Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology
From: mmcirvin@world.std.com (Matthew J McIrvin)
Subject: WATCH YOUR BRAIN!
Summary: Full text of an early Matt McIrvin work.
Date: Sun, 23 Aug 1998 14:59:29 GMT
Organization: The World, Public Access Internet, Brookline, MA

My lost masterpiece has been found.

I wrote Watch Your Brain in 1978 or 1979, when I was in the fifth grade and ten years old. It was, by far, my most ambitious writing effort up to that point. In previous years I had mostly confined myself to little "comic books" like The Space Fliers and Blub, Blub, distinguished mostly for the amount of explanation from the author required to figure out what was going on and which character was which.

After I saw a school-bus-mate writing an epic space adventure called "Space: 999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999," I decided that prose held wider possibilities, and started writing stories.

After writing a few shorter works about wild adventures in far parts of the universe, and reading Heinlein's The Rolling Stones and Asimov's I, Robot (and seeing Star Wars and "The Six Million Dollar Man"), I set out to write a serious science-fiction story, exciting but painstakingly realistic, with intrigue and a touch of political satire. The result was Watch Your Brain. I think that the title was supposed to refer to those fake-antique signs that say things like "watch your coat and hat, don't shoot the piano player."

Other influences included Neil R. Jones' 1930s story "The Jameson Satellite," a Tom Swift, Jr. novel whose name I don't remember in which the heroes transfer their minds into robots, and possibly a couple of stories in Lem's The Cyberiad (I don't remember whether I had read it by then, but that "What's two times two?" business suggests to me that I had-- on the other hand, I had also had horrendous difficulties with the multiplication table myself).

The original was written in dense, hard-to-read cursive, in felt-tip pen, on the backs of an octal core dump brought home by my father (my usual artistic and literary medium at the time). This particular dump was on letter-sized cut sheets of odd-smelling thermal paper. The slippery surface was hard to write on, but I had a large amount of it, which I kept in a gigantic binder with the first several pages bearing warnings of its most secret nature. This notebook lay in a desk drawer for about ten years, then ended up in my parents' attic, which they recently cleaned out. Other contents of the notebook include an earlier space-adventure story, and an unfinished, grindingly dull travelogue about an around-the-world balloon flight.

Unlike some of my other writings from the era, Watch Your Brain never had an audience until now. I think that I was waiting to finish it, which never happened. I never quite figured out where to go with Book 2, "The Birdbrain," despite its slightly clever premise. I had notions about Matt having to protect Kurt and himself from tabloid reporters, but they weren't very definite. I had vague plans for a third story, something about electromagnetic ghosts.

The character names in Watch Your Brain, apart from some obvious exceptions like "Sam Snickers" (the story reviews itself!), are scrambled and modified versions of the names of classmates and relatives of mine. However, the characters don't seem to have been based in any significant sense on the people they were named after, so I think it's safe to say that any resemblance is purely coincidental.

Some details are so embarrassing that they were difficult to transcribe. The "Russian sailor" has an accent so bizarre that it can't even be called stereotypical, and the character of "Nurse Dodrip" seems to have dropped out of a story from 1954 about a dizzy but resourceful Wonder Gal who saves the world with kitchen implements and cosmetic items. (She was named after a girl in my fifth-grade class. The boys made fun of her mercilessly because she was very tall and very pretty. I must have had some sort of crush on her, though I don't remember it being a particularly bad one.)

Still, all in all, it's better than I remembered it being when I read it a couple of years after writing it. Heck, I was ten.

I've tried to preserve the spelling and grammatical errors, odd paragraph breaks, and baroque chapter-numbering scheme of the original. There are also many illustrations, many depicting explosions, which Kibo wants to scan someday so that everybody can see them.

I was orbiting beautifully. I clicked on the radio. There was unusually much interference. Over the noise I heard "MWXwW We ZZXzzx reeeddzx radioemittingobjctxzapracxWwxwmm." It was amazingly loud-- like another spacecraft coming... I gazed through the windshield and saw a tiny shape, coming closer. I was tempted to steer away, but I would crash into debris-- space junk-- if I did not follow this path. I became very nervous as the shape came closer. It had two solar wings, a single rocket nozzle, and a spherical command section set on a cylindrical body... "Jumping Jupiter!" It was a Soyuz craft-- the Russians had launched it-- and they never told us! I felt like a matador with a bull charging at me-- but there were walls blocking my escape... I felt helpless as I saw the horrified faces of the cosmonauts staring out their portholes. They came closer, closer, POW! Everything went black. I felt like my hair stood up... Yet I felt like it didn't.

