But scientists were scientists, and even when handed the impossible, the reflex did not die. Having been forced to conclude that the answer lived in his body rather than in any device, a great many of them turned, almost helplessly, to the next question.
What would a body even need to be, for this to be possible? Even in the slightest?
They began, cautiously, to itemize it. And this wasn't because they believed it could exist, but because laying out the requirements would make the true scale of the impossibility clear in a way nothing else could.
For a body to achieve something like that, it would need, first, to be sealed against pressure without being sealed at all. A body that could stand in a vacuum without its fluids boiling, without its dissolved gases tearing it apart from within, would need every surface — skin, eyes, the wet lining of the lungs — to somehow hold internal pressure against an external nothing.
