Chapter II: He did not go home immediately

He wasn't entirely sure why he didn't. He knew that he wanted to go home more than anything else. To go back to the house he had known for so long, back to the soft comfort of the old, heavy, carved furniture, back to the rows of books, and the neat paintings on the walls. And back to Marian, who would be waiting there for him. Oh, he wanted to go back, but somehow something held him, some cold, unreasoning core of apprehension that lay in his mind, whispering in his ear as he walked down the steps of the Hoffman Medical Center into the crush of traffic on the street below. His wrist still tingled from the needles that had stamped the small green bar there, indelibly. The mark was his passport, and he shivered as his mind echoed Cranstead's words back in the office. "You're free in every sense of the word. Go wherever you like, do anything you want to do. Deliberate criminality won't occur to you, and you'll be incapable of it if it does. We've seen to that. But otherwise, the ultimate decision is up to you--"

A cab skidded by and he hailed it. He settled back in the seat as the little car swept up into the heavy elevated traffic that moved down through the miles of curves and straightways into the center of the City. It was huge, this beehive that had spread down from Boston and up from Washington to engulf the entire Atlantic Seaboard, a place where he could lose himself for a little while, and maybe think things through before he went back to his home and to Marian. He stared from the window at the bright lights below--the Lower Level commercial traffic, speeding with its never-ending hum--the tattered sections of the Old City that lay below, half-hidden ruins of an age that few men could remember, or would want to remember if they could. The driver's voice broke in on his reverie, and he gave a little start.

"I said, where you goin', Mister?"

"Oh. Anywhere. I don't care." He hesitated for a moment. "I'm a Free Agent."

The driver nodded. "Mind if I pick up fares?"

"Not in the least." Griffin shrugged himself back in the seat, staring out the window. Frightening, he'd said! It was paralyzing. He moved his arms, first one, then the other, feeling the remnants of the painful tightness under the smoothly-molded skin. Then his mind drifted back, and he tried to remember the days of sickness, trying to visualize physically how it had felt to be sick. He found that he couldn't remember. He was no longer sick, and the pain and fright and desperation were unpleasant memories, the first to be dulled, and hidden from sight, and larded over with the frosting of forgetfulness.

And yet he knew that he had been sick. He had been older then, just past fifty, and though he could not recreate those days in his mind, he knew that he had known he was sick for a long time, a growing awareness that health and youngness had somehow been left behind. There had been the gasping rests at the top of the stairs while he had waited for breath and energy to return; and the leaden tiredness at the end of the day that had made the evenings a gauntlet to be endured. And there had been those terrifying nights when he had awakened in a cold sweat, strangling in the darkness, with hardly the strength left to drag himself up into a sitting position; and then Marian, wide-eyed with fright, barely able to hold back the tears, packing pillows behind him as he sat gasping by the open window, wondering if this really might be the end. And then, later, the stabbing, excruciating pain that cut through his chest and down his arm, the vice-like wrenching pain that tore the breath from him, and almost life itself. Angina, the doctor had called it. Congestive failure. And he had sat there, by the window, and known that he was staring death in the face.

The pain he could not remember now, but the fear was sharp in his memory. And then there had been the day when old Doctor Barnez had come in to see him, and settled back in the chair, smiling at him, and said, "Griff, I think it's time you considered a repair job. A real repair job. Because you won't be with us long if you don't--"

He had grasped at it with the desperation that can be born only of staring death in the face, grasped at it as he stood literally in the valley of shadows. Oh, he had heard of prosthesis. He could even remember the bitter political battles that had raged. He could remember the attacks on it from the pulpit, and the rabble-rousing speeches of the men who used it as a football to carry them to power. But the laws were passed in spite of them, and many people had taken the step. And always Griffin had watched with desultory interest, and thought it a thing of the remote future, never applicable to a strong, active man like himself.

He stared out at the buildings, tall and proud in the gathering darkness. When the chips were finally down, he had agreed, Life was sweet. If it was within the power of medical techniques to restore it, could he scorn such a chance? Could anyone? For after all, it was the goal of hundreds of years of medical study. Gradually, over the years, medicine had leaped the low hurdles of disease, of microbes, and viruses, and creeping malignancies, and these had been the easy steps. At the end, they had moved against the real last enemies of man: old age, degeneration, the multitude of death's helpers which had held man to a hundred years of life. And then those hurdles had been crossed--

Griffin shook his head as the cab took another turn and sped deeper into the city. He had wanted a healthy body again. And they had promised him a healthy body. The prosthesis was almost total, the remodelling he could never have understood, the probing and repairing, the replacing and regrowing and relearning. And he had come forth with a healthy body, with his past life's full measure of memory and experience, and another sixty years in which to use it. He had thought that a healthy, whole body once more was all he could ever desire--

And now he wondered.

