THE OLD ONES By Betsy Curtis They had outlived their usefulness on Earth and society waited patiently for them to die. Thus it was only natural for them to seek a new world.... [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy December 1950 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Dr. Warner didn't usually burst into Dr. Farrar's office. Usually he paced slowly up the hospital corridor, pulling down his glistening white lastijac uniform, meditating on all the mistakes he might have made during the past week, reluctantly turning the knob on the outer door, hesitatingly asking Miss Herrington if the doctor wished to see him now, stepping humbly through the inner door into the presence. But this morning he burst in and slammed the inner door. "Two this morning in Block Nineteen!" he blurted. "Two suicides at once; Saul Forsythe and Madam LePays!" Only a few minutes before, Dr. Farrar had been reading and sighing, sighing at the thought that there were no excitements left, only annoyances and minor gratifications. "The publication of _The One-Hundred-Year-Old in the Culture of Today_ marks the date of another notable contribution to human understanding by the justly famous young doctor, Jules Farrar." The review grew more laudatory from paragraph to glowing paragraph. Dr. Farrar, re-reading it word by word, was inclined to smile at the adjective 'young'; he was fifty-eight and felt every day of it this smiling spring morning. He ran his hand back over his head smoothing the place where, twenty years ago, there had been hair. He looked up from the paper on his desk, through the glimmering sunlight at the row of dark green file cases banking the opposite end of the office, the first five now ticketed "closed" and the "closed" sign lying on top of the sixth, the 100-year case. He gazed on down the row--110, 120, 130, 140 and the rest--and sighed deeply. Futility washed over him, and an echo of the old story of the man who wrote his autobiography taking a year to write the doings of each day. The job would never be finished and the amusement of writing of youth was too far behind. He quoted grimly from his own _Sixty-Year-Old_, "Among males at this time, the conviction, often amounting to panic, that the time for accomplishment is almost past begins to grow and obscure the comfortable mellowness of being in the midst of important activity." How could he have known so much at thirty and still have arrived at almost sixty without having solved anything, discovered anything new, done nothing but descriptive studies steadily for thirty-five years? And there were no excitements left--nothing but annoyances.