THIS CORRUPTIBLE

By Jacob Transue

“By February the lump was the size of a bushel basket and had separated itself from him except for a gristly shining skin-covered tube, that pulsed with his heart like an obscene umbilicus. . .

* * * *

And so, after thirty-five years, they would be face to face again.

Andrew eased his car up under a big white pine and cut the motor. The place didn’t look like much. One old pickup truck parked between the two quonsets, a barn tucked against the forest, an unmowed meadow full of daisies and black-eyed susans on the south.

Andrew got out of the car and stood in the shade of the pine. His sense of uneasiness increased sharply. Of course, he was alone out here. He wasn’t used to being alone anymore. He was used to traveling with a swarm of secretaries, servants and assorted sycophants. He felt naked.

It ought to be refreshing. No planes, no cars, no engines of any kind. Nothing but the sputtering of summer insects. A wilderness. Anything could happen out here and no one would ever know.

Nonsense. Paul was a scientist. Men like him were too selfish, too single-minded to risk the interruption of their work for anything so sterile as vengeance. Paul always had been secretive. It was characteristic of him to insist Andrew come alone.

Andrew crossed the brown pine-needled ground toward the huts.

“Hello!” he called.

A leggy brown-haired girl wearing trousers peeped through the door and vanished as silently as a deer.

“Paul?”

And there, suddenly, was Paul behind the screening. “Hello, Andrew.”

The nylon netting was a dazzle of white between their faces, too blinding to penetrate. Then the door opened and Andrew stepped through, his hand extended in greeting. But Paul had already turned away to lead him inside.

It was cool and gloomy and dimly sparkling with long rows of chemical glass, glass cabinets, two tall glass closets so steamed with interior humidity their contents could not be seen. A long work counter ran the entire length of the building, with sinks and shelves, burners, centrifuges and other equipment he did not recognize. Off in one corner, squeezed between two huge filing cases, was an old gray metal desk.

“Sit down,” said Paul, seating himself behind the desk. “I’m sorry we’re rather primitive here. Take that crate,”

Andrew sat down uncomfortably. It had been years since his flesh had had to accommodate itself to such makeshifts.

“Well,” said Paul, “it’s been a long time.”

Able to see him clearly at last, Andrew clenched his jaws in surprise. It must be true, then, the incredible rumor his investigators had brought him. Paul had not changed at all. His thin dark hair, perpetually on the brink of baldness, was the same. The round child’s face had no dewlaps, no wrinkles. The beanpole body was still taut and narrow. Andrew’s hand crept surreptitiously under his coat. His tailor had again altered his measurements two months previously in London.

“Yes, a long time,” said Andrew. “What are you doing away out here?”

“Cheap land. Cheap labor. I have one girl here in the lab and a man up at the barn for the heavy work. Local people. I never had much money to operate with, you know.”

Was it a cut at him? Andrew felt for his cigar case, extended it and, when Paul shook his head, fumbled one out for himself.

Paul watched him light it. “I see your hands mended quite nicely. I didn’t think you’d ever be able to use them again.”

Andrew held them out for him to see. The palms and fingers, clear to the tips, were scar tissue, hard and white. The other memento of their last day of partnership. Scars on his hands and a fortune in his pocket.

“A whole beaker of acid,” said Paul. “It’s amazing you have hands at all.”

“I was preoccupied that day.”

“It was even convenient for you, wasn’t it. It gave your departure such logical urgency.”

“It ruined me for working,” said Andrew. He flexed his hands, stiffly, clumsily.

“Fortunately, you don’t need them for work,” said Paul and smiled thinly. “Tell me, how did you manage to find me?”

“It took me three years.”

“You must want something very badly.”

“You know what I want,” said Andrew.

Paul was silent, gazing at his desk-top. Andrew watched him narrowly. What was going on in his mind? Was that satisfaction, to have Andrew come seeking him out at last? Or was it perhaps caution, after what had happened so long ago?

“Now look,” said Andrew bluntly. “I’m not skillful at working people around. Power does that to you, I suppose. You get used to giving orders.”

“You have a great deal of power, haven’t you.”

“Yes. Now, I regret that thirty-five years have gone by since we worked together. But I make no apologies. You and I were different kinds of men. You were after knowledge. You’ve got it. I was after power. I’ve got it. You know yourself that in order to get what you wanted, you had to eliminate a lot of things from your life. I imagine you’ve had to slice your ethics pretty thin sometimes. So have I.”

