Reproducing that first robot in triplicate was easier than it might
seem, for when we had set up all the small machinery to make the parts,
duplication was almost automatic. But assembly remained a tedious
chore. On the other hand, the control hoods were almost of the standard
type used for much larger automatons.
Still, it was eight months before Doc announced on a Saturday
afternoon: "Step one completed. Now to repeat in step two!..."
We had test proved all three robots as soon as each was ready. But now
that each of us possessed a metal proxy, we could all go as a group on
that first step down into The Small.
Sitting in chairs in Doc's workroom we put on our control hoods. Then,
sensory illusion seemed to make us leave our real bodies behind. The
top of the work table spread suddenly around my tiny, artificial
eyes becoming a vast, cluttered plain. The ceiling was our sky. The
fluorescent lights were multiple suns. Doc and Jan were shining,
man-tall monsters, exactly like myself. I couldn't tell them apart,
until manner of speech betrayed Jan.
"Look at us!" she shouted gleefully in a thin, buzzing voice from a
tympanum in her chest. "Coming this far is like dropping into an abyss,
half way to the bottom! And see the _real_ us! Great, hooded colossi,
sitting as if asleep, in the distance!"
"Yeah, I know, Honey," was all I said.
In this moment of half realizing a goal, Doc's love of miniature things
became tense impatience.
"All right, my worthies!" he buzzed. "Supper and being ourselves again
is only a few hours away. So let's get started on tougher step two!"
We hurried to a clear plastic box (of building-size to us now) and
inside its drilled doorway our materials were waiting.
There were the roughed out beginnings of other micro-manipulators,
except that now, for work on pieces smaller than the width of a single
light wave, the microscopes would have to be of the electron variety.
Their parts had to be polished and fitted together here; for even
that was labor beyond the direct doing of a man in his own flesh.
Now we had to finish a whole array of super-fine micro tools and
equipment--lathes, heaters, shapers of glass.
Not until then could the real work proceed--making robots of which
only the largest pieces yet existed, still in the rough. They would
be robots bearing the same size-relationship to our present half-inch
selves, as those same selves bore to human beings!
"Specks, dust particles, dimensions on the order of the smallest
insects," Doc's new self buzzed. "Down near the barrier, the limit of
smallness, beyond which metals become, by relativity, too hard, and
too coarse-grained to be shaped. Small objects are always relatively
stronger than large ones. Yes, you'd have to decrease the strength of
materials in proportion to size to achieve a constant there. Take an
ant, far smaller than a man, but able to lift many times his own weight
because the substance of his muscles is relatively tougher!"
"Well, power for polishing comes first, doesn't it?" I said, and we
went to work.
The days went. Tediously our work progressed. Another spring came, and
we lived two lives, with almost two sets of identities. There were
classes and friends, and walks around the campus for Jan and me. Then
we were down again, where flecks of lint floating in the air looked
like twisted twigs, and where metal surfaces were difficult indeed to
burnish.
One evening, with grim excitement in his voice, Doc gave us some news:
"Again the Government is asking us for a favor. Small space ship
and everything provided! There have been more mysterious breakdowns
of equipment, and strange illnesses reported. So we're going out to
Ganymede! Sorry, check out of the U; get your gear together, tighten
your belts--because this is it! See a justice, maybe, if that's in your
minds. Take a few days off."
My hand tightened protectively on Jan's shoulder. Somehow, before the
unknown, I felt that marriage would be like a shield for us both,
though we were still pretty young.
"Time to get hitched, Jan," I said later. "If you've made up your mind.
Or should we consult George?"
Her eyes twinkled with a flare of recklessness. She lowered her voice
and mocked humorously: "'This is a question which I am not permitted to
answer. Unghh!'"
* * * * *
For a few days we were away from Doc Lanvin. Our brief honeymoon was on
the Moon with my folks. Jan's parents had died in a rocket crash years
before. It was good to see Mom and Dad and the old house again. Out
beyond the sprawling buildings of the expanded labs, the skeleton of a
huge hull was taking form. The stars, that meant, though the problem of
overdrive, speeds greater than light, promised no early answer after
all. A journey to the nearest stars would take a long, long time.
