Page 123 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

No Country for Old Men

“That’s a help. Of course, going public after several years would be
terrible for him, particularly as all that time spent alone would have
turned him into a misanthropic hermit. So then it becomes ‘a man
with a terrible secret’ story, and the focus might have to shift to
whoever exposes him. And that legitimate inquiry will, according to
the logic of such Faustian stories, destroy both the man and
machine in a conflagration of Nature purging the outrage.”
“But there is another type of time travel tale you haven’t
considered,” said Perversity Tinderstack. “Suspended animation or
cryogenic preservation, the suppression of aging by much simpler
means than using the universe and its gravity as a backstop to
bounce a few trillion times a second into the Twin Paradox. To
hoist this petard, you would need a few tweaks in your scenario. In
this case Treadwell is wealthy by inheritance; thus he can retreat to a
mountain fastness, set up his Buck Rogers apparatus and power it
with solar cells. As he cannot go for medical check-ups once he
looks way too young for his age, he forgoes them. Thus he does
know he is about to have a fatal heart attack. He has it while inside
the QAD, so it keeps running. Two or three years later the
authorities break into his fortress and destroy the box in order to
get to him. They find a hundred-year-old man with the body of a
thirty-year-old. Moral made, end of fable.”

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