avoid. He didn't understand very much about replacive surgery, really didn't care to. If Letzmiller said it could work, then he wasn't worried about that. Well, he guessed he really didn't have much choice. With this realization, he had only one more question for Letzmiller.

"Doc, if I'm not me when this is over, do you think I'll know it?"

Letzmiller looked at Lee's troubled face. "Do you think that you would want to?"

Lee answered slowly. "No, no I guess not."

Letzmiller rose from his chair. "I'll talk to you again after the operation. Do you think you're ready to go to your room now?"

Lee nodded and obediently followed the doctor.

Lee was asleep when the nurse came, but with the efficiency of all good nurses since time immemorial, she woke him to give him the sedative to prepare him for surgery. She chattered brightly as she prepared the hypodermic.

"You know, you have all the nurses speculating, Mr. Lee. I mean we're wondering just what Dr. Lakin, he's the anesthesiologist, is going to use for you when you won't have any brain for the anesthesia to work on." She stopped, the needle poised above Lee's arm, realizing the inaptness of her remark. "Oh. I shouldn't have said that."

"No, that's all right," said Lee. "I've already reconciled myself to being the headless horseman for a while." He had, too, although it was wonderfully strange to think of himself lying on the operating table with a cavity where he right now thought, felt, knew that he was a person.

Lee didn't actually lie on the table in the literal sense. The table was inclined to about forty-five degrees, with his head exposed and supported by a clamp on the cheek and jaw bones. This arrangement was necessary to allow the waiting machinery access to the area where it would perform.

Physicians, surgeons, biologists and the like were gathered in the amphitheater to see a bit of medical history. Actually there wasn't much to see. A team of technicians, radiologists and surgeons were working around Lee. Some were attaching electrodes to parts of Lee's body to maintain the electrical impulses necessary to keep his vital processes in motion while the main switchboard was out of commission. Others were sensitizing the exposed brain, from which the skull had already been removed, to guide the delicate fingers of the huge automatic Operating, Recording and Calculating Complex through its precisely programmed steps.

Letzmiller was among those in the amphitheater, as a spectator, drawn both by professional curiosity and a desire to know the answer to Lee's question, "Doc, what will there be left of me?" Of course he couldn't find out even part of the answer for some weeks. Even the ORC complex, now being fitted to Lee's unconscious brain, adjusted and activated, would not finish with its job for something like thirty-two hours.

The synthesizer would reconvert the data, translate it into countless chemical and electrical formulae, and apply it to the raw material of carbons, amino acids, proteins, and other components. When the basic organ had been reconstructed, a process requiring another week and a half in the synthesizer, it would be grafted back. The nerve lead-ins would then be reconnected, one by one, spaced at intervals to avoid shock. Lee would be unconscious the whole time, of course. Or rather Lee would be unconscious part of the time. Most of the time he wouldn't have the capacity for either consciousness or the lack of it.

Dr. Letzmiller observed the huge ORC complex for a time, but there wasn't anything to see. It simply sat over Lee, doing its job. Unwanted, the thought came to Letzmiller that the machine looked like a frog with a long worm dangling from its mouth. Lee was the worm.

"You can talk to him now, doctor." Oldenreid, Surgeon in Charge, addressed Letzmiller outside Lee's room where he had just finished his examination. "Personally, I think things went exactly as they should. All physical and mental