* * * * *

He knew now that he was going to see Dr. Barnez first, before he went anywhere else. He leaned over and gave the driver the address, and then settled back, waiting as the car reached the upper-level strips of the New City. He found the doctor's house, and waited in the small anteroom for a few moments. Then he saw the familiar, stooped figure, beaming at him from the door of the inner office. "Come in, Griff, come in!" he boomed. "Lord, man, what a change! You look like you never looked before. They treated you well over there--" The old doctor tossed him a cigar, and settled back, regarding him over silver-rimmed glasses. "Any regret, Griff? Even cigars you can have again now!"

Griffin shook his head, feeling the uneasiness nibbling again at his mind. "No--no regrets, nothing I can put my finger on--" He nipped the cigar, feeling suddenly foolish to take such relish in contemplating the acrid smoke of a dried-up weed.

"But a multitude of things you can't quite put your finger on, eh?" The old man was smiling.

Griffin nodded slowly.

"You'll find the readjustment troublesome at times. But as a Free Agent, it's infinitely easier." The old man paused. "You've seen Marian?"

Griffin flushed. "No. I haven't been home. I'm--I'm a little afraid to go."

"Don't be. Marian will be there."

"Oh, I don't mean that. It's just--I've been waiting so long, and hoping so much. I don't know what to expect of Marian, I'm afraid she'll be different, somehow--"

"_She_ won't be changed."

Griffin's eyes caught the old man's. "I know it. But what about me? I don't feel any different--"

Dr. Barnez held up a wrinkled, blue-veined hand. "It's to be expected, isn't it? You're not the same man you were. Your mind is intact, but there are many more things that make a man what he is than his mind, Griff. You've been changed in many ways--physical changes, chemical changes, endocrine changes. That's why you're a Free Agent. They've learned the hard way that they can't force the new form into the old mold. It just didn't work."

Griffin sat forward, his eyes burning on the old man's face. "What's happened to the others, doctor? I want it straight."

Doctor Barnez shook his head. "Why torture yourself, Griff? Go home to Marian, see how you feel--"

"I want it straight."

The doctor shrugged. "All right. Some have gone back and stayed. But many haven't stayed. A great many."

"Where have they gone?"

"Who knows? They're dead as far as the world they left is concerned. Who knows where they've gone?"

"But I don't want to change! Can't you see that? I love Marian. She's been my life. For years she's been more to me than anything else. I wouldn't change that for life itself--"

The old doctor stood up, shaking his head. "You mustn't worry," he said gently. "Ultimately, the choice is yours. It will be you who stays, or leaves, in the end. Not Marian."

* * * * *

He opened the door of his house, and walked in, and found himself face to face with a total stranger.

She looked the same, of course. The same dark, beautiful eyes, the same finely molded face, the same tiny figure, kept amazingly slender and youthful over the years. Her hair was graying more than he had remembered, but it was the same Marian he had left, eight months before. And yet, he knew the moment that he saw her that something was gone, and could never be replaced, not in a thousand years of life.

Her lips trembled as she searched his face, and she said, "I'm glad you're back, Griff--" and he walked into the room like a ghost, moving about as though he were not really here at all, but seeing things in a strange, subtly distorted dream. The desk, with its perpetual litter just as he had left it; the honey barrel full of pipes, charred and scratched from years of use, still slightly fragrant from the last smoking. And there were the soft chairs, the worn carpet, the pictures on the walls. The same, fine, smooth architectural lines that had pleased him so when the house was built five years before; scientifically fitted to their personalities in a thousand subtle ways, as any house should be. He sat down gingerly, as though expecting to fall through into the dust beneath the house, and looked again at Marian, his lovely, wonderful Marian--for the house which had fit so well was a nightmare to his sensibilities now, garish and impossible--and a Marian he didn't know was waiting eagerly for him to speak.

And then he knew it was only a dream, his memories of the life before. He waited for the surge of excitement, waited for the eager words to come into his throat, the words telling her how very much he had missed her, what plans he had made for them--and his throat was dry, and no words came. He waited for the joy of returning to sweep through him, and it did not come. It was dead, as dead as the ashes in that last-smoked pipe.

He didn't say a word. He didn't have to, because he saw it in her eyes, wide heart-broken eyes. He looked at her, and all he felt was pity. He didn't even feel shame, though he felt he should. And he knew that words would only make it harder, would be whiplashes to make the wounds deeper and more vicious.

He picked up his hat, and brushed her cheek with his lips, and without a word he walked out through the door.

Marian had not changed, not in any way. The house was the same, kept in readiness, waiting for him. No, Marian hadn't changed.

It was he who had changed.