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BUYING TIME - Joe Haldeman


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BUYING TIME
Joe Haldeman

This book is dedicated to the interesting people doing research in life extension,
cryonics, and other such intimations of immortality.
May you outlive your critics.


After the first hundred years, some people stop taking chances. With a new young body—or at least a
healthy one—every ten or twelve years, there's a strong temptation to go out and use it. But if you did
try to occupy centuries climbing mountains, skin diving, abseiling, and so forth, sooner or later the force
of statistics would catch up with you. The Stileman Clinics will cleanse you of cancer and sclerosis and
make your vital organs and muscle and bone think they're brand-new again—but lose a wing in a sudden
storm and you're as dead as any mortal. Any "ephemeral."
Dallas Barr had ignored this reality for almost a century. He had sailed around the world in a forty-foot
sloop, had braved vicious currents to swim the lonely corridors of the Titanic, had come to terms with
himself in a winterlong Antarctic vigil. On the Moon he had climbed the Straight Wall and tramped the
Plato desert in search of fairy lights. He'd bought his way onto the first team to climb Olympus Mons, on
Mars. Then just before his ninth rejuvenation he had been rappeling down an easy cliff in Australia's
Blue Mountains when a foolproof rope snapped to give him three seconds of weightlessness and then a
broken back.
That almost killed him, twice. It's hard to amass a fortune immobilized inside a body cast and either
distracted by constant pain or dulled by analgesia. The ninth fortune is easier than the first, though, and a
person without a knack for making money has to get used to the idea of growing old.
(Lord Stileman himself had lived only to a hundred and five, dying in the fiery wreckage of an antique
racing car. By then his clinics already were the second-wealthiest foundation in the world and only a few
years away from first place.)
The only people who got immortality for free were King Richard, a few politicians and administrators,
and about a hundred medical people, each of whom guarded one part of the complicated secret that was
the Stileman Process. Everyone else bought the next dozen years on the same terms: all your worldly


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goods signed over to the foundation. And don't even reach for your checkbook if you have less than a
million pounds.
Your perennial million pounds didn't buy true immortality, not in the absolute sense. The Stileman
Regeneration Clinics could slow down the decay of brain tissue, but couldn't stop it altogether. Nobody
had lived long enough to put it to the test, but from the clinics' extrapolations, it looked as if the upper
limit would be less than a thousand years. Sooner or later your brain would fog up, and when your time
came around, you wouldn't be able to find a million pounds. You would grow old and die.
Dallas Barr didn't spend much time mulling over that, even though he'd been in the first Stileman group
and was therefore one of the oldest people in the world. Tightrope walkers don't worry about distance