"No, my wife has been dead a long time. Months."

"Months?" The doctor snapped those weeks away with his fingers. "It could be years. Centuries. It's all mathematics, my boy. I need only one fragment of the body and my computers can compute what the rest of it was like and recreate it. It's infallible. Naturally there is a degree of risk involved."

"Infallible risk, yes," Linton murmured. "Could you go to work right away?"

"First, I must follow an ancient medical practice. I must bleed you."

Linton grasped the situation immediately. "You mean you want money. You realize I've just got out of an institution...."

"I've often been in institutions myself, for alcoholism, narcotics addiction and more."

"What a wonderful professional career," Linton said, when he couldn't care less.

"Oh, yes—yes, indeed. But I didn't come out broke."

"Neither did I," Linton said hastily. "I invested in shifty stocks, faltering bonds, and while I was away they sank to rock bottom."

"Then—"

"When they hit rock bottom, they bounced up. If I hadn't found you, I would have been secure for the rest of my lonely, miserable life."

"All that's ended now," the doctor assured him. "Now we must go dig up the corpse. The female corpse, eh?"

Resurrection Day!

"Doctor," Linton whispered, "my mind is singing with battalions of choirs. I hope that doesn't sound irreverent to you."

The doctor stroked his oily palms together. "Oh, but it does. Beautifully."

The certificate to allow reburial in Virginia hadn't been impossible to obtain. The doctor had taken the body and Linton's fortune and fed them both into the maw of his calculators, and by means of the secret, smuggled formulae, Greta would be cybernetically reborn.

Linton shook his head. It seemed impossible. But Greta opened the olive-drab slab of metal of the door to the doctor's inner-inner sanctum and walked out into the medicinal cold fluorescent lighting.

It wasn't 

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