Erik Bludrose, tall and straggly, had an old but prominent scar splitting his mustachioed upper lip. He wanted to forget an empty-headed body that breathed and waited for him back at College Federal Hospital. Also, a smart computer full of that body's identity, or, its soft-brain.

To be an inmate in 2053 did not involve prisons. There were no prisons in the civilized world anywhere. People conformed, where shot or used to further medical knowledge. You always had choices. Surprisingly, a few did 'chose' to participate in aiding the sciences. If your body got raped in old fashion prisons, in the modern clinics it was forbidden. However, all the rest that comprises a human being was left at the discretion of the medicos.

Bludrose was drinking nights at The Old Ye Pub hoping to scramble his own gray matter into proper functioning order for the next day's work. It was Monday and the establishment belonged to him and Lou. Or almost.

Lou, the burly custodian, leaned heavily on the counter, gave a dog's yawn and went back to staring through puffy, half-closed lids at the other half of his clientele.

The intruder at the other end of the bar was a stranger that had been nursing his tumbler for the past half hour. He was short, balding, and in his left hand was a folded white handkerchief making frequent trips over a glistening, pinkish forehead.

The wire-rimmed spectacles suited the little fellow like a stethoscope did a doctor, Bludrose considered. He, too, eyed the stranger.

"My name is Fingle," said the short man, finally, approaching Bludrose. "I--you see, there is a problem..." he wiped his face with the handkerchief, "a man is trapped inside a ghastly thing."

The bartender yawned again, dragged the towel from his bulging shoulder and commenced rubbing the glossy counter.

Bludrose took a long swig from his beer. "With me, it's this heady computer," he said, nodding a head full of straw curls.

Fingle momentarily turned and stared at the barman. And gulped down the remaining contents of his glass. He looked around as though unsure of where he was.

Bludrose was not too sure either. The All Ye Pub was not to be found on any map. You sort of bumped into it when nothing else worked, and forgot it as soon as you stepped out into fresh New England air. The research facilities of the University made it convenient. They were near enough not to put one entirely out of reach. But tonight Erik Bludrose wanted to place light-years between academia and himself.

"Always a drag Mondays." He grinned as a comrade at Fingle. "The place starts winding up on Thursdays. By Saturday it's Wonderland."

His beer was getting flat and the reek of souring, spilt liquor of days ago was slowly trespassing into his rosy glow. The man, now two nose-lengths away, had the roundest, most transparent eyes he had ever seen. They reminded him of...yeah, a saw's eyes--

"I need your body," the man quickly whispered to him.

Bludrose leaned forward.

"I know you have one. I want it."

Bludrose slowly placed a long arm around Fingle's hunched shoulders and moseyed to a table in the far corner.

"Your drink?"

"Orange juice."

"Lou, two more.

"Mr. Fingle," Bludrose began, meticulously, "there is protocol, perhaps even a modicum of propriety, to such manner of transaction. I am neither shocked with or against gay, but--"

Fingle gasped. His face immediately turned lavender. "I want your brains out of the Omega--like yesterday!" Fingle bludgeoned each word like a chiding schoolmarm out of a Dickens's tale. "And, you're a pervert!"

"Who are you?" A change now brewed in Bludrose's ash-blue eyes.

"Abe Fingle, Logistics and Programs Planning, Committee Chief. Dr. Bludrose, you have a convict's live body with a scanned, empty brain on stand-by. I demand you relinquish your--the body to me."

Bludrose let his breath out in easy measures. His eyes reclaimed their focus and studied Fingle. He steadied his elbow on the table they had been sitting, made a fist, and pummeled softly but deftly the man from the government on the nose. "It's impolite to demand."

Fingle bound up and pranced, holding his face.

"Lou, be kind enough to give us your towel?"

Middle-aged with a broad bust, silvering hair and bushy stray brows, President Reginald Marcus stopped scribbling, squinted and eyed the intruder from behind the posh cherry-wood desk.

"What is the nature of your call, Mr--?"

"Fingle, Abe Fingle. The fringe, Mr. President."

Staring hard now, Reginald Marcus, President of NewStates of NovaAmerica, bit his lip. Last night's partying with the Xenon board pantheon and incidental guests was apparently not punishment enough. And currently they had been the only staple of companionship around. His inflicted isolation lately, he hoped, would not debilitate him, turn him into another--what was it?--ah, Hughes.

The heavy sweet aroma expensive Havana cigars are famous for mingled with the scent of leather of the choicely Near East quality.

"The fringe?"

"The fringe, sir."

"Yes the fringe."

Reginald Marcus considered having an employer-employee talk with Ms. Atwood, his new, goggle-spectacled, personal secretary. Retirement had absorbed the older, more adept, Mrs. Parsons. Bless you, Mrs. Parsons, he thought, but your understudy dispenses protocol blindly.

"I do hope you remember." Fingle reached into his coat pocket and extricated a small white card. "You had said, `Show this card.'"

A vestige of recollection trundled in Marcus. "Lovesigh, Krell, Chickbrow..?"

