R.S.V.P.
|
|
|
Alone, because Death has come for his co-workers, one by one. He sits on a stool beside his work-counter, shirt sleeve rolled back past the left elbow. On the counter by that elbow, a watch, at which he glances from time to time as if afraid of missing an appointment. He glances at it now: the time is 4:17 and 12 seconds.
In his right hand he holds a syringe.
He is a fairly young man, surely not more than thirty-five, but with prematurely white hair. He and his colleagues have been laboring for years on a drug to extend human longevity...and which the newsmedia persist in calling "an immortality serum" — a sensationalistic phrase that generated scoffing publicity and interfered with funding. Still, they had pressed on, and for much of the last few years had felt themselves separated from success only by the narrowest of margins. Again and again, it had seemed within their grasp and, again and again, they had been proven fatally wrong. One by one, Death had come for them, and only he is left.
After the deaths of two volunteer subjects and Doctor Arthur Lake, Nobel Laureate and Head of the Institute, the Government had forbidden further testing of this series of drugs on human subjects. But those who were left — unable to relinquish the great prize that lay so close at hand (the mayflies had lived a whole year now with no noticeable ill-effects) — had carried on their research in secret.
|
R.S.V.P.
|
|
|
