Albert Teichner

“ Death is too rare and anachronistic a phenomenon today. "You're the one who needs treatment, Doctor. Overwork, too much study, one idea on the brain too much."
Resigned, he shrugged his shoulders. "All the first matter should be removed except for the spinal chord and the vertebrae. You'd still have that."
"Very kind of you," I said, and walked away, determined to have no more of his lectures now or in the future.
Marla wanted to know why I seemed so jumpy. "Seems is just the word," I snapped. "Never felt better in my life." ”

“ Marla went with me to hospital. She realized the danger I was in but put the best possible face on it. Her courage and support made all the difference and I went into the second matter chamber, ready for whatever fate awaited me.
Nothing happened. I came out of the chamber all protoplast except for the spinal zone. Yet I was still Treb Hawley. As the coma faded away, the last equation faded in, completely meaningful and soon followed by all the leads I could handle for the next few years.
Psychophysiology was in an uproar over my success. "Man can now be all protoplast," some said. ”

“ There is enough strangeness in feeling with absolute certainty that a limb exists where actually there is nothing, but the strangeness is compounded when you look down and discover that not only is the leg gone but that another, mechanical one has taken its place. Dr. Erics, who had performed the operation, said this difficulty would ultimately prove a blessing but I often had my doubts.
He was right. Upon my return to Earth, the serious operations took place, those giving me plastic limbs that would become living parts of my organic structure. ”

“ The rest of my body stood up well to this assault but every few seconds I had the eerie sensation that I was back in my old body, a ghostly superimposition on the living protoplast, as the spinal chord projected its agony outward. Finally the pain subsided, succeeded by a blank numbness.
I was carried on gravito-cushions to Erics' office. "It had to be," he sighed. "I didn't have the heart to tell you after the last operation. The subvirus is attacking the internuncial neurones."
I knew what that meant but was past caring. "We're not immortal—not yet," I said. "I'm ready for the end." ”

“ You could be the first scientific proof that the developing soul has the momentum to carry past the body in which it grows. At the least you would represent a step in the direction of soul freed from matter. ”

“ As a matter of fact, Planning Center preferred people in my condition; protoplast limbs were more durable than the real—no, let us say the original—thing.
At home and at the beach no one bothered to notice my reconstructed arm and leg. They looked too natural for the idea to occur to people who did not know me. And Marla treated the whole thing like a big joke. "You're better than new," she used to tell me and the kids wanted to know when they could have second matter limbs of their own. ”

“ Yet how could he say it was the old ship when everything about it was a substitution? The question was too much for him. When he came to Athens he turned the problem over to the wise men of that city, refusing ever to think about it again."
My mind was now in turmoil. "What," I demanded, "what did they decide?"
Erics frowned. "Nothing. They could not answer the question. Every available answer was equally right and proved every other right answer wrong. As you know, philosophy does not progress in its essentials. It merely continues to clarify what the problems are." ”

“ The old Centaurian virus had reappeared in my brain of all places and I started to have a peculiar feeling about where the end point in all this reintegrating routine would lie. Not that the brain operation was a risk; thousands of people had already gone through it and the substitute organisms had made no fundamental change in them. It didn't in my case either. But now I was more second matter than any man in history.
"It's the old question of Achilles' Ship," Dr. Erics told me. ”

“ We had known all along that every bit of atomic matter in each cell is replaced many times in one lifetime, electron by electron, without the cell's overall form disappearing. Now, by equally gradual steps, it had happened in the vaster arena of Newtonian living matter. ”

“ Fortunately the time was already past when protoplast patients were looked upon as something mildly freakish and to be pitied. Artificial noses, ears and limbs were becoming quite common. Whether there was some justification for the earlier reaction of pity, however, still remains to be seen. ”

“ In all the teeming domain of man there were only seven hundred who had gone through as many substitutions as I had. Where, they philosophised in passing, would a man cease to be a man in the sequence of substitutions? ”