"Don't paint it too bright, Jan," I laughed. "Come on. Let's explore farther."
I don't remember how many hours we spent on that long excursion, or all that we did. There was more than one bubble cavern; there must have been thousands connected by artificially drilled passages in double arrangement for traffic moving in two directions. In those passages, currents of air carried one along swiftly. It was a perfect transit method for a micro-world.
In some caverns were other cities. But there were more where tiny agricultural machines, with limbs like a beetle, crawled across miniature fields. Here we ate strange, sweet fruit, that surely contained the carbohydrates of familiar food. But no doubt it also contained radioactive salts from the soil in which it grew. As we had been, it would have poisoned us. As we were, it was a double source of vital energy, chemical and subatomic.
Other caverns were murked with the fumes of electric foundries, self-operating, close to the mine-tunnels that bored deep into the natural, nickel-steel core of the asteroid. In still other caverns there were low buildings full of lathes, drills, presses, among those that we could name—all automatic, too. Then there were caverns where stood lines of square containers, enormous to our eyes, and joined by a network of cables. This must be a power source—banks of nuclear batteries.
And in several adjacent bubble cavities we saw where an enormous metal cylinder was being built, each oblong segment being welded into place by mechanisms of the true robot variety. From any one cavern only a small part of the curving side of the tube could be seen.
"Some kind of jet engine?" I asked almost rhetorically. "For their further expansion toward the stars? Like moving a whole planet to them, eh?"
"Your guess, there, can be mine, Charlie," Jan said.
We felt no physical tiredness in spite of all our activity. "Let's get back to a more idyllic surface bubble, Jan," I suggested, "and go swimming in water if natural law, here, allows it."
"Crazy!" she responded gleefully.
Air, rising in a vertical shaft, bore us aloft for the few feet that, to us, stretched into seeming miles. Against what appeared to be a green hillside, we soon found what we sought, a great, clear ovoid, glinting like a lens in diffused sunshine.
It almost proved true that we could not swim, here; for the relativity of smallness gave water a terrific surface-tension. It was difficult even to get wet! You could lunge at the dewdrop, and it would throw you back like a net of rubber. Even with android strength, we tried several times before we penetrated it. But then things went well.
Jan glided like a little pink nymph, silvery bubbles clinging to her face. We did not breathe. The greater relative viscosity of water did not trouble us. Our eyes did not need to close. Inside the dewdrop swam Xians who had followed us. And extending in crystal vistas were the furry green bulks of water algae.
Maybe there was no moment or place, yet, as beautiful as this. We enjoyed ourselves immensely. But grim questions about our future remained in my mind, though here and now the charm of fantastic difference reached a pinnacle.
"Now I'd like to go up and out on the surface of the asteroid, Jan," I said when we had emerged from the water. "The real test. Game?"
"Why not?" she answered.
So we found our way upward to a surface airlock. It's Xian guard did not stop us. The lock's mechanism was automatic. We crept out onto bleakness, with harsh space all around. Icy stars, silence, deep, dry cold. Huge Jupiter, gray-white, and streaked. The far-off but still dazzling sun. And blotting out a third of the sky by its nearness, Ganymede, murked by its moving surface mists, almost congealed.
"A test for the android—unprotected in the raw void," I said.
No sound came from my mouth; the vacuum made it impossible. Speech was purely a matter of lip reading, here.
But Jan nodded.
All I felt of an energy change-over was a protective tightening of my skin, and that quickened, momentary throbbing inside me. There was no sense of cold or suffocation, no pangs of blood boiling under the release of pressure. Perhaps our outer flesh now served as a sealing shell.
A sense of personal power came over me—android power. The thrill contradicted my darker dreads.
Somehow I wondered how much I had had to be redesigned inside. In any tiny body the relative viscosity of liquids imposes a definite strain on the heart. Were my blood vessels now made especially wide to reduce circulatory drag? I had heard that the littlest insects have to be somewhat special in their inner construction for this same reason.
More confidently, my mind reached out to all distance, and all unknowns. The demigod mood was on me.