“What have ethics to do with it?” asked Paul.

“You’re right,” said Andrew. A cloud of fragrant cigar smoke drifted between them. “Men like you and me operate on a different code. We have no families, no private lives. We each had one goal and everything else was sacrificed.”

“You mean that when you sacrificed me, it was according to your code.”

“In a manner of speaking. But you had what you wanted when you discovered that formula. It was of no further use to you. On the other hand, it was of great use to me. I’ve built an empire with it. At the time I had no money to either buy or lease that formula from you. Now, however, it’s a different story. Perhaps I can make it up to you.”

Paul’s spectacles flashed as he turned his head away. “That is not what you have come here for.”

Andrew lipped his cigar in silence for a moment. “All right,” he said at last. “My investigators picked up rumors of your work. At first I doubted the whole thing. Then I put my secretary on it and his report seemed to confirm the rumors. Now that I see you myself, I have to believe them.”

“What do you want?”

“Look at me. And look at you. We’re both sixty-eight years old.”

“Well, the exercise of power is rather hard on the organism, I should think. I lead a quiet life.”

What did he want? To see the rich man crawl? Andrew studied him in silence for a moment. “My investigators tell me you have found a way to lengthen the life-span indefinitely. To reverse the aging process.”

“Science is always the subject of wild rumors. You know that.”

“They have seen your eight-year-old monarch butterfly and your ten-year-old shrew.”

That got to him. The pause lengthened as Paul fingered his lower lip. At last he said, “Which of my assistants was indiscreet?”

Andrew gave a grunt of amusement. “Money talks. I heard it from my checkbook.”

Paul stood up and went to the window. Outside, the meadow shimmered in the sun, the insects chittered and buzzed.

Andrew leaned forward on the crate. “I’m prepared to give you half of everything I possess.”

Paul smiled. “You said yourself that money was not my goal.”

“No, but knowledge is power, they say. Maybe we’re not so different after all.”

Paul turned toward him. It was impossible to see his face against the light pouring in through the window. “We’re entirely different,” he said. “I would never have allowed that formula to get out of my hands. I knew from the beginning it would be put to a lethal use—”

“But this isn’t lethal!”

“Oh, think, man! The planet is already staggering under its superfluous populations. Nobody deserves to live indefinitely. Why, death by superannuation is the only thing that frees us from pampered dictators in all walks of life—of whom you are one, more than likely. What makes you think that you should live forever? Do you contribute something so precious to the world?”

“Do you?”

“Certainly not.”

“Then what’s the use? Why did you involve yourself in this?”

“Curiosity.” He could hear the smile in Paul’s voice.

“Then it’s futile!”

Paul’s narrow shoulders lifted in a shrug. “In the last analysis, it’s all futile. All ultimates are ultimate nothing, from the human point of view. We pass our tiny span with tiny games—bridge or biology, it makes little difference.”

“Nevertheless,” said Andrew, “I don’t believe you’d look the way you do in the natural course of time.”

“As I said, I lead a quiet regular life. I’ll probably outlive you by a good many years.”

Andrew lapsed into silence again and a strange little sensation came over him. He had felt it before. Ephemeral as a spiderweb, it closed over him and left its small stickiness, its impalpable repulsiveness. It was the sense of approaching death. He felt like a child, ready to cry out in wild anger and rebellion. It was not fair! Here he was with unlimited opportunities. It took years to reach such a position and what good was it if time was about to run out? It was so preposterous, so badly arranged, so paradoxical. Why should life be so idiotically perverse? And there stood that prim ass with the secret in his skull, presuming to withhold it.

“You’ve become quite a moralist, haven’t you,” he said ironically. “Fit to judge the whole world!”

“I’m not judging you, Andrew.”

“If you have the means to keep me alive and you don’t use it, that constitutes a judgment.”

“Why should I give it to you and not someone else?”

“Because I know you.”

“I know lots of people.”

“Because I know you can.”

“Now you’re tempting me, Andrew.” Paul sat down again at his desk, pressing his hands flat on the top of it. “My two vulnerable points. Curiosity and a logical aversion for you.”

Craftily, Andrew kept quiet. There always came a time when you had to be quiet and let a man talk himself into doing what you wanted.

“I’ve succeeded with animals, but a human being— with the unpredictable human mind. I ought to be willing to sacrifice you, since you’ve already found me expendable. Here you are urging me, offering yourself. I can’t imagine why I hesitate.”

“Liar,” said Andrew calmly, watching his obviously youthful face.

