I Speak for Earth by John Brunner Read Free Book Online Page B

Good! My wife being willing, we tested the trick—the miracle—as you will.”
    Briaros frowned. “You reported that it was successful,” he began. Schneider cut him short.
    “Successful! Yes! Physically and technically it was a success. We achieved this transfer of the delicate physical counterpart of personality, and its restoration, and here I am and talk to you. But—there are diffiulties. I hardly know how to explain to you. You realize you are what you are?”
    “You mean that I—” Briaros bit his lip. “You mean I am the physical I? But obviously!”
    “No, no!” said Schneider impatiently. “I speak this badly. Realize that you are subject to your glands, your digestion, your tiredness, your muscle tone or lack of it, your eyes, everything. Your personality includes your subconscious—as though in the back of your mind there was always a hum, a carrier wave, all the nerve signals from the involuntary muscles and the organs of the body. Do you see? But we cannot carry that to another body! Personality, yes, memory, yes, learned skills, yes. Assume that you have lived till now in this body; to change to another is to shift the house of your life to another foundation, perhaps irregular. There will then be cracks in the walls through subsidence. There will be weakenings. You understand?”
    “You mean that there’s a risk of insanity in the candidates? During the test?”
    Schneider shook his head and spoke in a voice of forced optimism. He said, “I think not. Not in the others, that isto say. They are very stable. The short period of a month on the other foundation will not weaken them much. It is only I about whom I worry.”
    Briaros said slowly, “This sounds ominous.”
    “I do not try to make it so. Imagine, though: imagine that after more than fifty years of life in this body, feeling its muscles, knowing its ways, I look suddenly to the mirror and I—and I!—see the face of a woman. That face is more familiar than my own; it is my wife’s, so close to me. Yet I am inside it! And not the face alone. The body, you understand? The physical difference is incredibly minor; the mind makes substitutions automatically, and finds the counterparts of what it is used to. But that is a strain. I am not certain beyond doubt that I can stand the strain a second time.”
    He finished, and looked at Briaros with an air of dignity.
    “Why do you bring this to me?” said Briaros at last.
    “To whom else could I bring it?” said Schneider calmly.
    Briaros rose abruptly to his feet and began to pace the carpet. After two passes, he halted and swung to face the psychologist.
    “Do you wish to withdraw?” he snapped.
    “I have committed the blunder of making myself indispensable,” said Schneider in a voice little above a whisper.
    “That’s not a blunder. It’s a foregone conclusion.” Briaros’s forehead showed a little shiny with perspiration. “But do you want to withdraw?”
    No.”
    “Do you honestly think it would be better for the success of the project if you did?”
    Schneider spread his hands helplessly. “I cannot tell!” he said. “I know—you understand? I know—that it would take as long again for someone else to learn, to accept with his insides, the things I have learned in developing my miracle. I must stay. Yet I am afraid that I will break.”
    “Because of the strain you talked about?”
    “Because of age,” Schneider said. “We do not call men of fifty and sixty old, not today. But after fifty years, the personality has been so shaped and formed by its accustomed “carrier waves,” as I called them, in its own brain in its own body, that the change finds it too rigid to adjust. The other candidates are all young, none over thirty-six. They will flex,perhaps, yield enough to absorb the impact of the shock. But a second time might destroy me.”
    Briaros said at long last, “Don’t let it, Fritz. Whatever you can do to prevent it, do it! On you more than on anyone