It was then that a crowd of Xians emerged from the airlock. Horny digits clutched us.
We were drawn back into the interior of the asteroid, where the hoarded warmth of the sun was augmented by the decay of radioactive minerals. The crowd buzzed around Jan and me. Through tunnel and shaft we were guided back to the cavern and house of our first arrival, mistily illuminated, now that night had fallen.
Dr. Lanvin and Kobolah met us. Doc looked excited.
"Well, Charlie and Jan," he said, "I've met the real ruling force of this world, and have made my appeal. Come along for the answer!"
Kobolah led the way down a shaft that must have reached the center of the asteroid, the most protected place. Here there was a cylindrical chamber, the native nickel-steel of its walls gleaming silvery in the bluish fluorescence. Aerially, and on the floor, the chamber was crowded.
I looked up at a globe mounted on a spindle that traversed the central axis of that great round room. It gave off a faint blue glow. Its surface showed thousands of facets; but it was not rigid like a crystal. In its translucent milky mass were countless dark veins that pulsed.
"Think of George," Doc said softly. "The same thing in purpose, only far more so. Not a ruler, only an adviser whose opinion the populace respects more than its own. This is a great organized lump of androidal brain tissue of the same order as the condensed stuff now in our heads, according to Kobolah. It has the same volume efficiency, though millions of times larger. And it has all of the knowledge of this far scattered civilization at its command."
Jan smiled. "Poor old George," she mused. "I used to feel that his room over the library felt like a temple to Everything. Well, we've seen a few more mysteries, haven't we? And the feeling is here now."
There was a dry rustle in that steel chamber. First the message came in Xian. Then in English:
"Generally, the technologies of the peoples throughout the cosmos will achieve a sounder, more lasting state of the body as soon, or sooner, than it is deserved, and can be handled intelligently. When it is new, often there is fear, confusion and sometimes disaster. On Earth, the native invention of a process of this sort cannot be more than a century off. In each case it should come at about the time of the first journeys to the stars. But the perfected invention, as it exists here, is better than a crude beginning, which will add to danger. Essentially, Earthians are about as ready emotionally as they will be in a short hundred years. The universe seeks to improve its awareness as rapidly as it can. There will be danger; this is a warning. But it is recommended that the conversion method be demonstrated to the Earthians as a gift."
The rustling voice clicked off.
"Thank you," Doc said solemnly, his gaze directed upward at the great globe. "Thank you, too, for pointing out risks."
Then he turned toward Jan and me. "Yes," he said, "Kobolah tells me that it has a consciousness, unlike old George. And I'll take a chance, in spite of a man at a fire, fuddled in a world changing too fast for him. Anyway, what else can we do? Scientists can't stop studying and learning any more than they can stop breathing."
Kobolah's filamented eyelids blinked. "Then come," he said.
We reached the labs where our intensive instruction, which was to last more than an Earth-month, began. There we found our three micro-robot bodies of metal, kept as in a museum. In other rooms were the furnaces, subjecting silica, hydrogen, and other chemicals to great pressure and heat.
We became acquainted with the vats in which readied substances were held in solution. Next, under Kobolah and Nintan, his superior, we studied the shaper grids and power sources, and the intricate regulating devices attached.
Finally, an insect-like animal of natural protoplasm, native to these bubble caverns, was made the subject of a demonstration. He was bigger than we were, and tolerant to the radioactive poisons of his environment. Otherwise, he was of the same vital principle as humans.
Anesthetized, he was immersed in a gelatin-like solution. Power flowed. Slowly, the substance and chemistry of his tissues was altered, cell by cell, without change of form, and never losing the inner motion of living. It was a process remotely akin to electrolysis.
This was the simplest change that could happen. But there were others. A body, or its three-dimensional simulacra made in any size, could be used as a pattern for a protoplastic form, and made to grow in another vat. But necessary alterations could be interjected too.
The nature of consciousness remained obscure to me, even under instruction. But the idea of a special indivisible spark or node of energy seemed to remain an at least tolerable analogy. Doc Lanvin's comprehension here was a lot better than mine.
