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aperture, and wait for my signal.” Then, to Talbot, “Here comes your mite, old friend.”
Talbot felt a sense of resurrection.
The older female technician rolled a four-foot-high stainless steel pedestal to the center of
the lab, positioned it so the tiny, highly-polished spindle atop the pedestal touched the very bottom
of the faint ripple in the glass. It looked like, and was, an actualizing stage for the real test. The full-
sized hologram had been a gross test to ensure the image’s perfection. Now came the creation of a
living entity, a Lawrence Talbot, naked and the size of a single cell, possessing a consciousness and
intelligence and memories and desires identical to Talbot’s own.
“Ready, Karl?” Victor was saying.
Talbot heard no reply, but Victor nodded his head as if listening. Then he said, “ All right,
extract the beam!”
It happened so fast, Talbot missed most of it.
The micropion beam was composed of particles a million times smaller than the proton,
smaller than the quark, smaller than the muon or the pion. Victor had termed them micropions. The
slit opened in the wall, the beam was diverted, passed through the holographic ripple and was cut off
as the slit closed again.
It had all taken a billionth of a second.
“Done,” Victor said.
“I don’t see anything,” Talbot said, and realized how silly he must sound to these people. Of
course he didn’t see anything. There was nothing to see...with the naked eye. “Is he...is it there?”
“You’re there,” Victor said. He waved to one of the male technicians standing at a wall
hutch of instruments in protective bays, and the man hurried over with the slim, reflective barrel of a
microscope. He clipped it onto the tiny needle-pointed stand atop the pedestal in a fashion Talbot
could not quite follow. Then he stepped away, and Victor said, “Part two of your problem solved,
Larry. Go look and see yourself. “
Lawrence Talbot went to the microscope, adjusted the knob till he could see the reflective
surface of the spindle, and saw himself in infinitely reduced perfection
staring up at himself. He recognized himself, though all he could see was a cyclopean brown
eye staring down from the smooth glass satellite that dominated his sky.
He waved. The eye blinked.
Now it begins. he thought.
Lawrence Talbot stood at the lip of the huge crater that formed Lawrence Talbot’s navel. He
looked down in the bottomless pit with its atrophied remnants of umbilicus forming loops and
protuberances, smooth and undulant and vanishing into utter darkness. He stood poised to descend
and smelled the smells of his own body. First, sweat. Then the smells that wafted up from within.
The smell of penicillin like biting down on tin foil with a bad tooth. The smell of aspirin, chalky and
tickling the hairs of his nose like cleaning blackboard erasers by banging them together. The smells
of rotted food, digested and turning to waste. All the odors rising up out of himself like a wild
symphony of dark colors.
He sat down on the rounded rim of the navel and let himself slip forward.
He slid down, rode over an outcropping, dropped a few feet and slid again, tobogganing into
darkness. He fell for only a short time, then brought up against the soft and yielding, faintly springy
tissue plane where the umbilicus had been ligated. The darkness at the bottom of the hole suddenly
shattered as blinding light filled the navel. Shielding his eyes, Talbot looked up the shaft toward the
sky. A sun glowed there, brighter than a thousand novae. Victor had moved a surgical lamp over the
hole to assist him. For as long as he could.
Talbot saw the umbra of something large moving behind the light, and he strained to discern
