I’m only an amateur chemist, so I was deeply flattered when Professor Hiram Partington replied to one of my emails.
I’ve always been intrigued by heavy water. It looks just like water, it is water, and yet it’s heavier.
Allow me a brief explanation for the non-technical.
Typically a hydrogen atom consists of a single electron orbiting a single proton. That’s a simplistic way of looking at it but it works for many purposes. The proton has a positive electric change and is relatively heavy; the electron is this tiny negatively-charged thing, hardly even solid matter at all, and it’s drawn to the proton like a moth to a candle, flying around it.
Water, you may know, consists of small particles—molecules—where each particle is made of two hydrogens and an oxygen atom. This means that every particle of water has two hydrogen atoms in it. Actually these three atoms make a v-shape, which is why snowflakes take their intriguing forms—lots of v’s all linking together—but I digress.
The thing that’s different about heavy water is that, instead of the hydrogens consisting only of a proton and an electron, the proton is paired with a neutron. This is a particle of nearly equal mass, but no charge.
The mass of the hydrogen atom is then nearly doubled at a stroke, but most of the weight of the water molecule is in the oxygen anyway. In the end, the result is that if you replace the hydrogens in water with heavy hydrogen, which is known as deuterium, the water is more than 11% heavier.
Apart from that it acts just like water. It participates in the same chemical reactions, since the chemical properties of a substance are determined by their electrons, not by the protons and neutrons in the nuclei of their atoms, and both varieties of hydrogen possess only one electron per atom.
However, the way heavy water behaves is subtly different, due to its mass. Since it’s a bit heavier, it doesn’t move about quite as readily as ordinary water.
The question everyone wants answered immediately is, can you drink it? The answer is yes, in small doses, but you can’t live off heavy water, because its sheer weight disrupts metabolism. As little as a litre of it might be enough to kill a person, but it’d probably take more like ten litres. No-one’s ever died from drinking heavy water; it’s expensive, so difficult to obtain.
You can, of course, order it off the internet if you have the money, and I had been experimenting with reacting heavy water with various substances to create heavy version of them. Heavy alcohols particularly intrigued me. I fed them to plants to see what effect they’d have in small doses, compared to equivalent ordinary alcohols.
Usually these plants were simply impaired, but I discovered a remarkable effect when I substituted deuterium for ordinary hydrogen in an obscure complex alcohol.
I discovered the effect only by chance. I had some basil that had been fed the substance in small amounts. Observing no discernible effect, I left it to one side and forgot about it. It occupied only one corner of the grow box I’d built for my experiments.
Basil usually completes its growth cycle in one year. It’s quite difficult to make it go on for longer, especially if you allow it to flower, but I happened to realise one day that my basil wasn’t growing stringy and weak like basil usually does with age, but was instead on its second flowering cycle.
To cut a long story short, this is what I wrote to Partington about, and he replied swiftly saying he was conducting his own heavy hydrogen research, on beetles, and had observed similar results, whatever that meant. He suggested we meet.
We met at a bar called The Eagle in Cambridge, and, in spite of the enormous age difference, we found we had a lot in common, at least as regards our fascination with deuterium and heavy water.
Now that I think of it, perhaps that’s really the only thing we had in common, but we were both so interested in deuterium that it felt almost as though we were kindred spirits.
Partington was impossibly posh, aristocratic almost, with the kind of upper-class accent that you can hardly even find in younger people anymore. He absolutely looked the part of an ageing professor of chemistry, with thinning white hair that stuck out at odd angles and tiny pebble spectacles that he tended to peer over. His face was incredibly angular, as though eating was nothing but a distraction in his opinion.
He walked with a slight limp, using a stick to get around, which I later learned was due to osteoarthritis in his hip. Even so he refused to let the pain slow him down, and at times I even had trouble keeping pace with him.
At The Eagle, while I happily tackled a beer or two, he always confined himself to a single gin and tonic, or occasionally, a sherry.
