reduced to gas so quickly that only an oscilloscope could watch the process. The gas was sucked into the destructor chamber and atomically condensed in the matter bank; in time it would become an incoming passenger, or incoming freight. In a sense, the man had died.
If you could record the signal which entered the transmitter matrix—you could keep such a record indefinitely, recreate the man and his instantaneous memories, thoughts, habits, prejudices, hopes and loves and hates and horrors, a thousand years afterward. You could create a billion identical men. Or, more practically, a single handmade prototype could become a billion indistinguishable copies; nothing would be worth more than any handful of dirt. Or . . . superimpose the neurone trace-patterns, memories, of a lifetime, onto a recorded twenty-year-old body, be born again and live forever!
The signal was too complex, though. An unpromising research program went on. Perhaps in a few centuries they would find some trick which would enable them to record a man, or even a Frank tube. Meanwhile, transmission had to be simultaneous with scanning. The signal went out. Probably it would be relayed a few times. Eventually the desired receiving chamber got it. The receiver matrix, powered by dying atomic nuclei, flung gases together, formed higher elements, formed molecules and cells and dreams according to the signal, in microseconds. It was designed as an energy-consuming process, for obvious reasons: packing fraction energy was dissipated in gravitic and magnetic fields, to help shape the man. (Or the beefsteak, or the spaceship, or the colonial planet’s produce.) He left the receiving chamber and went about his business.
A mono-isotopic element is a simple enough signal to record, Maclaren reminded himself, though even that requires a houseful of transistor elements. So this civilization can afford to be extravagant with metals—can use pure mercury as the raw material of a spaceship’s blast, for instance. But we still eat our bread in the sweat of some commoner’s brow.
Not for the first time, but with no great indignation—life was too short for anything but amusement at the human race
—Maclaren wondered if the recording problem really was as difficult as the physicists claimed. No government likes revo
lutions, and molecular duplication would revolutionize society beyond imagining. Just think how they had to guard the stations as it was, and stick them out here on the Moon .
otherwise, even today, some fanatic could steal a tube of radium from a hospital and duplicate enough to sterilize a planet!
“Oh, well,” he said, half aloud.
T
HEY reached the special exploration section and entered an office. There was red tape to unsnarl. Ryerson let Maclaren handle it, and spent the time trying to understand that soon the pattern which was himself would be embodied in newly-shaped atoms, a hundred light-years from Tamara. It wouldn’t penetrate. It was only words.
Finally the papers were stamped. The transceivers to/from an interstellar spaceship could handle several hundred kilos at a time; Maclaren and Ryerson went together. They had a moment’s wait because of locked safety switches on the Southern Cross: someone else was arriving or departing ahead of them.
“Watch that first step,” said Maclaren. “It’s a honey.”
“What?” Ryerson blinked at him, uncomprehending.
The circuit closed. There was no sensation, the process went too fast.
The scanner put its signal into the matrix. The matrix modulated the carrier wave. But such terminology is mere slang, borrowed from electronics. You cannot have a “wave” when you have no velocity, and gravitational forces do not. (This is a more accurate rendition of the common statement that “gravitation propagates at an infinite speed.”) Inconceivable energies surged within a thermonuclear fire chamber; nothing controlled them, nothing could control them, but the force fields they themselves generated. Matter pulsed in and out of existence qua matter, from particle to gamma ray quantum and back. Since quanta have no rest mass, the pulsations disturbed the geometry of space according to the laws of Einsteinian mechanics. Not much: gravitation is feebler than magnetism or electricity. Were it not for the resonance effect, the signal would have been smothered in “noise” a few kilometers away. Even as it was, there were many relayings across