Sam flopped down on the bed and opened to A Child’s Garden of Biochemistry.
At nine that night he squatted next to the Combination Electron Microscope and Workbench and began opening certain small bottles. At nine forty-seven Sam Weber made his first simple living thing.
It wasn’t much, if you used the first chapter of Genesis as your standard. Just a primitive brown mold that, in the field of the microscope, fed diffidently on a piece of pretzel, put forth a few spores and died in about twenty minutes. But he had made it. He had constructed a specific life-form to feed on the constituents of a specific pretzel; it could survive nowhere else.
He went out to supper with every intention of getting drunk. After just a little alcohol, however, the dei-ish feeling returned and he scurried back to his room.
Never again that evening did he recapture the exultation of the brown mold, though he constructed a giant protein molecule and a whole slew of filterable viruses.
He called the office in the little corner drugstore which was his breakfast nook. “I’ll be home all day,” he told Tina.
She was a little puzzled. So was Lew Knight, who grabbed the phone. “Hey, counselor, you building up a neighborhood practice? Kid Blackstone is missing out on a lot of cases. Two ambulances have already clanged past the building.”
“Yeah,” said Sam. “I’ll tell him when he comes in.”
The weekend was almost upon him, so he decided to take the next day off as well. He wouldn’t have any real work till Monday when the Somerset Ojack basket would produce his lone egg.
Before he returned to his room, he purchased a copy of an advanced bacteriology. It was amusing to construct—with improvements!—unicellular creatures whose very place in the scheme of classification was a matter for argument among scientists of his own day. The Bild-A-Man manual, of course, merely gave a few examples and general rules; but with the descriptions in the bacteriology, the world was his oyster.