VI

Stripped of their boots and vacuum armor, they set the controls and

lowered themselves into the gelatinous contents of the tanks. A warm,

tingling numbness flowed into them at contact with the viscous,

energized fluid. Weariness stabbed into their muscles. Their knees

buckled, and they sank deeper into the gelatin.

"All okay, Babs?" he asked.

"Okay, Ed."

Then their faces went under that surface. Their minds numbed and were

blotted out. They no longer needed to breathe.

The journey downward into a smaller, or, in a sense, a vaster region,

was made without their awareness, in a single step. There was no need

to pause at middle size, represented by the tiny but easily visible

doll-like figure in the minute tank. Mitchell Prell's labors in two

size levels need not be done again, for that work was finished. The

direct path was prepared. There was a flow of impulses, like that of

the old-time transmission of photographs over wires. Gelatins already

roughly of human form responded, swirled and moved tediously, and took

sharper shape, in a still-smaller vat. And it was the same with the

brains meant to harbor mind, memory and personality. They also were

repeated in a finer medium, and by a different principle than their

originals--but nonetheless repeated. So, in slightly more than an hour,

the essences of two human beings were re-created in the dimensions of

motes of dust.

* * * * *

Awareness returned gradually to Ed. At first it was like a blur of

dreams, out of which came realization of a successful transformation,

and of where he must be. Panic followed, but briefly. He was struggling

violently in a thick, gluey substance. His entire body, even his face,

was imbedded in it. He was certain that he would smother--yet the

impulse to breathe was subdued.

Fighting the sticky stuff, he knew that he possessed great

strength--relatively. Some of this was the android power in him.

Perhaps more of it was the increased relative toughness of everything,

in lesser size. An ant was relatively stronger than a man--a phenomenon

of smaller dimensions. And here, even a gelatinous fluid seemed like

heavy glue, its molecular chains long and tough. Water itself, not

lying flat, but beading into dewdrops, would have seemed almost as

sticky.

Ed Dukas, or his tiny likeness, got clear of the vat and its contents,

though much of the latter still clung to him. On all fours he dragged

it with him, leaving a trail of it in his wake on a rough, glassy

surface. He kept spiraling around and around until he rid himself of

most of the gelatin.

With avidness and wonder and dread, his mind scrambled through a moment

of time to grasp the truths of his present state and to test them. Even

the act of _existing_ in the body he now inhabited was indescribably

different. His mouth was almost dry inside. He still could draw air

into his nostrils, but breathing became unnecessary before some source

of energy that was probably nuclear. His hands and his nude body still

looked slender and brown to him. And he retained memories--of people

he knew, sights he had seen, and of things he had learned. Here he

seemed to remain himself. Those memories were clear enough; but were

they already losing a little importance, were they too gigantic to be

concerned about in this place?

That thought, again, was panic at work--a sense of separation from

all that he held familiar. For the ato lamp towering over him seemed

as remote as the sun. The form of the less-than-miniature electron

microscope seemed a metal-sheened tower. And in his mind there was

even the certainty that his present form must be of a wholly different

design inside to meet different conditions. He knew that he could

feel the thump of a heavier heart, circulating relatively more viscous

fluids.

And something about his vision had changed. Close by, everything was

slightly blurred, as if he were far-sighted. Farther off, objects

became hazed, as by countless drifting, speeding dots that weren't

opaque but that seemed--each of them--to be surrounded by refractive

rings that distorted the view of what lay beyond them. And because

there were so many tiny centers of distortion constantly in motion,

vision at this middle-distance never quite cleared but remained

ashimmer. Were those translucent specks perhaps the auras of air

molecules themselves?

At a greater distance, clarity came again. For there the haze which

was not haze at all but which consisted merely of seeing too much

detail--in too coarse a grain, as under too much magnification--was

lost. Light and dark, and familiar rich colors. And he saw the whole

room around him almost as he used to see it, except for its limitless

vastness.

For a little while Ed wondered further about his new eyes. They were

responsive to familiar wave lengths of light. Those wave lengths were

not too coarse--at least when reflected from farther objects. For

nearer things, he was not at all sure that he could see even as well as

he could by ordinary light. Was his vision, in this segment, perhaps

electronic, then? Did he see, close at hand, fringed hints of strange,

beautiful hues? Were these electronic colors? Or were there infinitely

finer natural wave lengths, far above the known spectrum, which

too-massive instruments had been unable to detect?