For a moment they were both quiet, eyeing each other with mutual skepticism.

“You have no idea what it entails, Andrew,” said Paul at last. “You see, your investigators didn’t get it quite right. I don’t lengthen the life of your organism. I have a procedure by which you produce yourself a new one.”

Andrew puffed at his cigar. “What’s the difference?”

“The psychological hazard. It’s terrifying.”

“You can do it, then!”

“It’s also very painful.”

“Worse than dying?”

“It would take a year.”

“Give me six weeks to get my business in order.”

“You’re determined, then?”

Andrew carefully scraped the ash off his cigar into the saucer on the desk. Now why was the man so carefully decontaminating himself of all trace of responsibility? Was there more he had not disclosed? Or was it a last attempt to frighten him off? Oh, I know you, Paul. You’d complete an experiment if it cost your own life, much less saving mine. “Yes.”

* * * *

When Andrew returned to the laboratory, the hardwoods were turning color and the katydids had replaced the locusts. He brought with him a physician’s report, which Paul had insisted upon, attesting to the soundness of his heart, lungs, liver and kidneys.

Changes had occurred at the laboratory during the interval. A new cinderblock wing jutted from the end of the quonset. It housed a small operating room and the room which Andrew would occupy for a year.

“I have some tests of my own to make, first,” Paul told him, and for two weeks Andrew submitted to brief agonizing encounters with tubes, needles and the rest of the distasteful panoply of research. The experience of suffering was new to him. Not even the accident to his hands had hurt very much—too much nerve tissue had been destroyed. Now, for the first time in his healthy life, he suffered the intrusion of reality upon his intellectual horizon, a reality that probed deeper and deeper into the fortress of his mind, laying waste whole concepts by the quick dazzle of pain, the hollow echoes of relief. He was astounded and exasperated at the ease with which his body could dominate his attention. His buffeted ego retched, too, as he lay vomiting after one particularly trying exploration. He might have quit the whole attempt then and there had it not been for the old cold habits of his years in commercial chemistry. One did not easily relinquish the fruit of a three year search. Any new enterprise was like a boil, growing more tense and painful until it finally erupted in success.

The experiment itself commenced with a small operation. The large artery in Andrew’s groin had to be moved to the outer side of his thigh. This was for mechanical ease, Paul explained.

“I’m not much of a surgeon, but no reputable doctor would perform such an operation so you have no choice. Are you still interested?”

“Yes.”

“Once we go this far, there will be no turning back.”

Andrew nodded brusquely, took the sedatives Paul gave him and climbed into bed. Paul snapped out the light, the door closed, all was quiet.

So, here he was suddenly. In this small room, this great bed, facing the large window that looked out on the meadow and part of the woods. The rising moon, three-quarters full, shed its placid light on the world, the curtains moved beside the partly opened window and it was as though nothing but this room had ever existed. I will not go out of this room on these legs, he thought, and abruptly the gamut opened before him.

Thoughts of life and death lined either side, thoughts a healthy man should never think. How fragile life was! One blow and it was gone. There lay the bones and tissues, but the life was gone, emptied out so easily. How vulnerable it was, how final its departure! How short its tenure seemed, at best. If something were to go wrong, it would be as though he had never lived at all. Consciousness was no more than an abstraction, a geometrical point in the void, preceded by mindless infinity, succeeded by mindless infinity. How mad, the commotion this abstraction could produce. Between the two infinities, what difference did a few years make? And yet how precious they seemed. It was worthless. A man would never buy anything so problematical. Yet he had.

This is not the way to think. You can die thinking such thoughts. You have to fight. Now, fight, he told himself. Cling. Think of being alive!

Oh, but pain. It was a problem. Those additional tests Paul had made. Painful. Pain required a certain mental attitude. You had to alienate yourself, draw apart from your body, set it out there where you could look at it and see it was just a kind of automobile. Made the pain bearable. The pain was bad when you confused it with yourself, whatever yourself was. What is the self? This mysterious seer, hearer, thinker, this insubstantial entity that desires to continue, that hates these wincing tissues on which it depends. Repulsive, failing, dying stuff. Suddenly, he felt as though he were perched precariously in a small boat tossed on a wild sea of organic matter that would drown him if he let it.

But I will not be drowned, he told himself. I’ll cling to this boat and tomorrow in the daylight it will be better.

When he awoke, leaves were swirling past the window. It was a windy October day and he felt hungry. He pressed the button and Paxil came in carrying a small tray with sterile implements on it.

