l you it bothered me. But I went to a doctor, you know, a
psychoanalyst, and he convinced me that as long as I had what he
called a 'sense of identity', that I was me." Lee stopped. How could
he explain it?

But Letzmiller seemed to understand. "And you think that your brain is
all that is left of 'you'?"

"Doc, it's a funny feeling. Like this." Lee raised his hands, brought
them together and touched his fingertips. "See that? I can raise those
hands. I can make them touch each other. I can feel them touching each
other. But it is just not quite right. It's just a little bit off key,
like one trumpet player out of twenty being about one-sixteenth of a
note flat. Know what I mean?"

"I think I do," said Letzmiller, nodding slowly. "Now, just what does
that have to do with your operation?"

"Doctor--" Lee had to stop, for the patchwork quilt of blank spaces
was dancing in his head. The helplessness went away, slowly, like
smoke drifting from a fire. As his mind cleared, he realized that he
didn't know why he was being interviewed by this doctor.

"Anything wrong?" Dr. Letzmiller asked.

Lee knew he wasn't being too coherent, jumping about with the
conversation this way, but he asked the question, anyway. "Doc, why am
I seeing you?"

"You haven't guessed?"

"No."

The doctor paused to light a half-gone cigar. "My job here at Merkins
Replacive is to deal with just such fears as you have expressed. I'm
an M.D. and a psychologist, and"--Letzmiller smiled to himself--"a
kind of historian."

"Historian?"

"Well, you see I was supposed to give you the regular formal lecture
on the history of replacive surgery when you first came in. Like to
hear it?"

Lee nodded, so Letzmiller continued. "Replacive surgery is actually
quite old. Old as medicine itself, I suppose. Very early attempts at
dentures were tried, though with little success. And, of course, peg
legs and hooks for persons who had lost their hands might be called
replacive surgery, though they were very crude. Later on came more
refined dentures, artificial limbs, corrective lenses, skull plates,
hearing aids, plastic or cosmetic surgery, blood transfusions, all
types of skin grafts, et cetera.

"The 1950s saw the beginning of bone and corneal transplants, use of
plastics in arteries, those huge heart-lung and kidney machines,
implantation of electrodes in the heart to steady its beat--many
things which were mostly emergency or stop-gap measures. All th