The grinding area was the next stop. Plexiglass enclosed it. That was a must. Pieces of cadaver would fly everywhere as science turned Paul Jernigan into dust with a spinning, carbide-tipped blade. “You’d think we’d have trouble sectioning bone,” Pelster said, “but that’s not been the case. Bone always cuts very clean. But sometimes we have a lot of trouble with the tendons. The tendons are such that they don’t want to shear off cleanly, and so a lot of time we did hand scalpel work on each slice. So the slices might take ten minutes each instead of four minutes each.” Actually the time varied. “Ninety slices were the most we cut on any one day, and we averaged sixty. Sometimes it was ten a day. It was about four months of sectioning.” “Were you worried about damaging the goods?” I asked. “Definitely. We just did the best we could.” “Any near misses?” “There were definitely a few. We never were to the point where we torpedoed the whole project. It would be more a possibility of losing a slice. We never came close to botching the whole thing. You look back and you see a little dot of ice here or there, things like that. You do the best you can. But I think it turned out well.” All along, of course, cameras and lights were clicking and flashing away. The slices went into a black-walled, reflection-proof chamber for photographing by one digital camera and two with film. A table held the cameras. It turned to give each a view of the cross sections from the same angle. The results went into a Macintosh Quadra 840AV with 128 megabytes of random access memory and 2 gigabytes of hard disk space. It was, in other words, many times more powerful and could store at least several times more than the average personal computer. As with the grinding, problems sometimes arose. “You think computers are so precise,” Martha Pelster said, “but they’re not. Things are always going wrong.” Typically working with her and Tim were such people as the man who kept the grinding machine running, a camera expert, and a computer expert (Helen Pelster, Martha’s sister), who would transfer the digitized Jernigan to tape and CD-ROM. Come the end of a hard day of photography, the lab crew collected everything and put it back in the freezer. “And then when we were finished doing this,” Pelster said, “we had many bags of things that needed to go be cremated.” The dust went to a contractor for incineration.