{"product_id":"2940149630752","title":"2BRO2B","description":"Everything was perfectly swell.\u003cbr\u003eThere were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars.\u003cbr\u003eAll diseases were conquered. So was old age.\u003cbr\u003eDeath, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers.\u003cbr\u003eThe population of the United States was stabilized at forty-million souls.\u003cbr\u003eOne bright morning in the Chicago Lying-in Hospital, a man named Edward K. Wehling, Jr., waited for his wife to give birth. He was the only man waiting. Not many people were born a day any more.\u003cbr\u003eWehling was fifty-six, a mere stripling in a population whose average age was one hundred and twenty-nine.\u003cbr\u003eX-rays had revealed that his wife was going to have triplets. The children would be his first.\u003cbr\u003eYoung Wehling was hunched in his chair, his head in his hand. He was so rumpled, so still and colorless as to be virtually invisible. His camouflage was perfect, since the waiting room had a disorderly and demoralized air, too. Chairs and ashtrays had been moved away from the walls. The floor was paved with spattered dropcloths.\u003cbr\u003eThe room was being redecorated. It was being redecorated as a memorial to a man who had volunteered to die.\u003cbr\u003eA sardonic old man, about two hundred years old, sat on a stepladder, painting a mural he did not like. Back in the days when people aged visibly, his age would have been guessed at thirty-five or so. Aging had touched him that much before the cure for aging was found.\u003cbr\u003eThe mural he was working on depicted a very neat garden. Men and women in white, doctors and nurses, turned the soil, planted seedlings, sprayed bugs, spread fertilizer.\u003cbr\u003eMen and women in purple uniforms pulled up weeds, cut down plants that were old and sickly, raked leaves, carried refuse to trash-burners.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Starling and Black","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47176217166064,"sku":"2940149630752","price":0.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940149630752_p0.jpg?v=1763720371","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940149630752","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}