"Can do. Give it a try."

"Setting Z step two hundred through two ten . . . increment point one . . . step zero point five seconds."

"Check." Hunt watched the screen as the surface picked out through the volume of the book became distorted locally and the picture on the monitor began to change.

"Hold it there," he called.

Gray hit a key. "Okay?"

Hunt contemplated the modified view for a while.

"The middle of the element's clear now," he pronounced at last. "Fix the new plane inside forty percent. I still don't like the strip around it, though. Give me a vertical slice through the center point."

"Which screen d'you want it on?"

"Ah . . . number seven."

"Coming up."

The curve, showing a cross section of the page surface through the small area they were working on, appeared on Hunt's console. He studied it for a while, then called:

"Run an interpolation across the strip. Set thresholds of, say, minus five and thirty-five percent on Y."

"Parameters set . . . Interpolator running . . . run complete," Gray recited. "Integrating into scan program now." Again the picture altered subtly. There was a noticeable improvement.

"Still not right around the edge," Hunt said. "Try weighting the quarter and three-quarter points by plus ten. If that doesn't work, we'll have to break it down into isodepth bands."

"Plus ten on point two five zero and point seven five zero," Gray repeated as he operated the keys. "Integrated. How's it look?"

On the element of surface displayed on Hunt's monitor, the fragments of characters had magically assembled themselves into recognizable shapes. Hunt nodded with satisfaction.

"That'll do. Freeze it in. Okay—that clears that one. There's another messy patch up near the top right. Let's have a go at that next."

* * *

Life had been reduced to much this kind of pattern ever since the day the installation of the scope was completed. They had spent the first week obtaining a series of cross-sectional views of the body itself. This exercise had proved memorable on account of the mild discomfort and not so mild inconvenience of having to work in electrically heated suits, following the medical authority's insistence that Charlie be kept in a refrigerated environment. It had proved something of an anticlimax. The net results were that, inside as well as out, Charlie was surprisingly—or not so surprisingly, depending on one's point of view—human. During the second week they had begun examining the articles found on the body, especially the pieces of "paper" and the pocketbooks. This investigation had proved more interesting.