His clothes, spotted with green like lichen on trees, fell on the floor. The room got even lighter; his feet glowed, and his hair and vein pattern were visible on his hands. Krivoshein ran into the shower and turned it on. The cold water poured over him, sobering him up, over his head and body, forming an irridescent pool of emerald green on the floor, and refreshed him long enough to gather his thoughts and will power.
Now, like a strategist, he commanded the battle for survival that was raging in his body. Blood, blood, blood, was rushing through his entire body! The feverish pounding of his heart resounded in his temples. Myriad capillaries washed damaged molecules and particles from every cell in his muscles and glands and sucked them out from the lymph nodes. The white corpuscles surrounded them, breaking them down to elemental particles, and carried them off into the spleen, the lungs, the liver, kidneys, intestines, tossed them into the sweat glands. “Cover the bone vessels!” he instructed the nerves, remembering in time that radioactivity could settle in bone marrow, which produced blood cells.
Several minutes passed. Now he was exhaling radioactive air with faintly glowing vapors, spitting out glowing saliva that had collected the decayed radioactive cells of the brain and muscles, washing off greenish drops of sweat from his body, and urinating a beautiful emerald green stream. After an hour his excretions no longer glowed, but his body still ached.
And so he spent three hours in the shower. He swallowed water washed himself off, and threw out all the harmful radiation from his body. He came back to his room after midnight, unsteady on his feet from weakness and physical emaciation. He pushed his glowing clothes into a corner and fell onto his bed. Sleep!
The next day he was very thirsty. He dropped by the radiometrics lab, used the Geiger counter all over his body. The apparatus crackled as usual, noting random cosmic particles.
“My God, when did you lose all that weight?” Nechinorov asked as he ran into him at a lecture….
“Yes, in terms of results, that was a major experiment,” chuckled the graduate student. “I conquered a fatal dose of radiation! But in terms of performance… no, those experiments are no joke. It's better to do it his way.”
July 27. I have a great quantity of doubles and monsters. I set the normal rabbits free on the grounds, and the monsters I take out one at a time in a satchel and take them to the other side of the Dnieper.
That's it. The pleasure of the novelty has worn off. I'm disgusted by this mockery of nature: it's only a rabbit, but it is alive. The ones who squint at themselves suspiciously, two heads on the same body… ugh! But, what the hell! I've discovered a method of controlling biological synthesis. I tested it and developed it. Science in the long run creates methods, not constructions, not things, not objects, but methods — how to do it all. And no researcher would ever pass up a chance to squeeze every possibility from his method.
By the way, yesterday there was a new dish at the institute cafeteria — roast rabbit with new potatoes, forty — five kopeks. Let's just call it a coincidence. But even that's a possible application of the discovery: breeding rabbits, as well as cows, for meat, improving the breeds. With an industrial application this method would have to be better than standard methods.
Tomorrow I'm going back to experiment on the synthesis of man. The methodology is clear, there's no point in dragging it out. And the very thought of it makes me drool. To go back to the synthesis of man… it was one thing when my double appeared on his own, almost by accident, the way it happens in life; it'll be another thing to prepare a human being consciously, like a rabbit. In essence, I won't be 'going back' to this, I'll be beginning.
What kind of a creature is man, that I can't work with him as calmly as I do with a rabbit?
Let's set up some perspective here. The megagalaxy, a cloud of stars, floats in the black void. There is a lentil — shaped dust mote of stars in it — our Milky Way. At the edge of it, our Sun, and around it, the planets. On one of them — not the largest, and not the smallest — live people. Three and a half billion, that's not so many. If you line them up in formation, all of humanity can be seen from the Eiffel Tower. If you put them together, you would get a cube with each side a kilometer long, that's all. A cubic kilometer of living and thinking matter, a molecule in the universe…. And so what?
What? That I'm a human being too. One of them. Not the lowest and not the highest. Not the smartest, and not the dumbest. Not the first, and not the last. And yet I feel that I am all of that. And I feel responsible for everything.
Chapter 15
In caring about your neighbor, the important thing is not to overdo it.
— K. Prutkov — engineer, Thought 33
July 29. I'm sitting in the information chamber, surrounded by sensors, the Monomakh's Crown on my head. I'm keeping a diary because there's absolutely nothing else to do. I'll be sleeping here this week, too, on a cot.
So I'm sitting around, thinking wise thoughts.
Thus, man. The highest form of living matter.
A carcass of hollow bones, flexible clumps of protein, which contain what scientists and engineers are trying to analyze and re — create in logical circuits and electronic models — life, a complex, constantly functioning and constantly changing system. Millions of bits of information penetrate us every second through the nerve endings of our eyes, ears, skin, nose, and tongue and are turned into electrical impulses. If they are amplified, you can hear the characteristic “Drrrr… dr…” in their dynamics. The bionics people played it for me once. The machine — gun volleys of impulses spread along the nerves, increase or engulf one another, and stick in the molecular memory cells. A huge processing unit, the brain, sorts them, compares them with the chemical recording of the internal program that contains everything — dreams and wishes, duty and goal, survival instinct and hunger, love and hate, habits and knowledge, superstition and curiosity — and makes up the commands for the executive organs. And people talk, run, kiss, write poetry and denunciations, orbit in space, scratch their heads, shoot, push buttons, bring up children, meditate….
What's the most important thing?
I'm getting a picture of method for the controlled synthesis of man. You can introduce additional information and thereby alter the form and content of man. This will come — we're moving toward it. But what information should be introduced? What alterations should be made? Take me, for instance. Let's say that a computer will be synthesizing me (especially since it already has): what would I like changed?
You can't answer that off the bat. I'm used to myself. I'm much more interested in people around me than in myself. We all know what we want from other people: that they don't interfere with our lives. But what do we want from ourselves?
Yesterday I had the following conversation:
“Tell me, Lena, what kind of a son would you like?”
“Why?”
“Well, I mean how would you like to see him as an adult?”
“Handsome, healthy, smart, and talented. honest and kind. About your height, say… no, maybe a little taller! He could become a violinist, and I would go to his concerts. He could look like… oh, God, why did you bring it up? Oh, I see. You've decided to propose! Right? How interesting! Do it right, according to all the traditions, and I might say yes. Well!”
“Hmmmmmm… no, I was just asking….”
“Oh, just asking! An abstract son, so to speak?”
“Precisely.”
“Then you should be discussing it with an abstract woman, not with me!”
Women take things very concretely.
However, from what she said, one quality can be singled out — to be smart. That's what I know about.