I heard a faint sound. "Matt? Matt Barnes?" I tried to say "yes," but instead out came a low hum. I tried again. Out came "Woooosz..." I saw a black-and-white image of a man in a jacket, made up of small squares. "Yoos... Yus... Yes. Yes!" He replied, "Remember Project Syntheterm?" I thought, Project Syntheterm! Bionic Transfer System! I was being transferred!

I studied the image. I could tell he had a crewcut and a flat, attentuated expression. It was Private Lloyd Fredding, from the Pentagon. I remembered that this was top secret.

"This is only Stage 1. The Adaptation Sensory Computer-- Ascomp." (He had been in the Navy-- he loved making acronyms.) "Ya know what I mean." I knew-- I had helped develop Syntheterm myself.

I also knew the story. This is what they did:

They found the shuttle ruins-- and my corpse-to-be. They found that my brain was still ticking and they put it in a nifty life-support box. They put it in the Ascomp next. I replied: "Boy, this is strange. I'm partially my own brainchild!" "And mine," he said. "And all of ours." I said, "Yeah. Sort of like a rat helping develop a cancer test. Oh, and since I've got a full knowledge of this, I'll be ready for Bioterm in a week." Bioterm was the main phase-- a mobile, robotlike thing. Bioterm stood for Bionic Terminal. (Another acronym.) He took an oblong cartridge and stuck it into me. My brain's supply of energy came from the batteries. But this supplied an important bloodlike solution to keep it alive.

Almost nine days after that Soyuz rammed into me headlong, I said I was ready. A scientist who was a friend of mine, Patrick Browning, and his sidekick, J.B. Watson, walked in. "Relax," said Watson. Browning flipped a switch. Everything went black and I was startled as instead of a vague image made of rough squares, I had a clear color picture of the familiar lab. "Hey, this is great!" I said. Hardly any time had passed; my brain was in a life module that snapped in place. And I could move! My improved "eyes" could move up and down. My head could turn. And best of all, I had two arms that could grip, pivot, retract, bend, throw, and even feel, with two sensors on each claw of my hand. Pat showed me a mirror. I looked. It was my design! I thought again: I'm my own brainchild. My own!

On my front, I had a door, padlocked, that said: DO NOT OPEN, and below that BIOTERM, and below that, in small letters, Syntheterm System. My brain was in there. Below the door, there was a cooling vent and then a wide front wheel.

I turned my "head" and saw the blood-cartridge slot and brain-support controls.

The eye pivoted again. I saw an attachment jack ("just like a vacuum cleaner") and specifications listings. And on the fourth side, there as a battery door. My main head sat on a highly manuverable neck. It had binocular eyes, hearing microphones, a speaker, and a radio transmitter. "These could beat the spacesuit," I said. "I'm ready to go back up anytime."

Fredding walked up.

"Oh, no, you aren't," he said.

The next day we were in a part of the Pentagon in front of G. F. Lumps, Civil Defense Officer. He was very harshly against the U.S.S.R. and had a poster on the wall that clearly showed it.

[Author's note (1998): The accompanying illustration shows G. F. Lumps at his desk, a screaming man in glasses with one lens cracked. There are actually two posters on the wall behind him. One has "BOO U.S.S.R" in large letters and a crossed-out hammer and sickle, and the other is a map of the USSR with a bullseye drawn around Moscow.]

"Fredding!" he yelled. "Pay attention." He started: "Last week, an astronaut named Matt Barnes was killed in a collision with a Soyuz rocket. That was the last straw! We're gonna use this Bioterm as a secret weapon!"

Oh my gosh, I thought, not only am I my own brainchild, I'll have to avenge my own murder! If only he knew who I was... Fredding chuckled. He was thinking the same thing.

"Fredding!" Lumps yelled. "This man has superhuman strength, arms that never shake, and incredible accuracy. In a Bioterm body he is a superman!"

"Lumps!" said Fredding, laughing hysterically. "He is Matt Barnes! He's been listening all this time-- ha-ha-ha-ha!"

