Mindswap Read Free

desirous of travelling and wishes to find a suitable host body. He has left the selection entirely up to us, stipulating only mental and physical health.'
    'Well,' Marvin said, 'I don't mean to boast, but I've always been considered healthy.'
    'I can see that at a glance,' Mr Blanders said. 'It is only a feeling, of course, or perhaps an intuition, but I have come to trust my feelings in thirty years of dealing with the public. Purely on the basis of my feelings, I have rejected the last three applicants for this particular Swap.'
    Mr Blanders seemed so proud of this that Marvin felt impelled to say, 'Have you really?'
    'Most certainly. You can have no conception of how frequently I must detect and eliminate misfits in this line of work. Neurotics who seek ugly and illicit thrills; criminals who wish to escape the purview of local law; the mentally unstable, trying to escape their internal psychic pressures. And many more. I cull them all.'
    'I hope that I don't fit any of those categories,' Marvin said, with an embarrassed little laugh.
    'I can tell at once that you do not,' Mr Blanders said. 'I would judge you as an extremely normal young man, almost
excessively
normal, if that were possible. You have been bitten by the travel bug, which is very suitable for your time of life, and is a passion akin to failing in love, or fighting an idealistic war, or becoming disillusioned with the world, and other postures of the young. It is very fortunate that you had either the native wit or the good luck to come to us, the oldest and most reliable brokerage house in the Swap business, rather than to some of our less scrupulous competitors, or, worst of all, to the Open Market.'
    Marvin knew very little about the Open Market; but he remained silent, not wishing to betray his ignorance by asking.
    'Now then,' Mr Blanders said, 'we have certain formalities which we must go through before we can gratify your request.'
    'Formalities?' Marvin asked.
    'Most certainly. First, you must have a complete examination, which will produce an operational judgement of your physical, mental, and moral standing. This is quite necessary, since bodies are swapped on an equal basis. You would be quite unhappy if you found yourself stuck in the corpus of a Martian suffering from sandpest or tunnel syndrome. Just as he would be unhappy if he found that you had rickets or paranoia. By the term of our charter, we must attempt as complete a knowledge of the health and stability of the Swappers as possible, and apprise them of any discrepancies between real and advertised condition.'
    'I see,' Marvin said. 'And what happens after that?'
    'Next, you and the Martian Gentleman will both sign a Reciprocal Damage Clause. This states that any damage to your host body, whether by omission or commission, and including Acts of God, will, one, be recompensed at the rate established by interstellar convention, and, two, that such damage will be visited reciprocally upon your own body in accordance with the
lex talionis
.'
    'Huh?' Marvin said.
    'Eye for eye, tooth for tooth,' Mr Blanders explained. 'It's really quite simple enough. Suppose you, in the Martian corpus, break a leg on the last day of Occupancy. You suffer the pain, to be sure, but not the subsequent inconvenience, which you avoid by returning to your own undamaged body. But this is not equitable. Why should you escape the consequences of your own accident? Why should someone else suffer those consequences for you? So, in the interests of justice, interstellar law requires that, upon reoccupying your own body, your own leg be broken in as scientific and painless a manner as possible.'
    'Even if the first broken leg was an accident?'
    '
Especially
if it were an accident. We have found that the Reciprocal Damage Clause has cut down the number of such accidents quite considerably.'
    'This begins to sound sorta dangerous,' Marvin said.
    'Any course of action contains an element of danger,' Mr Blanders said. 'But the