"About the awareness, the philosophers were almost right, Charlie and Jan," he said one day. "But science can touch it too, reverently, as it touches a beating heart, which is a pump, easily understandable by physical law. So it is with the awareness, too. Who would want it any different? Who would want the soul to be merely a formless miracle of command, when Divinity must be logic and order, and completeness of understanding?"
VI
Somewhere along the way, this and other matters became too profound for me. I absorbed what I could; but my field is action and feeling, not deep penetration, like Dr. Lanvin's. He pursued androidal conversion down to its last secret. Drawings and formulae, changed to Earthly terms, went down on parchment, and into his head. He toyed with the wondrous slimes of another kind of life, and at last understood them.
Jan and I were lesser beings. Buffaloed and a little dazed, we would wander off from the labs. Often we swam and laughed. Part of our personalities was adjusting to the fantastic region of The Small. But we worried, too. About our original bodies, and about a reticence before questioning, on the part of even Kobolah. Then Jan expressed another thing:
"Have I learned to read suspicion in the manner of the local folks, Charlie? Their minds are beyond us. But to them, recently, we have been strange giants beyond easy imagining. Now, do they especially resent having their greatest secret given to us? Do they object to the advice of their version of George, that we should have it? I feel a danger, Charlie. They could destroy us, or keep us here. Already they won't let us go up to the surface of the asteroid, though gosh knows what we could do there."
Jan and I were crouching in a little glade, in a lush cavern where the sun shone. No one else was near. I said softly:
"From the surface, I think we might get back to Ganymede and theIntruder, and maybe to ourselves, if it's not too late."
Jan looked at me with a wondering frown. "Yes, she mused. A few inches is a mile to us. Some ways, our movements are terribly limited. But in other respects, we're more free. With only a jet rod, we might travel those thousands of miles."
"It's an idea to keep in reserve," I said. "But there's another trouble. We've been here for about two months—counting one for the changing of our forms. Would our own bodies, even if they are still alive, or our ship and Bowhart and Scharber, still be where they were, after so long?"
A trapped, icy feeling came over me.
Jan was a real pal. You didn't have to hide your fears from her. She was a courageous realist. Her little rounded face only looked sort of stern.
"What to do, Charlie?" she answered. "Wait and see, I guess. Funny how important old familiar circumstances are. But we'll get along—even always being what we are, now. Darn Doc, though, never thinking about anything but his studying. Double-darn our Xian sponsor, Kobolah! Hint about our personal futures, lately, and he gets as elusive as all the history of his kind!"
I chuckled bitterly, and then quoted some of the things Kobolah had buzzed at us: "'Leaving soon? How soon is soon? To a long life, a century is nothing. Are you not happy?...' Yeah, that's Kobolah! A demoniac cross between something we'll never quite understand, and a kid denying with naive aplomb that he stole the cookies."
Yes, an elusive inertia of suspicion was all around us now, like a barrier.
Jan and I got through to Doc Lanvin at last, penetrating his studious fog. An overtone of grimness came into his mild expression.
"I've noticed the change in Xian attitude, too," he admitted. "It's a shame to be wanting to skip out on them, now that I've learned all that is necessary. But with the biggest piece of potential human history in my possession, I could hardly let minor qualms deter me much, could I? We'll find a road to freedom."
Yet it turned out less easy than Doc hoped. Time after time we approached various surface airlocks. Redoubled Xian guard-groups pushed us back gently. Neither stealth nor violence had any chance of being effective. We were constantly watched and outnumbered. Twice we tried hiding in metal boxes, full of parts destined for the surface-assemblies of the tiny world's slowly developing star motors. Both times we were promptly discovered, and pulled forth with emphasis. Xian voices buzzed. Their eyes were cold. After that second try, Doc had a wild look, like somebody with a treasure that he can't use.
"No star trips for us, yet," he growled. "Not with another bigger purpose back home. Somehow I'll get there, or stop living!"