What stood out more than anything else was the sharpness of his mind. His knowledge was extremely extensive and by no means confined to chemistry. He could talk at great length on the history of almost any branch of science and was a profound scholar of human nature. On Relativity and its antecedents and consequences he could easily hold forth for hours, drawing the most fascinating parallels, and he probably could have written a biography of Curie without any further research at all.
Thus began an extremely fruitful partnership, of a kind, whereby we’d share each other’s research findings and speculations, and develop together proposals for new research.
I vividly remember the day we first discussed the effects of DFP-28, as we named it.
I have no intention of revealing the actual formula of this substances, but it was a polycyclic alcohol with half the hydrogens replaced with deuterium. Partington, who oddly enough was a vegetarian, had nevertheless fed it to gerbils and had been startled by the results.
The results were similar to those I had observed in basil with a closely related compound.
I immediately wondered why, exactly, he had taken it into his head to feed it to gerbils, but it seemed the idea had been going round his mind for some time. I suppose I had thought of it myself, but animals are not plants and I really hadn’t thought such experiments worthwhile in the end.
It took me several hours to wheedle the truth out of him, during which time he probably passed two solid hours just in speculations on the effects of heavy alcohols on the liver alone.
The fact is, Partington’s dog, Max—named after Max Planck—was on his last legs and Partington was faced with the awful prospect of having to euthanise his close companion of more than fifteen years. This had clearly been going around his mind a lot, and he’d started to wonder if our alcohols might not have a similar effect on animals that they had on plants. The idea was a ridiculously long shot; nothing in our research, apart from some strange effects Partington had noticed with beetles, had led us to think that might work, but Partington had got to the place where he was ready to mess with a few gerbils in the hope of helping Max.
In effect DFP-28 behaved a lot like the normal non-heavy version of itself when fed to gerbils, Partington informed me, except that certain metabolic reactions involving mitochondria were greatly enhanced, which he thought was due to some key step in a particular metabolic pathway positively relying on rapid transportation of a related substances across the membrane of the cell nucleus.
The astonishing thing was, this seemed to result in an incredible rejuvenation of elderly gerbils, which was exactly the kind of gerbil Partington had invested in.
“Hiram,” I said, “what’ve done to Max?”
“I’ll show you.” he replied. “My house is a fifteen-minute walk from here.”
Partington was an extremely private man and, aside from still giving occasional lectures, had practically lived as a hermit since the death of his wife. I had never seen his house before.
We walked through the town, across Parker’s Piece and up Mill Road. He lived just over the brow of the small hill there.
His house, when we got there, was lined with books from top to bottom. A young Labrador cross greeted us at the door, and Partington forgetfully referred to him as “Max”, or so I thought. It seemed tactless to ask about the actual Max so soon after that slip of the tongue, so I waited a while, while we sat in his living room. He pulled various books from the shelves there and rattled on about possible mechanisms of action for DFP-28, if the words of so august a man can be described as “rattling on”.
Presently he arrived naturally at the topic of Max.
“As you can see, the effects have been absolutely remarkable.” he said, tickling the Labrador’s ear.
“Hiram,” I said, very gently, “that’s not Max. Max is fifteen years old.”
“It’s astonishing, is it not?” he said. “Just a couple of months ago, this was an old dog with white hairs in his muzzle and a severe blood disorder.”
“That can’t be Max.” I said.
“I’ll show you the photos.” he said.
Digital cameras were common by then, but Partington was peculiarly resistant to certain forms of technology. He had photographed Max at regular intervals with an old Kodak instant, next to copies of The Times, to prove the date.
Were it not for The Times, I would certainly have assumed him to be showing me the photographs in reverse order, and taken over many years. It was clear that Max had undergone an astonishing reverse ageing process.
“This is going to change the world.” I said, wonderingly. “It’s going to change everything. It’ll work on humans. It’s bound to.”
