Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov (iphone ebook reader txt) 📕

There was a general howl of laughter which the anniversary couple were not backward in joining. Arvardan, however, felt plunged in horror as a distinct and uncomfortable suspicion entered his mind.

He said to the man sharing his seat, “This Sixty, this subject of conversation here—I take it they’re referring to euthanasia. I mean, you’re put out of the way when you reach your sixtieth birthday, aren’t you?”

Arvardan’s voice faded somewhat as his neighbor choked off the last of his chuckles to turn in his seat and favor the questioner with a long and suspicious stare. Finally he said, “Well, what do you think he meant?”

Arvardan made an indefinite gesture with his hand and smiled rather foolishly. He had known of the custom, but only academically. Something in a book. Something discussed in a scientific paper. But it was now borne in upon him that it actually applied to living beings, that the men and women surrounding him could, by custom, live only to sixty.

The man next to him was still staring. “Hey, fella, where you from? Don’t they know about the Sixty in your home town?”

“We call it the ‘Time,’ ” said Arvardan feebly. “I’m from back there.” He jerked his thumb hard over his shoulder, and after an additional quarter minute the other withdrew that hard, questioning stare.

Arvardan’s lips quirked. These people were suspicious. That facet of the caricature, at least, was authentic.

The elderly man was talking again. “She’s coming with me,” he said, nodding toward his genial wife. “She’s not due for about three months after that, but there’s no point in her waiting, she thinks, and we might as well go together. Isn’t that it, Chubby?”

“Oh yes,” she said, and giggled rosily. “Our children are all married and have homes of their own. I’d just be a bother to them. Besides, I couldn’t enjoy the time anyway without the old fellow—so we’ll just leave off together.”

Whereupon the entire list of passengers seemed to engage themselves in a simultaneous arithmetical calculation of the time remaining to each—a process involving conversion factors from months to days that occasioned several disputes among the married couples involved.

One small fellow with tight clothes and a determined expression said fiercely, “I’ve got exactly twelve years, three months, and four days left. Twelve years, three months, and four days. Not a day more, not a day less.”

Which someone qualified by saying, reasonably, “Unless you die first, of course.”

“Nonsense,” was the immediate reply. “I have no intention of dying first. Do I look like the sort of man who would die first? I’m living twelve years, three months, and four days, and there’s not a man here with the hardihood to deny it.” And he looked very fierce indeed.

A slim young man took a long, dandyish cigarette from between his lips to say darkly, “It’s well for them that can calculate it out to a day. There’s many a man living past his time.”

“Ah, surely,” said another, and there was a general nod and a rather inchoate air of indignation arose.

“Not,” continued the young man, interspersing his cigarette puffs with a complicated flourish intended to remove the ash, “that I see any objection to a man—or woman—wishing to continue on past their birthday to the next Council day, particularly if they have some business to clean up. It’s these sneaks and parasites that try to go past to the next Census, eating the food of the next generation—” He seemed to have a personal grievance there.

Arvardan interposed gently, “But aren’t the ages of everyone registered? They can’t very well pass their birthday too far, can they?”

A general silence followed, admixtured not a little with contempt at the foolish idealism expressed. Someone said at last, in diplomatic fashion, as though attempting to conclude the subject, “Well, there isn’t much point living past the Sixty, I suppose.”

“Not if you’re a farmer,” shot back another vigorously. “After you’ve been working in the fields for half a century, you’d be crazy not to be glad to call it off. How about the administrators, though, and the businessmen?”

Finally the elderly man, whose fortieth wedding anniversary had begun the conversation, ventured his own opinion, emboldened perhaps by the fact that, as a current victim of the Sixty, he had nothing to lose.

“As to that,” he said, “it depends on who you know.” And he winked with a sly innuendo. “I knew a man once who was sixty the year after the 810 Census and lived till the 820 Census caught him. He was sixty-nine before he left off. Sixty-nine! Think of that!”

“How did he manage that?”

“He had a little money, and his brother was one of the Society of Ancients. There’s nothing you can’t do if you’ve got that combination.”

There was general approval of that sentiment.

“Listen,” said the young man with the cigarette emphatically, “I had an uncle who lived a year past—just a year. He was just one of these selfish guys who don’t feel like going, you know. A lot he cared for the rest of us. . . . And I didn’t know about it, you see, or I would have reported him, believe me, because a guy should go when it’s his time. It’s only fair to the next generation. Anyway, he got caught all right, and the first thing I knew, the Brotherhood calls on me and my brother and wants to know how come we didn’t report him. I said, hell, I didn’t know anything about it; nobody in my family knew anything about it. I said we hadn’t seen him in ten years. My old man backed us up. But we got fined five hundred credits just the same. That’s when you don’t have any pull.”

The look of discomposure on Arvardan’s face was growing. Were these people madmen to accept death so—to resent their friends and relatives who tried to escape death? Could he, by accident, be on a ship carrying a cargo of lunatics