“How could I work out the implications alone? They can only be lived.”

“But—”

We batted this subject back and forth until it became clear even to me that I was playing for time.

“I was just thinking …” said Ralph. He was smiling. “If I were dead we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

The doctor said, “Adam’s is a necessary equivocation.” He turned to me. “You have to make a second important decision.”

I guessed this was coming. “It won’t be so difficult, I hope.”

“Please, follow me.”

The doctor, accompanied by a porter and a young nurse, took me and Ralph down several corridors and through several locked doors. At last we entered what seemed like a broad, low-ceilinged, neon-lit fridge with a tiled floor.

I was shivering as I stood there, and not only because of the temperature. Ralph took my arm and began to murmur in my ear, but I couldn’t hear him. What I saw was unlike anything I had seen before; indeed, unlike anything anyone had ever seen. This was no longer amusing speculation or inquisitiveness. It was where the new world began.

“Where do you get them?” I asked. “The bodies.”

“They’re young people who have, unfortunately, passed away,” said the doctor.

Stupidly, I said, as though I were looking at the result of a massacre, “All at once?”

“At different times, naturally. And in different parts of the world. They’re transported in the same way as organs are now. That’s not difficult to do.”

“What is difficult about this process now?”

“It takes time and great expertise. But so does cleaning a great painting. The right person has to do it. There are not many of those people yet. But it can be done. It is, of course, something that was always going to happen.”

Suspended in harnesses, there were rows and rows of bodies: the pale, the dark, and the in-between; the mottled, the clear-skinned, the hairy and the hairless, the bearded, and the large-breasted; the tall, the broad, and the squat. Each had a number in a plastic wallet above the head. Some looked awkward, as though they were asleep, with their heads lolling slightly to one side, their legs at different angles. Others looked as though they were about to go for a run. All the bodies, as far as I could see, were relatively young; some of them looked less like young adults than older children. The oldest were in their early forties. I was reminded of the rows of suits in the tailor’s I’d visit as a boy with my father. Except these were not cloth coverings but human bodies, born alive from between a woman’s legs.