Weekly Short Story: Successful Operation by Robert Heinlein

Twentieth century science fiction writer Robert Heinlein is probably best known for his novels Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but he also wrote a multitude of short stories.  Being a strong anti-fascist when Hitler and Mussolini had their followers in America before World War II,  Heinlein put his philosophy of liberty into his stories and never wavered from it after the war when he became equally anti-communist.  Successful Operation was one of his earliest works...from 1940...and is also very short, four pages long.  I'm happy to be the proud owner of Off the Main Sequence (SFBC Books, 2005), which is an extensive collection of short stories that tended to be left out of other collections of Heinlein's...this tale started off the book...

Heinlein had Successful Operation first published with a different title, "Heil!", in a pulp fiction magazine under a pseudonym, "Lyle Monroe".  That original title gives a hint about the story, as a racist dictator meant to be Adolf Hitler is in a health crisis with an undesirable solution.  His pituitary gland, which is located at the base of the brain, is diseased and he will only survive with a transplant.  The only surgeon available who can perform the operation, however, is Doctor Lans, who is implied to be Jewish and is in a concentration camp.  Lans and the Leader meet, and the doctor lays out his conditions for the operation, which include the restoration of his fortunes, passports for his family and himself, and that the operation take place on foreign land away from the Leader's control.  Begrudgingly, the dictator accedes and the operation is set.  The healthy pituitary gland to be transplanted belongs to a fellow inmate of Lans, and the donor agrees that he would rather have a sick pituitary and be free than have a healthy one and be under oppression.  Then the operation takes place and it's a success...only one problem, though, the Leader and the donor have both been secretly whisked back to their country.  And thus is the setup for the predictably outrageous ending for such an abbreviated story...

If our consciousness and identities are based within the strict confines of our own bodies, then where are they located there?  The obvious choice would be the brain...but beyond that it's an open question.  Robert Heinlein takes a deep dive off the board of speculation and comes up with an answer that would easily fit well in a Twilight Zone episode...I wonder whether that might in fact have been done... this story just seems familiar to me, as if I had already experienced it or something very similar before.  And now you can read it through the creative commons license via this link to the Free Speculative Fiction online site: [link]...