"Okay." The Assassin shrugged. "What other way is there?"

"Deposition!" Brozlan peered at him intently as if expecting some violent reaction. The Assassin looked back at him blankly. Brozlan explained: "Instead of cutting material away to leave the part, we deposited material to build the part up!"

"You mean like electrolytic forming? That's not new."

"The idea isn't," Brozlan agreed. "But the way we were doing it was. You see, electrolytic forming works only with certain metals. We were working with every kind of molecule."

"You mean you could build up something out of anything—any substance at all?" The Assassin looked astounded.

"Exactly! And it didn't have to be all from the same kind of molecule, either. We could mix them together any way we chose.' For instance, we could produce a solid block that was phophor-bronze at one end and polythene at the other, with a smooth transition from one to the other in between. It opened up a whole new dimension in engineering design possibilities. The whole process was computer-controlled. A designer could develop a program to create any part he wanted out of any material he chose or any combination of materials—molecule by molecule if he really wanted to go down to that level of detail and if he had the patience and the processor power to handle it."

"Molecule by molecule .. ." The Assassin's face registered undisguised disbelief. "That's incredible . . ."