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The Thousandth Birthday Party
Durant Imboden, first published in If: Worlds of Science Fiction, December, 1966.
part 2
Lots of people worried about the party. Practically anyone in his or her 900’s, as well as the kinfolk of these most senior citizens, worried about the party. For on a person’s 1,000th birthday, the lucky fellow or woman would be the guest of — and participants in — the lottery.
It was a lottery which decided not whether a man would win a soccer or baseball pool, or which women would be lucky enough to win a washing machine in a supermarket drawing, but which men would live and which men would die; which women would live, and which would go on to their heavenly reward.
It was, needless to say, a lottery of great importance for the people involved in it. And eventually practically anyone of any significant economic status would become involved in it, since the upper middle-class and the well-to-do invariably managed to reach their 1,000th birthdays.
How? Well, the health of the nation and of the technologized world was booming. It took money to live to be a thousand, but then lots of people had money in this era of unprecedented prosperity. Most of them chose to spend a large share of their money on keeping their feet — not to mention the rest of their bodies — out of the grace. Medical science could work wonders these days. If a man’s heart started to give out, all he had to do was undergo special drug and nutritive treatment. If that didn’t show results quickly, he would be given a reconditioned heart from the organ banks, Or if there was a momentary shortage of reconditioned hearts to prevent this rehabilitative surgery, he could settle for an artificial heart, which worked just as well or better, although it necessitated annoying yearly battery replacements and interfered with reception on many transistor radios. If an arm or a leg became mangled in an aircar accident, or if a stomach decided to come down with a stubborn cancer virus, all that was needed was a trip to the hospital. If drugs couldn’t do the job, the organ banks almost invariably could.
There was only one significant problem brought on by semi-universal longevity, and that was over-population.
Birth control had helped alleviate the difficulty somewhat, but the fact remained that if far more people were being born that were dying, Mother Earth would eventually have to give up trying to support them, since there would be no other alternative. The interplanetary colonies would continue to absorb some of the excess population, of course, but they were still relatively new, and their growth was limited by many logistical and economic factors.
So one year someone came up with the idea of the lottery.
In this Sunday series of posts I will be “re-publishing” pulp science fiction short stories that have long since gone out of print. When possible I will seek out author’s and estates for permission.
