Man Made

by Albert Teichner

  Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

  MAN MADE

  By ALBERT R. TEICHNER

  _A story that comes to grips with an age-old question--what is soul? and where?--and postulates an age-new answer._

  If I listed every trouble I've accumulated in a mere two hundred oddyears you might be inclined to laugh. When a tale of woe piles up toomany details it looks ridiculous, unreal. So here, at the outset, I wantto say my life has not been a tragic one--whose life is in this day ofadvanced techniques and universal good will?--but that, on the contrary,I have enjoyed this Earth and Solar System and all the abundantinterests that it has offered me. If, lying here beneath these greatlights, I could only be as sure of joy in the future....

  My name is Treb Hawley. As far back as I can remember in my childhood, Iwas always interested in astronautics. From the age of ten I specializedin that subject, never for a moment regretting the choice. When I wasstill a child of twenty-four I took part in the Ninth Jupiter Expeditionand after that there were many more. I had a precocious marriage atthirty and my boys, Robert and Neil, were born within a few years afterMarla and I wed. It was fortunate that I fought for governmentpermission that early; after the accident, despite my high rating, Iwould have been denied the rare privilege of parenthood.

  That accident, the first one, took place when I was fifty. On Planet 12of the Centauri System I was attacked by a six-limbed primate and wasbadly mangled on the left side before breaking loose to destroy it.Surgical Corps operated within an hour. Although they did an excellentprosthetic job after removing my left leg and arm, the substituted limbshad their limitations. While they permitted me to do all my jobs,phantom pain was a constant problem. There were new methods ofprosthesis to eliminate this weird effect but these were only availableback on the home planets.

  I had to wait one year for this release. Meanwhile I had plenty of timeto contemplate my mysterious affliction; the mystery of it was so greatthat I had little chance to notice how painful it actually was. There isenough strangeness in feeling with absolute certainty that a limb existswhere actually there is nothing, but the strangeness is compounded whenyou look down and discover that not only is the leg gone but thatanother, mechanical one has taken its place. Dr. Erics, who hadperformed the operation, said this difficulty would ultimately prove ablessing but I often had my doubts.

  * * * * *

  He was right. Upon my return to Earth, the serious operations tookplace, those giving me plastic limbs that would become _living_ parts ofmy organic structure. The same outward push of the brain and nervoussystem that had created phantom pain now made what was artificial seemreal. Not only did my own blood course through the protoplastic but Icould feel it doing so. The adjustment took less than a week and it wasa complete one.

  Fortunately the time was already past when protoplast patients werelooked upon as something mildly freakish and to be pitied. Artificialnoses, ears and limbs were becoming quite common. Whether there was somejustification for the earlier reaction of pity, however, still remainsto be seen.

  My career resumed and I was accepted for the next Centauri Expeditionwithout any questions being asked. As a matter of fact, Planning Centerpreferred people in my condition; protoplast limbs were more durablethan the real--no, let us say the original--thing.

  At home and at the beach no one bothered to notice my reconstructed armand leg. They looked too natural for the idea to occur to people who didnot know me. And Marla treated the whole thing like a big joke. "You'rebetter than new," she used to tell me and the kids wanted to know whenthey could have second matter limbs of their own.

  Life was good to me. The one-year periods away from home passed quicklyand the five-year layoffs on Earth permitted me to devote myself to myhobbies, music and mathematics, without taking any time away from myfamily. Eventually, of course, my condition became an extremely commonone. Who is there today among my readers who has all the parts withwhich he was born? If any such person past the childhood sixty yearsdid, _he_ would be the freak.

  Then at ninety new difficulties arose. A new Centaurian subvirusattacked my chest marrow. As is still true in this infection, the virusproved to be ineradicable. My ribs weren't, though, and a protoplasticcasing, exactly like the thoracic cavity, was substituted. It wasdiscovered that the infection had spread to my right radius and ulna sohere too a simple substitution was made. Of course, such a radicalinfection meant my circulatory system was contaminated and syntheticallycreated living hemoplast was pumped in as soon as all the blood wasremoved.

  This _did_ attract attention. At the time the procedure was still newand some medical people warned it would not take. They were right onlyto this extent: the old cardioarterial organs occasionally hunted intodefective feedback that required systole-diastole adjustments.Protoplastic circulatory substitutes corrected the deficiency and, justto avoid the slight possibility of further complications, the venoussystem was also replaced. Since the changeover there hasn't been theleast trouble in that sector.

  By then Marla had a perfect artificial ear and both of my sons had losttheir congenitally diseased livers. There was nothing extraordinaryabout our family; only in my case were replacements somewhat above theworld average.

  I am proud to say that I was among the first thousand who made thepioneer voyage on hyperdrive to the star group beyond Centaurus. Wereturned in triumph with our fantastic but true tales of the organicplanet Vita and the contemplative humanoids of Nirva who willconsciousness into subjectively grasping the life and beauty ofsubatomic space. The knowledge we brought back assured that the fataldisease of ennui could never again attack man though they lived to AlephNull.

  On the second voyage Marla, Robert and Neil went with me. This took alittle political wrangling but it was worth throwing my merit around tosee them benefit from Nirvan discoveries even before the rest ofhumanity. Planetary Council agreed my services entitled me to thisspecial consideration. Truly I could feel among the blessed.

  Then I volunteered for the small expeditionary force to the 38th moonthat the Nirvans themselves refused to visit. They tried to dissuade usbut, being of a much younger species, we were less plagued by cautionand went anyway. The mountains of this little moon are up to fifteenmiles high, causing a state of instability that is chronic. Walking downthose alabaster valleys was a more awesome experience than any galacticvista I have ever encountered. Our aesthetic sense proved stronger thancommon sense alertness and seven of us were buried in a rock slide.

  * * * * *

  Fortunately the great rocks formed a cavern above us. After two days wewere rescued. The others had suffered such minor injuries that they wererepaired before our craft landed on Nirva. I, though, unconscious andfeverish, was in serious condition from skin abrasions and a comminutedcranium. Dr. Erics made the only possible prognosis. My skull had to beremoved and a completely new protoskin had to be supplied also.

  * * * * *

  When I came out of coma Marla was standing at my bedside, smiling downat me. "Do you feel," she stumbled, "darling, I mean, do you feel theway you did?"

  I was puzzled. "Sure, I'm Treb Hawley, I'm your husband, and I rememberan awful fall of rocks but now I feel exactly the way I always have." Idid not even realize that further substitutions had been made and didnot believe them when they told me about it.

  Now I _was_ an object of curiosity. Upon our return to Earth thenewsplastics hailed me as one of the most highly reintegratedindividuals anywhere. In all the teeming domain of man there were onlyseven hundred who had gone through as many substitutions as I had.Where, they philosophised in passing, would a man cease to be a man inthe sequence
of substitutions?

  Philosophy had never been an important preoccupation of mine. It was theonly discipline no further ahead in its really essential questions thanthe Greeks of four thousand years ago. Oh certainly, there had been lotsof technical improvements that were fascinating but these wereperipheral points; the basic issues could not be experimentally testedso they had to remain on the level of accepted or rejected axioms. Iwasn't about to devote much time to them when the whole fascinatingfield of subatomic mirror numbers was just opening up; certainly notbecause a few sensational journalists were toying with dead-end notions.For that matter the newsplastics weren't either and quickly went back tothe regular mathematical reportage they do so well.

  A few decades later, however, I wasn't so cocksure. The old Centaurianvirus had reappeared in my brain of all places and I started to have apeculiar feeling about where the end point in all this reintegratingroutine would lie. Not that the brain operation was a risk; thousands ofpeople had already