"And," Lumps added, "they don't laugh, you bum!" Fredding dragged me out, rather feebly. Only then did I notice that I hadn't laughed one single chuckle. But I felt like I had.

I still couldn't believe it-- how could a 4-foot-tall, square-shaped, metal, 3-wheeled thing like me take a trip on a ship to Russia? I knew it was just a private boat, but how could I disguise?

We went to the port. A Russian sailor greeted us-- or, rather, Browning and Watson-- and we went aboard. "Hello," said Browning. "This is the Wonder Machine. Say 'hello,' Wonder." "Hello," I replied. "Amazing!" the sailor said in poor English. "Velcome abord. Zat zing is-- woaw!" We sat down and he started the boat.

About halfway across the Atlantic the box of food opened and a man came out. Pat's mouth dropped open.

"Diamond John!" he said.

Diamond John Shady had made him a bet a year ago that Syntheterm wouldn't work. The gambler's bet was $300.

"Hey, I'm really sorry," he said.

"How did you get here?" Pat asked.

"Stowed away. I'm sorry. This is what I did, just to win the bet:

"I stowed away, like this, all the way to Russia. I managed to steal Soyuz plans. I came back, and put together a Soyuz. I found two jerks who wanted to commit suicide and put them in. And I launched it into his path. Hey, I'm sorry, Matt. And as for you, Patrick, here's the 300 smackers." He handed pat 3 Ben Franklins, crisp and new.

Pat and J.B. yelled, "Turn around! Go back to America!"

"Traitors! Piratz!" the sailor yelled.

"Aw, c'mon," said Pat.

"Vell, ookay," he replied. The boat turned around.

When we were back at the Pentagon, Shady was with us. In walked Watson. "The Soyuz wasn't Russian," he said.

"What?" yelled Lumps. "They had to!"

"But they didn't. Tell him, Shady." I thrust Shady in the door and we ran for Fredding's car.

"Sign up for NASA? This job is top secret," said Fredding. "You can't do that." We were driving in Fredding's car around Washington. It was khaki, had one-way mirror windows, and had a special lock. It was completely bulletproof and was used for transporting top secret material. That's why we used it.

Then a secret closed-circuit TV in the car showed a picture of Lumps. "We've decided that the U.S.S.R didn't launch that Soyuz. We've also decided that the project can be known; we'll reveal it in a month."

"A whole month?" asked Fredding, worried.

"Well, you can tell anyone you want-- if they believe you. That's only when they'll put it in the papers."

If they believe us, I thought. Will I ever make it to space again?

We stopped at the Nasa building, on the Mall, near the Air and Space Museum. We went in and finally found what we wanted. We walked into that room.

"Hello! I'm Lt. Col. Jacob Nibpen. Which one of you wants to be an astronaut? Or does that robot want a job?"

"This robot wants a job," I said.

"Amazing! It even talks! It must have some computer," said Nibpen.

"Yes," said Watson. "A human brain."

"I don't believe it," snapped Nibpen. "I'll find it a computer job. Now get out of here!"

"But--" Browning said as the door slammed shut.

A few weeks later we came back. The four of us walked in smiling. "Oh, I've got a job for-- that," he said, pointing at me. "Food supply computer."

"Look at the newspaper," said Fredding. Nibpen picked it up. It said:

The whole front page was enough to make the Pentagon grin! Nibpen said: "I'm terribly sorry. He'll go through the test in a week. Matt Barnes-- alive! I can't believe it! But I do!"

I went through the shuttle test and passed easily. Soon I would be back in space.

The days went past like years. We had a party to celebrate my reacceptance to the space program.

I had been selected to put a satellite into orbit. It would then release an interplanetary probe, skimming the solar system. I had been trained completely, even though I had already made 3 flights before the brain transplant. And finally the big day came.

I was in a special seat-- I couldn't sit in an ordinary one-- on the U.S.S. Constitution, the seventh shuttle made. I had two partners (the first two were killed in the Soyuz bit), Frank Knarf and Ally Sappap, seated beside me. The speaker went:
10-9-8-7-6-5-ignition-2-1--

LIFTOFF!

