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.”

Cobb considered it, hesitated as if making up his mind to be frank against his better judgment. “I can’t see any other explanation. You’ve got a slight case of angina—nothing serious, but quite definite—as well as other signs of aging. I’m afraid the treatment didn’t take fully. It might have been some unconscious block on your part, some infection not diagnosed at the time, or even a fault in the treatment. That’s pretty rare, but we can’t neglect the possibility.”

HE STUDIED his charts again and then smiled. “So we’ll give you another treatment. Any reason you can’t begin immediately?”

Giles remembered that Dubbins was waiting for him, but this was more important. It hadn’t been a joke about his growing old, after all. But now, in a few days, he’d be his old—no, of course not—his young self again!

They went down the hall to another office, where Giles waited outside while Cobb conferred with another doctor and technician, with much waving of charts. He resented every second of it. It was as if the almost forgotten specter of age stood beside him, counting the seconds. But at last they were through and he was led into the quiet rejuvenation room, where the clamps were adjusted about his head and the earpieces were fitted. The drugs were shot painlessly into his arm and the light-pulser was adjusted to his brain-wave pattern.

It had been nothing like this his first time. Then it had required months of mental training, followed by crude mechanical and drug hypnosis for other months. Somewhere in every human brain lay the memory of what his cells had been like when he was young. Or perhaps it lay in the cells themselves, with the brain as only a linkage to it. They’d discovered that, and the fact that the mind could effect physical changes in the body. Even such things as cancer could be willed out of