“Yes, but not yet.” he said. “There are good reasons why I was reluctant to tell even you, James. Think of it. If people get hold of this drug, they will take it. Everyone over sixty or seventy will take it, and we don’t know the side-effects. The drug will need to be carefully studied, otherwise it’ll hit the world like a bomb, and who knows what the effects of it might be.”
“What do you propose?”
“We need human trials, and I propose to start with myself. I’m eighty-two years old and probably not long for this world.”
“You’re perfectly healthy.” I told him. “You might go on to ninety-six, or a hundred.”
“Yes, but I might equally well die next week.”
“Why would you? There’s nothing wrong with you. Usually there’s a process to dying.”
“Not always.” he said.
“We should try it on people who are definitely close to death. There’s no need for you to risk yourself.”
“On the contrary, I consider it my duty.” he replied, and try as I might, I couldn’t persuade him otherwise.
Max certainly seemed healthy, and physiologically, aside from certain obvious differences, it’s true that dogs are quite similar to humans. At the very least, if DFP-28 worked on Max and it worked on gerbils, some variant of it ought to work on humans, but there was no question that Partington, if he took it, would be risking his life. For all we knew, Max was a bizarre fluke. DFP-28 might even prove fatal to other dogs, never mind people.
I pointed all of this out, but he was obdurate.
“We need to synthesise a substantial stock of the substance.” he told me. “When the time comes, we give it out to trusted researchers. I can pay for the deuterium and synthesise the precursors. I would like you to enjoy the honour of synthesising the final product. You’ve proven yourself more than capable and I don’t really have the necessary space and equipment here for large-scale synthesis.”
In the end I agreed to everything. After all he was a genius, and I was just some guy who liked chemistry. I didn’t even have any formal qualifications in chemistry, aside from an A-level, which I’d obtained when I was 18.
He intended to begin dosing himself immediately, on a careful schedule, which he outlined in detail.
“If anything should happen to me, I want you to take care of Max.” he said, solemnly.
“Of course.” I said.
The next day, H. R. Partington began to take small doses of the experimental deuterated drug, beginning at 5mg per day, taken in two doses.
If only I had stopped him. If only I had argued more persuasively in favour of further animal trials. In general an untested drug can be assumed with a high degree of certainty to have terrible side-effects. That’s not the exception; it’s entirely usual. Those few drugs that have profound positive effects with few side-effects are rare birds, eagerly sought after by pharmaceutical companies who, most of the time, fail to find any such new drug and end up overhyping the positive effects of whatever they actually have discovered and covering up the side-effects as best they can.
The events that subsequently unfolded were entirely foreseeable, in a way, although I never could have guessed the precise form the side-effects would take.
For two weeks I didn’t see him. I did try to insist that, were he not under observation by doctors, he should at least allow me to keep an eye on him, but as I’ve mentioned, he was a very private and rather reclusive man.
Finally he phoned me and asked me to meet him at his house.
When I arrived, he opened the door then immediately dashed inside, as if he didn’t want to be seen. I followed him into his living room, where I found him wearing a paper bag over his head.
“My appearance may shock you.” he said.
Max chose that moment to jump on him, thinking the paper bag was some kind of game. He shouted “Down boy!” but Max took no notice. Eventually the dog jumped up beside him, where he was able to gently restrain him by putting his arm around him.
“What’s happened to you?” I asked, when the commotion had died down.
“Prepare yourself.” he said, and he slowly pulled the bag from his head.
My heart was in my mouth. I really thought I was going to see something horrific, but when the bag came off, I saw—more or less the same man I’d seen previously, except his skin was clearly smoother and he had dark roots growing under his white hair, and even at his temples where his hair had receded.
“Astounding.” I said.
“Yeah, it’s pretty cool, isn’t it?” he said, in what I took to be a humorous imitation of the kind of ordinary man that he was anything but.
“You look twenty years younger.”
