Our feet rang hollowly on the wood floor as we crossed a conventional chemical laboratory to steps leading upward. The doctor's face was flushed with excitement and eagerness. His footsteps were light on the stairs, light and swift. My own were heavy and slow behind him, each hollow blow the beat of a devil drum in some voodoo jungle as my thoughts rushed back over the lifetime I had crowded into the past three years, to prepare me for what I would see.
"There it is," the doctor said as I reached the last step and paused.
I saw the trim panel of the transfer machine, the two leather upholstered tables. But they were no more than background impressions as my eyes fixed on the form lying full length on one of those two tables.
If Dr. Leopold Moriss had not been standing beside me I would have sworn it was him—or his corpse. Unconsciously my feet carried me forward and to one side where I could look down at that face of carefully molded synthetic rubber, tinted the exact shade of the doctor's living flesh, the open unblinking eyes with irises the same pale blue. And blue-veined hands that seemed to have died just the moment before.
"Color photography," the doctor was explaining. "The sensitized chemicals impregnated in the rubberoid, and the color image of my own flesh imprinted in it from a projector."
"As authentic as a counterfeit ten dollar bill," I wisecracked tonelessly. "Even to the clothes and shoes!"
"Exactly," Dr. Moriss said, laughing gleefully. "Take a look at the insides of the transferer and see if it looks familiar to you. I built it so the circuits are all exposed and easy to follow. Different colored wires."
I stepped around the duplicate of the doctor on the table, something inside me crawling frantically, and unfastened the back of the cabinet, exposing the circuit. Skills that had not dimmed and would never dim took control of my sight and traced each element of the circuit, comparing it with that which I myself had built—and destroyed....
The drops of solder that held wires in contact glistened dully—silver blobs dotting orderly geometrical designs composed of blue, yellow, green, orange, and too many other colors to count. Little cylinders that were condensers and resistors and tubes and coils.
My mind clicked off one detail after another. It was my circuit. I might have built it myself. But I had destroyed everything except what I carried in my mind. Dr. Leopold Moriss had repeated my discoveries step by step. Reason had followed the path I had destroyed, just as surely as the instinct of an insect makes it live the life pattern of its ancestors down to the finest detail.