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softly for the other to hear. Then he squared his shoulders and went in.
    “Reb.”
    “It’s all right, John. Truly-I’m okay. I’m terribly disappointed, of course,, but when you look at it in perspective this is really just a minor setback.”
    “No,” he said very quietly. “It isn’t.”
    “Of course it is. Look, it’s perfectly obvious what’s happened. Some kind of cryonic traurea wiped his mind. All his memories are gone, he’ll have to start over again as an infant. But he’s got a mature brain, John. He’ll be an adult again in ten years, you wait and see if he isn’t. I know him. Oh, he’ll be different. He won’t be the man I l knew; he’ll have no memories In common with that man, and the new ‘upbringing’ is bound to alter his personality some. I’ll have to learn how to make him love me all over again. But I’ve got my Archer back!”
    Dirnsdale was struck dumb-as much by admiration for her indomitable spirit as by reluctance to tell her that she was dead wrong. He wished there were some honorable way he could die himself.
    “What’s ten years?” she chattered on, oblivious. “Hell, what’s twenty years? We’re both forty, now that I’ve caught up with him. With the medical we can afford, we’re both good for a century and a quarter. At least sixty more years we can have together, that’s four times as long as we’ve already had! I can be patient another decade or so for that.” She smiled, then made herself become businesslike. “I want you to start making arrangements for his care at once. I want him to have the best rehabilitation this planet can provide, the ideal childhood. I don’t know what kind of experts we have to hire, you’ll have to-“
    “No!” he cried.
    She started, and looked at him closely. “John, what in God’s name is wrong with-” She paled. “Oh my God, they lost him, didn’t they?”-
    “No,” he managed to say. “No, Reb, they haven’t lost him. They never had him.”
    “What the tuck are you talking about?” she blazed. “I heard him cry, saw him wave his arms and piss himself. He was alive.”
    “He still is. Was when I came in here, probably still is. But he is not Archer Howell.”
    “What are you saying?”
    “Bharadwaj said a lot I didn’t understand. Something about brain waves, something about radically different indices on the something-or-other profile, something about different reflexes and different-he was close to babbling. Archer was born after the development of brain-scan, so they have tapes on him from infancy. Eight experts and two computers agreee: Archer Howell’s body is alive down the hall, but that’s not him in it. Not even the infant Archer. Someone completely different.” He shuddered. “A new person. A new, forty-year-old person.”
    The doctor outside was on his toes, feeding tranquilizers and sedatives into her system in a frantic attempt to keep his telemetry readings within acceptable limits. But her will was a hot sun, burning the fog off her mind as fast as it formed. “Impossible,” she cried, and sprang from the bed before Dimsdale could react, ripping loose tubes and wires.
    “You’re wrong, all of you. That’s my Archer!”
    The doctor came in the door fast, trained and ready for anything, and she kicked him square in the stomach and leaped over him as he went down. She was out the door and into the hallway before Dimsdale could reach her.
    When he reached the room assigned to Archer Howell, Dimsdale found her sitting beside the bed, crooning softly and rocking back and forth. An intern and a nurse were sprawled on the floor, the nurse bleeding slowly from the nose. Dimsdalc looked briefly at the diapáed man on the bed, and glanced away. He had once liked Archer Howell a great deal. “Reb-“
    She glanced up and smiled. The smile sideswiped him.
    “He knows me. I’m sure he does. He smiled at me.” As she spoke, a flailing hand caught one of hers, quite by accident. “See?” It