A Brief Life Of Rudolph Isenglass

Labored for 45 years in the employ of Chearing Medical. Each morning he would clamber into a cloth clean-suit sealed at its bends with tubes of black rubber, and nestle his scanty tousle into a hood with an inch-thick faceplate. That accomplished, he’d travel through several airlocks into the working space, with stations numbered on stand-up placards and divided by quite small (five-inch-wide, perhaps) conveyal lines, rolls of further black rubber. Stocking in, galumphing, he’d proceed to work at fabricating plascalpels, shaping them by means of a series of fiendishly detailed procedures he kept in his head. At his retirement he gave up any thought of this process—and set instead to tealife, watching out for hefty feeder-birds hopping through his half-a-chestnut tree.