"And Bludrose, Mr. President, from the School of Computer Medicine--now doing a sabbatical at College Federal Hospital," said Fingle. "Hadn't explained half of what it's all about. Too busy looking over my shoulder and all last evening."

Then and there, President Marcus denounced Old Cherokee Bourbon and silently apologised to Ms. Atwood.

"You did say the fringe?"

"I did. Now, sir, you'll undoubtedly..."

President Marcus was grateful for the man's garrulity. It gave him time to compose. Looking out the window, that was one of the four walls opposite the luxurious bar, he gazed upon the azaleas flooding onto the terrace, the pointed and cubed tops of looming skyscrapers with their mirroring or black windows, the steel and glass blocks where delegations of thousands of men and women worked like sprightful ants scurrying every which away.

President Marcus kept on nodding at Fingle. If only Quasimodo would stop pealing those bells inside his head.

He reached into the pocket of his cashmere jacket. "Want a couple?"

Fingle looked at what President Marcus was offering. Anti acid drops. They came in an etched container, carved out of white gold in the shape of a basket cockle. A modest diamond carapace was set into it. A pistil of blood-red was infused atop it.

"I don't mind if I do." Fingle took two. "I say, we were a slight tipsy last night."

"A might." President Marcus took a deep breath.

"It's a Mont Blane ruby," he said, fingering the blaring red stone.

His tenure just then carried the exaggerated seriousness of Malvolio in Twelfth Night. The container was small in President Marcus's palm, but prodigious, substantial, potent.

"You do have an eye for the arresting, Mr. President," Fingle said, nervous about the course this meeting was taking.

"Now, to our subject, Mr. Fingle."

"Yes, sir." Fingle alternated his legs. "It's the Professor, to make a long story short. It's a somewhat different situation ... and ... and carries a certain, I might say, intrinsic jeopardy."

"Don't all?" President Marcus tossed four anti acid pills into his mouth. Haziness enclosed him and thickened.

"The man is a savage, and a pervert," Fingle said. "The others are civil and approachable. But not this Bludrose--"

A churning built up in President Marcus's stomach, clutched for a time, then loosened. For a moment the upheaval seemed to wane. It was a rough landing, not like ever before.

The whipping in his gut built up again, gripped, expired. The pill holder shone. Its rainbow beams washed over him and nudged him five centimetres into the soft leather of the chair.

"Don't claim to be a pundit, but I am conversant with the subject of computer medicine," President Marcus said, sounding a bit ruffled.

Fingle spoke over the wide desk separating them. "May I illustrate further?"

"Never say no to that."

President Marcus tolerated another brisk, vibrantly disorienting pang of nausea. He must look the worse for wear. His onerous, strained breathing patiently slowed down, but still tethered in pain. "The stuff must have been poison," he mumbled, his heart hammering against his chest, keening to break loose from it. But Fingle seemed to no longer be attending him or his predicament.

President Marcus listened to Fingle prattle on about what he considered a monumental disagreement, and rated him arch-ingrate. He thought that he would perish here, imbibed, maligned like an unsuspecting Napoleon amidst his empire; his immortality perhaps mere footsteps away.

"No offence intended but..." continued Fingle. Fingle sank into his chair, relaxed somewhat, and seemed to appraise all that surrounded him as he explained.

The office was huge and pushily furnished and was only a small part of the Presidential penthouse they were in. Low, soft music and singing was piped in that he recognised to be Bolivar, an old opera by French composer Darius Milhaud. Fingle never let on that his minor Degree was in the Arts.

He next upped his head and took in the vista of an expanse of Dallas (Capitol of NewStates of NovaAmerica since 2025) that lay beyond the enormous window and between an Apollo by Scopas and Orcagna's Madonna delle grazie.

"I only wanted to clarify a point," Fingle now continued. "My hard gained discovery, Mr. President, is neither good or bad. It's correctable, if Dr. Bludrose co-operates." He produced from his pocket a black cube the size of a die with a thin pig tail of tiny electrodes running off it. "The convict inmate's soft-brain."

"No offence taken," Marcus returned in his Texas drawl.

The sun, rising behind the forest of buildings, was turning the cinemascope, polarised plate-window to sunset red, and only a massive vermilion ball, jabbed by black angular and sharp-edged protrusions, could now be discerned. The flat land and low granite hills beyond gradually faded into an artificial, maroon dusk.

Numbing out there, President Marcus's thoughts bandied about. The yellows and ambers, the glare of the lapis blue sky, the harsh light of the desert rocks and dust.

"What do you think, Mr President. Shall we confiscate the convict's body." Fingle interrupted the President's fixed look and raised the black die higher. He regarded as President Marcus got deeper absorbed by the shades and moods around him. The hangover had overrun its course and would make things harder. President Marcus looked to him dazed, and his eyes like two red puddles at the bottom of a dry well.

"The body--yes, get the body."

Anthony Lovesigh waited patiently in Champ.

He exhaled.

Champ the chimp, too, exhaled.

Wasn't it enough that he had spent the last four years in a wheelchair, expecting death to knock on his door at any minute of any day? To have his brain removed and encapsulated in an ornery machine? Be bounty hunted by insubordinate and conspiratorial insects?