“You know, this shouldn’t be working,” he said, “but it is. I can only conjecture that the body must in effect have a kind of master switch, or perhaps more like a dial, that sets one’s current age. This substance we’ve found—it turns the dial back. Previously-unsuspected mechanisms kick in and clear up damage that we didn’t even know it was possible to undo. What we’ve found, James, is the Fons Aeternae Iuventutis itself: the fountain of eternal youth.”
“We’re going to be wealthy beyond belief.” I said. “Not that money is all I care about, but some would be quite helpful at this point.”
He shook his head.
“We must put ourselves in the background for the moment. It’s imperative that we think carefully of the greater good of humanity. Think of what we are unleashing on the world! There will be no space for children anymore. In the end there will only be an incomparably ancient and yet eternally youthful race of beings. Imagine the effect upon society!”
Max barked at something, jumped up and ran off, wagging his tail.
“Once the secret’s out, it’s out.” I said.
“Precisely. And as yet we cannot be sure that there aren’t terrible side effects. This is merely an initial human trial. Highly experimental. That’s why you must help me to conceal my unexpected youthfulness. I need you to research the process theatrical types use to make people look older. It’s vital that I retain every appearance of age, even if I should return biologically to my twenties by the time the trial’s finished.”
“Do you consider that likely?”
“Looking at Max, I should say so.” he replied.
“We might easily have enough deuterium to finish treating you and to try it on perhaps ten or twenty further volunteers. But what will happen when you stop taking it?”
“Likely I will remain at the biological age I have attained at that point. I haven’t give Max any medication for two weeks now. You can see he’s practically a puppy.”
“We should make a careful inventory of our supplies.” I said. “Everything will need to be processed into DFP-28 as quickly as possible.”
“Let’s go through to my lab.” he said.
We went through to the room he used as a lab, which was quite small and had formerly been used as a dining room, and was now absolutely packed with chemical apparatus.
I noticed his limp was distinctly better and he was no longer reaching for his cane.
But in the lab he seemed to become confused. His memory was excellent as always, but he struggled a little with the calculations we needed to make. After a life devoted to chemistry and to very little else, calculations of yields and molarity came naturally to him, and he was able to perform them in his head almost without any discernible effort, yet now he had to resort to writing on a piece of paper.
At the end of it we calculated that, in fact, on the basis of the dosage given to Max, and the preliminary data obtained from Partington’s self-experimentation, we probably had enough to reverse-age forty-three 80-year-olds to the age of 25. After that we’d need more deuterium, and more supplies generally, although the deuterium was by far the hardest thing to source and the most expensive.
I left Partington’s house that day a little bit worried about his mental state. What does it do to a person, to age in reverse twenty years in two weeks? No wonder he seemed distracted.
After that I stopped by his house every few days to collect the precursors he was making, but he didn’t invite me in. I think he was worried about being seen. He’d put the stuff by the door, open it a fraction, then scuttle off inside. Nevertheless, we did communicate frequently via text messages and email.
I researched theatrical makeup as best I could, not knowing the first thing about the topic, and I gradually collected together things I thought might be useful for maintaining his usual appearance, such as hair bleach and ordinary makeup, which I gathered could be skilfully applied to simulate the effects of ageing.
A couple of things were beginning to alarm me, at that stage. The first was, his precursors often weren’t of the highest quality. They were generally adequate, after I’d performed a bit of a clean up on them, but they weren’t what I’d come to expect from a world-class chemist such as Partington himself.
The other problem was his growing obsession with rainforests. I gathered he had taken to listening to the radio a bit, whereas previously he’d been an avowed reader who owned a radio only for emergencies. He hadn’t even been in the habit of reading newspapers. The Times, which appeared in the photographs he’d taken of Max, had been purchased specifically for that purpose.
Now it seemed he was actually reading The Times and listening to radio programs while he worked.
