Macroscope

“I’m thirty-seven now,” she said.

Ivo had an inspiration. “It must mean you’ll get there safely!”

Still she didn’t move.

Finally Ivo, sensing what was needed, went and led her to the basin and carefully removed the clothing she had so carefully preserved until this moment, while she stood listlessly. He could never, prior to the past few hours, have conceived of himself performing such an action. Undressing an older woman! What secrets remained for her to hide?

He steadied her as she got down, then he stood up to move away.

“Hold my hand, Ivo.”

He knelt just beyond the field of the beam and took her hand, trusting that its melting could catch up later.

The beam came on. She relaxed, unconscious, but he stayed where he was. The skin melted away from her arm up to just beyond the elbow; forearm, wrist and the hand he held remained whole.

Suddenly it came to him that the hand could die, stripped of its supplying mechanisms. He had to return it to the field before he disrupted everything.

His own hand lost sensation as it entered the field, and hers slipped down. He withdrew hastily, alarmed. A film of slick moisture already covered the exposed portion, and feeling did not return. Stupid! Did he think he was playing a game of tag with the alien signal?

He went to sit upon the edge of the last basin, holding the hand above it so that any moisture that dropped would fall inside. The nerves were out for the duration, that was evident; but there did not appear to be any further erosion. He had lost hair follicles and a scraping of skin: not serious.

What would happen if a person were only partially exposed? Could a limb be painlessly amputated and preserved in such fashion, in case of injury? He was sure it could. This, perhaps, had been the original purpose of the technique. There might even be instructions somewhere concerning the regeneration of such a limb. How little he knew about the process he had invoked!

Morbidly he watched Beatryx’s intestines come exposed. The light seemed to eat through the packed convolutions while it worried at the muscular bladder below them. What, indeed — what possible secrets could a woman have to hide, after the literal depth of her had been thus probed and vanquished? What physical act could approach the devastating intimacy of this association? There was her uterus, there the open cha

How was anyone different from anyone else, in this ultimate reckoning?

And he had been embarrassed to touch Afra’s body! He was glad now that at least one woman had insisted on it. The memory of the feel of that firm whole flesh was about the only comfort he had now, knowing that that flesh was whole no more.

God! (both prayer and expletive) — was the salvation offered by the macroscope worth it?

The beam ceased, startling him. Beatryx was done.

He realized that he was alone. He had only to wait a few more hours, and the UN ship would fetch him in, and the adventure would be over. He would not have to take the terrible risk the others had taken; he could be sure, at least, of life.

He was not honestly tempted. The others had not yielded to their fears; indeed, they had trusted him so far as to undertake this bizarre transformation before him, risking horrible extinction for the sake of the mission. His mission. That was the stuff of heroes. That was the stuff he meant to prove to himself. He, Ivo — not the grandiose Schön he had been summoned to summon.

And it was, he realized now, the only way he could follow Afra. If the UN caught them now, the macroscope would be taken away, and the vats of protoplasm would, in the course of months, gradually deteriorate. A year was about the limit, for shelf-life, as he understood it. After that, reconstitution could become ugly.

He stripped awkwardly, because of his unconscious hand. He moved Beatryx beside her husband and covered her and tied her down. He positioned his own bath and climbed in.

Then he climbed out quickly, remembering something. The clothing of four people lay scattered recklessly. It could be dangerous when the rocket maneuvered. He bundled it all together, separating out coins and pens and wallets and keys and pins and women’s purses and placing them in separate storage bins.

He looked at the worn old pe

He climbed in a second time. He would remain beneath the beam, of course, and it would come on again at any time after the minimum period had elapsed, provided that conditions were appropriate. That meant, in this case, normal gravity.

How could it tell what 1-G was, Earth definition? Too late to worry about that now!

Ready or not, he thought, not even frightened any more. Ready or not, here I—

Could experience be inherited? Lysenko, the Russian scientist of yore, had argued that it could. His theory of environment above heredity had seemingly been discredited by his own malfeasance and the winds of political change — but later researches had thrown the issue open again.

The alien beam melted down functional flesh and reduced it to quiescent cells that required little nourishment, surviving during their estivation largely upon their internal nutrient resources. The reconstitution would re-create the original individual — along with all his memories. All of it had to be in the cell — the lifetime of experience as well as the physical form. Only if that experience, right down to the most evanescent flicker of thought, were recorded in the chromosomes, the genes, or somewhere in the nucleus, of every tiny cell of the body — only thus could the complete physique and personality be restored.

The alien presentation said it could be done. The alien intellect was in a position to know.

Unless the flesh of Earthly creatures were not quite typical of that of the rest of the planetary species in the universe…

“Put up or shut up!” Ivo thought somewhere — before, after, during? — and waited for his answer.

What a joke if the alien were mistaken!

Here I—

Swimming through a thick warm sea, an ocean of blood, smooth, delicious, eternal.

Here—

Climbing on the cruel heavy land, a continent of bone, hot, chill, transient.

How to speak without a lung? To think, without a brain?

A jumble of sensation: curiosity, terror, hunger, passion, satiation, lethargy.

An eon passing.

“…come.” Ivo opened his eyes.

He was lying in the container, uncovered, bathed in lukewarm water. He felt fine. Even his hand was whole again.

He sat up, shook himself dry, and do

Inside was an attractive, vaguely layered semifluid. No bones showed. He withdrew.

The beam came on, illuminating the jellylike substance. The protoplasm quivered, but nothing obvious happened at first.

Patience, he told himself. It worked before.

Gradually a speck developed within its translucent upper layer; a mote, a tiny eye, a nucleus. It drifted about; it expanded into a marble, a golf-ball. It opened into a flexing cup that sucked in liquid and spewed it out through the same opening, propelling it cautiously through the medium. The walls of it became muscular, until it resembled an animate womb perpetually searching for an occupant. Then the spout folded over, sealed across the center, and became two: an intake and an outgo. The fluid fu