Free I Will Fear No Evil by Robert Heinlein Page A

was outside of jurisidiction before the warrant was signed and long before the name was straightened out. A famous and very stylish evangelist prepared a sermon denoucning the transplant, using as a text “Vanity of Vanities.”
    But on the third day a spectacular and unusually bloody political assassination crowded Johann Smith out of the news and the evangelist found that he could use the sermon by changing a few sentences—which he did, understanding instinctively the American lust for the blood of the mighty.
    As usual, the unlicensed birth rate exceeded the licensed rate while the abortion rate exceeded both. Upjohn International declared an extra dividend. The backing and filling for the upcoming Presidential campaign speeded up with a joint announcement by the national committees of the two conservative parties, the SDS and the PLA, that they would hold their conventions together (while preserving mutual autonomy) for the (unannounced but understood) purpose of reelecting the incumbent. The chairman of the extreme left-wing Constitutional Liberation Rally denounced it as a typical crypto-fascist capitalistic plot, and predicted a November victory for Constitutional freedom. The splinter parties, Democratic, Socialist, and Republican, met quietly (few members and almost no delegates under sixty-five) and stole away without causing more than a ripple in the news.
    In the Middle East an earthquake killed nine thousand people in three minutes and brought close the ever-present possiblity of war through disturbing the balance of terror. The Sino-American Lunar Commission announced that the Lunar Colonies were now 87% self-sufficient in proteins and carbohydrates, and raised the subsidized out-migration quota but again refused to relax the literacy requirement.
    Johann Sebastian Bach Smith dreamed on.

    After an unmeasured time (how measure a dream?) Smith woke enough to be aware of himself—the reflexive self-awareness of waking as contrasted with the unquestioning and unexplicit self-experience of dreaming. He knew who he was, Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, a very old man—not a baby, not a boy, not any of his younger selves—and was aware of his sensory surroundings, which were zero: darkness, silence, absence of any physical sensation, not even pressure, touch, kinesthesia.
    He wondered if the operation had started, and what it would feel like when he died. He did not worry about pain; he had been assured that the brain itself had no pain receptors and that he was being anesthetized solely to keep him quiet and unworried while the job was done—besides, pain had not worried Smith in years; it was his constant companion, almost an old friend.
    Presently he went back to sleep and to more dreams, unaware that his brain-wave pattern was being monitored and had caused great excitement when change in rhythm and peak had shown that the patient was awake.
    Again he was awake and this time gave thought to the possibility that this nothingness was death. He considered the idea without panic, having come to terms with death more than a half century earlier. If this was death, it was neither the Heaven he had been promised as a child nor the Hell he had long since ceased to believe in, nor even the total lack of self he had come to expect—it was just one damn big bore.
    He slept again, unaware that the physician in charge of his life-support team had decided that the patient had been awake long enough and had slowed his breathing and made a slight change in his blood chemistry.
    He woke again and tried to take stock of the situation. If he was dead—and there seemed no longer reason to doubt it—what did he have left and how could he cut his losses? Assets: none. Correction: one asset, memory. He had a recent memory-of-a-memory, vague and undefined, of confused and crazy dreams—probably from anesthesia and no use to him—plus other memories older but much sharper of being (or having been) Johann Smith. Well, Johann you old