“And, of course, we could build a human body up from scratch theoretically, anyhow. But no one ever has. In fact, no one has ever even started to. De Reinzie manufactured the first fully functional human cell—muscle tissue—in the middle of the last century, about 2062 or so. And shortly after that the major varieties were cooked up. And even then it wasn’t really manufactured from scratch. De Reinzie, like all the rest, built some basic DNA templates from actual carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and so on, or rather from simple sugars and alcohols. But then he grew the rest from these. That’s growth, not manufacture. And nobody’s come closer to building an organ than a lab that made a millimeter of stomach wall for several million credits a couple of decades ago.
“I don’t want to bother you with the mathematics,” he continued looking away from Terry. “But my old professor at Tech used to estimate that it would take all the scientific and manufacturing talent of Earth and the rest of the Federation something like fifty years and a googol credit to build a single human hand.
“You can imagine what it would take to make something like that,” he said, moving out of their line of vision and gesturing at the jogging figure. He took the clipboard that hung next to the treadmill’s control and scanned the sheets on it.
“This body had been blank for three years. It has a running-time age of thirty-one years, though of course Sally Cadmus—that’s the person involved—was born over thirty-four years ago. What with demand, of course, three years is a long time for a body to remain out of action. She’s in good health, fine musculature for a spacer—says Sally was an asteroid miner here. Seems the body spent two years frozen in a Holmann orbit. We’ve had it for four months and we’re preparing it now. You might see her walking around any day now.
“But Sally Cadmus won’t. Her last tape was just the obligator, one made on reaching majority and she left no instructions for implantation. I trust, people, that all your tapes are updated.” He gave then the family doctor look and went on, moving closer and dropping his voice.
“I have my mind taped every six months, just to be safe. After all the tape is you—your individual software, or program, including memory store. Everything that makes you you.” He walked up to the aide who had brought the beautiful young man.
“You—for instance—Ms. Pedersen, when did you have your last tape job?”
The aide, a gaunt red-haired woman in her mid-thirties, snatched her arm from around her young man and glared at Austin Worms.
“What business—”
“Oh, I wouldn’t really expect you to say in front of other people.” He grinned at the others as Pedersen subsided. “But that’s the whole point, you see. Maybe she has been renewing her tape yearly, which is what our profession recommends as an absolute minimum. But a lot of people neglect this elementary precaution because they are so appalled by the thought of severe bodily injury. They just let things slide. And because the topic is so personal, no one knows, no one asks, no one reminds them until the once-in-half-a-million accident happens—truly irreparable body damage or total destruction.
“And then you find that the person hasn’t taped for twenty years. Which means ....”
He surveyed the group to let it sink in. Then he saw the beautiful girl-child. Terry had been hiding her, no doubt. A classic blond-haired blue-eyed girl in her midteens. She was looking straight into his eyes. Or through them. Something … He went on.
“Which means if he or she is lucky and there’s estate money, you’ve got someone who has to face all the ordinary problems of rejection that come in trying to match a young mind with what is almost certain to a middle-aged body. But also the implant has all those problems multiplied by another. The implant has to deal with a world that is twenty years in the future. And a ‘career’ that is meaningless because he lacks the memory and skills that his old mind picked up over that twenty years.
“More likely, you’ll get the real blowout. You’ll get massive rejection psychosis and premature essential senility, and death. Real, final mind death.”
“But you would still have the person’s tape, their software, as you call it,” said Ms. Pedersen. “Couldn’t you just try again, with another blank body?” She still had her hands off her young man.
“Two problems. First”—he stuck his index finger in the air—“you got to realize how very difficult it is for a mind and a body to make match, even with all the help us somaticians and psycheticians can provide, the best that modern biopsychological engineering can put together. Even with a really creative harmonizer to get in there and make the structure jell. Being reborn is very hard work indeed.
“And the failure rate under ordinary circumstances—tapes up-to-date, good stable mind, decent recipient body—is about twenty percent. And we know that it jumps to ninety-five percent if there’s a second time around. It’s nearly that bad the first time if you got someone whose tapes are twenty years out of date. The person may get through the first few days all right but he can’t pull himself into reality. Everything he know was lost twenty years ago. No friends, no career, everything out of shape. Then the mind will reject its new body just as it rejects the new world it has woken up to. So you don’t have much of a chance. Unless, of course you’re the rare nympher or still rarer leaper.
“Second, the Government underwrites the cost of the first implantation. Of course, they don’t pay for a fancy body—a nympher body, that is. You’d pay more than two million credits for one of those beauties. You get what’s available and you are lucky if you get it within a year or two. What the Government underwrites is the basic operation and tuning job. That alone costs one and a half million or so. Enough to pay my salary for a hundred years. Enough to send the half-dozen or so of you on the Cunard Line Uranium Jubilee All-Planets Tour in first class.”
Austin had been moving over to the treadmill control console while speaking. As he finished, his audience noticed a large structure descending from the ceiling just over the jogging figure, Sally Cadmus’s body. It looked like a cross between the upper half of a large mummy and a comfortably stuffed armchair. Austin glided over to the treadmill. The audience watched the structure open like an ancient iron maiden. Some noticed that the jogging figure was slowing down.
Austin arrived just in time to complete a flurry of adjustments on the jogger’s control package before the structure folded itself around. Two practiced blows on the back of the jogger’s thighs brought the legs out of contact with the slowing treadmill.
“It’s a lucky thing that implantation is so risky and the sort of accident that calls for it so rare,” he said as the structure ascended behind him. “Otherwise, the Kellog-Murphy Law, which underwrites the first implantation, would bankrupt the Government.”
“Where is the body going?” asked the blond-haired youngster. Austin could see now that she was probably no more than ten or eleven years old. Something about her posture had made him think she was older.
“Normally it would go into a kind of artificial hibernation—low temperature and vital activity. But this body will be implanted tomorrow, so we’ll keep it at a normal level of biological function.” He had given the body an additional four cc.’s of glucose-saline plasma beyond the program. That was to compensate for the extra jogging. He hadn’t done the official calculations. It wasn’t that such mathematics was more than a minor chore. If you had asked him to explain, he would have said that the official calculation would have called for half again as much plasma. But he sensed that the body got more than usual from every cc. of water, from every molecule of sugar. Perhaps it was something in the sweat smell, the color and feel of the skin, the resilience of the musculature. But Austin knew.