This question was dropped quickly, because there was too much more.

Now he looked again, very briefly, out into the depths of air, full

of drifting debris--jagged stones that glinted, showing a crystalline

structure, twisted masses like the roots of trees, though they had the

sheen of floss. All of it was dust of one kind or another. Ed could

even hear the clink and rattle as bits of it collided. Everywhere

there were murmurings of sound, which made a constant, elfin ringing

never heard in the world he knew.

Gingerly now he crept across the rough glass surface, back toward

the vat from which he had emerged and its companion. Barbara was his

first concern. There she was, in the second vat, imbedded in a bead of

gelatin. Already she was trying to fight free. He reached both arms

into the stuff and tugged at her shoulders to help her. He lifted

her out easily and helped scrape away the adhering gelatin, while he

worried about how she might react to a tremendous change. To counteract

the shock of it, he kept up a running flow of talk, in a voice that

even seemed a little as it used to be:

"... We made it, Babs. Down to rock bottom, you might say. I don't

think that any conscious human shape could be made much smaller. Or

any machine, for that matter. Remember some old stories? Little men

lost in weed jungles, fighting spiders and things? Strange, unheard-of

adventure, in those days! Maybe we can even try it sometime. Except

that a spider, or even an aphid, wouldn't notice us. We're too small."

A little pink nymph with a rather determined jaw, she seemed only half

to listen as she stared around with large eyes.

Later, like two savages, they were clothing themselves crudely in

scraps of lint torn from what looked like a sleeping pallet. A fiber

was knotted across it in a way that reminded Ed of the safety straps by

which passengers of planes and space ships attached themselves to their

seats during take-offs and landings. Here, Prell, the tiny android,

must take his rare moments of rest. Some of the lint was far finer than

spiderweb, but it was still coarse to Ed and his wife in their present

state, as they wound its strands around them.

"You look beautiful, darling," he said. "You're just as you were."

Barbara smiled slightly. "Even here I'm vain enough to respond to

compliments, Eddie," she answered. "Where's Prell?"

Her voice was a thin thread in the keening murmur of sounds. And it

was worried. Ed and Barbara both craved the reassuring presence of

someone of experience here, where everything was changed--where minute

gusts of air seemed bent on hurling you upward, so that you would float

helplessly, like a mote. You stood up gingerly, meaning to try walking

a step. But that mode of locomotion seemed not only unsafe here but

impractical. You could be swept away, and in the vastness all around,

how could one mote find another again? Too much of what you were used

to was lost already. Even the habit of walking no longer functioned

properly. The air was a buoyant, resisting substance, a prickling

presence of individually palpable molecular impacts, and there was

little traction for one's feet. Perhaps, then, here you swam in the air.

Ed spoke at last: "My uncle can't be far away. He'll come to us. It's

been only a moment."

Barbara clung to him, afraid. "Eddie, am I me anymore? Can I even find

old ways of talking, and old subjects to talk about? Here? Everything

seems too different. Damn--I never could accept the idea of there being

two of anyone! Us up in those other tanks--giants asleep. And yet us

here! Maybe we're different already--shaped by other surroundings! And

remember how little we are and how helpless. Moving a couple of inches

would be like walking a mile. And we came here to see if we could find

a way to straighten out the giant affairs at home. We're _androids_

now, aren't we? A special kind. But we still have the capacity for the

old emotions. Damn it again, Eddie, everything around us in this place

is so strange. But it's beautiful, too."

He patted her shoulder and said nothing. But her thoughts paralleled

his own.

Suddenly there was a rumble, like distant thunder. In a more familiar

size level, it would have been a clink and a thud, coming through many

yards of granite. They both recognized it. Ed even chuckled.

"Whoever or whatever was following the canary machine," he said.

"Remember?"

Just then Mitchell Prell's simulacrum appeared, a comic, bearded

figure wrapped in a few strands of lint that suggested woven twigs.

He swam out of the depths of atmosphere--the fall-guy of an era that

had stumbled over its own achievements. And in several of those very

achievements, he had taken refuge.

He alighted near Ed and Barbara and wrung their hands cordially. Then

words spilled out of him excitedly: "Ed. Barbara. We've got to hurry.