No.

That was not enough.

Fate had marked him for well more; had strewn his cavalry with all manner of ensuing affliction. The most recent, his imprisonment in a ridiculous monkey's hairy body. All for trying to save a doomed Earth. A mother Earth that screamed to be helped and which expired on a year to year basis from her peoples' stupid mistakes. People he wanted to take faraway, to distant stars so as to alleviate Gaia's back-breaking load. Give her a breather. Free her from a besetting cancer that would soon suck all life from her.

But beyond all else, his heart ached, and at the same time thrilled in anticipation, at the prospects of using his new fringe, perchance to reach her.

"Dr. Lovesigh," interrupted the man holding the phone and on whose lap Dr. Lovesigh glumly sat reflecting. "Excellent news. Fingle found him!"

Chickbrow's enthusiasm was quickly sensed and conveyed. And all hell broke loose for Lovesigh. He did two somersaults, landed jarringly on a hard floor, climbed up an exposed conduit, flung himself across space, and swung breezily and single-handedly on a fluorescent light fixture.

"Quick!" Lovesigh cried, fighting for possession of the chimps speech centers and its incongruous mouth, "sho-ho-w him a banana."

"Here, Champ--," coaxed David Chickbrow, Managing Director of Mite Industries Special Projects Division, and procreator of the professor's most recent misadventure. "Banana, boy!"

Champ plummeted down, all of five meters, waded to the other and climbed back on the lap. Chickbrow could not help but witness the chimp's eyes glow with some sort of delight. He wasn't at all surprised.

"Tha-ha-nk you."

Granted that his host this time was benign and an exceptionally stocked subject of high technology implants that provided him with a consortium of new, and some even fascinating, abilities to toy with: telekinesis, libraries of memory, marginal speech and detection of telepathic waves, a vastly improved biochip synergistic processor, and more. Dr. Lovesigh, nevertheless, hard as he tried, could not cope with or have any control upon the beast's strange feral moods and bizarre, sometimes extraordinary and uncannily 'human' reactions and appetites. No one possibly could, whether inside or outside the beast. Who wants another person under his skin, and for who knows how long.

"Low tones, Chickbrow, ple-he-ase," he managed to say between bites, chews and gulps. The chimp ate humbly stealing quietly glimpses at his bearer.

Fingle came again the next week, hoping to make more sense out of things.

"Abe," the President lit his cigar, "you'll be doing it for the World Confederation. There's nobody out there with your experience involving these four somewhat idiosyncratic but basically benign gentlemen. It's their brilliance we're seeking, not their temperament. Just don't get personally involved. And you'll see things clearer."

Fingle took out his handkerchief and brought it to his forehead. He is sober and all there today, Fingle thought relieved. "Three, Mr. President. The fourth is still a chimpanzee."

He had as much as he could take, with all three. He had already sent in his resignation from what he called 'the animal farm' when the President himself asked to see him this second time.

"How unfortunate. Nothing could be done with Dr. Lovesigh yet?"

It turned out to be a very short session. Simply Xenon's Chief Executive had not accepted his resignation. Also Fingle had never seen the man in such complete candor and disquiet.

"All hope is lost without him, Mr. Fingle."

Fingle's handkerchief automatically covered his nose. "There persist difficulties in that area as well, Mr. President." Awesome ones, he said silently.

President Marcus closed his eyes and expelled a deep sigh.

"I didn't mean it to sound so final, sir," said Fingle, and blotted his forehead with a fresh, dry handkerchief. "We got the body from Dr. Bludrose, and purged the Omega of the convict's reckless soft-brain backup, the cause of our problems all along." Still, something nagged at the back of Fingle's mind.

The man across from him shook and nodded his silver locks, silently, his face riddled and grave.

"Tomorrow we'll be transferring Dr. Lovesigh from the chimpanzee to the new body."

"Is it safe--I mean going through the Omega again?"

What threats had Xenon expelled to drive the man to such a state of despondency? "Bludrose has eradicated all trace of the soft-brain program--the cube I had shown you, Mr. President," Fingle repeated, to get the man to relax.

Fingle had paid for that cube in blood and raw pain. But he wasn't the only one. Seeing Lovesigh ricochet from light fixture to light fixture as Champ took his daily morning exercises--well, it's not easy for an acrophobic.

A rosy, broad grin produced and accentuated what very few people knew to exist on Fingle's otherwise straight, pinkish face. An adorably charming dimple.

"Want to mete out some of the joke, Mr. Fingle. Or is it private?"

"Not at all, Mr. President," Fingle said. "Dr. Lovesigh's and the chimp's genes simply don't seem to mix so well."

"The new body should be safer. Less violent."

"...lobotomy...Inherent violent mental attitudes." Just then, Chickbrow's words of a few months ago struck Fingle like a blow from a mallet. Abruptly, the grin faded and the dimple evaporated.

Fingle's face turned utterly solemn. He weighed how much longer Lovesigh could remain inside the monkey against the proclivity of mal-traits--as those possibly dormant in the awaiting convict's body.

"Safer, Mr. President?" he said, feeling his stomach sink.