he still held. "Do you honestly think we would be so ... I won't say unscrupulous ... so stupid as to use violence?"

"No," said Radek. "Of course not. All I want is a few straight answers. I know you're quite able to lead me up the garden path, feed me some line of pap and hustle me out again—but I won't stand for that. I mentioned my tape only to convince you that I'm in earnest."

"You're not drunk," murmured Lang. "But there are a lot of people running loose who ought to be in a mental hospital."

"I know." Radek sat down without waiting for an invitation. "Anti-scientific fanatics. I'm not one of them. You know Darrell Burkhardt's news commentaries? I supply a lot of his data and interpretations. He's one of the leading friends of genuine science, one of the few you have left." Radek gestured at the card on the desk. "Read it, right there."

Lang picked the card up and glanced at the lettering and tossed it back. "Very well. That's still no excuse for breaking in like this. You—"

"It can't wait," interrupted Radek. "There are a lot of lives at stake. Every minute we sit here, there are perhaps a million people dying, perhaps more; I haven't the figures. And everyone else is dying all the time, millimeter by millimeter, we're all born dying. Every minute you hold back the cure for old age, you murder a million human beings."

"This is the most fantastic—"

"Let me finish! I get around. And I'm trained to look a little bit more closely at the facts everybody knows, the ordinary commonplace facts we take for granted and never think to inquire about because they are so ordinary. I've wondered about the Institute for a long time. Tonight I talked at great length with a fellow named Barwell ... remember him? A clerk here. You fired him this morning for being too nosy. He had a lot to say."

"Hm." Lang sat quiet for a while. He didn't rattle easily—he couldn't be snowed under by fast, aggressive talk. While Radek spat out what clues he had, Lang calmly reached into a drawer and got out an old-fashioned briar pipe, stuffed it and lit it.

"So what do you want?" he asked when Radek paused for breath.

"The truth, damn it!"

"There are privacy laws. It was established long ago that a citizen is entitled to privacy if he does nothing 

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