That was all it took. I fainted.

I awoke.

I couldn't see!

I had no sense of body weight!

In fact, I didn't have any sense at all!

Maybe I was dead!

I blinked my eyes. Yes, I could feel myself blinking my eyes.

Maybe they had thrown the rest of my body away. Maybe I was just a head!

Gods knew what a Voltarian cellologist would do. After all, I had known Doctor Crobe and how he loved to make human freaks. Maybe I was some sort of monster now. Maybe I looked like a cat or an octopus or Miss Pinch.

Worse than that: Earth psychologists and psychiatrists teach that all anyone is, is a bunch of cells evolved up the evolutionary track, that the person himself is just what his cells and body make him. There could be no doubt of the validity of their teachings, for one could be shot for not believing them. If Prahd had changed my cells, it followed by Earth psychology that my personality would suffer a total shift! So what new personality would I have? Something sweet and kind—Gods forbid! Or something whining and propitiative, like Izzy– which of course would be even less acceptable.

What had been changed? If I knew Prahd and Nurse Bildirjin, it would be something utterly underhanded and with some ghastly twist!

There was a sort of dim glow around. An eerie light was coming hazily through the slits of something. Gradually I could get a half-seen impression of my immediate environment.

I was in a sort of a long tub, midway between ceiling and floor. Only my head was out. The rest of me was suspended, probably by antigravity coils, in fluid: my body was not touching anything solid.

There were lights burning in the tub, probably emitting some strange wavelength. It was these, escaping through slits, that furnished the dim, greenish glow in the room. Cell catalysts of some kind? I had no real idea.

Accidentally, I moved my eyes to the right.

A window!

Through it I could see the pale sickle of a wintry moon. That was the moon of Earth! I was still on Blito-P3.

I concentrated. Maybe I could estimate how much time had gone by. If it took four and a half hours to come out from under gas—a fact of which I was uncertain—I must have been on that operating table for eight to ten hours! A very long time.

WHAT HAD THEY DONE TO ME?

It seemed to confirm my worst suspicions. A monster! Did I have flippers for feet? Did I now have tentacles for hands? Maybe a beak instead of a nose?

Horrors! What personality changes would follow such shifts?

Oh, Gods, I should never have come near those two fiends!

I had no question at all whether or not it was awful. That followed as the night the day. The only question was about the exact horror design. Dracula? Did I now have long teeth and live only on fresh blood? Would I be able to live with myself comfortably under the dictates of this new personality? I worked my jaws experimentally to see if they were now designed for severing jugular veins.

My face was bandaged right up to the eyes!

WHAT HAD THEY DONE???????????

I fussed and fumed and fretted through that dark and horrible night.

At least three centuries of worry later, dawn came. Only another century after that, possibly about nine according to the bleak sun through the window, Doctor Prahd Bittlestiffender came in.

I found I could turn my head and speak. "You put me out!"

He smiled. A very bad sign. He began to read meters and gauges around the suspended tub. When he had noted them all down on a chart, he looked at me and said, "I had to. You kept screaming even when you fainted. Nurse Bildirjin couldn't even hear her favorite radio program. It's the Hoochi-Hoochi Boys and Their Electric Cura Irizvas. She's only sixteen, you know, and she's a fan of theirs. They come on every day at..."

I knew the tactic. Trying to get me off the subject and lull my suspicions. "You did something dreadful," I snarled. "You cellologists are all alike!"

"No, no. The work was just very extensive, that's all. You have no idea how bashed up you've let yourself become in that strange career you have. Old, old injuries and wounds. A lot of improperly treated bone breaks. You apparently have not been in the habit of seeking professional care. I even took a coin out of your kidney."

"Aha!" I said. "You did all this just to recover a coin and enrich yourself!"

"No, no. It was only a two-cent piece from the planet Modon. Somebody must have shot it at you. I put it in your wallet so your accounts will balance. But all that aside, it was this last escapade that could have crippled you for the rest of your days. I even had to replace three square feet of skin entirely: it had some of the strangest things in it. In that town you call New York, the one that kept coming up in your screams, you surely must have been running with a rough crowd."

"You didn't do anything else?"

"No, I just put you together."

The day I believe a cellologist won't ever dawn. "You didn't change anything?"

"Well, I had to work on your genitals a bit."

"I knew it!" I screamed. "I knew you'd do something awful if you could put me out!"

"No, no. All I did was normalize things a bit. Purely routine cellological work. Well, bye-bye now. One of the gangsters I fixed doesn't like his new face: says it reminds him of somebody called J. Edgar Hoover. But that isn't odd because that's where I got it from. I need better picture books. I'll get some on my own when my pay starts."

I frowned so sourly at this hint that he left.

Oh, I didn't like the looks of things at all. I know when people are hiding things from me. But I was helpless. I could only move my eyes and my neck and talk through the bandages on my face.

I was more certain than ever that Prahd had done me in.

The only question was, exactly how?

Throughout that whole morning, I lay suspended in that (bleeped) tub and stewed and fumed.

I could see a Turkish tree through the window and the nameplate—Zanco Cell Catalyst Growth Machine, Model 16 Magnaspeed—on the tub rim above my face. The tree did not have the power to occupy the mind very long. The nameplate, in Voltarian script, was far more thought stimulating. WHAT was it growing? Bird feet?

I couldn't see my body. And after the two-thousandth reading, the nameplate was no more informative than it had been the first time.

One's imagination can become overactive.

Firmly, I steeled myself to shut off speculation on future form and the effect it inevitably would have upon my personality and character.

I wondered if I would be fed. I wasn't hungry but maybe starving me to death was part of their dastardly plot.

The shadows on the tree said it must be about noon.

The door opened.

Nurse Bildirjin! She was dressed in a starched white nurse's uniform and cap. She was not carrying a tray.

She had a notebook and chart in her hands. She went around reading all the meters or whatever there was to record on the outside of the tub. She sent a glance or two at my face. She looked awfully sly!

I decided to speak, regardless of consequences. Maybe I could get some information out of her.

"Where's my food?" I said.

"Oh, you don't have to eat. You're connected to the fluids and containers in the tub."

"Give me a mirror," I said.

"I'm sorry. It's not allowed. Patients can get upset."

"What did you two do to me?" I grated.

She faked a look of utter surprise.

I knew she wouldn't answer. I changed the subject. "I'm going crazy just floating here."

"Oh," she said, "I thought you had arrived there a long time ago, Sultan Bey." She gave a nasty, sniggering laugh at her own joke.

I didn't laugh.

"But," she said, "I wouldn't want any complaints being circulated about our care of patients."