It was his turn to be embarrassed. He covered by dosing his Blue Points with Worcestershire until they flinched visibly. "I'd like to know."

"It goes like this," she said. "In between 1940 and 1960, a big change took place in Western medicine. Before 1940in the early part of the century the infectious diseases were major killers. By 1960 they were all but knocked out of the running. The change started with the sulfa drugs; then came Fleming and Florey and mass production of penicillin during World War II. After that war we found a whole arsenal of new drugs against tuberculosis, which had really never been treated successfully before streptomycin, PAS, isoniazid viomycin, and so on, right up to Bloch's isolation of the TB toxins and the development of the metabolic blocking agents.

"Then came the broad-spectrum antibiotics, like tarramycin, which attacked some virus diseases, protozoan diseases, even worm diseases; that gave us a huge clue to a whole set of tough problems. The last major infectious disease, bilharzia, or schistosomiasis was reduced to the status of a nuisance by 1966."

"But we still have infectious diseases," Paige objected. "Of course we do," the girl said, the little atoms points in her brooch picking up the candlelight as she leaned forward. "No drug ever wipes out a disease, because it's impossible to kill all the dangerous organisms in the world just by treating the patients they invade. But you can reduce the danger. In the 1950's, for instance, malaria was the world's greatest killer. Now it's as rare as diphtheria. We still, have both diseases with us but how long has it been since you heard of a case of either?"

"You're asking the wrong man, germ diseases aren't common on space vessels. We bump any crewman who shows up with as much as a head cold. But you win the point, all the same. Go on. What happened then?"

"Something kind of ominous. Life insurance companies, and other people who kept records, began to be alarmed at the way the degenerative diseases were coming to the fore. Those are such ailments as hardening of the arteries, coronary heart disease, embolisms, and almost all the many forms of cancer, diseases where one or another body mechanism suddenly goes haywire, without any visible cause."

"Isn't old age the cause?"

"No," the girl said forcefully. "Old age is just the age; it's not a thing in itself, it's just the time of life when most degenerative diseases strike. Some of them prefer children leukemia or cancer of the bone marrow, for instance. When the actuaries first began to notice that the degenerative diseases were on the rise, they thought that it was just a sort of side effect of the decline of the infectious diseases. They thought that cancer was increasing because more people were living long enough to come down with it. Also, the reporting of the degenerative diseases was improving, and so part of the rise in incidence really was an illusion it just meant that more cases than before were being detected.