Time Thieves

they were a mile or two away.”
        
        “Dead?”
        
        “Yes, you were dead.”
        
        Impossibly, the hollowness within him deepened.
        
        “But death does not have to be a permanent condition -not when you have politin medical technology on your side.'
        
        “That is what you call yourselves?” he asked.
        
        “Politins. It doesn't translate.”
        
        “And you put Humpty Dumpty back together again, is that it?”
        
        “I read the associations with that allusion, but I cannot quite grasp the import.”
        
        “Skip it. You made me live again, right?”
        
        “Your body was no problem,” the politin said. “That required but a day's study and another day with the ship's special robotic surgeons. It was your mind that caused us trouble.”
        
        “With the body, we have only a one-dimentional puzzle. This is the digestive system, this the respiratory, this organ leads to this one, does this for that, produces this hormone or enzyme which accomplishes this duty or ' that, and so forth. But with the mind, the problem becomes four dimensional, with width and breadth and depth and time all considered. Too, though the brain is organic and easily studied, it does not actually tell us much about the mind it engenders. We did the very best we could and sent you back, with a robotic observer to tail you for a few days to see what you functioned like in your everyday life.”
        
        “The car?”
        
        “That required far more time to rebuild, for we knew we dared not miss a detail. We understood, from you, how many of your kind are-what you would call enthusiasts over automobiles. When we had both you and the car functioning and looking right, we sent you home and released your mind as you entered your garage.”
        
        “And then the problems started.”
        
        “Yes.”
        
        “With numbers. I couldn't make change or remember how many bags of popcorn to buy at the theater. Then it was accelerated into a time-space incomprehension, and I passed out on the stairs, looking for my office downtown.”
        
        “Actually, it began before that,” the newscaster said. “We should have given you a detailed false memory, so detailed that it could not be found false. But, in your mind, we found the concept 'amnesia,' along with all the amnesiac folklore you had picked up, and we decided to take the easier way out by letting you think you'd been a victim of just such an attack. To cement that we finished painting your cabin living room.”
        
        “And Della accidentally discovered what you'd done.”
        
        “Yes, because we overlooked placing any corroborative detail to substantiate the amnesia until it was almost too late.”
        
        “Question.”
        
        “Ask it.”
        
        “How did you remove me from the office building downtown? I presume you brought me back here, for more corrective surgery.”
        
        “You spent two days in surgery and one in testing the second time. When you passed out on the stairwell, we had an observer closeby. Our robots are capable of teleportation, or what you would call that, but only when they have the coordinates of their destination. They can teleport to this ship or the mother ship, but nowhere else until it has been mapped and pointed. They can take a passenger with them. This one brought you here.”
        
        “And this time you gave me a false set of memories, the Emerald Leaf Motel and everything.”
        
        “But we underestimated your species. It is a common fault every time we encounter a new galactic race. We did not do a good enough job with the false memories. We approached the night clerk and brought him here, implanted coinciding data in his mind and returned him to his post. We should have done the same with the maid. We thought, erroneously, that the clerk was responsible for bed changes. Your society breeds different institutions and circumstances than does ours.”
        
        “And I caught sight of your robot observer there.”
        
        “Only because, already, your mind was growing more observant, more careful of detail. We did not realize what we had done, how we had opened new regions of your brain and given you new talents. The first time, we under-performed; the second, we