“Well,” said Andrew heartily. “I feel ready for anything. Give me some breakfast and let’s get on with it.”

“The operation is over,” said Paul.

Andrew gaped at him, and in the silence Paul set down the tray on the table by the bed. Scissors, cotton, alcohol, a small vial with a plain darning needle stuck through the cork. Andrew turned away and instead looked at his hands. They were the same as always. But what matter if they were stiff and numb? They worked, didn’t they? He clenched them slowly. Good hands.

“Already past the point of no return, eh?”

“That’s right,” said Paul.

And then the reaction. This is not me. I’m in it, but it isn’t me. And the mad scramble back into the boat.

Paul lifted the bandage where the relocated artery pulsed. He swabbed a tiny patch of skin and picked up the vial.

“You see,” he said, extracting the cork with the needle, “in this process we take advantage of the fact that every cell of the body has in it the complete genetic equipment. We merely encourage one to divulge what it knows.” And he pricked the skin deeply.

“Is that all?”

“That’s the beginning.”

It itched, but Andrew, clinging to the cockleshell of his identity, refused to scratch it. The body was itching, not he.

“I’ll bring in your breakfast now,” said Paul, replacing things on the tray. “You’re going to have to eat quantities. Six meals a day. And unfortunately, special and not very tasty preparations. But it’ll be better in a couple of weeks. You won’t have to force yourself anymore. The new body is parasitic.”

Andrew said nothing. Instead, he watched with great attention as Paul recorked the vial. Small hard sounds of glass on metal, the movements of hands, footfalls as Paul went out.

Then what does one do with the mind?

One had to use these senses. They were all one had. But curse these sneaking side-glances at the machinery!

Leaves fell, dipping and kiting. Puffs of cloud drew their shadows over the blue hills. A flight of crows clamored noisily from tree to tree. One wondered what all the conversation was for. Why didn’t they just leave? It was as though they were saying, Where’s that report from the Florida labs? Dammit, Pete, I told you to take care of that. Their costs are running too high! Who’s that? Representative from Rupert Chemical. Get him out of here, damn spy!

He spent an hour watching a downy woodpecker go up and down the pitchpine just outside his window, picking and picking, softly and imperturbably, while the jays swooped, perched, bowed and brashly quoted prices. That woodpecker was like Paul. Research. The jays, salesmen, in and out all the time, bright-eyed and predatory. The starlings, speculators, always traveling in flocks.

And at last, breakfast came in on a wheeled tray pushed by Erna, the mountain girl, who looked at him white-eyed and served him at arm’s length.

Three days later there was a pimple on his leg. He got out of the boat long enough to touch it gingerly with an exploratory forefinger.

“What’s that?”

“That is how it begins,” said Paul.

Andrew turned to the window irritably. November was forecast by gray gusts of rain. “I wish it were spring.”

A month later, when the first snow lay feathered like a herring-cloud among the brown weeds of the meadow, the pimple had become a huge lump, the size of a grapefruit, and the pain had begun in earnest. It was a queer kind of pain, as though everything in him were being sucked through a pinhole.

“Is everything all right?”

“Yes,” Paul would say, each time he asked the fretful question.

But his suspicions grew. Then the practical self would take command again. You had to stick to the conviction that everything was fine! Maybe it wasn’t, but if not, it still was not practical to dwell on it. Stick with the paying premise.

“I’ve got to have something to do!”

“If you don’t mind Erna, I’ll send her in to play cards with you or something.”

“Anything!”

So Erna, the freckled, long-legged girl, sidled in with a pack of cards, and they played endless, wordless games of Russian bank, in between endless, tasteless meals. And, during the hour each morning, afternoon and evening, when Erna was up at the barn helping Paul with the experimental animals, Andrew played obsessive solitaire.

By February the lump was the size of a bushel basket and had separated itself from him except for a gristly shining skin-covered tube, that pulsed with his heart like an obscene umbilicus.

“That’s what it is,” said Paul.

“Cover it up!” Andrew ordered. “I don’t want to see it!”

Paul and Erna rigged a curtain between Andrew’s side and the lump’s side of the bed.

Yet, when the March winds started roaring over the quonset, he could no longer bear being in ignorance. He swept aside the curtain to see, and Paul came running at his sudden cry.

“My God, is that it? What’s gone wrong?”

It lay like a huge grub beside him, the head all frontal lobes, so large they wrinkled forward between the blind tumescent bulbs that should have been eyes. Its small caterpillarlike arms were curved in over the wrinkled chest.

