The Runaway Clock

But the one who opened the door and held it for the others wore the anxious look of years. Her face was sallow and her hair thin.

The first to enter, wearing a short print dress, cringed at the lightning and brittle thunder of the summer storm. Then she ran toward her teacher, who excused herself from our group. The child’s gait, for all her haste, was that of a diver forging through water, the shamble of a woman shrunken and stiff with age. Several of the children looked remarkably alike--the same birdlike features, with prominent eyes and beaked nose. Their faces were mottled and lined, their hands veined. Yet their laughter wasn’t unlike that of the girls and boys clearly in their first decade who pressed with them into the room.

The writer from Know--she called herself Kit Karson--said softly, "That’s one of them, isn’t it?" She indicated the afflicted girl, now hiding behind her mistress.

I nodded, noting the writer’s frown. The unexpected concern or pity raised hopes that her account would tend to offset the recent sensationalism. The institution didn’t deserve that notoriety, which exploited my clash with Buell while failing to denounce his despicable acts. Karson’s version, if balanced and factual . . . But I reminded myself that Know Magazine was little better than a tabloid.

"Isn’t it pretty rare?" she asked.

"We don’t really know the incidence, since the deaths are often ascribed to secondary conditions. But it’s certainly one of the rarer diseases."

"Progeria . . . Translate, please, Dr. Lindsay."

"Premature old age."

Rain lashed the playground and the glass, obscuring the high-rises beyond the grounds of the laboratory-clinic. We had recently sold several acres of that land in response to the alarming shortage of housing. In Baltimore’s crisis of growth and deterioration, our institution had entered the second millennium with plans to relocate, but was still here a quarter-century later.

Jill Buell was having her troubles as our presence distracted her class. She managed, though, to keep the children at the low tables littered with soap castles. I could see that the writer’s presence had upset her, for she snapped at the pupils who were watching the photographer pan the classroom with a camcorder.

The other visitor, our information man, reminded me to explain why we were studying progeria. Pete was right, of course. I shouldn’t leave the impression that the American Gerontology Endeavor (AGE) was principally concerned with rare health problems. Economists have said that a major cause of the Second Depression was the high cost of treating the common diseases of the aged.

"Research on progeria," I pointed out, "may throw light on the whole question of aging."

"And that was Dr. Buell’s specialty?"

"Well--yes, for the six years before his death."

"And he headed your Clinical Research as well as the Florida operation--?"

Prolonged lightning rent the sky, and the photographer swung his camera toward a window as thunder crashed. Wide eyes followed the young man’s actions but showed a mature indifference to the celestial display. As Jill knelt to tie a little boy’s shoe, I concealed my admiration of her shapeliness in the taut dress. The situation altogether was charged with tension. Absently I fingered an arrowhead I often carried in a coat pocket, a memento of my boyhood in Maine.

"Don’t some of them have other problems, Dr. Lindsay?"

"The progeric children?"

She peered at me as though her question couldn’t have been misunderstood.

"Aging increases the risk of certain diseases," I said--"atherosclerosis, osteoporosis, arthritis-- And these kids, physiologically, are old. You could almost mistake them for adult midgets. At one time Buell was giving them hormones to treat their growth problem." My sarcasm, it appeared, had escaped her, which was just as well.

The cigarette she had taken from a pack with her lips ignited when she drew on it. Surely she had seen the prominent No Smoking signs. "What was he known for besides the progeria discoveries?"

Discoveries? She probably meant my clarification of the cause. It was depressing to think Buell would be credited with that. Men of science, like political idols, sometimes gain such prominence that much of the work behind and around them becomes their own. But hadn’t I done enough already to deflate him? I began to summarize Buell’s achievements in the field of aging. Karson made a few notes before protesting that she wasn’t a science writer, that I’d have to speak in words of one syllable. At that moment Jill rejoined us and the reporter’s interest shifted.