Obviously, there’s nothing unusual about either of these things in themselves. It’s just that this represented a distinct departure from his previous habits. I questioned him carefully and cautiously and elicited the information that, indeed, he’d never been in the habit of consuming what he called, rather disparagingly, “mass media”. He said he was finding the necessity of hiding himself rather stressful and a bit of light entertainment, as he regarded radio news programs, took his mind off the problem.
News programs at the time were full of stuff about the rainforests disappearing. Numerous experts and celebrities popped up to tell us there would be no more rainforest in fifty years or whatever, and some of them went so far as to claim that without the rainforests the Earth would run out of oxygen: a claim that always struck me as unlikely since the Earth’s atmosphere is literally one-fifth oxygen.
The emails Partington sent me increasingly alluded to the “desperate situation with the rainforests”, which I found a little frustrating, feeling that we’d have plenty of time to think about rainforests once we’d finished completely overhauling the human lifespan.
After about a month had passed since Partington first began taking DFP-28, I felt myself sufficiently expert on the topic of applying ageing makeup to have a go at fixing him up. It was another week or so before he agreed to see me. I went to his house and, as usual, he pushed the door open a crack and scuttled off into the interior.
“Right, let’s see what we can do.” I said, taking out the makeup I had collected while he sat on a chair by a table in the kitchen.
My hope was that if I explained what I’d learned, he’d then be able to do it himself.
I switched on a light so that I could better see his face in the gloom of the north-facing kitchen with its grimy net-curtain-covered window.
“We don’t need that!” he said sharply. “You do realise, electricity is made by burning coal, causing pollution which further weakens the rainforests.”
“I don’t think the rainforests will mind if we use a bit of light for a few minutes.” I countered.
“Switch it off.” he said. “I don’t want it on my conscience. We all have to do our bit for the rainforests.”
“Do we, though?”
“You don’t seem to realise how serious this issue is. Only last night there was a documentary on Radio 2 where a charming young musician explained how ten percent of rainforest disappears every ten years. If we go on like this, we won’t have any rainforest left.”
“Hiram, we’ve got other things to think about right now besides rainforests.”
“James, extending human lifespan won’t do us much good if we don’t have any oxygen.”
“We’re not going to run out of oxygen.”
“Why not? There’s only a finite supply of it. It’s all generated by plants. Where do you think it comes from if not the rainforests? They are the lungs of the Earth.”
The conversation went on like that for several minutes, until eventually I managed to get him onto the topic at hand.
To cut a long story short, we tried to put the ageing makeup on him but by the time we’d finished he looked like Koko the Clown in his funeral makeup.
“It’s going to take some practice.” I said to him.
“Not to worry. I’ll give it my full attention.”
“Not your full attention. We still need more of the precursors, don’t forget. And we need to come up with an experimental protocol for further testing, or else find people who can manage it, discreetly.”
“Yes, of course.” he said, staring blankly into space. “Anyway, I don’t want to keep you any longer, James. There’s a splendid quiz show on at 5. The contestants have to guess what’s in a box and if they guess correctly, they win whatever’s in it. It’s really quite fascinating.”
“You will get the precursors done at least?”
“Yes, yes, don’t worry yourself.”
I was beginning to suspect the medication was exerting a psychological effect on the professor, quite distinct from its anti-ageing properties. His behaviour was not at all usual, for him.
It was as if he had lost that strangely distinctive intellectual edge that he’d always had, at least as far as I’d been able to tell. Partington had never truly lived in the common world of ordinary mortals, sharing such mundane concerns as quiz shows and rainforest destruction. No, he had lived his life, to all accounts, in a rarefied atmosphere of philosophy, chemical reactions and Greek and Latin texts.
Nevertheless, I told myself that it was all probably just a psychological reaction to growing younger at such an advanced age. After all, probably Partington had once been an awkward and shy youth, and awkwardness tends to wear off with age. Now, he was, at least, less awkward, and he was facing the prospect of becoming young once again.