“Nothing is wrong. It’s just shaped like a fetus at this stage.”

“It’s hideous!”

Paul jerked the curtain across the bed again and laid a barbiturate on the table. “Take that and stop thinking.”

Andrew gulped it down and replaced the water glass with a trembling hand. “That isn’t me,” he said hoarsely. “That could never be me.”

“Try to stop thinking.”

“What have you done to me?”

“What you insisted I do.”

“I want to stop. Cut it off. Kill it. Get rid of it!”

“If I did, you would die.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You would die. Your body processes are altered now.” He went out and returned with a mirror which he handed Andrew in silence. Glaring at him, Andrew took it, then he glanced in it, handed it back. He didn’t want to see. He had shriveled like a burnt leaf. His skin was leathery and stretched tight over the high bones of his cheeks and forehead and chin, sucked in in prunelike wrinkles around his mouth and eyes. He was aware suddenly of how very weak he had become. He closed his eyes tightly, withdrawing to the tiny boat, clinging to it, rocking and rocking in the now loathsome sea, hearing the suck and surge of his old body’s fluids, the receding tide of his blood.

He had made a mistake. He should not have left his business behind. That was the function of his mind, to keep him from being overwhelmed by this decaying carcass.

He demanded a Times, and Erna made a special trip in the pickup to get it. Thereafter, every day she went in to the distant county seat and brought one back to him. He began to write to his secretary, and large envelopes arrived in the mail once a day. It preoccupied him, and he congratulated himself on getting back to his proper activities again. But by June he was too weak to continue.

That day, when he admitted he could not write any longer, or even leaf stiffly through the contents of the latest brown envelope, Paul pushed back the curtain again. At first, Andrew refused to look.

“It has changed,” Paul assured him. “Take a look.”

At last Andrew turned his head on the pillow.

Beside him, head in the opposite direction, lay a young man.

“That isn’t me.”

“It’s you, all right.”

“It doesn’t look like me. I never looked like that.” He struggled to sit up, but was too feeble. Paul came around and helped him.

“The differences are only wear and tear,” said Paul. “This is a fully mature body, but it’s unmarked by experience. The feet, for example. No calluses, no deformities. They’ve never worn shoes. And the face. Even the face of a four-year-old child is altered to a certain extent by thought.”

Andrew gazed at it, rapt. It was eerie, lovely, locked in prenatal composure. “All the orifices are still shut,” he whispered.

“They’ll open shortly now,” said Paul.

Andrew hunched forward as far as he could. “Let me see the hands.”

Paul lifted one hand and held it up for Andrew to see the palm, smooth, flexible, traced like a baby’s with innumerable tiny lines. Andrew studied it avidly.

“I wonder how it will be to touch things again and be able to feel them,” he said, letting Paul help him lie down again.

They kept the curtain back, after that so that Andrew, propped up on pillows, could watch the last changes taking place, the slow unsealing of the eyelids, the lips.

“Why doesn’t he wake up?” Andrew asked.

“This is not your son,” said Paul. “This is you, remember?”

“How do I get in there?”

“Wait and see.”

Andrew was becoming too weak to worry. He avoided looking at his hands, which were so dessicated that the details of the bone structure could be seen through the darkening skin. Erna had to feed him, spoonful by spoonful, a long tedious process that seemed to do him no good at all anymore. Between meals he would sink into a torpor from which he roused sluggishly to be aware that for half-conscious hours he had been carrying on a long dialogue with himself, feebly insisting, heavily denying.

Live! Live!

Oh, it’s too weary, it’s too far away. I’m too tired.

That’s the trap of the flesh, the weakness of the mind. Don’t believe it. Don’t listen to it. Live!

And he would pick up the enormous load of his identity and struggle back to seeing once more.

And drift away again, down and down, deeper and deeper . . .

* * * *

It was warm again and he could smell the meadow, a fragrance compounded of warm grasses and a hint of wild strawberry, immensely sweet. He lay breathing it in, feeling for the first time in months a sense of ease, the quitting of innumerable pains and aches. I’m dead, he thought. And the faraway voice of Paul saying over and over again, “Andrew!” seemed the last echo out of time. So it does go on, he thought. This little I in the dinghy. Well, I’m glad to be out of it. How good to have no sensation but this pleasant scent ...

And then he opened—his eyes? But there was Paul, bent over the blackened shell, touching it gently, speaking to it. Loathsome thing. How could he bear to bend so close to it?