A little later we were back in the familiar laboratories. It was night, deepened by the fact that the sun was now eclipsed by Ganymede. But in the windowless lab with its electron lamps, this couldn't matter. Kobolah puttered in a corner. No one else was with us.
Keyed up and angry inside, I noticed a rather unobtrusive combination of circumstances—three new jet rods in a corner; small nets of fine wire, containing steel cylinders of supplies. Casually stuck to a metal prong on the wall was a parchment map, showing a vertical shaft leading to an airlock—the lab's private exit. Beside the map, a little used grille was slightly ajar.
Excitement became a kind of panic inside me. I looked at Jan. Her long lashes blinked knowingly. Doc nodded and walked casually away. The parchments of the secret he had gained were nearby. As if only to add further notes, he took the vast sheaf out of its compartment and carefully divided it into three. Midway in this operation, Kobolah turned toward us. Millions of years of difference in background, and in physical, mental, and emotional form, looked at us from great, cold eyes. A nervous chill came over me, both from the bleakness of discovery and frustration, again, and from the namelessness of that gaze.
Finally the monster imitated a harsh laugh. "Call this outburst peculiar," he buzzed. "Coming from nothing. But I happened to think that it is easy to be a fool, and often one will never know which way is foolish. Remember that."
He turned his attention back to the sputtering electrical apparatus over which he had been working.
"Thank you, Kobolah," Jan said nervously. He did not reply.
We divided the parchment among us, gathered up the equipment, and slipped quietly past the exit grille. An air current lifted us up the shaft to an unguarded airlock, whose control devices were readily responsive.
"Somebody stacked the deck for us," Doc whispered. "The scientist's logic, against popular doubts, maybe? Better to let us escape, than to release us openly, eh? I hope he doesn't get into trouble with his people. Or is there a deeper trick? Well, we'll soon know."
We emerged onto the deserted surface. We were micro-androids in space; dust-grain things matched against the universe, and the future of man. But we were part of both.
In the shadow of the asteroid world's eclipse by Ganymede, there was still soft light from Jupiter. Now we joined ourselves like mountain climbers, with a thoughtfully provided floss cable. Then, with small bursts from our jet-tubes, we leapt.
Soon we were falling toward Ganymede, accelerated by its attraction. It was a trip of many hours. Our jet rods checked our speed while we were still in space, and the satellite's atmosphere became a supporting cushion. We had an advantage over full-sized people—we could not fall to destruction. Instead we had to search for downdrafts to help force our descent with the rods.
Completing our journey, however, was not especially difficult. In Ganymede's glowing crescent we located a foamy dot—the airdomes of Port Hoverton. From this reference point it was easy to determine where we had left theIntruder. We got down into a prevailing wind. Thereafter our progress was swift.
After a few more hours, and some jockeying with our jet rods, we knew we were over the right place. We could speak audibly again, now.
Doc's grin was a bit forced. "You can even see its circular imprint in the dust," he said. "But theIntruderis gone."
Jan pointed below. "There's a space tent, Charlie!" she exclaimed. "The little brown dot! See? And somebody's standing before it!"
Swiftly we jetted down toward that bulging, inflated tent, fitted with its zippered airlock compartment. It stood alone in frigid desolation. "S.S. Intruder" was lettered on its side.
We alighted on the plastic face window of the armored figure, and clung to scratches in the material.
From this position we looked at the face of the man, huge, handsome to our former view, but made ugly by magnification. The skin-pores were craters. Individual scales of the epidermis, with the living cells beneath, were all visible, on forehead and nose, and around the colossal eyes, in which the separate flecks of pigmentation could be seen. It was an impressive, belittling vista.
The colossal jaw worked slightly: the narrowed gaze looked grim.
"It's Scharber!" Jan said. "He stayed here to keep watch, hoping for a sign from us, I'll bet! He knew part of what we were doing. But now he doesn't even notice us, any more than you notice motes on a windowpane. And how can we talk to him? He could never hear our voices directly. How can we get anything across?"