But first we should put our minds straight about one another. I know

that back home you were on the side of responsibility and good sense.

Well, so am I. There haven't been many new quirks added to my viewpoint

since you first knew me, Eddie. I want knowledge to blossom into all

that it can give us. I think you do, too. Now tell me how you feel."

Mitchell Prell could still inspire Ed Dukas. Even here, at this

opposite, smaller end of the cosmos, he imagined again his splendid

towers of the future.

"There were moments when I felt pretty bitter," he said, in not too

friendly a fashion. "But in the main I'm with what you just said--all

the way. I put my life on it as a pledge."

Barbara nodded solemnly.

"Thanks," Prell answered, the breath that he'd drawn for speech

sighing out of him. "I'm more grateful than I can tell. You two may

think that we're too tiny--that our size makes us powerless. I don't

believe that's true. I was on Earth as I am, you know. I went there and

back--undetected--on space liners. But while on Earth I missed many

opportunities to act against danger. Maybe I'd been here too long, down

close to the basic components of matter, studying them. And I went to

Earth poorly equipped in both materials and experience. Well, I think

you can see how it was. Let it go for now. Visitors are at our door. I

suppose we've got to try to meet them in the manner that they deserve."

"Call the shots!" Ed said impatiently.

Mitchell Prell smiled rather wistfully. "The main part is done," he

replied. "I set the small remote controls of the large vats for revival

of the bodies in them--our larger selves. That was why I was delayed in

getting to you here. They are colossi. They cannot hide. And they must

be defended. I'm sorry, they are better able to defend themselves than

we are to defend them. At least they will have a better chance alive than

inert. Revival takes a little time, but in a moment you will see."

Ed did not quite know what to think about this action on his uncle's

part--whether to agree to it or to suspect that it was somehow

a mistake. Circumstances were too strange here, and he was too

inexperienced. And the whole situation itself was fraught with

confusion for him. Two selves, both named Edward Dukas? It was not a

new circumstance in the ideas of the times. You knew that it could be.

Yet it remained a muddle of identities hard to straighten out. Barbara

clung to him again, her feelings doubtless similar to his own.

"It's happening," she whispered.

And it was. From their perch on the scored, glassy surface under a

miniature electron microscope, they looked out past the minute tanks

and the attendant cables, crystals and apparatus that had given them

special being, and across the shimmering void of air, they saw those

other vats, glassy, too, and tall as mountains.

It seemed then that the mountains opened, unfolded, grew taller,

disgorged Atlases that stepped dripping over a cliff wall. There was

no connection of mind now--these three giants were other people,

for the link had been broken in the past. There was no blending of

consciousness.

Now there were vibrations almost too heavy in this miniature region

to be called sounds. They were more like earthquake shocks. But Ed

realized that they were just the noises of normal human movement--the

giants Ed, Barbara and Mitch putting on their boots, the grind of their

footsteps. Meanwhile they conversed, it seemed; but their voices were

only a quiver, a rattle, with a hint of worried inquiry. The giant

Mitchell Prell seemed to make suggestions.

The lesser Prell must still have understood what was being said. For

now he gripped a roughly made microphone and talked into it. His words

were amplified to a seismic temblor as they emerged from the sound cone

on the far wall; but to Ed and Barbara they were still directly audible

from the speaker's own lips. "You've come down to me successfully.

Now we must see what will happen. Ed, if it is only the police at

our gates, perhaps it would be best simply to present yourselves as

citizens. You and Barbara have rights. And you've fulfilled your pledge

to them. They can't harm you. Beyond this, I must apologize to you

both. You have made a difficult journey to what must seem to you a

frustrating blank wall--without experiencing anything very new. That

is a defect of being duplicated. And there is no time now to blend

into your minds the memories of the descent into smallness. I'm sorry.

Mitchell Sandhurst Prell--yes, you, my overgrown former identity--show

them what to do. But for heaven's sake, move this workshop of mine to a

slightly less exposed place!"

Because he was like his old self, the smaller Ed Dukas still thought

as his original did. So, after all, there was that much contact. He

understood the frustration that had just been mentioned, plus the

confusion of not having seen the reality of another size level. This

failure could even involve suspicion of his uncle's purposes. But there

was loyalty and belief, too. From the basis of parallel minds, the

lesser Ed felt all these emotions personally.