And then he blinked. Blinked what? Slowly down, glance over these limbs?

He could not speak.

There, Paul, you bloody genius, it hasn’t worked. Something has gone wrong and I can’t even tell you that I anticipated it and did not arrange to endow you with half my worldly goods.

Ah, there at last. Paul was looking toward him. If he couldn’t speak, he could smile. He knew he must be smiling, because Paul straightened slowly and came toward him, his academic frown shattered into wonder, his hand extended tentatively.

“Are you there?” Paul’s voice gently inquiring, curious, concerned.

Andrew smiled again.

“Can you speak?”

Can this head be moved? It’s extremely heavy, ah, but it can be shaken back and forth on the pillow, with effort, yet the effort is not painful, merely difficult.

“Don’t be anxious,” said Paul. “These delicate neural complexities of speech will need some training. Everything is there. You just need a little time. Erna!”

The girl came running, glanced at him wildly, turned away, turned back. He could have laughed, if he had been able, watching the comic graceful pirouette of alarm and curiosity and amazement.

“We must get some fluids going,” said Paul to her. “That thing—” a thumb over his shoulder toward the other form in the bed “—is not quite defunct. We can keep it operating a little longer and give him a margin.”

She vanished out the door, returned quickly with the bottled fluid and the rack. They suspended it over the other one, jabbed the needle into the papery vein.

“Get this one something to sip at. We’ve got to get it functioning!”

Erna ran out again while Paul wrapped a blood-pressure band and listened to his heart, meanwhile glancing at him with eyes that seemed filled with new unsuspected perplexities, eyes newly gentle, newly troubled and searching. Had something gone wrong?

Paul folded his stethoscope, patted his hand and waited until Erna returned with a tall glass of fruit juice. “Hold it for him,” he said to her, and she sat down beside the bed and put the straw in his mouth. Andrew drank greedily, and instantly was filled with such an intensity of pleasure that tears sprang to his eyes. All that was new and waiting and ripe functioned smoothly, joyously, and was in turn rejoiced by the cool liquid flowing into the receptive stomach. Andrew tongued aside the straw for a moment to smile reassuringly at Paul. It works, he wanted to say. You see, it does work. Don’t worry. All will be well. Poor old Paul.

Old Paul?

Andrew squinted at him, trying to manage the unsteady focusing of these sharp new eyes with their exquisitely flexible lenses. Ah, there it was! The tiny webbing of lines around Paul’s eyes. And the papery look of the skin under his chin. Old Paul. My God. Andrew turned his head and gazed at Erna, really seeing her for the first time. Here was genuine youth. This luminous skin, the high round contours of cheeks outlined in light, contours to be understood not by their bones or their lines, but by the simple fruit-like bloom of skin.

Andrew lifted one hand uncertainly. It wavered but it rose, and he studied the skin of his forearm. There it was. The moist pellucid bloom of youth.

So Paul had not lied. He had never passed through the process. He really was the fortunate possessor of a type of organism that aged very inconspicuously.

“We’ll teach you to talk,” Paul was saying. “That can be Erna’s job.”

And so he learned to speak again from Erna, who had once so diffidently played cards with him in his old person. He watched her lips form the syllables, and from the syllables his attention was drawn to the lips that formed them. How was it possible he had associated with her for a year and never seen her at all, save as someone to be sent or summoned? Why, she was lovely, brimming with whimsical grace, warm and attentive.

Beware, whispered old experience, drawing him back into the boat. The sea is the sea. Today the sun shines on it, but remember the darkness.

Oh, but life is so sweet again! All these senses—surely they should be tried for their own sakes. This body has so many potentials besides just carrying around an ego and a calculator.

Hormones, came the ironic reply. The subtle secretions of a new set of endocrines. Did I endure that year for a pretty hillbilly?

How marvelous she is! These textures, these fragrances, this animation!

Even Paul seemed to consider her a more appropriate companion for him (youth to youth, perhaps), for days went by when Andrew did not see him at all except for the daily blood-count. He did not care. He was too charmed with the small pleasures of each succeeding day, the exercises he could do in bed, shaving, eating (real food again, meat and fruit and vegetables), looking at Erna.

“Oh, but I want to get my feet on the ground,” he said moving his legs restlessly. “I want to walk out in the meadow.”

Erna had been sitting in the open window, obviously longing to go outside almost as much as she wanted to stay with him. Now she turned with a grin. “Let’s ask Paul,” she said, slipping from the window.