The riddle faced us tautly, as if we were trapped forever in a lesser dimension, even beyond communication with our own kind.
"The jet rods again!" Doc shouted. "He'll see the spark of blue fire!"
Doc braced himself in a scratch ridge in the plastic and squeezed the trigger of his rod. At a little distance, the glassy surface boiled up in dazzling flame. When the thread of intense atomic heat was broken off, a smoldering pit was left in the outer surface of Scharber's face window. A mere pinprick.
But plainly Scharber had observed, and added it up. His great eyes widened; the plateaux that were his cheeks, paled. In the canyon-like ridges of his brow, came the sweat of fear. Drops of it were bulging lakes, rushing down past the lopped-off redwood trunks of the blond bristle along his jowls.
It was then that I found that another's fear of the unknown can inspire fear—which was easy to feel, anyway, when looking up at that mighty visage. Here was I, minute before this Atlas. I felt outclassed beyond measure.
There came suddenly a great shock of sound. Almost, it was more a heavy vibration, like an earthquake. Quivering with it, Jan, Doc and I clung to the roughness of Scharber's face window. Yet it had the beat of recognizable words. Scharber was speaking:
"So you've come, damn you, whoever you are! Like you came for some part of Lanvin and Charlie Harver and his wife. Well, their bodies, still in deep coma, were shipped back to Earth a week ago on theJovian! We have scientists to figure out what you've done to my pals. Bowhart has gone to help the scientists with what we know! So look out! We're strong on Earth. We can fight and punish. So—to hell with you!"
Scharber was terrified before the unknown, but defiant and brave. The oldest human virtue was there, and it gave me a lift.
"I wish we could thank him for that kind of talk," Jan said.
"Maybe we can," Doc answered. "But our big problem is to get home fast, now. Ships from Ganymede to Earth run only every two months, and if theJovianleft only a week ago, there aren't any ships here! And how long before coma becomes death? When it has already gone on for so long? I know how you two must feel. With me, maybe it's not quite so bad. But darn, I still need that carcass of mine!"
I looked again at Scharber's frightened face. I had hoped that he could help us. But without space craft, that was unlikely. Oh, a call might be sent for a rescue vessel. But it would be sixty or so Earth-days in arriving, even if involved explanations of our peculiar position could be made by interworld radio.
"There's a way to communicate with Scharber," I said. "We could probably get him to have a message sent to Bowhart to recall theIntruder. But to turn a fully accelerated space ship around in mid-trajectory is no simple trick. Anyhow, there'd still be a bad delay."
"So, beyond trying to locate some small craft at Port Hoverton, there's just one other thing for us to do," Doc said grimly.
Jan expressed it for us: "Use the same method that we used to come here from the sub-moon of the Kobolah's people? Go without a ship at all? Achieve a high velocity; trust ourselves to something over four hundred million miles of empty void unprotected? Is that what you mean, Dr. Lanvin?"
Her small face looked pinched and awed.
"That's exactly what I mean," Doc replied. "As things are, I believe that it is considerably the best way. Oh, we can still die, I imagine, under certain circumstances! But the stakes are pretty big. I'd suggest that you stay behind, Jan, until we could send for you. But the form that was you is also one of those in a coma; and time is undoubtedly precious. Yes, there's desperation of at least a minor kind in what I suggest. But I think we've got all that we will need. And being as tiny as dust gives us certain definite advantages."
Jan looked at me soberly. "Sometimes small, inert objects actually leave worlds on their own, don't they, Charlie?" she mused. "Not only atmospheric molecules achieving escape velocity, but sometimes much more massive particles? At least, there was the Arrhenius theory of the propagation of life throughout space—by means of spores torn from the upper air of one world by the light-pressure of its mother star, and propelled by the same force across the interstellar regions to the planets of other suns. About ourselves—well—aren't we about the right size and toughness to travel in approximately the same way?"
I looked at Jan, gulped hard, breathed "Okay," raggedly. Then I returned my attention to the enormity that was Scharber's face.