So he moved quickly, closer to the tiny microphone, bent on giving

reassurance. He shouted into it; and of course his words came out

sounding somewhat mad: "Ed, it's me! Ed! Honestly! And that was a real

Mitchell Prell speaking. Take care of yourself--and Babs--because

you're me--or still part of me. And we both love Barbara--in any form.

Hello, Barbara, darling."

There was no time to say any more, for now there began a steady, heavy

vibration, growing gradually stronger. In a moment he guessed what

it was. A huge, high-speed drill had been brought into play against

granite. Very soon now these caverns would be invaded.

And more was happening. There were more seismic temblors. A colossus

moved nearer, bringing its shadow; its wet clothing seemed to be woven

of cables instead of thread. The face, briefly glimpsed, was a huge,

pitted mask, bearded with a forest of dark and tangled trunks. A wind

came with him, caused by his motion. He was that other Prell.

"Hang on!" his tiny android likeness yelled.

Ed of the dust-grain region drew his Barbara down. They flattened

together and clutched part of the intricate but roughly made apparatus

attached to the vats from which they had emerged, just as the glassy

floor under them tilted, and they were almost swept away by gusts of

air. Wires had been disconnected, and now the whole assembly--large

microscope with the miniature machine shop, middle-sized tank and

middle-sized doll figure under it, and the lesser electron microscope

with its similar though reduced equipment--was being carried and

hoisted.

It was set on a high shelf. And what must have been a translucent jar

was placed in front of it to hide it casually. Maybe there was no time

for anything else, for that rough vibration of the drill was becoming

rapidly more pronounced.

"They ought to put on oxygen helmets!" Barbara shouted in the quaking

tumult. "These vaults will be unsealed! And they aren't built to live

in Martian air!"

Maybe the three giants even heard her, through the mike and sound cone.

But they would know, anyway.

From the twilight of the jar's shadow, Ed could still see into the

immensity of the room. The colossi were donning their heavy gear.

The vibration had become a gigantic rattle with creaking, crackling

overtones, audible only to micro-ears. Ed felt almost shaken apart and

dazed by it. Any instant now the drill would break through into the

room. But he didn't anticipate much real trouble. It wasn't reasonable.

He felt fairly sure that it was the police who had followed his larger

self here. They had their duty to give protection, not harm. Their

power might be warped by the fears and prejudices of the times, but not

beyond reason.

He knew that there would be a jolt when the drill came through. So he

scrambled over to the pallet and pulled from it a long bit of floss,

thicker to him than a rope. Quickly he bent one end around his waist

and knotted it, and fastened the middle of it around Barbara. The far

end he passed to his uncle.

"Tie on!" he shouted. "So we don't get separated. And hold tight to

anything solid!"

The break-through came, and it was not too bad. It felt like a monster

ram hitting the world one sharp, stinging blow; then the spinning

mountain of the super-hardened drill bit--all of a yard across, it

must have been--braked quickly to stationary. There was no tumultuous

outrush of air of earthly composition and pressure. The drill hole had

evidently been capped.

Ed saw the colossi there in the room--the originals of himself, his

wife and his uncle--grimly clad for Mars. They had taken up positions

a little behind this obstacle or that, not ready to trust entirely but

more or less sure. He knew how it was--particularly with his other

identity. There had to be this tense moment before someone, known or

unknown, spoke. They were armed. At the hip that was still his own in

a way hung the Midas Touch pistol that he remembered, though it was

expanded seemingly a million fold.

The outcome was different from what he could have hoped or expected.

There was no voice of challenge or greeting from behind the drill. You

could not see beyond the dark space around its jagged rim. There was

only perhaps a small, intuitive warning before the neutrons of another

Midas Touch struck, and a few of the atoms of metal and flesh and

stone exploded in a narrow, sweeping curve, making a flash in which

all visible details became lost and a volume of sound and quaking in a

confined space that, of itself, could have killed.

The little Ed Dukas could be proud of his forerunner, for he was quick

enough to have half drawn his own Midas Touch, just as the blaze of

light came.

