“You mean, all your reference standards have to be reestablished,” Michelle said.
“Exactly. You have to recreate the whole system of dimensional gauges, flatness gauges, machine lead-screws, and so on to produce a new regime of precision tooling. Your entire engineering practice has to be exported down to the reduced scale.”
Michelle watched him looking down into the compartment like some cosmic lord contemplating the strange realm that he had brought into being. She could understand why Corfe had abandoned his normal taciturnity to come and talk to her. The chances of seriously awakening Eric to the possibility of a criminal conspiracy directed against him would be about as remote as the far side of the moon.
“I’m still amazed that you can have that kind of complexity on such a tiny scale at all,” Michelle said. “It makes you wonder why we’re as big as we are in the first place.”
Eric smiled without looking up. “Erwin Schrödinger asked the same thing.”
“Who’s he?”
“Was. One of the pioneer quantum physicists. He concluded that it has to be that way for a world that makes sense to be possible. The illusion of causality only takes over above a scale large enough to swamp out quantum weirdness. . . . But you’re right. It still doesn’t explain why we’re as big as we are.”
“That was your field originally, wasn’t it?” Michelle said. “Before you turned commercial and got into microengineering. You were more of a physicist to start with.”
Eric looked up and eyed her with mock severity through his gold-rimmed spectacles. “What’s this? Have you been checking up on me?”
“No. Just talking to Doug. He said you were excommunicated from the church for being a heretic, and that was why you got out of the academic scene.”
“Hmm.”
“What did he mean?”
Eric didn’t answer immediately, but moved away from the bench to glance briefly over the status display for the two operating couplers. “Every generation of scientists eventually becomes impervious to any ideas that challenge the ones they were raised on,” he replied finally. “They stop being the impartial seekers after truth that they’re supposed to—if they ever were in the first place—and turn into high priests defending the entrenched dogma.”
“So why didn’t it happen to you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I was born between generations—too late to be a bishop in the established church; too early to start my own. So I changed to a different religion and ended up at Microbotics.” Eric grinned as the irony struck him, and swept an arm to take in the surroundings. “And now here I am, doing the same thing again. Maybe it’s just in my nature.” Michelle would have been curious to learn more, but Eric changed the subject. “Anyhow, I don’t think that was what you wanted to talk about.” He turned to her and waited. Michelle shifted her eyes to indicate the two technicians in the couplers and returned a questioning look. Eric nodded and led the way around a partition to an equipment bay where the sounds of motors and extractor fans soaked up their voices.
“Back when you quit to set up on your own, there was this business about DNC having side effects,” Michelle said. “I’m concerned about it.”
“My word, you are being thorough with your homework,” Eric commented.
“It’s what I’m paid for. So what’s the real story?”
Eric made a dismissive gesture. “You just said it—that was years ago now.”
“Yes, but it never really went away, did it? And it could be coming back. Isn’t there something in Science this month about a call for putting direct neural work on hold?”
“You know about that too, eh?” Eric nodded and looked impressed.
“I have to know the truth. If there are any grounds at all for suspicion about this technology, we can’t risk using it in a project that would involve the general public.”
Eric drew a long breath and exhaled it sharply, as if determined to put this to rest finally. “The truth is that there was never a scrap of truth in it. There were some overactive imaginations at work, coupled with sensationalized journalism. That’s always a bad combination. When you peel away the hype, it all boiled down to two cases of mental disturbance that turned out to have nothing to do with DNC.”
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