7

"That's where I work. I'm a go-go dancer. They couldn't believe it when I wrote down on the applica­tion how old I was. Bet you can't guess, either."

"I don't care." He was on his way to paradise again.

"Go ahead. Guess."

Foxx sat up with a sigh. "All right. Twenty? Twenty-five?"

"Forty-three."

Foxx inhaled deeply. "Forty-three?" There were no lines on her face, no trace that Irma Schwartz had been on the planet longer than two decades. "You really are a horse," he mused. "The rarest kind of horse."

"I read a thing about it once in Ripley's Believe It or Not. There's some kind of drug in me. Not that I put it there on purpose or nothing, it's just there. Doctors call it propane."

"Procaine," Foxx corrected abstractly. His mind was racing. Irma Schwartz was too good to be true. What she possessed was worth more than all the nookie in the world. It would be selfish to keep her to himself. She belonged to the world.

"Yeah, that's it. Procaine."

"You're very lucky," he said. "People pay thou­sands of dollars for what you've got. A lot of forty-three-year-old women would like to look like they're twenty. It's an age retardant. Procaine's been used by the military for years. In small amounts, it wards off pain. It's related to Novocaine and to cocaine, only the human body produces it. In larger quantities, the drug can slow down the aging process. Theoretically, it can actually stop aging completely, allowing people to stay young for their entire lives. Of course,.that's only theory. It's much too rare to use in quantities like that."

8

"Well, how do you like that?" irma said, "i got something floating around inside me that's worth money."

"Lots of money," Foxx said. "Any clinic in Europe would pay a fortune for the procaine in your system."

"Yeah?" Irma brightened. "Maybe I can sell some. I mean, I got lots, right?"