transfer operation'—'I' was to be moved into the body of this young Mayan—The operation is illegal and few are competent to practice it—I was referred to an American doctor who had become a heavy metal addict and lost his certificate—'He is the best transfer artist in the industry' I was told 'For a price.'
We found the doctor in a dingy office on the Avenida Cinco de Mayo—He was a thin grey man who flickered in and out of focus like an old film—I told him what I wanted and he looked at me from a remote distance without warmth or hostility or any emotion I had ever experienced in myself or seen in another—He nodded silently and ordered the Mayan boy to strip, and ran practiced fingers over his naked body—The doctor picked up a box-like instrument with electrical attachments and moved it slowly up and down the boy's back from the base of the spine to the neck
—The instrument clicked like a Geiger counter—The doctor sat down and explained to me that the operation was usually performed with 'the hanging technique'—The patient's neck is broken and during the orgasm that results he passes into the other body—This method, however, was obsolete and dangerous—For the operation to succeed you must work with a pure vessel who has not been subject to parasite invasion—Such subjects are almost impossible to find in present time he stated flatly—His cold grey eyes flicked across the young Mayan's naked body:
'This subject is riddled with parasites—If I were to employ the barbarous method used by some of my learned colleagues—(nameless assholes)—you would be eaten body and soul by crab parasites
—My technique is quite different—I operate with molds—Your body will remain here intact in deepfreeze—On your return, if you do return, you can have it back.' He looked pointedly at my stomach sagging from sedentary city life—'You could do with a stomach tuck, young man—But one thing at a time—The transfer operation will take some weeks—And I warn you it will be expensive.'
I told him that cost was no object—The News was behind me all the way—He nodded briefly:
'Come back at this time tomorrow.' When we returned to the doctor's office he introduced me to a thin young man who had the doctor's cool removed grey eyes—'This is my photographer—I will make my molds from his negatives.' The photographer told me his name was Jiminez—('Just call me 'Jimmy the Take'')—We followed the 'Take' to a studio in the same building equipped with a 35 millimeter movie camera and Mayan backdrops—He posed us naked in erection and orgasm, cutting the images in together down the middle line of our bodies—Three times a week we went to the doctor's office—He looked through rolls of film his eyes intense, cold, impersonal—And ran the clicking box up and down our spines—Then he injected a drug which he described as a variation of the apomorphine formula—The injection caused simultaneous vomiting and orgasm and several times I found myself vomiting and ejaculating in the Mayan vessel—The doctor told me these exercises were only the preliminaries and that the actual operation, despite all precautions and skills, was still dangerous enough.
At the end of three weeks he indicated the time has come to operate—He arranged us side by side naked on the operating table under floodlights—With a phosphorescent pencil he traced the middle line of our bodies from the cleft under the nose down to the rectum —Then he injected a blue fluid of heavy cold silence as word dust fell from demagnetized patterns—From a remote Polar distance I could see the doctor separate the two halves of our bodies and fitting together a composite being—I came back in other flesh the lookout different, thoughts and memories of the young Mayan drifting through my brain—
The doctor gave me a bottle of the vomiting drug which he explained was efficacious in blocking out any control waves—He also gave me another drug which, if injected into a subject, would enable me to occupy his body for a few hours and only at night. 'Don't let the sun come up on you or it's curtains—zero eaten by crab—And now there is the matter of my fee.'
I handed him a brief case of bank notes and he faded into the shadows furtive and seedy as an old junky.
The paper and the embassy had warned me that I would be on my own, a thousand years from any help— I had a vibrating camera gun sewed into my fly, a small tape recorder and a transistor radio concealed in a clay pot —I took a plane to Merida where I set about contacting a 'broker' who could put me in touch with a 'time guide'— Most of these so-called 'brokers' are old drunken frauds and my first contact was no exception—I had been warned to pay nothing until I was satisfied with the arrangements—I found this 'broker' in a filthy hut on the outskirts surrounded by a rubbish heap of scrap iron, old bones, broken pottery and worked flints—I produced a bottle of
—Also dangerous and illegal—He could get into trouble—Besides I might be an informer from the Time Police —He would have to think about it
—He drank two more cups of spirit and fell on the floor in a stupor—The following day I called again—He had thought it over and perhaps—In any case he would need a week to prepare his medicines and this he could only do if he were properly supplied with
—As I was walking back toward town a boy fell in beside me.
'Hello, Meester, you look for broker yes?—Muy know good one—Him,' he gestured back toward the hut. 'No good
Thinking I could not do worse, I accompanied the boy to another hut built on stilts over a pond—A youngish man greeted us and listened silently while I explained what I wanted—The boy squatted on the floor rolling a marijuana cigarette—He passed it around and we all smoked—The broker said yes he could make the arrangements and named a price considerably lower than what I had been told to expect—How soon?—He looked at a shelf where I could see a number of elaborate hourglasses with sand in different colors: red, green, black, blue, and white—The glasses were marked with symbols—He explained to me that the sand represented color time and color words—
He pointed to a symbol on the green glass, 'Then—One hour'—He took out some dried mushrooms and herbs and began cooking them in a clay pot—As green sand touched the symbol, he filled little clay cups and handed one to me and one to the boy—I drank the bitter medicine and almost immediately the pictures I had seen of Mayan artifacts and codices began moving in my brain like animated cartoons—A spermy, compost heap smell filled the room—The boy began to twitch and mutter and fell to the floor in a fit—I could see that he had an erection under his thin trousers—The broker opened the boy's shirt and pulled off his pants—The penis flipped out spurting in orgasm after orgasm—A green light filled the room and burned through the boy's flesh
—Suddenly he sat up talking in Mayan—The words curled out his mouth and hung visible in the air like vine tendrils—I felt a strange vertigo which I recognized as the motion sickness of time travel
—The broker smiled and held out a hand—I passed over his fee—The boy was putting on his clothes—He beckoned me to follow and I got up and left the hut—We were walking along a jungle hut the boy ahead his whole body alert and twitching like a dog—We walked many hours and it was dawn when we came to a clearing where I
