it sends signals to the motor nerves of the entire body; the muscles tense into a position of readiness. The primary sources of muscular energy — adenosine triphosphate and phosphocreatine — break down in tissue into adenosine diphosphate and creatine, releasing phosphoric acid and the first amounts of heat and energy. And I want to direct your attention once more to the biological expediency of raising muscle tone. After all, danger in the old days required quick energetic movement, to leap away, strike, bend, climb a tree. And since it is not yet clear which way you will have to jump or strike, all the muscles are brought into readiness.
Simultaneously, the sympathetic nervous system is also stimulated and begins to command the whole kitchen array of metabolism in the organism. Its signals reach the adrenal gland, which throws adrenaline into the blood, stimulating everything. The liver and spleen, like sponges, squeeze out several liters of extra blood into the circulatory system. Blood vessels expand in the muscles, lungs, and brain. The heart beats faster, pumping blood into all the organs, and with it, oxygen and glucose. The spinal cord and the autonomous nervous system prepare thestudent's bodyforheavy, fierce, and long fighting for life or death!
But the examiner cannot be stunned with a cudgel or even with a marble inkwell. And you can't run away from him either. The examiner won't be satisfied even if the student, overflowing with muscular energy, performs a handstand on the desk instead of answering the question. That's why the secret, stormy activity of the student's organism ends in a useless burning up of glucose in the muscles and heat generation. The thermoreceptors in different parts of the body send hysterical signals of overheating to the brain and spinal cord. And the brain responds in the only way it knows — by expanding the vessels of the skin. Blood rushes to the skin (incidentally, also causing the student to blush) and heats up the air between the body and the clothes. The sweat glands open up to help the student with evaporation of moisture. The reflex chain, stimulated by the question, is finally over.
I'm sure you will make your own conclusions about the role of knowledge in the correct regulation of the human organism in our complex environment, and about its role in the regulation of the student organism at our next session…”
Yes, he was leaving in order to become himself, and not the Krivoshein who lived and worked in Dneprovsk. He threw the apartment key which Val had tucked into his pocket out of the train window. He crossed out all the addresses and phone numbers of Moscow acquaintances from his book, including his Aunt Lapanalda. He had no friends, no relatives, no past — only the present, from the moment he entered the biology department, and the future. He knew a simple but dependable way of establishing himself in the future; the method had never let him down. It was work.
And he had more than that.
Once upon a time physicists had perfected the methods of measuring the speed of light, just so that they could achieve the greatest accuracy. They did. And they determined a scandalous fact: the speed of light did not depend on the speed of motion of the light source. “Impossible! The equipment is wrong! The results contradict classical mechanics!” They checked. They measured the speed of light another way — with the same results. And the almost completed, logically perfect universe rising in the scaffolding of right — angled coordinates, crumbled, raising an awful lot of dust. The “crisis of physics” began.
The human mind often strives for a reconciliation of all the facts in the world rather than for a deeper knowledge of those facts: the important thing is for everything to become simpler and more logical. And then some sneaky little fact floats out, irreconcilable with the neat theories, and you have to start all over again….
They had also created a simple and understandable picture in their minds of how a computer creates a man from information about man. The computer — womb was playing children's games with blocks. In a liquid medium via electrical impulse it combined molecules into molecular chains, the molecular chains into cells, and the cells into tissue — with the sole difference that there were untold billions of “informational blocks.” The fact that the result of the game was not a monster or even another person, but Krivoshein's informational double, proves that there was only one solution to the puzzle. Well, naturally, it couldn't have been any other way: blocks can only fit into a picture that exists in their surfaces. The variants (a fragmented Lena, a fragmented father, the “delirium of memory,” the eyes and feelers) were merely informational garbage that could not exist independent of the computer.
This concept was not incorrect, merely superficial. It suited them, as long as the facts supported the theory that they were the same externally and in thoughts and deeds. But when irreconcilable differences came up on the use of biology in their work, this concept turned out to be inadequate.
Yes, it was their inability to understand each other, and not the interest in biology (which might have passed in Krivoshein — 2 with no harmful effects), that became to his discovery what the constancy of the speed of light was to the theory of relativity. A man never knows what's banal about him and what's original; that only comes in comparsion with others. And unlike other people, Krivoshein — 2 could compare himself to not only his acquaintances, but to “himself” as well.
Now it became very clear to graduate student Krivoshein what the difference between them was: their ways of appearing were different. Valentin Krivoshein appeared over three decades ago the way every living thing did — from an embryo, in which a program for building a human being developed over thousands of centuries and in which generations had been encoded by a specific arrangement of protein and DNA. But the computer — womb, even though it was working from individual Krivoshein information, was still dealing with random information; it had to seek out the principles of formation and all the details of the biological information system. And the computer found a way different from nature's: a biochemical assembly instead of embryonic development.
Yes, now there was much that he understood. In a year he had passed from sensations to knowledge and from knowledge to mastery of himself. And then… then it had merely been a powerful attraction to biology and the inexpressible certainty that this was where he had to seek his answers. He couldn't even explain it well to Krivoshein. He came to Moscow with the vague feeling that something was wrong with him. He wasn't sick or imagining things, but he had to figure himself out, to make sure that his feeling was reality and not an idee fixe or a hypochondriacal hallucination.
He worked so hard that he could look back on the days at the institute in Dneprovsk as if they had been a vacation. Lectures, lab work, the anatomy theater, the library, lectures, seminars, lab work, lectures, the clinic, the library, lab work…. He never left the Lenin Hills campus during the first semester; he would walk down to the parapet before going to bed, to look down at the Moscow River, smoke, enjoy the lights glimmering and blending with the stars on the horizon.
A gray — eyed, second — year student who resembled Lena always sat next to him in Androsiashvili's class, which he attended. Once she asked: “You're so solid, so serious — were you in the Army?” “In prison,” he replied, jutting out his jaw. The girl lost interest in him. It had to be. Girls take up too much time.
And he was convinced by every experiment, every calculation. Yes, in a cross section of a nerve bundle that goes from the brain to the pituitary gland, under a microscope you can actually count approximately a hundred thousand fibers — and that means that the pituitary is closely monitored by the brain. Yes, if you add beta — active calcium to a lab monkey's diet of bananas and then use a Geiger counter on its excretions, it really is true that bone tissue renews itself approximately twice a year. Yes, if you stick electrode needles into muscle tissue and conduct sound into earphones, you can really hear a rhythmic quacking or a fragmented pulse of the nerve signals, and these sounds corresponded with what he was feeling! Yes, skin cells actually do move up toward the surface, changing structure, dying, so that they can slough off and make room for new ones.
He studied his own body. He took blood samples and lymphatic samples; he got a piece of muscle tissue from his right hip and examined it under an optical microscope and then an electronic one; he calumnied himself to get a Wassermann at the school clinic. And he determined that everything in him was normal. Even the amount and distribution of nerves in the tissue was the same as in the bodies they dissected in anatomy class. The nerves went up to the brain, but he couldn't get in there with the use of laboratory technology. He would have to implant too many electrodes into his skull and plug into too many oscilloscopes to understand the secrets of his self. And would he understand them then? Or would he come up with “streptocidal striptease” — not in binary alphabet, but in the jagged lines of an electroencephalogram?
The situation — a living person studying his own organism can't even breech the mysteries of his body with laboratory equipment — was paradoxical. After all, this wasn't a question of discovering invisible “radiostars” or
