“So, as the unlucky one was Terence Rice, it follows that one of those two back there must be Gompez, and the other—well, he must be George Montgomery Troon, the one who made the Venus landing in 2144... and, incidentally, my grandfather....”
“Well,” said my companion, “they got them back all right. Gompez was unlucky, though—at least I suppose you’d call it unlucky—anyway, he didn’t come through the resuscitation. George did, of course....
“But there’s more to resuscitation than mere revival. There’s a degree of physical shock in any case, and when you’ve been under as long as he had there’s plenty of mental shock, too.
“He went under, a youngish man with a young family; he woke up to find himself a great-grandfather; his wife a very old lady who had remarried; his friends gone, or elderly; his two companions in the Astarte, dead.
‘That was bad enough, but worse still was that he knew all about the Hapson System. He knew that when you go into a deep-freeze the whole metabolism comes quickly to a complete stop. You are, by every known definition and test, dead.... Corruption cannot set in, of course, but every vital process has stopped; every single feature which we regard as evidence of life has ceased to exist....
“So you are dead....
“So if you believe, as George does, that your psyche, your soul, has independent existence, then it must have left your body when you died.
“And how do you get it back? That’s what George wants to know—what he keeps searching for. That’s why he’s over there now, praying to be told____”
I leaned back in my chair, looking across the Place at the dark opening of the church door.
“You mean to say that that young man, that George who was here just now, is the very same George Montgomery Troon who made the first landing on Venus, half a century ago?” I said.
“He’s the man,” he affirmed.
I shook my head, not for disbelief, but for George’s sake.
“What will happen to him?” I asked.
“God knows,” said my neighbor. “He is getting better; he’s less distressed than he was. And now he’s beginning to show touches of the real Troon obsession to get into space again.
“But what then?... You can’t ship a Troon as crew. And you can’t have a Captain who might take it into his head to go hunting through Space for his soul....”