I WILL FEAR NO EVIL by Robert A. Heinlein

“Humph! ‘You’ll go when the wagon comes.”

“Perhaps. But I’m going to spend as much as necessary of that silly stack of dollars to try to beat the game. Will you help?”

“Johann, if you were talking about a routine heart transplant, I would say ‘Good luck and God bless you!’ But a brain transplant—have you any idea what that entails?”

“No, and neither do you. But I know more about it than you do; I’ve had endless time to read up. No need to tell me that no successful transplant of a human brain has ever been made; I know it. No need to tell me that the Chinese have tried it several times and failed—although they have three basket cases still alive if my informants are correct.”

“Do you want to be a basket case?”

“No. But there are two chimpanzees climbing trees and eating bananas this very day—and each has the brain the other one started with.”

“Oho! That Australian.”

“Dr. Lindsay Boyle. He’s the surgeon I must have.”

“Boyle. There was a scandal, wasn’t there? They ran him out of Australia.”

“So they did, Jake. Ever hear of professional jealousy? Most neurosurgeons are wedded to the notion that a brain transplant is too complicated. But if you dig into it, you will find the same opinions expressed fifty years ago about heart transplants. If you ask neurosurgeons about those chimpanzees, the kindest thing any of them will say is that it’s a fake—even though there are motion pictures of both operations. Or they talk about the many failures Boyle had before he learned how. Jake, they hate him so much they ran him out of his home country when he was about to try it on a human being. Why, those bastards—excuse me, Eunice.”

“My machine is instructed to spell that word as ‘scoundrel,’ Mr. Smith.”

“Thank you, Eunice.”

“Where is he now, Johann?”

“In Buenos Aires.”

“Can you travel that far?”

“Oh, no! Well, perhaps I could, in a plane big enough for these mechanical monstrosities they use to keep me alive. But first we need that body. And the best possible medical center for computer-assisted surgery. And a support team of surgeons. And all the rest. Say Johns Hopkins. Or Stanford Medical Center.”

“I venture to say that neither one will permit this unfrocked surgeon to operate.”

“Jake, lake, of course they will. Don’t you know how to bribe a university?”

“I’ve never tried it.”

“You do it with really big chunks of money, openly, with an academic procession to give it dignity. But first you find out what they want—football stands, or a particle accelerator, or an endowed chair. But the key is plenty of money. From, my point of view it is better to be alive and young again, and broke, than it is to be the richest corpse in Forest Lawn.” Smith smiled. “It would be exhilarating to be young—and broke. So don’t spare the shekels.

“I know you can set it up for Boyle; it’s just a question of whom to bribe and how—in the words of Bill Gresham, a man I knew a long time ago: ‘Find out what he wants—he’ll geek!’

“But the toughest problem involves no bribery but simply’ a willingness to spend money. Locating that warm body. Jake, in this country over ninety thousand people per year are killed in traffic accidents alone—call it two hundred and fifty each day—and a lot of those victims die of skull injuries. A far percentage are between twenty and forty years old and in good health aside from a broken skull and a ruined brain. The problem is to find one while the body is still alive, then keep it alive and rush it to surgery.”

“With wives and relatives and cops and lawyers chasing along behind.”

“Certainly. If money and organization weren’t used beforehand. Finders’ fees—call them something else. Life ­support teams and copters equipped for them always standing by, near the worst concentrations of dangerous traffic. Contributions to highway patrol relief funds, thousands of release forms ready to sign, lavish payment to the estate of the deceased—oh, at least a million dollars. Oh, yes, nearly forgot—I’ve got an odd blood type and any transplant is more likely to take if they don’t have to fiddle with swapping blood. There are only about a million people in this country with blood matching mine. Not an impossible number when you cut it down still further by age span—twenty to forty—and good health. Call it three hundred thousand, tops. Jake, if we ran big newspaper ads and bought prime time on video, how many of those people could we flush out of the bushes? If we dangled a million dollars as bait? One megabuck in escrow with Chase Manhattan Bank for the estate of the accident victim whose body is used? With a retainer to any prospective donor and his spouse who will sign up in advance.”