Naturally he must be thinking, I reasoned, of the many opportunities that being young would afford him, with a wise old head on his shoulders. Who hasn’t regretted a thousand and one things about their youth, whether sins of omission or commission, things that Partington now had a very real chance of correcting, in a second youth.
This train of thought made me wonder what the limits of the drug might be. Could it return a full-grown elderly man or woman to the age of 18, for example? Being 18 isn’t simply a question of having smooth skin and sprightly joints. To take but one small example, a man’s ears grow throughout his life, and Partington’s ears were substantial. Would the substance shrink his ears? It didn’t seem possible, but I resolved to take careful measurements of his ears every time I saw him, and I further hoped that Partington would not push the experiment too far. A man as long in the tooth as him ought to be delighted if he can return to the age of 30 or 40.
Then there was the question of the buoyant and flexible mentality of the young versus the cynical and rigid psychology of the elderly. Certainly Partington could not hope to fit in with any crowd of teenagers. Music, for instance: a person’s musical preferences are set between the ages of about 12 and 24. I hardly know a single person over the age of sixty who doesn’t think nearly all new music is absolute garbage.
After this window of perhaps twelve years, all subsequent music tends to be judged by the standards previously determined during the musical imprinting process, and the further it departs from these standards with the passage of time and changing fashions, the worse it sounds.
Technically, it may be the case that popular music is actually deteriorating, and one could argue that the sustained appeal of the music of the 60’s and 70’s for the young argues in favour of this thesis, but the fact remains that Partington would simply be unable to endure any discussion of contemporary popular music.
No, he would be a fish truly out of water if he should attempt to return to his teenage years, or even his twenties.
That night I had a terrible dream. In this nightmare, I saw a de-aged Partington, perhaps only 17 years old, but with massive dangly ears and a huge nose, trying to fit in with a group of loud obnoxious youths and lecherously attempting to charm young women.
It was one of those dreams that sticks like flypaper, and after I awoke from it in the middle of the night, my mouth as dry as a bone, for some minutes I couldn’t shake the idea that this appalling manifestation would soon become a reality.
Only after I’d drunk a bit of tea and listened to some calming Chopin did my common sense begin to reassert itself.
Partington was no degenerate wastrel. Regardless of age, his interests would remain elevated and rarefied, and he would retain his conscientious character. Of that, I was certain.
But the nightmare vision haunted me nonetheless. During the day I was mostly able to shake it, then at night it would stick its claws into me insistently, especially in the small hours.
I scanned all of Partington’s messages carefully for signs of his intentions, and at times I outright asked him how far he intended to continue the experiment, to receive only nebulous and evasive replies.
A week later Partington told me I could collect a further batch of precursors. He said he had to go out somewhere but would leave them at his back door. This rather alarmed me, and it meant I didn’t actually see him in the end, and it was to turn out that this was the last batch I would receive from him, and they were of distinctly reduced quality. I was to end up synthesising enough DFP-28 to, in theory, return youth to perhaps 20 or 30 elderly people, or to shave a decade off the age of perhaps as many as a hundred.
His communications became increasingly terse, and he began to scatter abbreviations pretty freely in everything he wrote, as though he was in a great hurry. Exactly what he might be up to, I had no idea. Certainly not working on the precursors.
Then, to cap it all, he asked if I could take care of Max for two weeks, because he needed to make a trip somewhere. I asked him where and he wouldn’t tell me. I agreed to look after Max, hoping that wherever Partington was going, it was somehow germane to the business of handling a revolution in anti-ageing technology. Again he left Max in his back yard for me to collect. I happened to catch a glimpse of Partington’s living room through a pair of semi-drawn curtains while collecting Max; I couldn’t see much but I spotted several empty beer cans and a number of filled-in lottery tickets.
I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what the beer cans might be for. Was it possible that he had discovered some important interaction between the substance and chemicals found in common beverages? The lottery tickets seemed easier to explain; Partington had long been interested in probability so probably he wanted to test some theory related to mathematics and mass psychology.