The next morning Paul gave him a pill and prepared him for the final operation. He awoke at noon to find himself free at last, with a small bandage on his navel, and the still sinister form of his past gone forever.

During the following week he learned to walk again, first simply getting in and out of bed, or standing up, then wobbling around the room holding fast to things. His strength increased rapidly and in five days he was able to walk up and down the corridor. A week later he was ready to try the meadow and, leaning on Erna’s round arm, he went slowly out through the daisies and beebalm and wild chicory.

“Not too far the first time,” said Erna.

“Just to the pines,” he begged, so they went down and into the shade of the pines where she helped him to sit down to rest on the brown needles. He was no sooner securely on the ground than he tightened his arm around her shoulders and dragged her down to him and kissed her on the mouth. After one start of surprise, she threw her arms around him and very happily kissed him back.

He laughed. “I knew it would be good to kiss you!”

“How could you know!”

“Because I’ve watched your mouth for weeks. It’s so sweet and fresh.” He let her sit up beside him. “And so am I! No old dental plumbing! No tobacco stains! No jaded tissues!” And he touched her cheek with his fingertips, relishing the texture of silky skin.

He remembered the first sight he’d had of her. Wild and shy as a deer. And like a deer, confidence made her playful. What did it matter if she was a mountain girl? What did education matter? She spoke well enough. Paul’s influence, perhaps. But she was young and pretty and healthy and bright. What more could a man want? Besides, she was guileless. Nothing haughty there, nothing combative. With a girl like this you could be two against the world instead of each other. Marriage was one thing he’d never tried.

“Erna,” he said, “I realize I’m too old for you. I’m sixty-eight, after all. But I want to marry you anyway.”

Her bright eyes looked into his, a little abashed. Then she grinned. She had such a fetching open-hearted smile. “You’ve got it backwards! I’m ancient compared to you. You’ll only be two months tomorrow!”

They laughed and hugged each other and then she leaned contentedly on his chest and tucked her head underneath his chin. “I’d love to marry you, Andrew. Only do you suppose we could live here in the woods?”

“I’ll buy you two thousand acres of your very own and you can fence out the hunters and tame all the varmints.”

“I’d like that!” She lifted her head and looked into his face. “How did you know?”

Andrew, holding her in his arms, smiled dreamily out at the meadow. “I seem to know a lot of things all of a sudden. Maybe I never had time before.”

And without a backward glance, there under the pine trees, he left the dinghy and slipped into the welcoming sea.

That evening after dinner, Paul came in, listened to his heart and said he was doing very well,

“Sit down,” said Andrew.

Erna was sitting on the edge of the bed beside him. Paul sat down in the chair. “It’s time,” he said cryptically.

“Well,” said Andrew, “I feel it’s time, anyway.” He glanced gratefully at Erna. “I doublecrossed you, Paul.”

“That was too long ago to think about,” said Paul.

“No. I mean, I did it again. I said I’d give you half of everything I had. Why didn’t you ask about it? Why didn’t you insist on seeing it legalized before you went through with this?”

Paul looked at him in silence.

“Well, it doesn’t matter, anyway,” Andrew went on. “I’ve been thinking about a great many things. I regret so much. Half of what I have is more than you’d ever need. But I want to reestablish what we had, what I wrecked thirty-five years ago. I know I can trust you, but I want you to know you can trust me, now. I thought we could work out some way for you to be joint owner with me of everything. It belongs to you probably more than it does to me, anyway.”

“It won’t work,” said Paul.

“Yes, it will,” said Andrew. “I’ve been going over it in my mind and I’ve a good idea how to go about it. I’m going to bring my lawyers up here and we’ll put the whole thing on paper once and for all. I know you aren’t interested in money, but don’t tell me you’d turn down unlimited funds for your laboratory.”

Paul smiled his habitual thin smile. “It would be very nice, but it won’t work.” He glanced at Andrew wearily, with a touch of his old irony. “You see, Andrew, your personality has changed. Oh, I’m almost certain you’re the same entity, but there are dozens of significant little differences that make you a human being instead of a monster.”

“I suppose I should be grateful . . .”

“But there are ramifications,” Paul continued. “I mean, you haven’t asked how you can prove your identity. Can you make your lawyers believe you’re a sixty-eight-year-old man? Will they believe you?”

Andrew blinked at him. “We’ll do it by mail,” he said.

Paul took his notepad and pencil from his breast pocket. He laid them carefully on the table beside Andrew. “Sign your name.”

