"Are you coming?" the doctor's voice protested my delay.
"O.K.," I said, stepping inside and closing the door.
Our feet rang hollowly on the wood floor as we crossed a conventional
chemical laboratory to steps leading upward. The doctor's face was
flushed with excitement and eagerness. His footsteps were light on
the stairs, light and swift. My own were heavy and slow behind him,
each hollow blow the beat of a devil drum in some voodoo jungle as my
thoughts rushed back over the lifetime I had crowded into the past
three years, to prepare me for what I would see.
"There it is," the doctor said as I reached the last step and paused.
I saw the trim panel of the transfer machine, the two leather
upholstered tables. But they were no more than background impressions
as my eyes fixed on the form lying full length on one of those two
tables.
If Dr. Leopold Moriss had not been standing beside me I would have
sworn it was him--or his corpse. Unconsciously my feet carried me
forward and to one side where I could look down at that face of
carefully molded synthetic rubber, tinted the exact shade of the
doctor's living flesh, the open unblinking eyes with irises the same
pale blue. And blue-veined hands that seemed to have died just the
moment before.
"Color photography," the doctor was explaining. "The sensitized
chemicals impregnated in the rubberoid, and the color image of my own
flesh imprinted in it from a projector."
"As authentic as a counterfeit ten dollar bill," I wisecracked
tonelessly. "Even to the clothes and shoes!"
"Exactly," Dr. Moriss said, laughing gleefully. "Take a look at the
insides of the transferer and see if it looks familiar to you. I built
it so the circuits are all exposed and easy to follow. Different
colored wires."
I stepped around the duplicate of the doctor on the table, something
inside me crawling frantically, and unfastened the back of the cabinet,
exposing the circuit. Skills that had not dimmed and would never dim
took control of my sight and traced each element of the circuit,
comparing it with that which I myself had built--and destroyed....
The drops of solder that held wires in contact glistened dully--silver
blobs dotting orderly geometrical designs composed of blue, yellow,
green, orange, and too many other colors to count. Little cylinders
that were condensers and resistors and tubes and coils.
My mind clicked off one detail after another. It was my circuit. I
might have built it myself. But I had destroyed everything except what
I carried in my mind. Dr. Leopold Moriss had repeated my discoveries
step by step. Reason had followed the path I had destroyed, just as
surely as the instinct of an insect makes it live the life pattern of
its ancestors down to the finest detail.
"Does it check?" The doctor asked.
I looked at one particular blob of solder connecting a blue coated wire
with a red one, and nodded.
"Yes," I said carefully.
"How about the hoods?" he asked.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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