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yawn: purse lips: wink one eye: wink both.”
    Like a loosely made rubber ventriloquist’s doll, he writhed these roughly modeled features, grimaced, went through the command performance. It seemed to him simply a tangle of grotesque leers.
    But at the end they said, “Fine! And now pull it into a repose. Yes”—and it was clear they were speaking to each other, not to him—“yes, that will do. When it’s got proper backing that will be a very convincing piece of assembly. No visible tremors, strains, or tension, though of course one can see that there are a few stiffnesses and resistance reflexes hanging on under the surface.” Then to him, “But we’ll deal with all that quite soon.”
    The horrible mirror flashed off and he heard it sliding away. He lay quiet in the dark. He wasn’t quite sure—hadn’t been able in the first flash of the light to see with any exactness. They didn’t care whether he saw as long as they could see him doing what they said. But it must be pretty bad. He could stand that voice now embedded in his throat and which made coarse guttural growls, the sound of an old rasped organ. The blow was in what he thought he’d glimpsed of the face.
    He’d tried to start at the top—the rest was writhing under the orders too much for him to be sure he made out anything clearly. He was sure the forehead and eyes had aged fifteen years fully from that time perhaps not fifteen weeks ago when he had stood unconsciously fully satisfied with the appearance through which he looked out at the world. Something wonderful, diabolically wonderful, had been done—a black magician’s marvel of grafting and blends. From that upper piece, on which he had fixed his attention as soon as he could focus, it was clear that not only had they forged new features, new profile, new oval—they had made a new, or rather an old, texture, an old skin out of a new, fresh, healthy one. Large pores, coarsened texture, the first faint blotchy discolorations of oncoming old age—yes, he’d seen enough to see they must all be there to give that effect of tiredness and general loss of tone. It was just as when out of fresh, innocent wood a faker of antiques turns a good, simple piece of furniture of the right build and size into a weather-beaten, time-eroded period-piece, a museum curiosity.
    He threw himself back on his bed. Coldly, comfortlessly through his mind as he lay in the silence ran the thought, “So we do care so much for ourselves, for what we feel we look like!”
    The first time he again paid any attention or tried to understand was when some time after a voice said, “You will now have something enjoyable.” But his shudder of anticipation was cut short by, “Your muscle tone can be put back quickly by massage and you will have a good spell every day. You’ll feel wonderfully better.”
    True enough, two masked masseurs came a few minutes later and with the first manipulations he discovered to his surprised relief that he was in the hands of men who wished to give him comfort and knew how. It was the first real rest and relaxation that he’d had. It was hard to keep up those submuscle tensions, that qui vive of the deep sinews, when these strong reassurances, so much more massive and deep than any words, came to him from the deepest sense, touch. He could not doubt the friendliness of the hands that dealt with him, if he still knew nothing of the eyes that were looking him over from behind their masks.
    Then one day one of them spoke. “I’d like to show you how to do something of this for yourself. Especially round the head and neck you should keep this up. It will keep you free of tensions and set the circulation flowing well through all this new skin.”
    He was willing to learn. He was shown how to soothe a nerve with a few fingerings of its power-line.
    â€œThe back of the neck, though, is