'Call a doctor!' George exclaimed excitedly . . .

          'Superman' had discovered he was no man of steel - and there
          wasn't a speck  of kryptonite to be found anywhere. During a
          break in rehearsals,  George  -  the actor who plays the one
          who's faster than  a speeding bullet - had gone backstage by
          himself,  attached  a  silencer  to  a  loaded  pistol  he'd
          secreted behind the  curtain, held the gun to his temple and
          coolly pulled the  trigger.  Miraculously,  he  didn't lapse
          into unconsciousness until he'd cried out for a doctor.

          Rushing backstage, the  producer  faced  the  tragic  scene,
          realised what the  muffled sound reaching her ears had been,
          and momentarily froze in astonishment: 'It makes no sense at
          all! Lately, George  has been even happier than usual. Could
          he have actually believed he'd be able to move his head away
          before the bullet reached it?'

          At the hospital, George was immediately prepped for surgery.
          Doctor Crusher lamented  that  there  was  no  time to do an
          M.R.I.. The patient's  life could not be stopped from ebbing
          away while one  of  the  world's  most skilled neurosurgeons
          awaited Magnetic Resonance  Imaging scans which would reveal
          the projectile's exact path of destruction.

          Not that it  mattered  -  before  she'd  finished scrubbing,
          George  was clinically  brain  dead.  Apparently  numbed  to
          tragedy by the  reality of confronting it daily, most of the
          staff returned to  their routines -the emptiness inside each
          of them would have to wait until the doctors and nurses were
          off duty before it could be dealt with.

          Dr. Crusher, though, stayed. 'I can still save him, if I get
          in the O.R. quickly enough! All I need is a few seconds with
          the patient, the  opportunity  to  do some lab work and that
          gizmo I invented  after being inspired by, of all things the
          movie "Ghostbusters".'

          In the operating  room,  she  picked up a wooden spatula and
          obtained a sample  of  cells  from  the  inner lining of the
          mouth. Then she  dismissed the few remaining attendants with
          'You may all  leave  now, I'll finish up in here.' After the
          last attendant strode  out  and  she  heard  the  outer door
          close. she grabbed  the  shoebox-size  'Ghostbusters'  gizmo
          kept inside a  locked  panel  of  one  of the many high-tech
          machines.

          Flipping a switch  caused its ultra-sensitive electronics to
          search out George's non-physical doppelganger - his soul, if
          you  like -  which,  according  to  Dr.  Crusher's  previous
          hypothesising, was now separated from his physical being and
          pausing in the  room for a few minutes while getting its (or
          his)  bearings.  When   the   display   registered  George's
          location,  he  was  data-compressed  (a  process  which,  in
          effect,  miniaturised  him)  and  'stored'  in  the  gizmo's
          electronic memory.

          From the O.R.  the  doctor  went  straight to the hospital's
          remarkably well equipped  laboratory,  where  the  spatula's
          cells were genetically  engineered  to  prevent  illness and
          ageing and to  increase  the rate of healing a trillionfold,
          then cloned into  a  replica  of  George's old body. 'Nice,'
          thought Dr. Crusher,  'but  without  my  Ghostbusting gizmo,
          this  would  only   be   a   20th  century  version  of  Dr.
          Frankenstein's monster.'

          She  reversed  the   gizmo   so  George's  BITS  (space-time
          equivalents of computers'  BInary digiTS) were data-expanded
          and downloaded into the clone. So the actor's encounter with
          a  speeding  bullet  ironically  transformed  him,  via  the
          futuristic bio-technology performed  by a 'Superdoc', into a
          virtual man of steel.