When I got Max home he was absolutely unmanageable. That dog was full of beans and didn’t listen to a thing I said. I’d previously seen him obediently sitting and walking to heel with Partington, but with me I may as well have been speaking Chinese, and even then you’d think he’d have picked up on my tone somewhat.
I had to take him for a long walk to tire him out. We went for nearly eight miles, Max running hither and thither like a maniac, before he showed the slightest sign of calming down at all. I could only pray that this behaviour was due to the excitement of being in a new place.
Unfortunately, a week later, he was exactly the same. The long walks were tiring me out quite successfully; Max, not so much.
I was sitting one evening eating a sandwich while Max stared me down, periodically attempting to climb on me, when I looked into his vacant but determined yellow eyes and an unsettling idea popped into my mind.
The very next day I took Max to a friend of mine who happens to be a vet, or at least I tried to, but he wouldn’t go anywhere near the clinic. I had to get Sylvia to supply me with some sedative tablets that I could crush up and add to his food. Then I drove him there, peacefully sleeping, and after a further sedative injection alongside a contrast agent, we managed to get him into an MRI.
The results were deeply unsettling. Max was clearly suffering from decreased blood flow in several key areas of his brain, especially the prefrontal cortex and inferior frontal gyrus.
Sylvia peered worriedly at the scans on a computer screen. She asked me how old Max was, even though I’d already told her he was 4 — what else could I say? — and she said she’d never seen anything quite like it and had no idea what might be causing it. “As long as he’s getting a balanced diet and he seems happy,”, she said. “maybe best not to worry. There’s nothing we can do at the moment.”
“Oh, he’s happy all right.” I told her.
Max woke up and began growling at her, so I thought it best to get him home.
I passed the night unable to sleep, thoughts whirling around my mind.
I couldn’t for the life of me understand why DFP-28 would cause that kind of damage to Max’s brain, but we were in completely new territory and anything was possible. More worrying was the question of whether Partington would suffer the same effects.
The next day I tried emailing and calling Partington, but of course he wasn’t at home and he wasn’t responding to his emails.
A week later, when he was due back, there was no sign of him. An anxious week passed by while I fretted over whether to inform the police or not. Partington had gone off somewhere voluntarily and there’s no law against staying on holiday longer than anticipated, but I was dreadfully worried something bad might have happened to him. Since I had no idea where he had gone due to him refusing to tell me, my imagination did its worst. I imagined him comatose in Turkish hospitals or suffering amnesia in obscure Russian clinics, or perhaps wandering the streets of New York unable to remember his own name.
Finally I received a phone call, which went something like the following.
“Yo, what’s up mate?” said a voice.
“Who is this?” I asked.
“It’s your main man H. Partington, dude. I’m back! How’s my doggo doing?”
This left me temporarily speechless, but I quickly realised that, of course, Partington was only indulging in a spot of uncharacteristic humour. Naturally his sense of humour had changed, perhaps reverting to whatever it was like earlier in his life, and of that I had little real knowledge.
“He’s fine.” I said, after I’d collected my wits. “Shall I bring him over?”
“Yeah man, do it, bro.” he replied.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah, chill bro. Bring over the doggy dude and we’ll discuss, yeah?”
I walked over to Partington’s house, Max scampering madly around my legs on the leash, completely impossible to control, even though we’d hiked a good ten miles that day alone.
I saw even from a distance that there was something amiss. There were a bunch of cars parked at odd angles along the road by Partington’s house. When I rang the bell, the door was opened by an enormous bald bloke with a handlebar moustache, who ushered me inside.
On the sofa was sitting a man of perhaps 22 years of age, with his arm around two young women. His hair was cut very short and he was wearing some kind of sleeveless t-shirt with the logo of a band on it.
There was another man, with long braided hair, messing with some kind of drug pipe on the floor in the corner, and two more young women dancing to some music coming from a TV set, tuned to a music channel, over by the window.
