn’t
rejuvenate at all, and I had no trouble even then.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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