And, after all, he thought suddenly, who was to stop him?
The screens for students were nearly as formidable as the secretary's, but Castor was thrilled to be able to practice on one. When he had got it into communications mode, the first thing he did was to call Professor Many-face's secretary to make sure the strange old creature had not decided to come in early. He hadn't. Reassured, Castor tinkered the screen into data-retrieval mode and punched up Directory—University. He found the entry for Fung Bohsien easily. The cursor poured out fifty characters a second, and in no time at all Castor had Many-face's vital statistics:
Fung Bohsien, b. Sinjiang Province 2019. BSc Sinjiang 2037. MSc Beijing 2039. MD Tokyo Prefecture 2042. PhD Stanford 2046. Fellow Academica Sinica—
Fast-feed. Castor humped the crawl ahead, past dozens of lines of honors given and positions held—then, with a growing puzzlement, past a much longer roll of major papers published. It was a perfectly ordinary, if unusually distinguished, academic vita. There was not one word to suggest what made him talk so funny or have such weird nicknames. The only unusual thing about the biographical entry was a postscript that said, "See also Hsang Futsui, Dien Kaichung, Potter Alicia, Su Wonmu, Angorak Aglat, Shum Hengdzhou, Tsai Mingwo, Corelli Anastasio, Hong Ludzhen, and Gwai Hunmong."
Castor frowned in frustration at the screen, then doggedly rolled it back to the beginning and reread every word. And in the list of papers for the year 2057 he hit pay dirt.
He looked around to get his bearings, then headed straight for the nearest screen room.
He looked around to get his bearings, then headed straight for the nearest screen room.
The title was "Personality Retention after Brain Tissue Transplant," and the authors were given as Fung, Shan, Tzuling, Gwui, and Gwui.
Fortunately the journal cited was in the university library memory. It was the answer. Not easily found, because Castor's autoeducation had not included much anatomy. He had to force his way through thickets of fornices and corpus callosa and tangles of epiphyses and hypophyses, but the story was there to read. At the age of only thirty-six, Dr. Fung had developed a brain tumor, and it was malignant. Worse, it involved areas with names like the "basis pedunculi" that involved the basic functioning of the body; to lose them was not merely to lose a few memories or the sense of smell, it was a loss incompatible with life. The only hope was a transplant. The operation was successful... except that, coming out of his druggy post-op doze, young Dr. Fung Bohsien responded to the surgeon's questions clearly and positively. Who was he? Why, he was Fung Bohsien, of course, and in the next breath identified himself equally certainly as Hsang Futsui, the young Han student killed under the wheels of a trolleybus who had donated the brain stem.
Castor stared at the golden characters on the screen, thrilled and revolted. Revolted to find that the famous scientist and high party member did not merely perform experiments but was the subject of one. Thrilled to be, at last, in the place where such wonders could happen. Revolted, and thrilled, and desperately, desperately sick with longing to stay there.
"No," the secretary said good-humoredly, "Professor Fung isn't here, and I have no idea where he is. He did call. He said he would be greatly pleased if you would remain in the city for a few days. All the necessary papers will be arranged."
Castor's heart throbbed joyfully. "In the transient hotel?" he asked hopefully. The secretary pursed her lips.
"If you wish that, I suppose it could be arranged, but Professor Fung suggested you stay with Police Inspector Tsoong. It is more convenient to the university. I promise the inspector will not object," the secretary grinned. "I have informed her already. So stay in the city, enjoy yourself—but first you should see the professor. He may come at any time."
Never since the feast days of childhood had Castor had so many wishes granted at once. "Can I wait in the student center?" he asked with stars in his eyes.
"No, why? Are you hungry still?"
"I would like to use the screens," he confessed.
"Do you know how? Well, then! Why use a public screen when you can use the professor's?"
And so for three hours and more Pettyman Castor lived in the very heart of heaven, seated at the huge keyboard belonging to a famous scientist and high party member, with what seemed nearly unrestricted access to all the world's scientific data. The keyboard, of course, was formidable. He studied it for ten minutes before he dared do anything more than turn it on. Then he repeated the searches he had conducted in the student center, adding a cross-lookup instruction to find later papers, and easier papers, to describe what Fung Bohsien was and had done. The screen was a marvel. It seemed to think for him, once instructed in what he wished. By the time the secretary came in with a cup of tea and word that the professor was still missing, he had learned more than he ever wished to know about Fung Bohsien. He had part or most of the brains of ten other human beings, all dead of things that wrecked their bodies but left their brains intact, installed within his own skull—well, not his own skull anymore, because one cranium could not hold so much tissue. Bone grafts and later noble-metal plates had expanded the cranial capacity. He seemed—now it was perhaps they seemed—to have no limit to his desire for added personalities; it was not lack of will that kept him from adding a dozen more but the difficulty of finding proper tissue matches. Most of the conventional series of antigen factors were no problem at all, because immune-reaction suppressants handled them well, but the brain was tricky stuff. Fewer than one cadaver in a hundred could live comfortably inside Manyface's pumpkin-sized skull.
Then, emboldened, Castor threw a wider net. Was there any progress in solving the mystery of Ursa QY since his last course in astronomy a year before? No. There was not; it was still an anomalous black hole. Had the Earth-based telescopes any new pictures of the massive eruptions on Callisto? Yes, they had—good ones, considering that astronomy was all back on the surface of the planet again, with the adventure into space a forgotten chapter a century old...
He might have gone on forever if the secretary had not appeared to say, "The professor is in his laboratory; go there. Out the door, down the stairs, room 3C44—don't worry, you won't have any trouble finding it!"
Castor had no trouble at all. The laboratory announced itself by its sounds and smells before he reached the open door. Sounds of chirping, cheeping, squeaking, yowling; smells of animal cages by the dozen. Most of the cages were full. A good half of their occupants were monsters. A capuchin monkey, intact and lively, chattered as it bounded from perch to floor in one cage; next door another monkey squatted sullenly in a nest of rags, its huge head braced by a leather collar, its eyes fierce. The dominant freakishness of the animals was the big head, but there were others—a snake with two bodies joined to a single skull, a steel band reinforcing the joint as the creature squirmed and twisted in its own coils; a piglet's head on a puppy's body; a guinea pig that seemed to have no proper head at all, just a nose and a mouth that seemed to come right from its shoulders and eyes that peeped pleadingly at Castor. He was shaken. When he saw the great football helmet of Manyface past a row of cages, he looked at the animals no more, but kept his gaze on the scientist as he approached.
Three or four normally formed human beings were with Manyface, a couple of them Yankee, Castor saw with surprise. They listened patiently to the internal debate that confused every statement that came from the mouth of Fung Bohsien; they seemed skilled at disregarding the minority voices and extracting the instructions and comments of the boss.