The man nodded. "Just off the assembly line, pal. The same guy--because
you and your mother, and some other people, remembered what I was like.
There was no record of me or of my mind. So, okay, they made one,
fella. From the memories of me left in other minds. Thanks, Eddie."
"Thanks?" Ed Dukas said in a choked voice.
Bloody and dirty, he stepped forward. Father and son clung to each
other. It was a moment of great triumph.
Ed's mind pictured filaments, as fragile at first as pink spiderweb
but already outlining a human shape, held suspended in a kind of
jelly--growing there, forming according to a record. Now even the
record could be synthesized. It seemed like real freedom from death at
last.
Ash Parker had not fled. Now he spoke, sounding awed, "Jeez, Mr. Dukas.
I didn't believe it. Maybe my folks can come back, too."
"Your parents _will_ come back," Jack Dukas affirmed. "I am the first
'memory man' to be resurrected. Among those killed who had had their
bodies and minds recorded as was recommended, about a hundred thousand
are alive again, as I think you know. Millions more are in process. One
way or another, by record or by the memories of others, in flesh of the
old kind or the new, almost everyone will return."
Ed felt his father's hand. As far as he could tell, it _was_ of flesh.
Yet it could be something else; Ed nearly trembled with excitement as
his eager wonder and primitive dread of the strange battled inside him.
He thought again of Mitchell Prell's first samples of vitaplasm.
"Of which flesh are you, Dad?" Ed asked anxiously.
His father studied him there in the twilight of the day, while the
silvery ring of lunar wreckage brightened in the sky.
"The old kind, Eddie," he answered.
"I'm glad," Ed said, feeling greatly relieved, a reaction which he knew
was odd for one who loved the thought of coming miracles.
Jack Dukas sighed as if he had escaped a terrible fate. "So am I glad,
pal," he said. "I guess I was favored by family connections." Here he
paused, but his wink meant Uncle Mitch. "However," he continued, "the
old flesh takes so much longer. That's why in many cases it won't be
used. There must be thousands of androids already among us, living like
everybody else. Since personal concerns are involved, statistics are
kept rather confidential. These synthetic people have organs the same
as we have. And you can't recognize them just by looking. Only they're
thirty per cent heavier, stronger, and they don't tire. There was a
thought, once, that robots would make human beings obsolete and replace
them. Sorry, Eddie. Why be gruesome at a time like this? Let's patch
you up and then find your mother."
* * * * *
Young Ed Dukas was happier than he had ever been before. For quite a
while he found peace. Maybe that was true of most of humanity now--for
the past three or four years at least. There was no sharp delineation
of an interval before the smokes of doubt began to come back.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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