Still gazing at him in bewilderment, Andrew picked up the pad, curled his fingers around the pencil. Then he bent his head and concentrated on the absurdly difficult task of writing his name. A childish scrawl met his eyes. He looked up at Paul, startled. “But I’ll learn to write again! A little practice . . .”

“Certainly.” Paul nodded. “But the difference between your present personality and your—’late’—personality, would make any graphologist testify against your claim.” He paused, then added softly. “And then, doubtless many of your associates are quick men to grasp an opportunity. Can you trust them not to find it to their interest to deny your identity?”

Slowly, Andrew leaned back on his pillow. It was true enough. The high ridges of industrial finance had their quota of predators. Even as he digested his predicament, he felt the slow stirring of his own old instinct, rousing to prowl again. And with it came the old cunning: you bare your fangs when you have power, but while you’re jockeying for it, you go quietly, head down. “Well,” he said. He glanced at Erna who was watching him with wide-eyed concern. So sweet, so desirable. But that would have to wait awhile. “What’ll I do?” He lifted his hands and looked at them. “No fingerprints that are any use. But they’re good again, Paul. Can you give me a job here for a while?”

Paul smiled suddenly, with relief, it seemed. “That’s an idea. Then it really would be like old times.” He rose. “Well, we have to get up to the barn. I’m delighted with the way you’ve come along, Andrew. And very happy with the way you’ve taken this turn of events.”

“You did what you said you would,” said Andrew. “I’m the luckiest man in history. And if I hadn’t tried to cheat you, I wouldn’t have cheated myself, would I?”

Paul sighed. “I admit it. It was my breaking point. The idea of letting you cut yourself off without a penny was irresistible. But now I’m genuinely sorry, Andrew.”

“Forget it.”

Erna slipped off the bed and followed Paul out, touching Andrew’s hand as she passed. He listened to their footsteps going down the corridor, then the soft closing of the door as they left the building to go up to the barn. After that, he lay still, thinking and thinking, while contempt and rage slowly accumulated force. At last he snaked quietly out of bed and stood barefoot on the floor, his entire being poised, cold, feral.

Work for you again! Work for you! Why, you stupid vindictive old ass! To annihilate the fruits of a lifetime for a moment’s spite! You dried-up academician! You might be satisfied to spend sixty years with your eyes plastered to a microscope but I have other fish to fry. And this time I won’t waste fifteen years getting started.

He knew they would be at the barn for an hour at least. He slipped down the corridor, past the operating room, into the laboratory. It was dark, save for one small light above Paul’s desk. In a moment his eyes adjusted as he went softly and slowly down the long aisle, examining Paul’s equipment as he went, touching things here and there, recognizing, remembering as the knowledge seeped back with his other reviving powers. Halfway down the long continuous bench, he stopped. There, in a glass cabinet, in front of several rows of similar little vials, was the one with the darning needle stuck through the cork. He looked at it impassively.

“Will he be all right?”

Erna’s voice. He froze.

“Are you in love with him?”

At the sound of Paul’s voice, Andrew realized he was listening to an open intercom between the laboratory and the barn. He looked about for it, then spotted it a little to his left where he had passed it in the dark.

“Guess I am”

Now he could hear, faintly in the background, the nicker of a horse and the intermittent whining of a dog. He relaxed and turned back to the cabinet, his eyes fixing on the vial.

A chuckle from Paul. “He’s going to make it.”

“How can you be sure?”

It was worth millions, that vial. Untold millions. Every fortune in the world would come tumbling into his lap. The idle rich, politicians, athletes, movie stars . . .

“The rats, Erna”

Stealthily, Andrew slid open the door of the cabinet. His hands closed over the vial. Then he paused, assessing the other little bottles ranked on the shelves. Did they all contain the same fluid?

“Which ones? The first two died,”

“Ah, but they served their purpose! If they hadn’t remembered the maze after processing, we never would have suspected we had preserved the same entity”

Andrew turned the vial in his fingers. Well, then. Perhaps I shall work for you awhile, after all. Long enough to observe, to learn. I can go whenever I’m ready.

“But the next four rats forgot the maze and had to learn it all over again. It’s been so in every case, Erna. The ones that remember the maze are the ones whose blood production fails after a few weeks. It’s as if the entity had to make a massive realignment to survive. I’m happy to say Andrew’s a changed man”

Andrew, hearing Paul’s dry reassuring chuckle, felt the vial grow heavy in his hand.