We were fifty miles above Florida and getting higher. I nervously stuffed a blood cartridge into my side slot and said, "I hope everything goes right." After all, this probe was going to study Pluto. We reached 400 miles finally. That was the "decision point," the place where we decided to go on or back home. We chose to go on. 500... 550... 600 miles. We were to release the satellite which would release the probe. We tried but it was stuck. I went out to get it loose. It was a lucky thing my radio was wired to my thought so that I didn't have to have air to "hear" it. I didn't need air. That was also lucky. I pulled the probe out. A wire in the shuttle snapped! The rockets went crazy, and I was left floating in space while they plunged toward Earth like a dead duck! My brain received a message on the radio: "We can't steer this bird. Will you direct us?" I thought in this: "Try to make one rocket fire more than the other. Then make them both fire the same. You'll come back up." (I could switch my radio from thought to sound at will.) "Okay. All systems are go! We have fixed the wire. We are coming back for you." My batteries were running low! I tried my best to relax. I saw a tiny speck in the distance. It was the Constitution! It came up and braked itself. I got in and recharged my batteries.

The trip back was hard. We almost burnt up in re-entry. Soon we were over Kennedy Space Center. We overshot the runway! "Turn on the brakes!" I shouted. But when the drag chutes came out, we were at the runway's end. But we were so close to the ground that a chute caught on a post and we slammed, with a great explosion, into the ground. No one was killed, but Knarf and Sappap were hospitalized, and I was bashed in just in time to try a new body developed at our lab. Our new lab, that is. Our first one was owned by the Pentagon and was taken from us when I was no longer top secret.

I was taken to Wash. via bus. When we got there-- it took a day or so-- we went to the new lab.

"You know that new body?" said Pat. "Step in-- or roll in, in your case. This is Bioterm 2!" He showed me a shape like C-3PO from Star Wars. It would be covered with vinyl and made to look like my body. It would even have hair. Only during space flights would this be removed.

We got a formal letter from NASA to come over. And come over we did. Nibpen looked disgusted. "Who's he?" he asked. "I'm Matt Barnes. They gave me a new body."

"I want to talk to you about the accidents."

"Yes, okay."

"You're fired."

"Why?"

"The accidents."

"It was the design and flight path of the shuttle, not me."

"Prove it."

"Okay. Now, let's start with the first collision. One, I had no warning. Two, I would surely collide with space junk if not this. Three, and most important, I found out later that if I had steered away they would have steered too. They were trying to commit suicide and kill me. See the newspaper?" I showed him the Post front page I mentioned earlier. I carried it with me.

"Okay. Now how about the second one?"

"Give me your opinion."

"You came back from a successful mission, skimmed happily over the runway, and at the end you put your nose in the air and did a graceful belly flop into the ground."

"I'll tell you what happened. We tried to release the satellite. It was stuck. I got out; I had the best body. When I set it free, a wire snapped and the rockets went crazy. You didn't even train them for things like that! I had to direct them by radio. They came back and got me. But our fuel ran out. We should have had more. We nearly got Kentucky fried at re-entry. We couldn't slow down and touch the runway. The drag chutes came out at the right time, which was a bad time; they got caught on a post; bam! That's what happened." I found my speaker very useful, for it could talk very fast.

"Can you prove you were out of fuel?"

I thought for a while. I finally said: "Yes. If there was rocket fuel in there, the 'belly flop' would have looked like the Empire State Building being demolished."

"You've got a point-- and a job," said Nibpen. I walked up to Browning, Fredding and Watson.

"Nobody's ever had problems like me," I said to them. All three of them nodded at once. None of them had ever made as many narrow ecapes as I.

Well, this time they decided I was useful. They put me on a pioneer mission to Mars! We went into orbit via shuttle...

A young astronaut, Sam Snickers, a woman named Meg Johnson, and I all went up in a shuttle. 200, 400, 600, 800, 1000 miles!

"This is the farthest up I've ever gone," I said.

"Not in a moment," said Meg as she pointed out of the shuttle to...

...A huge rocket. We marvelled at its size, bigger than a Saturn 5. It was put together in orbit and launched toward Mars.

We docked with it and walked in. Floated, that is. Even the command module was huge-- the size of a house with half of it housing the lander. We sat in our places. "Boy, is this fancy," said Sam.

"We are ready," I said. "Go for launch."

"Liftoff in ten seconds. 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, ignition, 3, 2, launch!" The rocket moved slowly, then faster.

"We have liftoff."

"You have the best bird we've seen. You are deorbiting."

"Looks like an easy trip. Just great."

An easy trip it was. Lasting three weeks, it was also a long trip. I was used to being in space about four hours at the most. I never got bored-- there was always something to do in our happy little environment, the size of a house.

