"At the end of your Free Agent period, if you want it back. Or any other name you choose. That's up to you." Cranstead smiled. "And of course, as a Free Agent you can use any name you like."
"I can't see what's wrong with the old one. I was quite happy with it."
Cranstead shrugged. "You may find yourself quite a different man now."
"Well, I don't feel any different." Griffin's voice had a sharp defensive edge, and his eyes were suddenly bright with anger. "I feel fine; just the same as I always felt. Why all this ridiculous rigmarole?"
Cranstead sighed. "Take it easy, Griff. How do you know how you feel? You haven't been outside the hospital walls since the prosthesis started. You haven't met anyone or reacted to anything other than carefully controlled hospital conditions. Don't be impatient. You don't know yet what you'll want because you're literally a new man. You've turned in your old worn out body for a new one. Give it a try before you get excited."
Griffin scowled. "But why this insinuation that things will be different? I remember my old life perfectly well. I liked it. I want to go back. Why make it so difficult?"
Cranstead tossed him a cigarette. "Look at it this way," he said. "If you hadn't come here to the Center for prosthesis, in about five years, give or take a little, that death certificate would have been valid in a very, very final sense. You'd have been gone and there'd have been no bringing you back. But you did come here to the Center, under your own steam, and submitted to a very thorough repair job; a repair job that will last you another sixty to eighty years, starting now—"
"All right, I know that," snapped Griffin. "I still don't see—"
Cranstead held up his hand. "Wait a minute—you don't quite realize that you may indeed be very dead to the world you knew before. The doctors can't predict the personality changes you may have undergone. Except for certain very broad limits, they can't predict how you'll act. So we have to protect you, as well as the world you left when you came here. The prosthesis is almost a total job—replaced organs, replaced vascular system, replaced glandular system, even some repaired nervous tissue. Some men come out almost exactly as they were before. But some come out vastly different—"
Griffin blinked and stared at the death certificate. "And this," he said slowly, "protects me."