“I knew you’d say it,” I said. “Then don’t go near the hospital. Don’t do anything to rouse him from his stupor!”

And then we both fell silent, looking at one another. The alarm was fast draining out of me. I was no longer trembling. And I realized quite suddenly that he had never been alarmed.

He wasn’t alarmed now. He did not even look sad. He was looking at me, as if asking me silently to understand. Or perhaps he wasn’t thinking of me at all.

Seventy-four years old he was! And he had gone out of a body full of predictable aches and pains and dulling vision and into this hardy and beautiful form.

Why, I could have no idea at all of what he was really feeling! I’d swapped a god’s body for those limbs! He had swapped the body of an aged being, with death ever present at his shoulder, a man for whom youth was a collection of painful and tormenting memories, a man so shaken by those memories that his peace of mind was fast crumbling away entirely, threatening to leave him bitter and discouraged in the few years he had left.

Now he had been given back his youth! He might live another whole lifetime! And it was a body that he himself had found enticing, beautiful, even magnificent—a body for which he himself had felt carnal desire.

And here I’d been crying anxiously about the aged body, battered and losing its life drop by drop, in a hospital bed.

“Yes,” he said, “I’d say that is the situation, exactly. And yet I know that I should go to that body! I know that it is the proper home of this soul. I know that every moment I wait, I risk the unimaginable—that it will expire, and I will have to remain in this body. Yet I brought you here. And here is exactly where I intend to remain.”

I shuddered all over, staring at him, blinking as if to wake myself from a dream, and then shuddering again. Finally I laughed, a crazed ironic laugh. And then I said:

“Sit down, pour yourself some of your bloody miserable Scotch and tell me how this came about.”

He wasn’t ready to laugh. He appeared mystified, or merely in a great state of passivity, peering at me and at the problem and at the whole world from within that marvelous frame.

He stood a moment longer at the windows, eyes moving over the distant high-rises, so very white and clean looking with their hundreds of little balconies, and then at the water stretching on to the bright sky.

Then he went to the small bar in the corner, without the slightest awkwardness, and picked up the bottle of Scotch, along with a glass, and brought these back to the table. He poured himself a good thick swallow of the stinking stuff, and drank half of it, making that lovely little grimace with his tight new facial skin, exactly the way he had with the older, softer face, and then he flashed his irresistible eyes on me again.