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available members of the same litter.
    It may sound ridiculous to say that things could be boring when I had to learn to control and live with a body that was more like a patchwork quilt than the standard human model. But the body was merely a nuisance rather than a real source of interest. Inside six weeks I was up and about, and had even taken the classical step in patient recovery—the "turn for the nurse." Tess Thomson handled my clumsy advance without missing a beat of my pulse, and took it for the good omen that it was.
    One week more, and I was given the run of the hospital wards. Although there was plenty of evidence of imperfect body control as I hobbled, staggered and leaked (kidneys and bladder still partly out of control) along the corridors, the presence of Leo's brain segment was not apparent. Sir Westcott dismissed as "predictable and minor" most of the things that worried me.
    Predictable and minor —good doctors' talk. It included incredible blinding headaches, dizziness, nausea (he blamed the ear for that, not the brain, but the distinction was a fine one to the sufferer), insomnia, sneezing fits, aphasia, weak bladder, sudden and stupefying lethargy, uncontrollable weeping, muscular spasms, and a rolling left eye. I don't know where the left eye took its orders from, but I never knew where it would be looking, or why, even though I was beginning to receive random images from it.
    I poured out this whole catalog of woes to Sir Westcott. He would eat another apple and say, "Most interesting."
    It went slowly. Two months after my first conversation with Sir Westcott Shaw I was ready to climb the walls. I had enough control to walk from one end of the hospital to the other without falling down, visibly twitching, or peeing myself. On the strength of that I applied (pleaded might be a better word) for a day outside.
    Where would you go?
    I had anticipated that question. To the Zoo. Where else?
    As I mentioned earlier, it's natural to assume that anyone who performs frequently in public must be extroverted and thrive on attention. After all, applause is rightly regarded as the purest form of ego-food. I like that as much as anyone else, but once I'm offstage I have always found it hard to meet people or to feel at home among new faces. Leo was the confident and the outgoing one. I would find myself again and again in a big city, the day of an evening recital, free and with nowhere to go. Movies staled after a while, and I had no taste for museums, horse racing, or dog shows.
    Zoos were another matter. Before I was twenty I was a connoisseur. Most big cities have a zoo of some kind, or at worst an aviary. I looked forward to seeing the pandas whenever I went to Washington, the snow leopards in San Diego, the giraffes at Whipsnade, the gorillas in Riyadh, springbok herd in Denver, sealions in Sydney, elephants in Tokyo, lions and tigers in Santiago, and hippopotami in Montevideo and Berlin.
    My favorites, wherever I went (and the psychologists can make what they like of it) were the snakes and reptiles.
    So if Sir Westcott would let me out for a day, I would go to the new London Zoo. I told him about my long-time hobby, but I didn't tell him my secondary motive. Maybe I was reluctant to admit it, even to myself. My secondary motive was fear.
    Sir Westcott had given me plenty of material to read about the human brain, and I had struggled through most of it. It's surprising how fast we learn things when they apply to us personally. One message that was repeated in paper after paper was the importance of the right hemisphere of the brain for music. Even if I recovered my health completely—even if Leo and I became a single and integrated personality—the old career of concert pianist might be closed to me. I might be able to read the notes easily enough, but if the feel had gone no amount of technique could hide it. I was scared.
    As for the technique: there is a story that was told to me when I was ten years old