“What the fuck are you talking about?”

I said, “Is it someone you know? A friend or a lover?”

“Shut up!”

I said, “Fine. But that’s what I’ve decided to do. I’m not handing my body over to anyone. I’m just settling in. We’re getting attached.”

“But you don’t even want it! How can a few months matter when you’re going back? I would advise you most strongly to sell it now.”

“Strongly, eh?”

“If I were you, I wouldn’t want to put myself in unnecessary danger. You’re not the sort to be able to look after yourself.”

“Matte, it’s my decision. I don’t want your money, and I don’t want my ‘body holiday’ interrupted.”

He was having difficulty controlling himself. Some anxiety or fury was flooding him. He walked about the cabin, with his face turned away from me.

“The demand is there,” he said. “The bodies of young women, on which there has always been a premium, are in big demand in the United States. These women are disappearing from the streets, not to be robbed or raped but to be painlessly murdered. There are machines for doing it, which I am hoping to be involved in the manufacture of. It’s a beautiful procedure, Leo. The sacked bodies are kept in fridges, waiting for the time when the operation will have been simplified. When it’ll be like slotting an engine into a car, rather than having to redesign the car itself each time. People might even start to share bodies to go out in, the way girls share clothes now. They’ll say to one another, ‘Who’ll wear the body tonight?’ There’s no going back. Immortality is where some of us are heading, like it or not. But there will be some people for whom it will be too late.”

I was interested to meet someone in my situation and I would have liked to have spent at least one evening with a group of Newbodies—we waxen immortals—sitting around a card table, discussing the past, of which there would have been plenty, no doubt. His tone concerned me, however. I was afraid and wanted to get out of there but he had locked the door. I didn’t want to provoke him; he seemed capable of anything. So when he said, “Come, look at this-it might interest you,” I went with him.

I followed him through narrow, twisting corridors. We passed a door outside of which stood two big men in white short-sleeved shirts. Matte nodded at the men and exchanged a few words with one of them in Greek. I was going to ask Matte what they were guarding, but I had been too curious already.

We went down another corridor. At last, Matte knocked on the door of another cabin. An upper-class English voice said, “Come.”