Doc and Jan would do the same. They, too, following the plan we had made in space, had similarly cached their portions of his notes. But now we had assembled the complete record of the android process in Doc's house.
And so the beginning was made. When Doc was able to get around again, things really got under way. He obtained a government grant. A whole lab and a large staff of workers, was set aside for us. Retorts, pressure-vats, and other apparatus to produce the basic materials, were constructed and installed.
Ours was a major project, coinciding in time with another major project. For the first real starship was finally under construction on the Moon. Three more years it would take to be completed.
But our enterprise reached practical fruition in fourteen months. I was among the men present when Dr. Lanvin lowered himself into a tank of special gelatins.
He was nude and emaciated; yet he kept his humor, and a certain dignity. A thin hand made a slight gesture. To Scharber and me and the others, he said:
"This will be the easiest trick, learned among the micro-Xians. Simple tissue-replacement, cell by cell. Improved protoplast in place of protoplasm. That's all. Well, wish me luck."
The anesthetic that had been injected into his veins worked. He slumped down gently. The gelatins closed in over his face, and the month of slow gestation toward rebirth began. I saw his body at various stages of the process; little changed in appearance except for much increased robustness.
Other duties intervened, so I did not observe his actual removal from the tank nor his reawakening. But Jan and I met him a few hours later, as he left the small hospital of our lab. The old gray suit he wore, hardly fitted him. He still had his ragged blond mustache. You could tell that he was he—with many years subtracted. He looked about as old as I was—twenty-three. But these were the only signs.
He grinned like a kid, jubilant, but a bit self-conscious. He said, half joshing:
"Look me over—the miracle of the era, the successor to natural man; and no casual observer could ever tell that I'm not as humans have always been. I eat, I breathe oxygen; I need some foods with a different mineral content, it is true. I sleep if I want to. Given a mate of like substance, I can reproduce my own kind. But I won't age. Cut a finger off me, and it would manage to live independently for a long time. Wound me terribly, and I'd probably manage to heal up someway. Deprive me of air, or common chemical foods, and my body would try to seek out other sources of energy—sunlight, radioactivity, or whatever is available. Even change my basic tissue fluid from water to—"