Krivoshein licked his lips.

“Salty.” His voice was hoarse.

“What?”

“The liquid. Like sea water.”

They waited a minute.

“It seems in order. No sensations, as to be expected. Give me the crown.”

Kravets put Monomakh's Crown firmly on his head, clicked the dials, and climbed back down. Now his job was to observe Krivoshein, give advice, if needed, and help him out of the tank in case of some unexpected emergency.

Krivoshein spent another minute getting used to his new position.

“The sensations are familiar: tingling, prickling,” he said. “Nothing new. Well, that's it. Wish me luck. I'm starting to plug in.”

“Break a leg, Val.”

“The hell with it. We're off!”

They didn't talk after that.

Krivoshein's body developed in the liquid like a color negative. The white contours of the bones and tendons showed through the purple muscles with their layers of yellowish fat. His ribs rose and fell rhythmically, like a bellows. Kravets saw white swellings in two ribs on the right side. The purplish red fist of the heart contracted and relaxed, pushing along crimson streams of blood (it was no longer clear into where).

Krivoshein didn't take his eyes off his reflection. His face was pale and concentrated.

Soon the muscles turned golden yellow and you could distinguish them from the liquid only by light refraction.

“And then….” Kravets rubbed his temples with the palms of his hands, took a deep drag on his cigarette, “and then the automatic vacillations began. Like it had in the very beginning with the rabbits: everything in Val began changing size and shape synchronously. I ran up to the tank: 'Val, what are you doing? He looked at me, but said nothing in reply. 'The vacillations! Unplug! He tried to say something, opened his lips, and suddenly went under into the liquid. He began jerking, twisting, a dancing skeleton with a nickel — plated helmet!”

He took another deep drag.

“The only thing to do, to save him was to use Monomakh's Crown and the 'it — not it' commands to get into rhythm with the vacillations of his body and stop them gradually, using them to return the body to the nontransparent stage. You know, external control, the way he made you,” Kravets nodded at Adam, and me.

He stopped talking, working his jaw muscles.

“That damn Harry! We could really have used an extra SES — 2 then. But of course there was no hope of getting a second crown after his dissertation flopped! Putting him in jail wouldn't be enough.”

“He probably wouldn't even get a reprimand for not completing an order in time. It's not like insulting a professor,” Krivoshein laughed drily. “And you can't accuse him of anything more than that.”

“The only way was to remove the crown from Val's head,” Victor continued. “I jumped up on the steps, put my hands in the liquid — and I got an electric shock through both arms. Judging by the effect, I'd say four hundred or five hundred volts. There had never been potentials like that in the liquid before. Well, you know, the hands jerk away involuntarily in cases like that. I ran to the shelves, got rubber gloves, and tried again, but Val was deep inside, and the gloves weren't long enough. The shock was so strong that this time I fell to the floor. I had to turn over the tank. I couldn't let him dissolve into the liquid before my very eyes like… like you had.” Kravets looked over at Adam. “I was him, Krivoshein, when he was dissolving you. [Adam's face tensed.] And he was still alive. His face had dissolved, too. There was only the crown on his skull, but he was jumping about, so that meant his muscles were working. I grabbed the edge of the tank and started shaking it. The edges are flexible and slippery but finally I pulled it down, almost on me. I just got out in time — but the liquid splashed on my face and neck and I got a third shock from that. I don't remember the rest. I came to on the stretcher.”

He was silent. The others said nothing. Krivoshein stood up and paced the room in thought.

“There was nothing wrong with the way you set up the experiment. It was thought through. No evildoing, no fatal accident, not even a gross miscalculation… killed a man according to all the rules, as they say! If you hadn't turned over the tank he would have dissolved, since the liquid that had permeated him was no longer the organizing liquid circuit. It's too bad he kept the crown on, though. Once he was plugged into the liquid he could control it without the crown.”

“So that's how it is.” Kravets looked up.

“Yes. That stupid cap was only necessary to plug into the computer — womb — and nothing else. From there the brain commands the nerves directly, and not through wires and circuits. And when the uncontrolled autovacillations began, it was the crown that destroyed him. A foreign body in the living liquid — it's as irritating as a slingshot to a bear!”

“Yes, but why did the vacillations start?” Adam interrupted. He turned to Kravets. “Tell me, did you investigate any further the process after the rabbits and… me?”

“No. In the last experiments we didn't touch on it. All the transformations were going smoothly directed only by sensations. I told you that. I can't imagine how he lost control of himself! Did he panic? That process is sort of like confusion… but why was he confused?”

“The switch from quantity to quality,” Adam said. “As long as you were immersing only an arm or a leg into the liquid, there were only a few 'hotbeds of uncorrection' which you used to control and direct the penetration of the body with the liquid. It was like talking to one or two people at the same time. But once he put in his whole body, there were naturally many more places like that in his whole body than in just parts of it, and — “

“And instead of a decent conversation there was the incomprehensible babble of a crowd,” Krivoshein added. “And he grew confused. That's quite possible.”

“Listen, you self — taught experts!” Kravets glared at them. “There are always a lot of people ready to explain why something went wrong, to make themselves look bigger. 'I warned you. I told you so! If there's nuclear war, I'm sure there will be people who, before turning into cinders, will have time to exclaim joyously: 'I told you so! Are you so sure that the experiment failed precisely for those reasons, that you would get into the tank if the corrections were made?”

“No, Victor Kravets,” Krivoshein said, “not that sure. And not one of us will get into the tank just to prove that he's right or that someone else is wrong — that's not our work. We will have to get in, and more than once — the idea was sound. But we will do it with minimal risk and maximum benefit. And there's no point in your getting so excited. You two made the experiment. An experiment like that! And you almost ruined the lab and the whole project. You had everything — great ideas, heroics, discoveries, meditations, high — level effort — except one thing: reasonable caution! Of course, maybe it's not for me to reproach you. I did pretty much the same thing in one very serious experiment and almost killed myself. But tell me, why couldn't you have called me back from Moscow to participate in this one?”

Kravets looked at him ironically.

“How would you have helped? You were way behind in this work.”

The graduate student sighed: to hear that after all his labors!

“You're a louse, Vitya,” he said with unbelievable meekness. “It's terrible to have to say this to someone so close to you, but you are simply a son of a bitch. I'm good enough to be used as a decoy with the police while you get off scot — free from criminal culpability? But not good enough to be a researcher on this project?” He turned away from the window.

“What does culpability have to do with this?” Kravets muttered in confusion. “Someone had to save the project….”