Arvardan looked about at the undistinguished and normal faces of his fellow passengers. They were supposed to be different, these Earthmen, but could he have told these from ordinary men if he had met them casually in a crowd? He didn't think so. The women weren't bad-looking...His brows knit. Of course even tolerance must draw the line somewhere. Intermarriage, for instance, was quite unthinkable.
The plane itself was, in his eyes, a small affair of imperfect construction. It was, of course, atomic-powered, but the application of the principle was far from efficient. For one thing, the power unit was not well shielded. Then it occurred to Arvardan that the presence of stray gamma rays and a high neutron density in the atmosphere might well strike Earthmen as less important than it might strike others.
Then the view caught his eyes. From the dark wine-purple of the extreme stratosphere, Earth presented a fabulous appearance. Beneath him the vast and misted land areas in sight (obscured here and there by the patches of sun-bright clouds) showed a desert orange. Behind them, slowly receding from the fleeing stratoliner, was the soft and fuzzy night line, within whose dark shadow there was the sparking of the radioactive areas.
His attention was drawn from the window by the laughter among the others. It seemed to center about an elderly couple, comfortably stout and all smiles.
Arvardan nudged his neighbor. "What's going on?"
His neighbor paused to say, "They've been married forty years, and they're making the Grand Tour."
"The Grand Tour?"
"You know. All around the Earth."
The elderly man, flushed with pleasure, was recounting in voluble fashion his experiences and impressions. His wife joined in periodically, with meticulous corrections involving completely unimportant points; these being given and taken in the best of humor. To all this the audience listened with the greatest attention, so that to Arvardan it seemed that Earthmen were as warm and human as any people in the Galaxy.
And then someone asked, "And when is it that you're scheduled for the Sixty?"
"In about a month," came the ready, cheerful answer. "Sixteenth November."
"Well," said the questioner, "I hope you have a nice day for it. My father reached his Sixty in a damned pouring rain. I've never seen one like it since. I was going with him-you know, a fellow likes company on a day like that-and he complained about the rain every step of the way. We had an open biwheel, you see, and we got soaked. 'Listen,' I said, 'what are you complaining about, Dad? I've got to come back.' "
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.