He had hardly moved; his eyes continued to search the curve of his face window, as if needing another sign from out of the unknown—as if, in fascination, he feared to miss such a sign. But his sweat of terror, at least, was subsiding.
"He can help us, a little," I said. "But staying here, he's unhappy, and can't do any good."
Doc nodded.
"So we do the right thing," I chuckled. "First we change position; mount to the top of the metal flange that frames his face window. Just let go of this plastic surface, you two."
My jet rod flashed. The cable of floss which joined us all, drew Jan and Doc after me, as I shot outward through the air to the crest of the flange. There we clung. I had to hold on tight to resist the kick of the rod, which would have hurled us far out into the air again, as I used it for a pencil to etch a message on Scharber's face window with its long needle of atomic heat.
It was like writing on the sky. My arm swung wide. But the range of about half an inch, with the rod's energy roaring at full, was about right to give me a normal-sized script. The jet's kick was trying to break my arm, otherwise it wasn't too hard to do.
I even tried writing backwards so that Scharber could read my message normally from inside his helmet. Where the needle of heat touched, plastic seethed, and a visible line was left.
I wrote:
It's us, Scharber. Lanvin, the Harvers. Changed. Micro-androids now—like race of Xian origin. Friendly. Go home, Scharber. But please send radiogram. Urge imperative need to keep our bodies alive. Will return to them. A million thanks for everything.
It's us, Scharber. Lanvin, the Harvers. Changed. Micro-androids now—like race of Xian origin. Friendly. Go home, Scharber. But please send radiogram. Urge imperative need to keep our bodies alive. Will return to them. A million thanks for everything.
The eyes of the Atlas who was our friend, stared again. Lakes of nervous reaction came into them. The plains of the cheeks whitened, as with some strange frost.
The eyes of the Atlas who was our friend stared ... stared fearfully at the message being inscribed so mysteriously on his plastic helmet.
The eyes of the Atlas who was our friend stared ... stared fearfully at the message being inscribed so mysteriously on his plastic helmet.
The eyes of the Atlas who was our friend stared ... stared fearfully at the message being inscribed so mysteriously on his plastic helmet.
The earthquake spoke:
"Charlie? Or am I going space nuts? Maybe this could be.... But who ever heard of it!..."
Panic at his own thoughts made Scharber move suddenly. The movement threw Jan and Doc and me from the frame of his face window. As we tumbled in the thin, methane atmosphere of Ganymede, I heard Doc laugh.
"Scharber will probably be all right," he said. "It's the shock of difference, again. But the message won't vanish from the plastic. He won't think that madness made him dream it. He's tough and young. He'll straighten out.... Come on, let's get started—for Earth!"
VII
We were lifted upward toward the limits of the atmosphere by the jets of our rods, aided by natural updrafts, which we sought out. Joined together as a group by the floss cable, we were certainly far heavier than any of Arrhenius' theoretical spores; but we had the advantage of intelligence to seek out forces to help us. We were not inert particles to be buffetted by chance impulses of nature.
We attained the high ionosphere of Ganymede where the sky was almost as black as space, where accelerated residual molecules beat against us, giving us some of their upward motion, and where sound had almost been smothered by the vacuum. There, Doc clutched mine and Jan's hands for sonic contact, and said thinly:
"Last chance for vocal speech. We'd better know how we all feel. In the parchments we carry we have about the greatest possible material gift to man, a dream of his from his beginnings. Practical freedom from death, from physical affliction. Immensely increased range of possibilities. The universe, in almost all of its phases, can truly become his stamping ground, now. It's a treasure that men would kill to have. To me it is an inevitable and wonderful step of progress. But there's a confusion in it, based on a split in human nature. You've seen and felt how it works. The mistrust of old instincts for the completely different and revolutionary. Fear and even horror that invokes a savage compulsion to fight back. There's trouble ahead—between the two halves of man's character—represented by eagerness and revulsion. We know how it is from our own feelings. The android bodies we now have are the substance of the treasure, the gift. We exult at its legendary advantages; yet we have a terror of a strange exile, if we can't get back to our weak, natural flesh! The answer, on Earth, when the Big Change really comes, will be emotional adjustment, acclimation, time. Right?"
