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“But cleanliness is next to fordliness,” she insisted.
“Yes, and civilization is sterilization,” Bernard went on, concluding on a tone of irony the second hypnopaedic lesson in elementary hygiene. “But these people have never heard of Our Ford, and they aren't civilized. So there's no point in…”
“We preserve them from diseases. We keep their internal secretions artificially balanced at a youthful equilibrium. We don't permit their magnesium-calcium ration to fall below what it was at thirty. We give them transfusion of young blood. We keep their metabolism permanently stimulated. So, of course, they don't look like that. Partly,” he added, “because most of them die long before they reach this old creature's age. Youth almost unimpaired till sixty, and then, crack! the end.”
The strange words rolled through his mind; rumbled, like the drums at the summer dances, if the drums could have spoken; like the men singing the Corn Song, beautiful, beautiful, so that you cried; like old Mitsima saying magic over his feathers and his carved sticks and his bits of bone and stone…but better than Mitsima's magic, because it meant more, because it talked to him.
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