It didn't do any good. The lesser Ed's android consciousness was rugged

enough not to be lost, even as he and his companions, tethered like

beads on a string, were sucked upward into the swirling dust of the

atmosphere. So he saw how the Midas Touch, discharged from behind the

drill, cut slantingly, like a sword blade, across the room, its narrow

beam slicing through the three giants almost simultaneously. Then,

for a moment, coherence of impression was lost in swirl and glare and

tumbling motion. But when the tumult quieted slightly and he floated on

choppy air currents, he saw the crumpled, mountainous forms. Mitchell

Prell--colossal version--had been chopped in two at the waist. The

heads and shoulders of the other two giants had ceased to be.

To Ed Dukas's micro-cosmic nostrils, the smell of burned flesh remained

unchanged. Nor was his capacity for horror any different. It came after

that small, numb pause of doubt of what he had just seen. He heard the

lesser Prell and the lesser Barbara shout from beside him. They had not

been torn loose from the joining strand--luckily.

At first he thought that the attack had come from someone other than

those who had trailed him. But then the drill point moved forward.

From behind it stepped several men, wearing the trim vacuum armor of

Interworld Security--usually honorable in the past but now sometimes

made shaky and corrupt by the doubts within its own ranks and among the

people about what, within the realm of human effort, was good or bad.

The group had a leader. Ed and his companions drifted idly in the air,

near the man's shoulders, but his helmeted head still loomed in the sky

of their present world. Old personality hints were hard to translate

from such magnitudes; but the cocky briskness and triumph showed. There

were rumblings and quakings of speech. Ed began to recognize repeated

patterns in the rattle of it. Centuries ago, the deaf had had a way

to "hear"--by sense of touch. And by feeling the heavy vibration, Ed

knew that he was "hearing" syllables too heavy for his present auditory

organs to detect as such: "... Prell's lab ... Dukas led us...."

Ed could still understand only scattered scraps; but the skill was

coming--now, with his body, he felt the stinging discord which must

have been a harsh laugh.

Now a gust of wind from a vast swinging arm lifted the strand of floss

and the three who were tied to it upward. Beyond the view window of the

helmet, Ed saw the tremendous face--rolling plains and hills, pitted

with pores and hair follicles, and scaled with skin, beneath which the

individual living cells were easily visible, the latter mysteriously

haloed around the edges with a faint luminosity. The mouth was a long,

rilled valley, crescented into a hard grin. The nose was a crag. The

eyes were concave lakes set in rough country and islanded with iris and

pupil.

"You know him, don't you, Eddie?" Barbara said.

Size did not hide the bullish quality or the gimlet stare. Rather, it

emphasized an ugliness of character.

"Of course," Ed answered. "Carter Loman, who was with Chief Bronson and

who spoke to us before we left. An unidentified official with whom we

made the deal to come here. Nice guy. Feels that he can be the whole of

the law out here in the remote Martian desert."

Again Loman addressed his henchmen. Ed was getting better at

understanding the vibrating words: "We'll clear everything out for

shipment back home. I've got to study this equipment! But before we

even open a door we'll sterilize everything with a four per cent

neutron stream. That'll kill even that damned vitaplasm! Fascinating,

devilish stuff! Too bad, in a way, to erase it here--because I think I

know what's still around, and I'd like to see. But we can't take the

risk. A snake I might give a chance, but not a robot or robot-lover!"

Loman paused, then spoke again, turning his head this way and that,

directing his words toward the invisible: "Prell, you're dead, but are

you still somehow here? What can't happen in the crazy age you helped

create? On Earth we psyched your nephew. Don't think I didn't guess

what you were doing. Now we've taken your carcass into the other room

to psych your dead brain. In a few minutes we'll know. There'll be ways

to stop your kind of folly!"

As the great head continued to turn here and there questioningly, the

still-living Mitchell Prell shouted in derision: "Here I am, crusader!"

But there were no microphone and sound-cone in action now, and Loman

did not hear him.

Maybe Barbara's present eyes were too minute to shed tears, but her

face looked as though she were weeping. "Loman is the worst kind

of fanatic," she said. "Sure that he's right, and blind about it.

Sadistic, energetic and, I suppose, clever."

"I'll tell you more about him," Mitchell Prell offered softly. "His

face gives a faint glow--a fine radiation that only our eyes can see.

Radioactivity. It wouldn't be visible on Earth, where oxygen gives even

an android bodily energy. But on Mars--or wherever else that oxygen

is in short supply--vitaplasm adapts readily to other energy sources.