I answered Doc quickly: "You're looking for possible treachery in our nerves—opposition. Don't worry, Doc. I know every feeling you've mentioned. But the balance is all on the side of belief that progress is inevitable and good. I say this as a pretty average guy, Doc. Let Jan speak for herself."
My wife smiled. "Charlie knows I agree," she said. "So let's get the show on the road...."
We rose still higher in the atmosphere, to a place where the rising sun's rays were like a thin wind blowing against us. It was the pressure of light, the same thing that makes the vanes of an antique photometer spin. Gently, but with increasing speed, we were urged into space. One thing was wrong. Our Earthward course was to sunward, against that minute thrust of solar light. But there was a way to correct part of this.
Accelerating with the help of the pressure, we swept around Ganymede in an orbit; we waited until our direction reversed itself, as must always happen in circular motion. Then we really built up velocity with long bursts from our rods, and tangented sunward, breaking our last tie with the Jovian moon. We were on our way.
I felt my hide stiffening defensively. Over long periods we were not entirely without need of shelter in the awful spatial dryness, so we kept watch. The void is not completely empty. It contains many scattered hydrogen and helium atoms, and a rarer sprinkling of cosmic dust. We were lucky. Gleaming like a planet reflecting solar light, we saw a lump of rock moving with us toward the sun. We jetted to it and clung, laughing silently in the vacuum.
Doc's lips formed the words: "More speed. Time is short. Use up the cartridges of the rods. We have more."
Any object, broken clear of the gravity of a planet or large moon, is free in space. Acceleration is resisted then only by inertia. A relatively small force can build velocity enormously.
We were traveling at many miles per second when Doc mouthed: "Not too much. Eventually we must apply the brakes."
We fused our way into the meteor with our rods, and hollowed it out. We closed the exit with the slag of our excavations. True, the sun's radiations were a source of energy to our android tissues; but they also hastened drying—our worst enemy here since our body fluid was water.
As time went on, our skins hardened further, forming a kind of shell around the moisture in our vitals. And we had a small supply of water in steel cylinders. In a pinch, we needed little. We had food, too, similarly packed—Xian gelatins containing the radioactive and other minerals necessary to sustain protoplastic flesh, and give it a sure energy source in space.
While we were burrowing into the meteor Jan did a whimsical thing. With a diamond-chip tool she inscribed over the entrance of our cave:
"Dr. Shane Lanvin and Charles and Janice Harver traveling to Earth in the Miniature—2037 A.D."
"There," she said in silent lip motion, for the reading of which we were gaining practice. "Maybe the inscription on that quartz-grain meteor you used to carry, Doc, was just as casual. Maybe it was carved, just on the spur of the moment, recording a journey of little Xians."
"You happen to be right," Doc answered. "I knew those hieroglyphics by heart. I drew them once for Kobolah. He translated. Four micro-Xians were traveling the short distance from one of their inhabited asteroids to another."
Later, the three of us fell into a kind of sleep. Or was it creeping death? It scared me. Our metabolism slowed. Consciousness left us. And so, time went very quickly. Maybe our tissues actually froze. I know now that this hibernation is a natural android function, conserving physical forces during long periods of inactivity. And it could not stop for good our rugged vitality. We revived when the sun was nearer, and warmed us more. Stiff with dryness, we drank water, and loosened up our muscles.
We cleared the exit of our burrow, and crept out on the surface of the meteor. Rushing on in its elongated eclipse around the sun, it had come close enough to Earth to make the latter a disc of about one-quarter the apparent diameter of the Moon, as seen from Chicago on a clear night.
"Our meteor probably won't get much closer," I mouthed. "So we might as well jump soon. No use wasting the energy of our rods, decelerating a meteor mass, too."
Doc nodded.
"Where will we be most likely to find our old selves?" we read from Jan's lips.
