“We could start someone on the cycle,” Groton said. “If it means death, that should be apparent very soon. The smell—”
“All right!” Afra.
“But if everything appears to be in order—”
“All right. A test-cycle, halfway. Who?”
“I said I was willing to—” Ivo began.
“Better you go last,” she said. “It’s your show. If it bombs out, you should take the consequences.”
“Afra, that isn’t very kind,” Beatryx objected. The negative comment was obviously an effort for her. “We’re not in a kind situation, dearie.”
Groton left the telescope assembly and faced Afra. “I’m glad you see it that way. We do have the obvious choice for the testing cycle.”
She understood him immediately. “No! Not Brad!”
“If the process works, he must undertake it sooner or later unless we leave him behind. If it doesn’t, what kind of a life does he have to lose? It is not, as you pointed out, a kind situation.”
Afra looked at Brad. He was sitting up with his hair boyishly tousled, a day’s shadow on his face, and saliva dribbling down his chin. His trousers were dark where he had wet them again. He was watching something, half-smiling, but his eyes did not move about.
“Let me handle it,” Afra said soberly. “No one else. I’ll — tell you how it comes out.”
Ivo explained in detail what would be necessary. Groton retired to the underbody of Joseph for some work with the power saw, and brought forth the required basin. They set everything up and left her with Brad. The three of them retreated again into Joseph. No one spoke.
There was a short silence. Then Afra screamed — but as Groton went to look, she cried out to be left alone, and he yielded. Faintly they could hear her sobbing, but nothing else.
No one dared conjecture. Ivo pictured Brad slumping down into an amorphous puddle, first the feet, then the legs, then the torso and finally the handsome head. Had she screamed when the face submerged? Tense and silent, they waited.
Half an hour later she summoned them. She was pale and her eyes were open too wide, but her voice was desperately calm. “It works,” she said.
Brad’s clothing was folded neatly on his former chair. Near it was a covered coffinlike container. There was no other sign of what had passed.
But Afra was very uneasy. “Let’s assume it works — the complete cycle. That we come through it and emerge exactly as we are now, to all appearances. I still can’t accept it intellectually — no, I mean emotionally. How do we know we have survived it? That the same person comes out of it that goes in?”
“I’ll know if I’m the same,” Ivo said defensively.
“But will you, Ivo? You may look the same, sound the same — but how do we know you are the same? Not another person of identical configuration?”
Ivo shrugged. “I’d know it. I’d know if anything were different.”
She concentrated on him with that disarming intensity. She was loveliest when expressing emotion. “Would you? Or would you only think you hadn’t changed? How could you be sure you weren’t an impostor, using Ivo’s body and mind and experience?”
“What else is there? If I have Ivo’s physique and personality, I’m Ivo, aren’t I?”
“No! You could be an identical twin — a congruent copy — a different individual. A different self.”
“What’s different about it?”
“What’s different about any two people, or any two apples or pencils or planets? If they coexist, they’re discrete individuals.”
“But I’m not coexisting with anybody else. Any other me, I mean. How can I be different?”
“Your soul could be different!”
“Oh-oh,” Groton said.
“How else can you term it?” Afra flared at him.
“I’m not trying to bring religion into it — though that might not be a bad idea — I’m just asking how we can verify the price we pay for this wonder from a foreign galaxy. How can we measure self, when physique and mind are suspect? I don’t want to be replaced by a twin that looks and thinks like me; I don’t care how good the facsimile is, if it isn’t me.”
Ivo wondered more urgently just what she had seen happen to Brad. She had been profoundly shaken, and now was clutching at theoretical, philosophical objections.
“It happens I’ve thought along similar lines,” Groton said. “I used to question whether the person who woke up in the morning was the same as the one who had gone to bed at night. Whether the identity changed a little with each change in composition — each new bite of food, each act of elimination. I finally concluded that people do change, all the time — and that it doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter!”
“The important thing is that we perform our functions while we exist,” he said. “That we live each day as it comes, and don’t regret it. If a new person lives the next day, he is responsible. He is guided by his configurations, and his successors after him, and it is not right or wrong so much as predestined.”
“Astrology again?” she inquired disdainfully.
“One day you may come to have a better opinion of it, Afra,” he said mildly.
She sniffed, astonishing Ivo — he had not thought the mannerism could be executed naturally.
He also wondered whether the fervor of her reactions against Groton’s ideas indicated a lurking suspicion that there might be something to them after all.
“At any rate,” Groton continued, “it seems we must either undertake this process, or submit to the approaching UN party. Perhaps the question is whether we prefer to escape in alternate guise, or to surrender in our own.”
“You,” Afra said, “are a fourteen-carat casuist.”
“What are we going to do?” Ivo asked.
“All right. Since I object the most, I’ll go first. But I want some subjective reassurance. I’ve seen it; you haven’t. Once you witness it, you’ll know what I’m talking about. I don’t care what’s foreordained; I want to believe I’m me.”
Groton kept a straight face. “No one else can do it for you.”
“Yes they can. I want someone else to believe I’m me, too.”
“Does it matter what we think?”
“It does.”
“Feedback,” Ivo said.
Unexpectedly, she flashed him a smile. Then she unbuttoned her blouse.
The three watched, hesitating to comment. Afra stripped methodically, completely, and without affectation. She stood before them, a splendid figure of a woman in her prime. “I want — to be handled.”
“Confirmation by tactile perception — very important,” Groton said, not mocking her; but he did not move.
“I don’t understand,” Beatryx said, seemingly more put out by this display than the men were.
“I want you — all of you — to handle me,” Afra explained as though she were giving instructions in storing groceries. Her voice was normal but a flush was developing upon cheek and neck and spreading attractively downward. “So that afterwards you will know me as well as you can, not just by sight or sound.” She smiled fleetingly. “Or temper. So that you can tell whether it is the same girl, outside. When you watch me melt down, you’ll never believe I’m whole again, unless you prove it with all your senses. And if you don’t believe, how can I?”
“I couldn’t tell one girl from another, by touch,” Ivo objected, feeling his own face heating.