existence—provided the brain could be reached far below the conscious level and forced to operate.

There had been impossible faith cures for millenia—cataracts removed from blinded eyes within minutes, even—but finding the mechanism in the brain that worked those miracles had taken an incredible amount of study and finding a means of bringing it under control had taken even longer.

Now they did it with dozens of mechanical aids in addition to the hypnotic instructions—and did it usually in a single sitting, with the full transformation of the body taking less than a week after the treatment!

But with all the equipment, it wasn’t impossible for a mistake to happen. It had been no fault of his ... he was sure of that ... his mind was easy to reach ... he could relax so easily....

He came out of it without even a headache, while they were removing the probes, but the fatigue on the operator’s face told him it had been a long and difficult job. He stretched experimentally, with the eternal unconscious expectation that he would find himself suddenly young again. But that, of course, was ridiculous. It took days for the mind to work on all the cells and to repair the damage of time.

COBB LED him back to the first office, where he was given an injection of some kind and another sample of his blood was taken, while the earlier tests were repeated. But finally the doctor nodded.

“That’s all for now, Mr. Giles. You might drop in tomorrow morning, after I’ve had a chance to complete my study of all this. We’ll know by then whether you’ll need more treatment. Ten o’clock okay?”

“But I’ll be all right?”

Cobb smiled the automatic reassurance of his profession. “We haven’t lost a patient in two hundred years, to my knowledge.”

“Thanks,” said Giles. “Ten o’clock is fine.”

Dubbins was still waiting, reading a paper whose headlined feature carried a glowing account of the discovery of the super-light missile and what it might mean. He took a quick look at Giles and pointed to it. “Great work, Mr. Giles. Maybe we’ll all get to see some of those other worlds yet.” Then he studied Giles more carefully. “Everything’s in good shape now, sir?”

“The doctor says everything’s going to be fine,” Giles answered.

It was then he realized for the first time that Cobb had said no such thing. A statement that lightning had never struck a house was no guarantee that it never would. It was an evasion meant to give such an impression.

The worry nagged at him all the way back. Word had already gone around the club that he’d had some kind of attack and there were endless questions that kept it on his mind. And even when it had been covered and recovered, he could still sense the glances of the others, as if he were Vincenti in one of the man’s more morose moods.

He found a single table in the dining room and picked his way through the meal, listening to the conversation about him only when it was necessary because someone called across to him. Ordinarily, he was quick to support the idea of clubs in place of private families. A man here could choose his group and grow into them. Yet he wasn’t swallowed by them, as he might be by a family. Giles had been living here for nearly a century now and he’d never regretted it. But tonight his own group irritated him.

He puzzled over it, finding no real reason. Certainly they weren’t forcing themselves on him. He remembered once when he’d had a cold, before they finally licked that; Harry had been a complete nuisance, running around with various nostrums, giving him no peace. Constant questions about how he felt, constant little looks of worry—until he’d been ready to yell at the boy. In fact, he had.