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    _Robert J. Shea returns with this intriguing short-short predicting
    a not too distant future where medicine, not content with
    stimulating life and new growth in people who had already died, goes
    on to further experiments which Baron von Frankenstein would have
    found interesting._


resurrection

_by ROBERT J. SHEA_


 They had been cramped for space, him and his people.
 Obviously this new age had solved the problem better.


"You're a fascinating person," the girl said. "I've never met anyone
like you before. Tell me your story again."

The man was short and stocky, with Asiatic features and a long, stringy
mustache. "The whole story?" he asked. "It would take a lifetime to tell
you." He stared out the window at the yellow sun and the red sun. He
still hadn't gotten used to seeing two suns. But that was minor, really,
when there were so many other things he had to get used to.

A robot waiter, with long thin metal tubes for arms and legs, glided
over. When he'd first seen one of those, he'd thought it was a demon.
He'd tried to smash it. They'd had trouble with him at first.

"They had trouble with me at first," he said.

"I can imagine," said the girl. "How did they explain it to you?"

"It was hard. They had to give me the whole history of medicine. It was
years before I got over the notion that I was up in the Everlasting Blue
Sky, or under the earth, or something." He grinned at the girl. She was
the first person he'd met since they got him a job and gave him a home
in a world uncountable light years from the one he'd been born on.

"When did you begin to understand?"

"They simply taught all of history to me. Including the part about
myself. Then I began to get the picture. Funny. I wound up teaching them
a lot of history."

"I bet you know a lot."

"I do," the man with the Asiatic features said modestly. "Anyway, they
finally got across to me that in the 22nd century--they had explained
the calendar to me, too; I used a different one in my day--they had
learned how to grow new limbs on people who had lost arms and legs."

"That was the first real step," said the girl.

"It was a long time till they got to the second step," he said. "They
learned how to stimulate life and new growth in people who had already
died."

"The next part is the thing I don't understand," the girl said.

"Well," said the man, "as I get it, they found that any piece of matter
that has been part of an organism, retains a physical 'memory' of the
entire structure of the organism of which it was part. And that they
could reconstruct that structure from a part of a person, if that was
all there was left of him. From there it was just a matter of pushing
the process back through time. They had to teach me a whole new language
to explain that one."

"Isn't it wonderful that intergalactic travel gives us room to expand?"
said the girl. "I mean now that every human being that ever lived has
been brought back to life and will live forever?"

"Same problem I had, me and my people," said the man. "We were cramped
for space. This age has solved it a lot better than I did. But they had
to give me a whole psychological overhauling before I understood that."

"Tell me about your past life," said the girl, staring dreamily at him.

"Well, six thousand years ago, I was born in the Gobi Desert, on Earth,"
said Genghis Khan, sipping his drink.




Transcriber's Note:

    This etext was produced from _Fantastic Universe_ December 1957.
    Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
    copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
    typographical errors have been corrected without note.