Then I saw a hole, like a tiny cigarette burn, at the fabric-and-wire
elbow joint of my armor's left arm.
"Scharber! Bowhart!" I yelled. It was a thin wheeze. I wished that they
knew more about Doc's work so they could help us. My final awareness
was of the rush of their footsteps.
Time became timeless. Then I had a sense of struggling upward toward
light. The effort was mental. A minute might have passed, or a year. I
had a body which seemed to turn lightly on a mattress of coarse sticks.
I felt like myself, clothed in real flesh. The light around me might
have been diffused sunshine, and I saw colors, the familiar ones, plus
what might be the indescribable paleness of ultra-violet, unknown to
man as himself, and another nameless hue that perhaps was the sensory
effect of electronic vision.
I didn't fully guess all this at once; but its ghost was in the back of
my mind, and at the edge of panic.
I had sat up easily. I realized that I was still in the region of
The Small. Once experiencing that environment denies any failure to
recognize it later. Oh, there was the roughness of the glassy walls of
the room, pleasingly decorated with geometric patterns like those of
old tiles brought back to Earth from the asteroid belt. But I refer
more to the insecure sense of buoyancy, of ease with which one might
float in the air or recline upon it, after a tiny push at the floor.
It is a feeling quite apart from the weightlessness experienced in
space; and though there was certainly very little gravity here, too,
the difference remained palpable. And now I even felt a tingling in my
skin--the impact of molecules, perhaps, as they tried to lift and carry
me away.
My body seemed to conform to such a dimensional plane. It was me with
some details blurred or omitted. I was clad in stiff imitations of the
slacks and shirt I had worn inside my space armor. My hands, rough
in texture, lacked the fine hairs, as if they had been left out in a
process of transformation. Was the stiff, wirelike hair on my head
still black? I fumbled at my face. The nose, large jaw, and brow,
seemed the same, except for a certain shortness and roundness, as in
a doll-like simulacra. Corresponding to this was the length of lashes
around my eyes--or had electronic sense-organs been added, necessary
here for close vision?
Again I looked around the room. One wall was absent. But the square
left for ventilation was crossed by interwoven diagonals--bars which
must have been incredibly fine wire from another viewpoint.
Beyond this barrier was an egg-shaped chamber, so huge to my present
minuteness that it was like a mountain valley, its sides curving up in
shade and lushness; though through its vitreous, natural roof, light
streamed. Everywhere, bright green foliage peeped over garden walls.
Sometimes it was shaggy and filamented, sometimes massy and spheroidal
on thin stalks. Along streets rising in angular charm, were geometric
masses in pastel tints, some unknown to man, before. There were cubes,
pyramids, even spheres--buildings, obviously--yet of such simple oddity
that a child might have designed them.
Water did not lie flat as in a lake, but gathered in great glistening
dewdrops, burying a house or hill fantastically, but with startling
beauty.
But all this moved with the daily life of a teeming
civilization--living, manufacturing, buying and selling in the market
place. The air was full of craggy shapes, some propelling themselves
with arm and leg movement, others using jet rods. High on a slope
there was a continuous electrical flicker, a bluish spark. Perhaps the
furnace of a metallurgical process.
* * * * *
The springy stuff on which I sat, gross as brushwood, would have been
cotton wool to normal-sized human touch. Perhaps it was vegetable fibre
of that order. Crouching near me was a girl, clad in coarse blue fabric
which in reality would have shamed our finest textiles. The details of
her face were simplified in a doll-like blurring of line. But still she
was recognizable, even with the lashlike filaments around her eyes.
Somehow I still spoke with my lips. "Jan." My voice seemed a miniature
bass bell. I crept to her side.
Her courage and sense of humor were intact.
Her laughter was a tinier bell. "I'm all right, Charlie. At least, yet.
Maybe I just don't realize. One thing we've talked about has happened,
hasn't it? You look sort of cute, Charlie, like a puppet in a show.
Doc, too." Jan laughed again.
Beyond her, dressed like myself, was the reduced image of Dr. Shane
Lanvin, though his inner self remained unchanged, his triumphant smile
just faintly edged with doubt.
"Hi, Doc!" I greeted. "Congratulations for success in a venture which
began with you. Now, for the record, let's hear your version of just
what has happened."
He smirked good-naturedly. "All right," he chuckled. "You can't get
back to any control hoods, our former human-size selves. I've tried.
So our whole identities must have been transferred to these far
smaller forms. Somewhere in our adventures the structure of each of
our brains must have been exhaustively charted, down to the finest
wavering of cell-filament, and the least variation of chemical state.
Thus must have been captured every phase of our minds, memories, and
personalities. This might have been done by something analagous to
our focused radar or X-ray photography, penetrating deep, and making
an instant record. From this record, the pattern of our brains must
have been rebuilt, with all the complex channels of association and so
forth, but in a totally different medium, capable of a far finer and
more compact flow of energy than mere nerve impulses. In a brain of
protoplast, I think it could happen."
"Loose ends still dangle," I chuckled. "For instance, I remember a
machine called George, and a statement by him that consciousness,
awareness of self, was even difficult to define. How about transferring
that?"
Doc Lanvin shrugged. "Maybe the consciousness--the true self--is
inherent in the brain channels, like the memory, and would also be
transferred simply by copying them precisely," he said. "Or could the
awareness be a kind of spark, capable of being captured and transported
by an appropriate apparatus, as an electric spark can be captured in
an electroscope? I don't know, Charlie. But I noticed some of the
equipment carried by these Xians when they took us; and I thought of
that."
Silence seemed to close in as Doc finished; and it grew heavy with
monumental implications, almost apart from mentioned things. I
breathed, which suggested that my present form was getting energy in
the familiar way--by the combustion of food substances. But as I held
my breath for a prolonged moment, there was only a brief flutter,
as of a heart quickening its beat inside me. I wondered eerily if
this was evidence of a casual change-over, as if my android flesh
could so quickly convert to some other energy supply, perhaps that of
radioactive salts naturally in its substance. Such minerals were fairly
common on the Jovian moons, and far commoner among the asteroids.