Gay Phoenix Read Online Free PDF

taken over the keeping of a proper record – only very imperfectly, as one might expect from his recurrent amnesiac condition. In fact, it occurred to nobody to doubt that it was a fellow called Adam Buzfuz whom, with such skill as we possessed, we were nursing back to life. It was quite a shock to me, I must confess, when I discovered we were wrong. More significantly, I had to consider what sort of shock it was going to be to him , when we explained to him that he wasn’t the chap he supposed he was. There seemed to be a case for going about the job gently.’
    ‘Very judicious,’ Appleby said. ‘But just how did you discover the truth of the matter?’
    ‘We had a pretty bad slip-up, for a start. Our patient was tricked out with an identity disk, which is decidedly a device for identifying people. But one of my young men, having no notion we were going to have a problem on our hands, simply noted the patient’s blood group, stowed the thing away, and forgot about it. It came back into his head in the end, of course, but not before we’d suffered quite unnecessary bewilderment. He got a bit of a rocket, as you may well imagine.’
    ‘It was Colin’s identity disk?’ Appleby asked.
    ‘Certainly it was. But let me get the sequence of events right. Here had been Adam Buzfuz, as we supposed him to be, tucked up in my intensive care ward, and doing not too badly. It struck me, however, that we ought to get hold of his medical record, if it could be done with any reasonable speed. And – sure enough – in a file on board the Jabberwock were the medical cards of both the Buzfuz brothers. That means no more, you know, than a British National Health Service document, with a number to it, and the name of the owner’s GP. But it enabled me to cable home, and Adam Buzfuz’s history came out to me in a matter of hours. It recorded nothing of the slightest interest. But it did fail to record something! My patient’s left hand was minus its index finger – the consequence, clearly, of an accident, and not a congenital malformation. But there was no mention of anything of the sort on the record.’
    ‘Nor – I’d suppose – need there have been. Or not positively.’ The judge said this. ‘Various obvious explanations are possible. So I don’t, my dear Tim, really see–’
    ‘Quite so, George, quite so.’ Professor Budgery was delighted. ‘And that makes all the odder what I was suddenly prompted to do. It was something not altogether regular, perhaps. Colin Buzfuz was no patient of mine. A dead man can’t be anybody’s patient, can he? So cabling to Colin ’s doctor for Colin ’s record was not quite the thing. Still, I did it. And what did I learn? That Colin Buzfuz had lost his left index finger in some domestic accident or other as a young man. It was when I was still chewing over this that my young fool of a houseman remembered the identity disk. So that was that. Here, snug in bed, we had a character called Colin Buzfuz pretending to be his own younger brother Adam.’
    ‘Pretending?’ Merryweather asked.
    ‘The wrong word, of course. Convinced he was his own younger brother Adam. Better still just taking the thing for granted. He was Adam; he’d seen his elder brother killed, and he’d consigned him to the deep; and now here he himself was – after the cannibal isle and all the rest of it.’
    ‘He was now giving you a whole story?’ Appleby asked. ‘Talking reasonably and coherently, except just for this single curious misapprehension?’
    ‘Just that.’
    ‘Do you know,’ a voice said out of the darkness of the verandah, ‘I don’t find this at all strange? People do at least forget their own identity from time to time – just as we all forget other people’s, or at least their names. For instance, there was Dr Tennyson – the poet’s father. He went to call on a new parishioner, and the servant who opened the door asked him his name. Dr Tennyson couldn’t remember his name, so he