decimal points. Still drunk as a lord, Kelvin clamped on a mental tight beam, turned on the teleportation, and rode the beam across America to a well-equipped laboratory where a man sat reading.

The man was bald and had a bristling red moustache. He looked up sharply at some sound Kelvin made.

“Hey!” he said. “How did you get in here?”

“Ask Quarra Vee,” Kelvin said.

“Who? What?” The man put down his book.

Kelvin called on his memory. It seemed to be slipping. He used the rapport case for an instant, and refreshed his mind. Not so unpleasant this time, either. He was beginning to understand Quarra Vee’s world a little. He liked it. However, he supposed he’d forget that too.

“An improvement on Woodward’s protein analogues,” he told the red-moustached man. “Simple synthesis will do it.”

“Who the devil are you?”

“Call me Jim,” Kelvin said simply. “And shut up and listen.” He began to explain, as to a small, stupid child. (The man before him was one of America’s foremost chemists.) “Proteins are made of amino acids. There are about thirty-three amino acids—”

“There aren’t.”

“There are. Shut up. Their molecules can be arranged in lots of ways. So we get an almost infinite variety of proteins. And all living things are forms of protein. The absolute synthesis involves a chain of amino acids long enough to recognize clearly as a protein molecule. That’s been the trouble.”

The man with the red moustache seemed quite interested. “Fischer assembled a chain of eighteen,” he said, blinking. “Abderhalden got up to nineteen, and Woodward, of course, has made chains ten thousand units long. But as for testing—”

“The complete protein molecule consists of complete sets of sequences. But if you can test only one or two sections of an analogue you can’t be sure of the others. Wait a minute.” Kelvin used the rapport case again. “Now I know. Well, you can make almost anything out of synthesized protein. Silk, wool, hair—but the main thing, of course,” he said, sneezing, “is a cure for coryza.”

“Now look—” said the red-moustached man.

“Some of the viruses are 

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