I use the word “charge” advisedly when I try to esplain our immortality. They call it “nerve-firing” nowadays. As near as I’ve researched, we all underwent identical traumas which destroyed or discharged the lethal secretions that are the crux of old age and death. If your cells accumulate lethal secretions you’re not forever for this world, and all creatures have been endowed with this metabolic suicide. Maybe that’s nature’s way of wiping the slate clean and trying again. I’m intensely anthropomorphic and I can see nature getting disgusted and closing the show on the road.

But our Group has proven that death doesn’t have to be inevitable. Of course we did it the hard way. Each of us knew we were going to die and received a psychogalvanic shock that wiped out our lethal cell products and turned us into Molecular Men; Molemen for short. I’ll explain that later. It’s a sort of updating of Cuvier’s “Catastrophism” theory of evolution. In case you’ve forgotten, he argued that periodic catastrophes destroyed all life and God started it all over again on a higher level. He was wrong about the God bit, of course, but catastrophes do alter creatures.

As described in each case (with the exception of Hic-Haec-Hoc, who can’t describe anything) the circumstances were almost identical. We were trapped in some natural or man-made catastrophe that gave us no chance of survival; we were aware of it; a psychogalvanic charge ripped through us as we toppled into extinction; then some miracle aborted the death and so here the Group is forever. The odds against this sort of freak are fantastic, but the Greek Syndicate says that even the longest odds are bound to come in sooner or later. The Greek ought to know. He’s been a professional gambler ever since Aristotle kicked him out of the Peripatetic School in Athens.