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
