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are blind,” Adam told me, when we discussed his treatment in histories other than my own, “but it ought to be impossible for any reasonable person of your day to entertain an atom of sympathy for my critics. It should have been obvious, even to my contemporaries, that I was the ultimate incarnation of the underlying philosophy of capitalism, as first set out in Bernard de Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Public Benefits — but I suppose we ought to be generous and remember that Mandeville’s writings were also misconstrued in their day, and prosecuted for the offense they offered to Puritan ideals.
    I asked Adam whether he had had the remotest inkling, in the early twenty-first century, of the difference that his actions would ultimately make to the general human condition.
    “Yes,” he said, unequivocally. “I knew perfectly well, from the very beginning, that emortality would become the privilege of all humankind — or, at any rate, all but the very poorest members of society. Some of the more shortsighted members of the Cartel were inclined for a while to think of it as something that ought to be reserved for the ultimate elite, but I tried to persuade them that it would be as unwise as it would be impossible to monopolise longevity. The whole point of their enterprise was to achieve economic stability, and there could be no other permanent guarantee of stability than universal, or near-universal, emortality. Before I was frozen down I advised them to make every effort to persuade their customers that emortality was imminent, that nothing was required for its attainment but loyalty and patience, and that once it was commercially available they should err on the side of generosity rather than play the miser.”
    “Are you surprised,” I asked him, “that so very few of them followed your own example and put themselves into suspended animation to await the fulfilment of that promise?”
    “Had you asked me in 2035 how many would follow my example,” he said, after a pause for thought, “I would have guessed that every rational man who had the means would do so. But I think I can understand why the actual figure was so low. The men to whom I acted as adviser were not of my kind. They were hungry for power, and they loved to exercise authority. They were, of course, ambitious to be the saviors of the ecosphere, but they did not want power because they wanted to save the world — they wanted to save the world because that was the best way to prove that they were powerful.
    “The men for whom I stole the world had the same deep-rooted fear of death and annihilation that I had, but they had never brought it to clear consciousness in the manner that I was fortunate enough to achieve. Their coping strategy was a different one, requiring a fierce avidity to seize the moment, and to lose themselves in the opportunities of the moment. They were, above all else, successful men, and their success extended to the repression of their death anxiety. They did not have the strength of mind or the force of will to let go of what they had and what they were about, until it was too late. They could be honest in their dealings with their fellow men when the situation demanded it — as it occasionally did — but they were incapable of being honest with themselves. They thought themselves extraordinary men, but their insensitivity to the fact of their own mortality was pathetically ordinary.”
    “It seems to have been surprisingly easy for people of your era to persuade themselves that they did not want to live forever,” I observed. He had not yet had the opportunity to read The History of Death , and did not know the extent of my own speculations or the nature of my own conclusions in regard to that matter.
    “Not at all,” he said, decisively. “If they had had to persuade themselves, they would have been quite unable to do it. The point was that they did not have to persuade themselves because