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"I've got this beautiful panoramic three-dimensional painting of Mars based on Martian photos. It's 30 feet wide. You can pick out every pebble on the Martian landscape. And who'd have dreamed you could do that?"
- Arthur C. Clarke
 |
| Xixtline | ||
| Venusian drug provides a rejuvenate effect. |
Mankind has dreamed of youth eternal for millennia, if not forever. SF writers do, too.
| Ham Hammond was a trader...
He was, in fact, trading with the natives for the spore-pods of the Venusian plant xixtchil, from which terrestrial chemists would extract trihydroxyl-tertiary-tolunitrile-beta-anthraquinone, the xixtline or triple-T-B-A that was so effective in rejuvenation treatments. He was pursuing no such abstractions, but the good, solid lure of wealth. Ham was young and sometimes wondered why rich old men—and women—would pay such tremendous prices for a few more years of virility, especially as the treatments didn’t actually increase the span of life, but just produced a sort of temporary and synthetic youth. Gray hair darkened, wrinkles filled out, bald heads grew fuzzy, and then, in a few years, the rejuvenated person was just as dead as he would have been, anyway. But as long as triple-T-B-A commanded a price about equal to its weight in radium, why, Ham was willing to take the gamble to obtain it. |
| Technovelgy from Parasite Planet,
by Stanley G. Weinbaum. Published by Astounding Stories in 1935 Additional resources -
|
Compare to anti-gerasone from Kurt Vonnegut's Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, young-forever from A World Out Of Time by Larry Niven, the Sprung-Samser treatments from This Immortal by Roger Zelazny and of course the anti-agathics from James Blish's excellent series Cities in Flight.
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'But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts. George winced...'
