 What is so significant about the surgiscope?
The original text appears when hovering the cursor over the marked text. The gravity of Ganymede was hardly more than that of Earth's moon, but the way the man picked up the limp Motwick with one hand and tossed him over a shoulder was startling: as though he lifted a feather pillow. He followed Trella out the door of the Golden Satellite and fell in step beside her. The transparent dome of Jupiter's View was faintly visible in the reflected night lights of the colonial city, but the lights were overwhelmed by the giant, vari-colored disc of Jupiter itself, riding high in the sky. I was born and brought up there, and I was finally able to build a small rocket with a powerful enough drive to clear the planet.” “If Dr. Mansard succeeded in landing on Jupiter, why didn't anyone ever hear from him again?” she demanded. For some reason she decided against telling him that the assignment on which she had come to the Jupiter system was to gather his own father's notebooks and take them back to Earth. The ship that they boarded on Moon Nine was one of the newer ships that could attain a hundred-mile-per-second velocity and take a hyperbolic path to Earth, but it would still require fifty-four days to make the trip. The Cometfire swung around great Jupiter in an opening arc and plummeted ever more swiftly toward the tight circles of the inner planets. She told him only that she was a messenger, sent out to Ganymede to pick up some important papers and take them back to Earth. She knew that Dr. Mansard had invented the surgiscope. This was an instrument with a three-dimensional screen as its heart. The screen was a cubical frame in which an apparently solid image was built up of an object under an electron microscope. The actual cutting instrument of the surgiscope was an ion stream. By operating a tool in the three-dimensional screen, corresponding movements were made by the ion stream on the object under the microscope. The principle was the same as that used in operation of remote control “hands” in atomic laboratories to handle hot material, and with the surgiscope very delicate operations could be performed at the cellular level. Dr. Mansard and his wife had disappeared into the turbulent atmosphere of Jupiter just after his invention of the surgiscope, and it had been developed by Dom Blessing. Its success had built Spaceway Instruments, Incorporated, which Blessing headed. When it was found at last, he sent Trella, his most trusted secretary, to Ganymede to bring back to him the notebooks found there.
 It can perform fine operations at a microscopic level
 It can allow a surgeon to permanently alter a person's DNA  It can perform fine operations at a microscopic level  It can be used to turn a human into an android  It can probe the brain of any creature, dead or alive