Once inside, the under-secretary tried his best to look everywhere at once. The room cut into the rock was roughly two hundred feet high. Most of it was occupied by the bulk of the Re-Education Monitor, a mechanism as tall as a fifteen-storey building, and about a city block square. Guards watched it on all sides, and the face of the machine swarmed with technicians.
"Incredible," Hamelin murmured. "That enormous object can process only one man at a time?"
"That's right," Mudgett said. "Luckily it doesn't have to treat all the body cells directly. It works through the blood, re-selfing the cells by means of small changes in the serum chemistry."
"What kind of changes?"
"Well," Carson said, choosing each word carefully, "that's more or less a graveyard secret, Mr. Secretary. We can tell you this much: the machine uses a vast array of crystalline, complex sugars which behave rather like the blood group-and-type proteins. They're fed into the serum in minute amounts, under feedback control of second-by-second analysis of the blood. The computations involved in deciding upon the amount and the precise nature of each introduced chemical are highly complex. Hence the size of the machine. It is, in its major effect, an artificial kidney."
"I've seen artificial kidneys in the hospitals," Hamelin said, frowning. "They're rather compact affairs."
"Because all they do is remove waste products from the patient's blood, and restore the fluid and electrolyte balance. Those are very minor renal functions in the higher mammals. The organ's main duty is chemical control of immunity. If Burnet and Fenner had known that back in 1949, when the selfing theory was being formulated, we'd have had Re-Education long before now."
"Most of the machine's size is due to the computation section," Mudgett emphasized. "In the body, the brain-stem does those computations, as part of maintaining homeostasis. But we can't reach the brain-stem from outside; it's not under conscious control. Once the body is re-selfed, it will re-train the thalamus where we can't." Suddenly, two swinging doors at the base of the machine were pushed apart and a mobile operating table came through, guided by two attendants. There was a form on it, covered to the chin with a sheet. The face above the sheet was immobile and almost as white.