Within a week Jan and I were back on Earth, packing equipment. Armand
Cope, whom I've mentioned, was one of those who came to bid us
good-bye. His cynical mouth twisted as if he were both sorry for, and
contemptuous of us.
"Maybe I was just born too late," he said. "I don't know just what
you're after, but there are rumors. Well--honestly--keep safe."
"Thanks, Cope," I said.
"Yes, from me, too," Jan added gently. Then she threw a mild jibe at
him: "Still trying to hold back tomorrow, Cope?"
Two guys I knew slightly, Bowhart and Scharber, were selected as
crewmen for our ship, the _Intruder_.
"Bow and I are trained for simple space stuff, Charlie," Scharber said.
"We won't stick our noses into this micro-robot business."
Scharber was broad and easy going. Bowhart was short and dark and
serious.
Jan changed to the rough coverall, acceleration suit, and boots of a
space wanderer. Maybe there was a regret for the difference, but it
also brought a new jauntiness.
On a Sunday night our ship blasted off from the New Mexico desert. When
our acceleration was completed, our ringlike hull began to rotate, to
give us a centrifugal substitute for gravity. The outer silence closed
in, and two months of monotonous journeying provided only a new setting
for our efforts to build us metal forms that could stand beside an
inscription on a sand-grain meteor as a man stands beside a monument.
All of Doc's home workshop had been transferred to the _Intruder_.
There, in the lab compartment, Doc, Jan and I sat hour after hour,
wearing our control hoods, but living in metal bodies half an inch
high that bent intently over an even far finer and more difficult
craftsmanship.
We passed Mars' orbit without seeing the new man-made airdome cities
among the ruins. We saw nothing of the asteroid belt where fortunes
were being made in metals from the heavy core of an exploded planet.
Our quest had a different goal.
When we finished three super-micro-manipulators, we were better
prepared to finish our tools and equipment to make parts. But our
tedious job was less than half done when we arrived on Ganymede, cold
and bleak, its tenuous atmosphere composed mostly of unbreathable
methane gas.
Scharber brought us down on the landing stage of Port Hoverton. The
settlement itself was under domes nearby.
And Jan said: "Hurdy-gurdies, Charlie! Hey, Doc! Scharber! Bow! Beer,
music, games. A last fling, like the spacemen and miners! Let's have
it!"
So we did for a few hours. Then we had us a good sleep. Then we
found a guide. Boom Harlow, he called himself. Oldish, cheerful as a
gravedigger.
"Sure I'll take you to where that little tool chest was found," he
said. "If you stay, likely you'll never come back."
He blasted off with us for a thousand-mile jaunt in our ship, arcing
above the stratified mists of half-congealed gases that hovered over
the Ganymedean landscape, and after we had landed at his command, he
pointed out stone structures that looked both very old and very odd.
"There you are!" he said through the helmet phones of our space suits.
"Maybe the last camp of the last survivors of Planet X, came here
millions of years ago, before their world went ffttt--before there
were asteroids. But there's something here yet, I'm tellin' yuh! Now,
after you pay me, I'll get my mono-wing out of your hold, and fly back
to town, and I hope I won't stop long before I rocket back to Seattle.
Keep alive if you can. So long."
Boom Harlow was gone, then, riding a jetted metal triangle high against
the thin murk. The rest of us were left with the creeps and the wonder,
and all the work we had to do.
* * * * *
There was an ancient shelter of glassy rock, metal-lined, and once
sealed, for there was an airlock. A dried, age-blackened form, its
claws clenched, its queer, vertical ribs sticking through the
skin, was crumpled in one corner of the shelter. Around him was his
gear--tools and weapons like those in museums. Perhaps no one had dared
to take them, for a curse was supposed to be here.
But you could tell that he had been moved; and the even cones of dust
on the floor showed that every bit of it had been carefully sifted,
no doubt after prospector Jeffers had found that tiny box of glinting
tools. He had shown the box to reliable people; but then, by later
report, had somehow lost it.
The mummy was an Xian. With what sadness at the loss of a home world,
had he awaited death under the bleak sky of Ganymede?