We were highly amused when we passed Phobos. It looked like a big-- but not too big-- potato. The moon of Mars was only 10 miles wide!

We descended toward Mars. We had just entered the atmosphere. I was going to start the brakes. It was a fine time for the control to jam! I pushed until the control board bent, but I could not brake the module! (We had separated from the main module some time ago, with Snickers piloting it. He would not land.) We streaked downward, white-hot! Then I heard a click. The button went down! The parachutes and retrorocket went on. We landed with a bump on the Martian surface.

On the radio we heard, "Hello. We were scared for a moment there."

"Yeah. We were too."

We climbed out.

I found that a bionic body was at maximum efficiency in Mars gravity. The motor ran smoothly and the blood substitute flowed freely to my brain.

The ground was red and earthy, and looked even moreso in the pinkish sky, well defined in the early Viking photos. I stuck out a claw and picked up a rock. It was charred black with the descent engine of the craft. We put together a simple rover and rode a while. But we found something we didn't expect.

The ground blew up! It may sound crazy, but our rover was flipped over on its back! Meg fell on her back and was knocked out. One of my arms-- both legs-- and one claw of mine were broken off. I realized that we had driven over a volcanic vent-- we were near the mighty Olympus Mons, a volcano higher than Mt. Everest.

I said in my radio, "Meg, wake up. Get me back to the base. Wake up."

"Uh?" said Meg. "What was that?"

"Get my parts to the base!"

"Oh, my goodness!" She picked up my parts and ran to the base.

I had a spare body, custom made and like the one I had then. She asked, "How do you use this?"

"Flip that switch in the middle of my chest. Then take a box from a drawer on the back of my head. Then put it in the drawer on the other one, and flip the same switch on the other body."

"Okay." Click-- and I was in the lander, feeling refreshed and stronger. We never went near Olympus again-- we heard blasts in that direction, like we were living in a mine field. There must have been an extra lava surge at that time. Other than that and the rocket business, the mission ran smoothly. We launched with soil and air samples, Mars rocks, core tubes, and other paraphenalia. We docked with the main module and went home.

Getting home wasn't that easy, though. A strange thing occurred near re-entry. We were almost in the atmosphere when it came. I looked out the windshield when some stars in Orion disappeared. Something black was in front. It moved on, eclipsing the Pleiades. From the re-entry module (a part of the spacecraft that separated and splashed down) I could see its shape when it went in front of the Milky Way. It was instantly recognizable as that old ship that sunk me-- a Soyuz, painted black! A sausage-shaped object came out. It blew a hole in our side-- it was some kind of torpedo, all our fuel for steering leaked out, and the spacecraft was badly knocked out of orbit toward the Pacific! We were lucky we had parachutes, but we couldn't steer! We rammed into a coral reef near Hawaii. Even in padded couches and spacesuits it wildly jarred us. And when we were picked up, disinfected, and quarantined (I was simply put in a spare body,) the firing bit started up again.

"You're a jinx!" said Nibpen. His eyebrows showed a frustrated and angry I-told-you-so expression. "Syntheterm is just jinxed, jinxed, jinxed! It's just one thing after another!" I was even beginning to believe him.

"Look, now, the second time it was a design flaw, and the first and third the act of other people," I said, half telling myself. "The third time, they even bombed us!"

"If you weren't an astronaut, this wouldn't be public. If it wasn't public, the Russians wouldn't know. If they didn't know about you, they wouldn't have tried to kill or kidnap you."

"I didn't decide to make myself public. The Pentagon did."

"Oh. Well, we can't correct the past. But why do you want to stay an astronaut? If I had gone through what you have, I'd quit."

"Because-- because I couldn't be anything else. I'd end up with a bunch of robots in a Chevrolet factory," I sighed. That was what I had thought from the start-- unconciously. I was too exited then to think about it before. It had just come through as a desire to regain my job. This was the third time.

"We'll see what job we can give you. I guess we should take advantage of your-- I can't find a word-- systems." I walked out the door and headed for the lab.

"They said they'd give me a job." I sighed. This was the fourth time I'd been hired by NASA. But Pat Browning had better news. "We're a company!" he said with a smile. "Completely independent from the government." But his main source of happiness came from a sign on his desk that said: "Patrick Browning President Browning Corporation"! He grinned at me, and I went slowly down the hall. If I didn't have rubber and metal for skin, I would have frowned.