It would be silly for him to carry air purifiers in that helmet he's

wearing."

Ed Dukas looked down at his own arms. Yes, they glowed, too, though

he'd hardly noticed it before in the light of the great ato lamps.

"Then Loman is an android who hates androids!" Barbara breathed. "Well,

I guess that hating one's own kind has happened often enough before.

But an android in the Interworld Police? Under physical examination, he

could never hide what he is."

"Legally, they still have equal rights," Ed answered. "That much I'm

glad for. They couldn't be kept out of the Force. But there could be

other twists, not so unprejudiced. A thief sent to catch a thief, would

you say? Something strong, and full of self-hatred, sent out to match

strength? Tom Granger, and thousands of others, might think like that."

Ed Dukas's anger broke through at last, slow and terrible. Maybe he

had been too startled before for exact meanings to register. The other

Barbara, whom he loved, had been murdered, her body mangled. It was the

same with his own other self, and his uncle's. Those bodies had been

the one available route back to all familiar things and out of this

weird place of expanded forms, warped physical laws, keening sounds and

distances multiplied a millionfold. But now those bodies were gone. And

even if beings invisible in smallness could escape death in neutron

streams from Midas Touch pistols turned low, there would be little left

that they, in their tininess, could work with. They would be stranded

here in a microcosmos for as long as they could survive, helpless to

move even a pebble.

These thoughts were fringed with a homesickness that Ed had never

before known. He wondered if a little dust-grain android could go mad.

It was Carter Loman's fault. No, the responsibility extended further

than that! To Tom Granger, the rabble-rouser, and those like him,

and those who listened. And to a renegade android leader of mythical

origin. Yes, it was Mitchell Prell's fault, too, and his own for coming

here and bringing Barbara.

With his two companions, Ed Dukas floated high in the air, supported

by molecular impacts, near the helmeted head of an Atlas called Carter

Loman, and felt his fury and the helpless contrast of dimensions.

This giant, aided by his henchmen, had all of the advantage, while Ed

and his wife and uncle could be blown away merely by the wind of that

monster hand in motion.

Loman was throwing words at Mitchell Prell again, his voice coming

easily through the thin face plate of his helmet. It was not a true

sound to micro-ears. Rather, it was a heavy quiver in the air, felt

with one's entire body. "Prell, I'm sure you haven't stopped existing.

Don't think that I can't understand how. And you did things to me.

There was your Moonblast, but that wasn't the worst. Everything you

stand for must be stamped out. Even if we all go with it."

Maybe it was then that Ed's thoughts became crystalized. His anger was

turned cold and clear, as if by need. Although Ed was of vitaplasm

himself, he felt no loyalty to kind. In fact, he was still far from

reconciled to the condition. But an enemy of reason was an enemy to all

men of whatever sort.

His wits were sharpened. Suddenly a realization of the power in

smallness came to him--combined with the hardiness and flexibility

of flesh that made even such dimensions and powers possible. Android

powers.

"I guess everybody must have a breaking point of fear and

exasperation," he said softly. "We were born to it. To be crowded from

the Earth can seem a terrible idea. But maybe even that is as it should

be, and good. I can't agree that pushing everything into extinction

in an open fight can be any better. We've gained too much. There is

too much wonder ahead. And maybe, small as we are, we can quiet the

leaders. Under the right conditions, I think we could handle these

giants--even kill them if necessary. Quieting Loman and Granger might

help a little."

"I know," Mitchell Prell answered. "I thought of it myself. Perhaps I

didn't have the nerve to carry the idea through. Maybe that was why I

wanted you to come to me on Mars--where I had the apparatus to change

you. Microbes are smaller than we are, yet they used to kill men."

Ed Dukas saw his wife wince. But this couldn't make any difference now.

"Ed and Barbara, I'm sorry for all I've gotten you into," Prell added.

"Don't be," Ed told him. "Who can regret a chance to try to do some

good in what seemed a hopeless conflict? Now, first, let's get out of

here, if we still can or ever could."

Ed felt some of the command switching to himself--strange, because his

uncle knew far more about these regions than he did. But Mitchell Prell

was made more for study than for physical action. And he was somewhat

fuddled by the effects of the miracles he had helped produce.