"Forgotten?" Bitterly, he recalled that other time. Then, as now, he had been strapped to the operating table. But then he had been a poor shattered thing. Forgotten? He had never forgotten those frenzied pleas of years back: "Promise the change will only be temporary. Promise you'll find a way."
"Now," the doctor said: "I'm keeping that promise. We did find the way."
"Dr. Tiel." Jim's chest heaved, "I've changed my mind. I don't want reconversion. I want to be me—as I am now—as you made me!"
The masked man stared down at him. "They told me about this." His voice was almost sad. "They told me you were recalcitrant. I couldn't believe it."
"But it's true." His voice was only a whisper. "There's Amelia. I love her. What will happen to her?"
"Your wife? Why, she will be reassigned. There are other tasks—in our factories—our farms. Her memory of you and of your marriage will be erased. We aren't barbarians, you know."
"Not barbarians?" His laugh was raw. "Not cruel to force reconversion on me? And what about my memories? Can you erase them?"
"No, but you will adjust. You did before." His tone turned ironic. "You didn't call me cruel when your arms were gone, and your body shot to pieces. I was your saviour then, your healer. You couldn't thank me enough, or praise me. You—and all the men like you that I salvaged out of the Great War."
His eyes blazed at Jim. "Only half a million of you left. Half a million men out of a world of billions. I took those with minds and hearts and gave them new bodies. And almost all of them used those new bodies to work in my Body Parts Bank, helping me experiment and recreate the real thing. Except the few—like you—who ran to hide out on farms, in caves of the mountains, even in sailing boats.
"I even manufactured wives for you—moving, talking, mechanical dolls with memory tapes for minds—just to keep you from loneliness till the time when I found the way to give back the bodies you had lost. And now when I give you the chance for the greatest gift—the chance to bear children, to repopulate our dying world—you hide! You reject it!"