This was it. At last the great cubical bulk that had been lurking quietly in the corner of his vision was squarely before him. It was there and it undoubtedly contained all the outlandish collection he remembered.
“Open,” he said, and the box opened.
The book, still open to the metallic table of contents, was lying at the bottom of the box. Part of it had slipped into the chamber of a strange piece of apparatus. Sam picked both out gingerly.
He slipped the book out and noticed the apparatus consisted mostly of some sort of binoculars, supported by a coil and tube arrangement and bearing on a flat green plate. He turned it over. The underside was lettered in the same streaky way as the book. Combination Electron Microscope and Workbench.
Very carefully he placed it on the floor. One by one, he removed the other items, from the Junior Biocalibrator to the Jiffy Vitalizer. Very respectfully he ranged against the box in five multi-colored rows the phials of lymph and the jars of basic cartilage. The walls of the chest were lined with indescribably thin and wrinkled sheets; a slight pressure along their edges expanded them into three-dimensional outlines of human organs whose shape and size could be varied with pinching any part of their surface—most indubitably molds.
Quite an assortment. If there was anything solidly scientific to it, that box might mean unimaginable wealth. Or some very useful publicity. Or—well, it should mean something!
If there was anything solidly scientific to it.
Sam flopped down on the bed and opened to A Child’s Garden of Biochemistry.
At nine that night he squatted next to the Combination Electron Microscope and Workbench and began opening certain small bottles. At nine forty-seven Sam Weber made his first simple living thing.
It wasn’t much, if you used the first chapter of Genesis as your standard. Just a primitive brown mold that, in the field of the microscope, fed diffidently on a piece of pretzel, put forth a few spores and died in about twenty minutes. But he had made it. He had constructed a specific life-form to feed on the constituents of a specific pretzel; it could survive nowhere else.
He went out to supper with every intention of getting drunk. After just a little alcohol, however, the dei-ish feeling returned and he scurried back to his room.
Never again that evening did he recapture the exultation of the brown mold, though he constructed a giant protein molecule and a whole slew of filterable viruses.
He called the office in the little corner drugstore which was his breakfast nook. “I’ll be home all day,” he told Tina.
She was a little puzzled. So was Lew Knight, who grabbed the phone. “Hey, counselor, you building up a neighborhood practice? Kid Blackstone is missing out on a lot of cases. Two ambulances have already clanged past the building.”
“Yeah,” said Sam. “I’ll tell him when he comes in.”
The weekend was almost upon him, so he decided to take the next day off as well. He wouldn’t have any real work till Monday when the Somerset Ojack basket would produce his lone egg.
Before he returned to his room, he purchased a copy of an advanced bacteriology. It was amusing to construct—with improvements!—unicellular creatures whose very place in the scheme of classification was a matter for argument among scientists of his own day. The Bild-A-Man manual, of course, merely gave a few examples and general rules; but with the descriptions in the bacteriology, the world was his oyster.
Which was an idea: he made a few oysters. The shells weren’t hard enough, and he couldn’t quite screw his courage up to the eating point, but they were most undeniably bivalves. If he cared to perfect his technique, his food problem would be solved.
The manual was fairly easy to follow and profusely illustrated with pictures that expanded into solidity as the page was opened. Very little was taken for granted; involved explanations followed simpler ones. Only the allusions were occasionally obscure—“This is the principle used in the phanphophlink toys,” “When your teeth are next yokekkled or demortoned, think of the Bacterium cyanogenum and the humble part it plays,” “If you have a rubicular mannikin around the house, you needn’t bother with the chapter on mannikins.”
After a brief search had convinced Sam that whatever else he now had in his apartment he didn’t have a rubicular mannikin, he felt justified in turning to the chapter on mannikins. He had conquered completely this feeling of being Pop playing with Junior’s toy train: already he had done more than the world’s top biologists ever dreamed of for the next generation and what might not lie ahead—what problems might he not yet solve?
“Never forget that mannikins are constructed for one purpose and one purpose only.” I won’t, Sam promised. “Whether they are sanitary mannikins, tailoring mannikins, printing mannikins or even sunevviarry mannikins, they are each constructed with one operation of a given process in view. When you make a mannikin that is capable of more than one function, you are committing a crime so serious as to be punishable by public admonition.”
“To construct an elementary mannikin—”
It was very difficult. Three times he tore down developing monstrosities and began anew. It wasn’t till Sunday afternoon that the mannikin was complete—or rather, incomplete.
Long arms it had—although by an error, one was slightly longer than the other—a faceless head and a trunk. No legs. No eyes or ears, no organs of reproduction. It lay on his bed and gurgled out of the red rim of a mouth that was supposed to serve both for ingress and excretion of food. It waved the long arms, designed for some one simple operation not yet invented, in slow circles.
Sam, watching it, decided that life could be as ugly as an open field latrine in midsummer.
He had to disassemble it. Its length—three feet from almost boneless fingers to tapering, sealed-off trunk—precluded the use of the tiny disassembleator with which he had taken apart the oysters and miscellaneous small creations. There was a bright yellow notice on the large diassembleator, however—“To be used only under the direct supervision of a Census Keeper. Call formula A76 or unstable your id.”
“Formula A76” meant about as much as “sunevviarry,” and Sam decided his id was already sufficiently unstabled, thank you. He’d have to make out without a Census Keeper. The big disassembleator probably used the same general principles as the small one.
He clamped it to a bedpost and adjusted the focus. He snapped the switch set in the smooth underside.
Five minutes later the mannikin was a bright, gooey mess on his bed.
The large disassembleator, Sam was convinced as he tidied his room, did require the supervision of a Census Keeper. Some sort of keeper anyway. He rescued as many of the legless creature’s constituents as he could, although he doubted he’d be using the set for the next fifty years or so. He certainly wouldn’t ever use the disassembleator again; much less spectacular and disagreeable to shove the whole thing into a meat grinder and crank the handle as it squashed inside.
As he locked the door behind him on his way to a gentle binge, he made a mental note to purchase some fresh sheets the next morning. He’d have to sleep on the floor tonight.
Wrist-deep in Somerset Ojack minutiae, Sam was conscious of Lew Knight’s stares and Tina’s puzzled glances. If they only knew, he exulted! But Tina would probably just think it “marr-vell-ouss!” and Lew Knight might make some crack like “Hey! Kid Frankenstein himself.” Come to think of it, though, Lew would probably have worked out some method of duplicating, to a limited extent, the contents of the Bild-A-Man set and marketing it commercially. Whereas he—well, there were other things you could do with the gadget. Plenty of other things.