I met Nurse Dodrip in the hall. She was walking with a thin young man with light brown hair, blue eyes, and a bandage on his head. "Who's he, Debra?" I asked.

"Oh, his name is Kurt Barna. He is a city plumber. He was working in a manhole wiehn he stuck his head up and a car came along. It knocked out part of his brain. All he can't remember is multiplication."

"What's 2 times 2?" I asked him. He became cold and stiff, like a zombi.

We were sitting around thinking. I said, "When Kurt thinks of multiplication, he 'zombies out' because there's nothing in that part of his brain."

J.B. Watson had an idea. "Do you remember Twitter?" he asked. "You know, that robin whose brain we used in life-support testing?" (That was way back-- before the first Soyuz bit.) "I saved his brain; we could fill the space with it."

"Oh, that would be cruel," said Dodrip.

"Do you think it would be comfortable to zombi out?" I snapped. I remembered that it was not polite to butt in and I told myself to clamp my speaker shut. But we finally decided for it.

The best equipment we could find was in the operating room. We had the best doctors in the country with us. Barna had a hole cut in his head with a lot of gore inside. I got Twitter's brain, in a life support module, and handed it to a surgeon named Thomas Bowles. He carefully made delicate connections and after a long time, a nicely made rubber patch was put on top. The sad thing was that he would never have hair there.

After a while (a long one) Barna woke up. "Ugh get a barf bag," were his first words. When the retching stopped, I tested him.

"What's two times two?"

Kurt's eyes rolled. "I feel fine-- hey, where'd my cage go? Aak! You've plucked me! Why did you do this?!?" yelled Kurt, followed by a long whistle.

"Recite the alphabet," I said, to keep his mind-- I mean minds-- off multiplication.

"What-- oh, yeah, A, B, C, D..."

"Never mind. I want to get this straight so you won't be confused. Remember when I told you about the operation?"

"Yeah."

"Think about multiplication-- I want to tell it to your other brain."

After I had calmed Kurt/Twitter down with some sunflower seeds, he understood pretty well. I found that Twitter, coupled with a human brain, was very witty and told us funny stories about his previous life.

Kurt had a two-room apartment in the Northwest section. Every weekday, he went to the Browning building near the Pentagon, "bringing" Twitter with him, and was paid for studies. Unfortunately, Twitter sometimes forgot about not having wings. Once I was figuring out my income tax when Kurt became Twitter and jumped through the open window-- 5 stories up. Luckily Nancy, an office robot, caught him by the feet and dragged him back in-- not Twitter, but Kurt. Soon we were taping signs on all the windows that said: Remember, no wings! The only problem was that the signs kept switching Kurt back to his old brain. Twitter apparently couldn't quite grasp the idea of having a human body and used only enough of Kurt's brain to talk. We decided to perform another operation to link the brains more closely. We called Tom Bowles and the room was set up.

During the operation, Bowles broke a wire he was putting in. We searched for a wire everywhere. Finally I pulled a wire out of a socket on my chest. Suddenly, I gasped. It was my main power wire! "Quick-- somebody-- re-con-nect-my-poooooowwwww," I said. Then all was black. After what was seemingly an instant I woke up with Pat Browning standing over me with Nurse Dodrip. A small bent metal object was jammed in the socket.

"You can do anything with a bobby pin," said Debra. If I didn't have a rubber face I would have blushed.

When I met Kurt/Twitter he seemed to be in a surprised mood. "I-- feel like-- I'm looking out of-- four eyes," he said. "I-- uh-oh-- who am I? You're Matt Barnes. This is Washington, D. C. But who am I?"

I now realized what Deb had meant. Even when the "zombi" effect had been removed, there would be a lot of confusion on Kurt's part. I said:

"You're Kurt Barna. You also have been Twitter, a robin. As Kurt you worked in the streets of the city."

"It's coming back to me. I was in a manhole. I stuck my head up and was hurt by a car. I was in a hospital and-- oh! That can't be true!" He paused and stared at the ceiling.

"Why?"

"Because at the same time-- I don't know when, really-- I was in a cage in a building. There were people there. Some of them are here-- now!"

I tried to tell him about the operation and he accepted the idea. He said that he remembered me telling him the same thing, twice-- at least most of it. Which was true.