From time so far and distant long agone…. “Have you a name?” Arthur asked.

“Yes. I am always Ben.”

“Ben?”

“Yes. Always Ben.”

Arthur began to sit up for the first time. It was not as difficult as he had feared it might be. He felt fairly strong. “What kind of tape, Ben?”

“Oh, machine tape. Ancient computer tape,” Ben said. “They had all of you all over on the tape. Except a body.”

Arthur had already figured that one out. Some time or other, even years after that night with the thing on his head, Mel had stuck that tape in a refrigerator for some reason. And twenty-seven centuries later somebody had dug it out, freakishly preserved, and figured out what it was: a record of the memory, mind, imagination, personality, lusts, ambitions, neuroses and everything else of Arthur Franks. Then somebody had gotten some kind of artificial body from a factory in Cleveland and had played the tape into it. And here he was, reconstructed from some point before his life’s end. Somewhere out in this strange world the dust of his first life lay; he was now being given a chance to live out the last part of that life again. If he wanted to.

How long had he lived, a near-suicide, back in the twentieth century? Had he killed himself?

“You found me as a recording,” he said. “Without a body.”

“Yes,” Ben said. “And as a student of the ancient tongue of English and of old times long agone I had you made especially a body. To have a thing to put the tape into so then to talk with me. As we indeed are doing now.”

“Do you know anything more about me? Like when I… died? Or about my wife?”

Ben looked sad, his normally smooth forehead wrinkling. “Sorry always.” Then he smiled. “All I know for sure and always is America was home for you.”

“Okay,” Arthur said. Maybe it was better not to know what had become of himself—of that other himself. “Is there still an America?”

Ben continued smiling. “Two. One north and one is always south.”

“That’s good to know,” Arthur said. “Could I have another drink?”

***

The bathroom was much like a twentieth-century one except that the water from the taps was scented and the light coming from the ceiling was like daylight—yellowish and very pleasant to his eyes. Over the sink was a mirror.

He stood and stared at himself for several minutes, shocked.

He was very Negroid and very handsome, with a short Afro of glossy black hair, a broad nose, generous ears, thick lips and clear eyes. His shoulders were broad and the chest beneath them was smooth, hairless, and powerful. His stomach was flat, his arms well muscled but soft-looking, like a woman’s.

He stood back to see himself full length. His body was perfect; there wasn’t a blemish on it. He looked at his face again—his new face—and smiled. What the hell, he thought, this beats suicide.