“The three technicians of the floating globe monitored fluctuations in interstellar magnetic fields, and they did a good job up until the moment they died.”

That is a classic Dick first line. In this short story, one of the shortest in his canon, Dick explores a alien view of humanity through an examination of our idea of divinity. Of the three technicians working on the lethal experiment only one was a candidate for resuscitation, the female, Agneta Rautavaara. There were no humans near enough to make this attempt, so a poly-mind entity that lived in a state of ambivalent peace with humans and other intelligent life, decided to make the attempt.

In Dick’s imagined futures humans who have progressed enough to engage in space travel live to be hundreds of years old and their lives are guarded as precious far beyond our current levels of concern with maintaining life. In this exploration of the concept of aliens trying to preserve human life, the human’s investigating the alien attempt become enraged over the manner in which the aliens used the scientist’s body to sustain her mind. The body of the story that follows consists of the imaged death-consciousness of Agneta, and of the alien explanation for their intervention. The result is an interesting meditation on the ideal of the Savior.