onger feels. The
experience of the one becomes the experience of the other--the thrill of
running after a baseball, the pride of doing something clever with the
hands, the touch of a girl's kiss upon the lips--all these become the
property of the weaker, since he is receiving the thoughts of the
stronger. There is, of course, no flow in the other direction. The
stronger brother has no way of knowing that his every thought is being
duplicated in his brother's mind.
"In effect, the damaged brother ceases to think. The thoughts in his
mind are those of the healthy brother. The feeling of identity becomes
almost complete.
"To the outside observer, the damaged brother appears to be a cataleptic
schizophrenic, completely cut off from reality. And, in a sense, he is."
Stanton walked over to the nightstand by the bed, took another cigarette
from the pack, lit it, and looked at the smoke curling up from the tip.
_So Martin became a cataleptic schizophrenic_, he thought.
The mind of Martin had ceased to think at all. The "Bart" part of him
had not wanted to be disturbed by the garbled, feeble sensory
impressions that "Mart's" body provided. Like many another
schizophrenic, Martin had been living in a little world cut off from the
actual physical world around his body.
The difference between Martin's condition and that of the ordinary
schizophrenic had been that Martin's little dream world had actually
existed. It had been an almost exact counterpart of the world that had
existed in the perfectly sane, rational mind of his brother, Bart. It
had grown and developed as Bart had, fed by the one-way telepathic flow
from the stronger mind to the weaker.
There had been two Barts--and no Mart at all.
But there had been only one human being between them. Bart Stanton had
been a strong, capable, intelligent, active human being. The duplicate
of his mind was just a recording in the mind of a useless,
radiation-blasted hulk.
And then the Neurophysical Institute had come into the picture. A new
process had been developed by Dr. Farnsworth and his crew, by which a
human being could be reconstructed--made, literally, into a superman.
All the techniques had been worked out in careful and minute detail. But
there was one major drawback. Any normal human body would resist the
process--to the death, if necessary--just as a normal human body will
resist a skin graft from an alien donor or the injection of an alien
protein.
But
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