2 B R 0 2 B (in Short Science Fiction Collection 039 )

MP3 Audio CD. 2 B R 0 2 B (in Short Science Fiction Collection 039 )

Everything was perfectly swell.

There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no
poverty, no wars.

All diseases were conquered. So was old age.

Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers.

The population of the United States was stabilized at forty-million
souls.

One bright morning in the Chicago Lying-in Hospital, a man named Edward
K. Wehling, Jr., waited for his wife to give birth. He was the only man
waiting. Not many people were born a day any more.

Wehling was fifty-six, a mere stripling in a population whose average
age was one hundred and twenty-nine.

X-rays had revealed that his wife was going to have triplets. The
children would be his first.

Young Wehling was hunched in his chair, his head in his hand. He was so
rumpled, so still and colorless as to be virtually invisible. His
camouflage was perfect, since the waiting room had a disorderly and
demoralized air, too. Chairs and ashtrays had been moved away from the
walls. The floor was paved with spattered dropcloths.

The room was being redecorated. It was being redecorated as a memorial
to a man who had volunteered to die.

A sardonic old man, about two hundred years old, sat on a stepladder,
painting a mural he did not like. Back in the days when people aged
visibly, his age would have been guessed at thirty-five or so. Aging had
touched him that much before the cure for aging was found.