I Will Fear No Evil

"Is there a tub of hot water nearby?"

"Oh, certainly."

"Then I'll ask for another beer and that hot tub and about ten hours' sleep. I've been arrested before. Doesn't worry me."

5

Joha

Then slowly, over eons, he came up from the nothingness of total anesthesia, surfaced into dreaming. The dreams went on for unmeasured time, endlessly. Mrs, Schmidt, can Yo

Meanwhile the world flowed on around him—and forgot him. The attempt at transplanting a living brain offered opportunity for much loose talk by video commentators, plus guest "experts" who were encouraged to add their own mixture of prejudice, speculation, and bias in the name of "science." A judge in need of publicity issued a warrant for the arrest of "Dr. Lyndon Doyle" (sic) but Dr. Lindsay Boyle was outside of jurisdiction before the warrant was signed and long before the name was straightened out. A famous and very stylish evangelist prepared a sermon denouncing the transplant, using as a text "Vanity of Vanities."

But on the third day a spectacular and unusually bloody political assassination crowded Joha

As usual, the unlicensed birth rate exceeded the licensed rate while the abortion rate exceeded both. Upjohn In­ternational declared an extra dividend. The backing and filling for the upcoming Presidential campaign speeded up with a joint a

In the Middle East an earthquake killed nine thousand people in three minutes and brought close the ever-present possibility of war through disturbing the balance of terror.

The Sino-American Lunar Commission a

Joha

After an unmeasured time (how measure a dream?) Smith woke enough to be aware of himself—the reflexive self-awareness of waking as contrasted with the unquestioning and unexplicit self-experience of dreaming.. He know who he was, Joha

He wondered if the operation had started, and what it would feel like when he died. He did not worry about pain; he had been assured that the brain itself had no pain receptors and that he was being anesthetized solely to keep him quiet and unworried while the job was done—besides, pain had not worried Smith in years; it was his constant companion, almost an old friend.

Presently he went back to sleep and to more dreams, unaware that his brain-wave pattern was being monitored and had caused great excitement when change in rhythm and peak had shown that the patient was awake.

Again be was awake and this time gave thought to the possibility that this nothingness was death. He considered the idea without panic, having come to terms with death more than a half century earlier. If this was death, it was neither the Heaven he had been promised as a child nor the Hell he had long since ceased to believe in, nor even the] total lack of self he had come to expect—it was just one damn big bore.

He slept again, unaware that the physician in charge of his life-support team had decided that the patient had been awake long enough and had slowed his breathing and made a slight change in his blood chemistry.

He woke again and tried to take stock of the situation. if he was dead—and there seemed no longer reason to doubt it—what did he have left and how could he cut his losses? Assets: none. Correction: one asset, memory. He had a recent memory-of-a-memory, vague and undefined, of confused and crazy dreams—probably from anesthesia and no use to him—plus other memories older but much sharper of being (or having been) Joha