"Doc, you've got my records there. At one time or another, since they
first put a new heart in me, every single inch of me has been replaced
by an artificial part. I mean all of me. There's not one bit of me,
heart, eyes, toenails, _nothing_, that is _me_. That bothered me quite
a bit when this left eye was put in. I mean I thought, 'Well, this
isn't me. This is my brain walking around in a jumble of artificial
flesh.' I tell 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 through
the late 1900s refinements continued to be made, but it wasn't until
1988 that the fathers of replacive surgery, Doctors Mills, Levinson
and McCarty made the breakthrough that revolutionized the whole
concept. In very simplified language they unlocked the key to
producing specialized living tissue through a bombardment of an
extremely complex carbon compound with amino acids and electricity,
then making it selective in function by a fantastically intricate
application of radiation.
"That pulmonary replacement you received in 1991 was undoubtedly one
of the first successes. You were quite lucky, you know. Up until 2017,
only about five per cent of their synthesized hearts lasted more than
thirty days. At any rate, the principle was established, and it was
proven that it could work. Most of our work from then till a few years
ago has been in improving and refining the work those three good
doctors did over three hundred years ago."
Letzmiller's cigar had gone out, and he discarded it in favor of a
cigarette. "That would be the end of my history lecture, if it were
not for the nature of your trouble."