The moustachioed man came up behind me and pushed me gently into the room.
“Where’s Hiram?” I asked, shocked by these scenes of debauchery—or at least, if I’m being hyperbolic, they were debauched scenes compared to anything that had previously happened in Partington’s house.
“Dude, it’s me.” said the man on the sofa.
I gazed at him with growing astonishment. Could it be? But it was. This was none other than Partington himself, transformed not only into a young man, but into a young man of somewhat inferior intellectual capacities, to judge by his speech and looks.
“Hiram?” I gasped.
“Yeah, dude.” he replied.
“I have to speak with you privately.” I said. “The substance, it has side effects that we didn’t anticipate. It’s vital that —”
But he cut me off, holding up his hand to silence me.
“Chill.” he said. “There’s more important stuff to fix up. We’re going to need your entire supply of the stuff.”
“I’m not handing it all over to you in your present state.” I replied, absolutely outraged.
“What’s wrong with my present state?” he said, his expression suddenly darkening.
“I mean —” I began.
“I don’t even give a toss.” he said. “Just bring the stuff here. I need to sell it to make some dough, and these girls are going to need a bit more. Myra was 70 last week and now she’s 25. She wants to be 18.”
He waved at one of the women dancing by the window.
“Absolutely not.” I said. “This is science, not some tawdry drug ring.”
“I’ll ‘ave to insist.” said Hiram, and I became aware that the man behind me with the ridiculous moustache was holding a knife at my neck. “Jeb here will go with you. Just to make sure you stay, what’s the word …”
“Focused.” growled Jeb.
“Thass right.” said Hiram. “Focused.”
“C-can’t we at least discuss it?” I stammered.
“Consider it discussed.” said Hiram. “Tell you what, you can keep Max. A little gift.
Max was scampering manically around the house, ignoring Partington completely. I don’t think he recognised him.
I put the leash back on Max and walked back to my house with Jeb following closely behind me. There I collected the DFP-28—it seemed I had no choice—and took it back to Partington, leaving Max at home.
The last words he said to me were, “You’d better get on with making more. I’ll cut you in for, like, ten percent. You’ll need some cash for buying more … what’s that stuff called?”
“Deuterium.” I replied.
“That’s the stuff.” he said.
Back at home I flopped onto my sofa and Max immediately started licking my face, which frankly I found horribly annoying, but he was a good dog, none of the whole business was his fault, and I could only hope he would settle down eventually.
Partington and his disturbing new friends disappeared out of my life for a while. I never found out where he’d acquired them, but it was clear that his little trip had taken him to places that the old Hiram Partington would have avoided like the Plague.
Two months passed by without me hearing a peep from him. I didn’t have enough money to buy significant quantities of deuterium, so I simply waited nervously, hoping they wouldn’t return.
Then I had a bit of a shock. Let’s call it a mixed blessing. One morning I found Max, who had never settled down at all, lying dead on my living room floor. It looked like the old boy had passed away peacefully in his sleep.
I got Sylvia to do a bit of an autopsy, and it turned out he had died of a sudden massive stroke.
Poor old Max, but at at least he hadn’t suffered, and I daresay the last couple of months of his long life had been the happiest of all his time on Earth.
Naturally that set me wondering what might happen to Partington, and I didn’t have to wonder for long. A few months later, two men and a woman were arrested at Partington’s house for improper disposal of a body. I’m sure the body in question was Partington’s own, although he was never positively identified. He had apparently died of a stroke, and three of those idiots had decided to dump him in the fens, but they had been seen by a passing motorist.
I don’t know what happened to the other two women; perhaps they fled.
The three that were arrested all died one after the other while in custody, all suffering catastrophic brain damage.
If the other two women had taken DFP-28, I’m sure they’re dead too.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering if the drug could be modified and improved, to bring about reverse ageing without the brain damage.
Perhaps, but I intend to take the secret of its molecular structure to my grave.
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