Groton drew the second — actually, third — basin into position. Silently he undressed, casting his clothing absently on the pile left by Afra. He lay down.
Beatryx turned away.
This time Ivo timed it by his watch: twenty-four minutes until the beam desisted. Another skeleton lay within its vat. Beatryx had not looked at all.
Again they waited. Two murders?
Ivo moved the remains, discovering that the container slid readily. He was irrationally fearful of slopping some of the juice over the side. He sighed in silent relief as he set the cover, though it was light and did not actually seal the basin. Air had to enter, or it would quickly become a coffin. He found the snaps Groton had fashioned to connect to the floor-plugs. This was the kind of detail an engineer would think of; Ivo certainly had not. Of course, free-fall or jerky acceleration would throw the protoplasm out to splatter over the equipment — but Afra and Groton would have anticipated this also, and accounted for it in the programming. Probably the engines would never cut off at all; Joseph would perform a turnabout under 10-G acceleration and commence 10-G deceleration without affecting its contents enough for any slopping.
Ivo positioned the next basin.
“No!” Beatryx cried, near hysteria. She had seemed calm, but obviously this type of experience had brought her to her breaking point. He could not blame her.
He waited, and after a few minutes she spoke again, still facing away. “I’m afraid.”
“So am I.” It was the total truth.
That seemed to encourage her. “I have to go next. I didn’t know it would be like this. I wouldn’t be able to do it myself. And I have to.”
“Yes.” What else could he say?
“He has his charts,” she said, meaning her husband. “When he gets bothered, he just settles down for a few hours with his diagrams and figures and houses and planets, and he works it all out and finally he’s satisfied. But I never understood all that. I don’t have anything.”
Now he did not dare even to agree with her.
“He told me,” she said quickly, “I don’t know what it means but I remember it — he told me that when I was thirty-seven my progressed midheaven would square with Neptune.”
“Neptune!”
“And he said my progressed ascendant would be opposite Neptune, and my progressed Mercury opposite Neptune. And he said Neptune was the planet of obligation — I think that’s what it was. And—”
“And we’re going to Neptune,” Ivo finished for her. “I don’t know what all those terms mean either, but it sounds as though you have to — progress to Neptune.” Could it mean anything, or was it sheer coincidence?
“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 channel of her vagina, there her anus and colon, seen from the inside in surgical cutaway. How was she different from Afra now?
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 penny he had saved so long, memento of a foolishly missed bus. He also still had the unused bus token. Suppose one of those were to drift loose during maneuvers, and drop into someone’s vat of jelly? Ouch!
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!