None of us spoke. At last Jan kicked dust over the corpse in a gesture
of kindness.
"It may be safer in the ship," I offered.
Scharber and Bowhart had the _Intruder_, and the simpler wants of the
rest of us to look after. Doc, Jan, and I kept working on the smaller
micro-robots. But during an occasional spare hour we'd send our
half-inch alter-bodies out into the cold to look around the ancient
camp. We found nothing of interest except a splinter of diamond set in
a metal shank. A cutting tool?
But within a month, certain phenomena began to appear inside the ship
itself. As humans, we couldn't have noticed. But being half an inch
high, it was different.
"Whispers in dark corners, and shadows that move," Jan said. "And
tinkles. Or are spatial solitudes affecting my mind?"
We had just put down her control hood, so she was speaking as strictly
herself. She looked alert and curious, not overwrought.
"I thought I noticed something vague, too," I admitted. "Funny, the
ship is sealed. Even the air is constantly being filtered. But who's
complaining if there are developments so soon?"
"It would be best even to sleep in our armor," Doc advised. "Scharber
and Bowhart, too. Yes, I thought I heard a muttering and chirping.
And just now, as we worked on that final assembly, I was sure I saw
something hide in a bit of floss that was adrift in the air. But
they never come too close; they just hover near and wait. And only
miniature microphones, like those of our robots, could ever pick up the
sounds they make."
My hide was coldly atingle again. "Darn!" I laughed. "Why does the idea
of smallness and beauty always suggest fairyland, unreality? Small
things are just as factual as large ones."
"Fairyland is a dream, Charlie," Jan chuckled. "Something which many of
us in humdrum surroundings wish was so. But a yearning can sometimes be
made to come true."
Though we felt that we were being watched, nothing came to interrupt
our hard work. At last we won our fight with materials when we arrived
at the microscopic size-level limit of the workability of metals.
We now had three true micro-robots. They were like their half-inch
creators, except that they had two coordinated sets of eyes--a lensed
pair to see by ordinary light, and another pair, fitted with magnetic
focusing rings, to see by the rebounding of electrons from objects at
close range, where detail was less than the span of a single light-wave.
Step two, down into The Small, was made like step one. We used the same
control hoods, adjusted slightly, while we sat at our work table in the
shop aboard the ship.
"To the bottom of the pit!" were Jan's final words as a woman.
We put on our hoods and plunged. It seemed infinite, this time. The
gleaming walls and girders of the shop appeared as distant as planets.
The surface on which we sprawled became pitted and scored from our
new viewpoint. Polish was gone with magnification. An eerie, elfin
ringing--perhaps the finer overtones of normal sounds--reached our
tiny, tympanic ears.
We arose unsteadily. Our mechanical fingers joined, till we were a
chain of three, moving toward the door of the box as a group. Then we
were out on the undulating porcelain expanse of the table top. An air
current, magnified to a hurricane by our minuteness, lifted us up till
we floated free, still clutching each other's hands.
One peculiar thing about difference in size, is that the smaller an
object is, the larger is its exposed surface in proportion to volume
and mass. That greater surface in relation to weight, allows the
bombardment of passing air molecules to lift anything of dust-grain
dimensions and density into wingless flight. It also can give a sense
of helplessness, as if the atmosphere has become a treacherous medium
full of irresistible currents.
We tumbled, we laughed, and would have been panic stricken except for
knowing that our real selves were in normal circumstances. Nearby, the
air seemed to shimmer. A gnarled thing floated close--floss, looking
like a twisted tree-stump, to which clear ovoids clung--some common
form of microscopic life. A chunk of mineral dust came drifting nearer,
its sheared-off side glinting like quartz strata. Our two pairs of eyes
still were not developed to distinguish colors. Yet Jan had reasons
when she exclaimed in tinkling tones:
"Beautiful, truly beautiful! We came--we got here! In a sense, it's
farther than the stars! But now what happens? Where are--_they_?"
"I don't believe they'll be long in coming," Dr. Lanvin said at last.
"To write, to make tools, and to get into our sealed ship requires a
capacity to think and plan. So, about us, they must be following a set
purpose."