“Are you getting on all right?”
“Not too bad. How about you?”
“Not so well as you, I dare say. May I…?”
“Do you want to come over here?”
I glanced at Rheya over my shoulder. She was leaning back, legs crossed, her head bent. With a morose air, she was fiddling mechanically with the little chrome ball on the end of a chain fixed to the arm-rest.
Snow’s voice erupted:
“Stop that, do you hear? I told you to stop it!”
I could see his profile on the screen, but I could no longer hear him although his lips were moving — he had put his hand over the microphone.
“No, I can’t come,” he said quickly. “Later perhaps, in any case, I’ll contact you in an hour.”
The screen went blank; I replaced the receiver.
“Who was it?” asked Rheya indifferently.
“Snow, a cybernetician. You don’t know him.”
“Is this going on much longer?”
“Are you bored?”
I put the first of the series of slides into the neutron microscope, and, one after another, I pressed the different-colored switches; the magnetic fields rumbled hollowly.
“There’s not much to do in here, and if my humble company isn’t enough for you…”
I was talking distractedly, with long gaps between my words.
I pulled the big black hood round the eye-piece of the microscope towards me, and leaned my forehead against the resilient foam-rubber viewer. I could hear Rheya’s voice, but without taking in what she was saying. Beneath my gaze, sharply foreshortened, was a vast desert flooded with silvery light, and strewn with rounded boulders — red corpuscles — which trembled and wriggled behind a veil of mist. I focused the eye-piece and penetrated further into the depths of the silvery landscape. Without taking my eyes away from the viewer, I turned the view-finder; when a boulder, a single corpuscle, detached itself and appeared at the junction of the cross-hairs, I enlarged the image. The lens had apparently picked up a deformed erythrocyte, sunken in the centre, whose uneven edges projected sharp shadows over the depths of a circular crater. The crater, bristling with silver ion deposits, extended beyond the microscope’s field of vision. The nebulous outlines of threads of albumen, distorted and atrophied, appeared in the midst of an opalescent liquid. A worm of albumen twisted and turned beneath the cross-hairs of the lens. Gradually I increased the enlargement. At any moment, I should reach the limit of this exploration of the depths; the shadow of a molecule occupied the whole of the space; then the image became fuzzy.
There was nothing to be seen. There should have been the ferment of a quivering cloud of atoms, but I saw nothing. A dazzling light filled the screen, which was flawlessly clear. I pushed the lever to its utmost. The angry, whirring noise grew louder, but the screen remained a blank. An alarm signal sounded once, then was repeated; the circuit was overloaded. I took a final look at the silvery desert, then I cut the current.
I looked at Rheya. She was in the middle of a yawn which she changed adroitly into a smile. “Am I in good health?” she asked.
“Excellent. Couldn’t be better.” I continued to look at her and once more I felt as though something was crawling along my lower lip. What had happened exactly? What was the meaning of it? Was this body, frail and weak in appearance but indestructible in reality, actually made of nothing? I gave the microscope cylinder a blow with my fist. Was the instrument out of order? No, I knew that it was working perfectly. I had followed the procedure faithfully: first the cells, then the albumen, then the molecules; and everything was just as I was accustomed to seeing it in the course of examining thousands of slides. But the final step, into the heart of the matter, had taken me nowhere.
I put a ligature on Rheya, took some blood from a median vein and transferred it to a graduated glass, then divided it between several test-tubes and began the analyses. These took longer than usual; I was rather out of practice. The reactions were normal, every one of them.
I dropped some congealed acid on to a coral-tinted pearl. Smoke. The blood turned grey and a dirty foam rose to the surface. Disintegration, decomposition, faster and faster! I turned my back to get another test-tube; when I looked again at the experiment, I nearly dropped the slim glass phial.
Beneath the skin of dirty foam, a dark coral was rising. The blood, destroyed by the acid, was re-creating itself. It was crazy, impossible!
“Kris.” I heard my name called, as though from a great distance. “Kris, the videophone!”
“What? Oh, thanks.”
The instrument had been buzzing for some time, but I had only just noticed it. I picked up the receiver: “Kelvin.”
“Snow. We are now all three plugged into the same circuit.”
The high-pitched voice of Sartorius came over the receiver:
“Greetings, Dr. Kelvin!” It was the wary tone of voice, full of false assurance, of the lecturer who knows he is on tenuous ground.
“Good-day to you, Dr. Sartorius!” I wanted to laugh; but in the circumstances I hardly felt I could yield to a mood of hilarity. After all, which of us was the laughing stock? In my hand I held a test-tube containing some blood. I shook it. The blood coagulated. Had I been the victim of an illusion a moment ago? Had I, perhaps, been mistaken?
“I should like to set forth, gentlemen, certain questions concerning the… the phantoms.”
I listened to Sartorius, but my mind refused to take in his words. I was pondering the coagulated blood and shutting out this distracting voice.
“Let’s call them Phi-creatures,” Snow interjected.
“Very well, agreed.”
A vertical line, bisecting the screen and barely perceptible, showed that I was linked by two channels: on either side of this line, I should have seen two images — Snow and Sartorius. But the light-rimmed screen remained dark. Both my interlocutors had covered the lenses of their sets.
“Each of us has made various experiments.” The nasal voice still held the same wariness. There was a pause.
“I suggest first of all that we pool such knowledge as we have acquired so far,” Sartorius went on. “Afterwards, I shall venture to communicate to you the conclusion that I, personally, have reached. If you would be so good as to begin, Dr. Kelvin…”
“Me?”
All of a sudden, I sensed Rheya watching me. I put my hand on the table and rolled the test-tube under the instrument racks. Then I perched myself on a stool which I dragged up with my foot. I was about to decline to give an opinion when, to my surprise, I heard myself answer:
“Right. A little talk? I haven’t done much, but I can tell you about it. A histological sample… certain reactions. Micro-reactions. I have the impression that…” I did not know how to go on. Suddenly I found my tongue and continued: “Everything looks normal, but it’s a camouflage. A cover. In a way, it’s a super-copy, a reproduction which is superior to the original. I’ll explain what I mean: there exists, in man, an absolute limit — a term to structural divisibility — whereas here, the frontiers have been pushed back. We are dealing with a sub-atomic structure.”
“Just a minute, just a minute! Kindly be more precise!” Sartorius interrupted.
Snow said nothing. Did I catch an echo of his rapid breathing? Rheya was looking at me again. I realized that, in my excitement, I had almost shouted the last words. Calmer, I settled myself on my uncomfortable perch and closed my eyes. How could I be more precise?
“The atom is the ultimate constituent element of our bodies. My guess is that the Phi-beings are constituted of units smaller than ordinary atoms, much smaller.”