It was only now I noticed that the locker had been slid aside to reveal the entrance to the bathroom.
“And then?”
“I ran to the door.”
“And?”
“I don’t remember. Something must have happened.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you remember? What happened next?”
“I was sitting here on the bed.”
“You don’t remember me carrying you here?”
She hesitated. The corners of her mouth drooped, her face was intent.
“I guess. Maybe. I really can’t say.”
She lowered her feet to the floor and stood up. She went up to the broken door.
“Kris!”
I put my arms around her shoulders from behind. She was shaking. All at once she turned and sought my eyes.
“Kris,” she whispered, “Kris.”
“Take it easy.”
“Kris, what if… Kris, do I have epilepsy?”
Epilepsy? Dear God! I felt like laughing.
“Of course not, darling. It’s just a door, you know, they have these kind of doors here…”
We left the room when the outer plating rose over the windows with its drawn-out grinding sound, revealing the disk of the sun setting into the ocean.
I headed for the small galley at the far end of the corridor. Harey and I worked together, checking out the cabinets and refrigerators. I quickly realized she wasn’t much of a cook and couldn’t do a lot more than open a few cans, much like me. I wolfed down the contents of two of the cans and drank endless cups of coffee. Harey ate too, but the way children sometimes eat, so as not to hurt the feelings of the grown-ups — not exactly forcing themselves, but mechanically and indifferently.
The two of us went together to the small surgery next to the radio station. I had a plan. I told her I wanted to examine her just in case. I sat her down in a folding chair and took a hypodermic syringe and needle from the sterilizer. I knew where everything was almost by heart, we’d been so well prepared at the training copy of the Station on Earth. I took a drop of blood from her finger, prepared a smear, dried it in the exhauster and sprinkled it with silver ions in a high vacuum.
The matter-of-factness of this work had a calming effect. Harey, resting on the cushions of the folding chair, was looking around the interior of the room, cluttered with apparatus.
The silence was broken by the ringing of the internal telephone. I picked up the receiver.
“Kelvin,” I said. I didn’t take my eyes off Harey, who for some time now had been apathetic, as if she’d been exhausted by her experiences in the last few hours.
“You’re in the surgery? Finally!” I heard what sounded like a sigh of relief.
It was Snaut. I waited with the receiver pressed to my ear.
“You have a ‘guest,’ eh?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re busy?”
“Yes.”
“A little examination perhaps?”
“What of it? Are you looking for a chess partner?”
“Give it a rest, Kelvin. Sartorius wants to see you. That is, see us.”
“That’s something new,” I said, surprised. “What about the…” I broke off and added:
“Is he alone?”
“No. I misspoke. He wants to talk with us. The three of us can connect by visuphone, he’s going to cover up the screen.”
“Is that so? Why didn’t he just call me directly? Is he embarrassed?”
“Something like that,” Snaut muttered indistinctly. “Well then?”
“You want to set a time? Let’s say in an hour. OK?”
“OK.”
I could see him on the screen, just his face, no bigger than the palm of my hand. For a moment that was filled with the faint hum of current, he looked searchingly into my face.
In the end he said with a certain hesitation:
“How’s life?”
“Bearable. You?”
“I’m guessing a bit worse than for you. Could I…”
“You want to come see me?” I guessed. I glanced over my shoulder at Harey. Her head hung over the cushion; she was lying with her legs crossed, in her boredom absentmindedly tossing up the silver ball at the end of a chain attached to the arm of the chair.
“Leave that alone, you hear? Leave it!” I heard Snaut’s raised voice. On the screen I could see him in profile. I didn’t catch the rest, he covered the microphone with his hand, but I saw his lips move.
“No, I can’t come. Maybe later. In an hour, then,” he said quickly, and the screen went blank. I hung up the receiver.
“Who was that?” Harey asked indifferently.
“Just this guy. Snaut. A cybernetician. You don’t know him.”
“Is it going to take much longer?”
“Are you bored?” I asked. I placed the first of a series of slides in the holder of the neutrino microscope and one by one flipped the colored switches. The force fields set up a hollow drone. “There’s not much in the way of entertainment around here. If my modest company isn’t enough for you, things are going to get tough,” I said, distractedly elongating the pauses between words as I simultaneously used both hands to pull the huge black head of the microscope toward me, and pressed my eyes into the soft rubber cup of the gleaming eyepiece. Harey said something I didn’t catch. I saw from above, sharply foreshortened, a vast wilderness flooded by a silvery glow. On it, in a hazy mist there lay flat round rocks that looked shattered and weather-beaten. These were the red corpuscles. I focused the image without removing my eyes; it was as if I were sailing ever deeper into the silvery radiance of the field of vision. At the same time, with my left hand I operated the crank that turned the stage, and when a blood corpuscle solitary as an erratic boulder appeared between the cross-hairs, I increased the magnification. The lens zoomed in on what seemed like a misshapen erythrocyte, sagging in the middle, which already resembled the rim of a rocky crater, with distinct black shadows in the indentations around its ring like edge. The rim, bristling with crystallized accumulations of silver ions, stretched beyond the edge of the microscope’s field. Murky outlines of half-fused, twisting protein chains came into view, as if seen through opalescent water. When I had one such tangle of ruined proteins in the cross-hairs, I gradually turned the dial to bring the magnification up further and still further. Any moment now I’d reach the limit of this journey into the depths. The flattened shadow of a single molecule was filling the picture; the mist was clearing now!
But nothing happened. I ought to have seen a trembling haze of atoms, like a quaking jelly, but it wasn’t there. The screen glowed pure silver. I turned the dial all the way to the maximum. The hum intensified angrily, but still I didn’t see anything. A repeated buzz let me know the apparatus was overloaded. I looked one more time into the silver emptiness and turned off the electricity.
I looked over at Harey. She was just opening her mouth in a yawn that she turned adroitly into a smile.
“So how am I?” she asked.
“You’re fine,” I said. “In my view… you couldn’t be better.”
I kept staring at her, once again feeling that crawling sensation in my lower lip. What had actually happened? What did it mean? This body, seemingly so slender and frail — in fact indestructible — at its deepest level had turned out to be made of nothingness? I thumped the cylindrical casing of the microscope. Maybe there was something wrong with it? Maybe the force fields weren’t centering? No, I knew the equipment was in order. I’d gone down through all the stages, cells, protein conglomerate, molecules, and they looked exactly as they had on thousands of slides I’d seen. But the last step downwards led nowhere.
I drew some blood from her vein and poured it into a measuring glass. I separated it into portions and prepared it for analysis. It took me longer than I expected; I was out of practice. The reactions were within expected norms. All of them. Unless…