Project Pope

'You take the gamble willingly?

'Indeed I do, said Theodosius.

Fifty-four

'Up to a point I can remember some of it, said Decker. 'I remember being plastered against the hull of the ship, trying to dig my fingers into the metal of it, looking out and seeing the hub of this place spearing up at me and the roads that ran into the hub like so many spokes. I don't remember ru

'It all checks out, said Te

'So am I, said Decker II, 'but the shock and I might say the joy in meeting people of my kind has knocked some of the reticence out of me.

They sat in a pleasant room, high in one of the many towers. Thick carpeting covered the floors and paintings hung upon the walls. Comfortable furniture stood about.

'I'm glad, said Jill, 'that you were able to find this place for us. In all the alie

'It took a bit of doing, said Decker, 'but the Bubbly was insistent that I find a proper place to put you up. He's gone on hospitality.

'The Bubbly?

'The bubble with the fu

'I noticed it, said Te

'He is Smoky's first friend — first because he has been with him longer. I am his second friend, second because I've not been here that long. We make up a triad. Among the Bubblies, no Bubbly stands by himself. There must be two others with him. It's a sort of brotherhood, a blood brotherhood, but that's not exactly it, either, but it's as close as I can come. Old Haystack must have given you something of a start. He's a strange-looking critter.

'He certainly is, said Jill.

'Haystack's not too bad a sort, said Decker, 'once you get to know him. For one thing, he's not the kind of slobbering horror that you meet so often here.

'You take all of it very well, said Jill.

'I have no complaint, said Decker. 'I've been treated well. At first I wondered about my position — captive, refugee, exhibit? I guess I still don't know what I am, but I don't worry about it any longer. The Bubblies have done well enough by me.

'The Bubblies took what amounted to a picture of you, out there in the ship; not of you, but of the original Decker, said Te

'You have to understand, Decker told him, 'that far more than a picture, as you term it, is involved. I'm not sure about the technique. I understand the principle but not how it works. The nearest I can come to explaining it, and it's a feeble explanation, is to compare it with the body sca

'But Decker, the original Decker, was two hundred years or so out of his time, said Te

'This is the first I've known of that, said Decker. "But I can make a guess. It probably took the Bubblies a hundred years before they got around to me. They have a lot of data piled up. Sometimes they have to pick and choose what they want to recreate. Some of the data they have here may have been in the files for several hundreds of years. Some of it they may never get around to.

'You say a hundred years. How old were you when this happened — forty years or so? You don't look a hundred and forty to me. You don't look a day older than the Decker that I knew.

'Well, the way it goes, said Decker, 'is that they improve upon the data. When they turn out an organism from the data, they try to spot the weak points. I suppose that when I was built from the data, the data provided for that useless human organ, the vermiform appendix. Noting it was useless, they'd have probably left that out. I'll make you a wager I have no appendix. A weak or malformed heart valve — they'd fix that up as well. A missing tooth would be replaced, one that had caries would be replaced as well. A bad kidney or a suspect length of gut…

'You sound as if you could be immortal.

'Not immortal, but I'll probably last a while. If something went wrong and there was any need of saving me, they probably could do something about it — replace a heart, perhaps, or a liver or a lung. That's the way it is with everything. I'm the only human they have and they had no idea of my life style. But when I explained, once I'd learned their language, what I needed, they came through with — carpeting, paintings, furniture, the kind of food I required. They even made a few extras, more than I needed. That's what you have here. Give them the specifications and they'll come up with anything. They have matter converters of a sort. Not a dingus that you shovel sand into and out comes bouquets of flowers or ice-cream cones or decks of playing cards or whatever you may ask, but efficient machines, terribly efficient.

'There are no other humans here? asked Jill.

'A few other humanoids, but they aren't human. On a number of counts they aren't. Two legs, two arms, two eyes, two ears, a mouth and nose, but they aren't human. Which is not to say they are any less than human, for they aren't. Some of them may be a cut above a human. I know all of them and all of them know me; we all get along together. We do have a few things in common. For any one of us, it is better than associating with a brainy spider or a blob of pulsating intelligence.

'But what's the point of all of this? asked Jill. 'It sounds like a sort of galactic zoo.

'It's that, of course. But it's something else as well. My best translation, which is far wide of the mark, of the term used to describe this place would be the Center for Galactic Studies. The basic operation is very like your Vatican, although from what you've told me, the approach is somewhat different and the motives somewhat different, too. The Bubblies were the ones who started it, perhaps close to a million years ago, but they're only part of it now. Top dogs, of course, but along the way they picked up partners from other cultures oriented to research. Taken all together, it is an impressive operation. The entire undertaking is based on going out into the galaxy, going physically, and bringing back data. Once the data are in, life forms can be recreated and studied. It's not only data on life forms that they bring back, but artifacts from other cultures — machines, buildings, vehicles, toys, foods, crops, you name it. In this respect, the method would seem to be somewhat better than the Vatican approach; a more solid approach, but the area is restricted to a single galaxy, although there has been some noise over the last century or so about developing a technique that will make it possible to go farther out, to some of the nearby galaxies perhaps.