the ravages of disease, yes? People will die, Benjamin, as a result of the decisions, the priorities, entailed by your purchase. I'm quite serious: Can you deny that the ninety dollars a bottle of Dom Perignon costs could have easily saved half a dozen lives, perhaps more? Think about it. The bottle will yield seven or eight glasses of wine. Each glass, we can say, represents a life lost." His eyes were bright, a scientist having solved an equation and moved on to another one. "That is why I say that such trade-offs are inevitable. And once you understand that, you start to ask higher order questions: qualitative questions, not quantitative ones. Here we have the opportunity to vastly extend the useful life span of a great humanitarian or thinker someone whose contribution to the commonweal is inarguable. Compared to this good, what is the life of a Serbian goatherd? Of an illiterate child who would have otherwise been destined to a life of poverty and petty criminality. Of a Gypsy girl who would otherwise spend her days picking the pockets of tourists visiting Florence, her nights picking lice out of her hair. You have been taught that lives are sacrosanct, and yet every day you make decisions signifying an awareness that some lives are more valuable than others. I mourn for those who have given their lives for the greater good. I truly do. I genuinely wish that the sacrifice they made was unnecessary. But I also know that every great achievement in the history of our species has come at the cost of human lives. "There is no document of civilization that is not simultaneously a document of barbarism": a great thinker said that, a thinker who died too young."
Ben stood blinking, speechless.
"Come," Lenz said, "there's someone who wants to say hello to you. An old friend of yours."
Ben gaped. "Professor Godwin?"
"Ben."
It was his old college mentor, long since retired. But his posture seemed straighter, his once wrinkled skin was now smooth and pink. He looked younger by several decades than his eighty-two years. John Barnes Godwin, emeritus historian of Europe in the twentieth century, was vigorous. His handshake was firm.
"Good Lord," Ben said. If he hadn't known Godwin, he'd have put his age in the early fifties.
Godwin was one of the elect. Of course: he was a behind-the-scenes kingmaker, he was powerful and extremely well connected.
Godwin stood before him as mind-boggling proof of Lenz's achievement. They stood in a small antechamber off the great hall, which was comfortably furnished with couches and easy chairs, throw pillows and reading lamps, and racks of newspapers and magazines in a variety of languages.
Godwin seemed pleased at Ben's astonishment. Jurgen Lenz beamed.
"You must not know what to make of all this," Godwin said.
It took Ben a few seconds before he could think of a response. "That's one way of putting it."
"It's extraordinary, what Dr. Lenz has achieved. We're all deeply grateful to him. But I think we're also aware of the significance, the gravity, of his gift. In essence, we've been given our lives back. Not our youth so much as as another chance. A reprieve from death." He frowned thoughtfully. "Is it against nature? Maybe. The way curing cancer is against nature. Emerson, remember, told us that old age is 'the only disease.""
His eyes gleamed. Ben listened in stunned silence.
In college, Ben had always addressed him as Professor Godwin, but now he chose not to address him by name at all. He said simply, "Why?"
"Why? On a personal level? Do you have to ask? I've been given another lifetime. Perhaps even another two lifetimes."
"Will you gentlemen excuse me?" Lenz interrupted. "The first helicopter is about to leave, and I must say good-bye." He bustled, almost sprinted, out of the room.
"Ben, when you get to be my age, you don't buy green bananas," Godwin resumed. "You don't take on book projects you don't think you'll live to complete. But think of how much I can do now. Until Dr. Lenz called, I'd felt as if I'd struggled and worked and learned for decades to get where I am, to learn what I know, to gain the understanding I have-yet at any moment everything might be snatched away: "If youth but knew, if old age but could," right?"
"Even if all this is true-"
"You have eyes. You can see what's in front of you. Look at me, for God's sake! I used not to be able to climb the stairs at Firestone Library,