"At the Space Medicine Research Hospital, near Chicago, I'd guess," Doc answered. "They send them nearest our homes. Or—peek over a shoulder at a newspaper, or into somebody's television. I think we are news. Are you both sure you know just what to do if that old protoplasm of ours hasn't got tired of waiting for us?"
"Yes," Jan replied.
"Fine," Doc commented. "So we'll drink some water, eat a little, limber up, and then start for home without the meteor."
Much of our physical forces had returned with the prospect of activity. Like any awakening, it was a natural tuning up of body. But I think that even our android chemistry had suffered in our vast journey. Doc and Jan both looked thinned down. I hugged Jan in appreciation of her unwavering spirits.
"Good kid," I said. "It shouldn't be long, now, with luck."
We all jumped, then, and broke our velocity in one direction with our rod-blasts, bending our course toward Earth, now only hours away, even at steadily declining speed. And so, as unheralded as ghosts, but as significant as a new dawn of history, we came in.
Yes, we still hit the fringes of the atmosphere a bit too fast. The floss bond, holding us joined, burned in the heat of friction. Thereafter, there was no keeping together in tumultuous vastness, that, though it was just the Earth's air, seemed infinite to our tininess. I could cry out for Doc, and more especially for Jan; but there could be no answer. Really, it was the first bad break we had had.
I was high over a coastline. And a circumstance, particularly effective in The Small, helped me to orient myself. I found a bit of quartz-dust floating near me. I clung to it. Yes, I had heard of quartz crystals functioning sometimes as natural radio receivers. But my tiny ears were much better designed than the human to pick up minute sounds.
For more than an hour I listened to overlapping broadcasts. But the most powerful station I heard was in Frisco. So that was the city beneath me. I heard several newscasts. Parts of them were significant:
"... Dr. Shane Lanvin, micrologist, and the Harver couple, his associates, seem near death now in Chicago. For almost five months a spark of life has been sustained by intravenous feeding and other therapy. Dr. Lanvin's party was sent to investigate certain threatening micro-phenomena in the vicinity of Jupiter. Should any credence be given to a fantastic radiogram sent from Ganymede by another member of the party about a micro-race of supermen? Perhaps not; but it has been the thing that sparked the special effort to sustain life in these three during the past six weeks."
I was already jetting, riding the prevailing winds high in the stratosphere, and at last grabbing a lift on the skin of a passenger rocket-plane. From high up Chicago looked almost as it did from normal human eyes. There was no feeling of being lost in enormity, at least. That was how I found the Experimental Hospital, and descended toward it. The rest was easy. I had only to follow the newscast men to the three rooms.
Hovering in the air, I felt the thunderous vibration of a doctor explaining wearily for perhaps the thousandth time:
"Tissues and organs have no fundamental defect; some repair and replacement has even been made. There should be consciousness, but there is not. The rest is mystery."
I went to Jan's room first. How long had it been since I had seen her real face? It was waxen, now. All the color faded, as in an old painting. Never mind how I felt; it was bad enough. I drifted to Doc's room. His eyes and cheeks were sunken. Hovering high over him, I could not tell that he breathed. Then I saw myself, gigantic and pallid. The embarrassment of seeing this corpselike thing was lessened by the fact that it resembled my former lusty self only slightly.
"Hurry back, Jan, please," I urged aloud, though no one could hear me. "Hurry back, Doc."
I heard things in that room. Physicians conversing in thunderous undertones: "I'm getting tired of this. Interesting case, but it has been too long. Can't last much longer. Yes, sometimes it seems an unkindness to try to maintain life in something doomed to die."
Now that there was a chance at last, the help of those doctors might be wavering.
I found an interne writing at a table in the corridor. It occurred to me that, had it been necessary, I would even have dunked my entire body in ink from his pen-nib, and written him a message by dragging myself across the paper of the form he was filling out. But I still had my jet rod, so I clung to his knuckle, and scribbled on the form in a charred line left by a needle of atomic fire:
I have returned. So have the others. Please continue your efforts. Thanks.Charles Harver.
I have returned. So have the others. Please continue your efforts. Thanks.
Charles Harver.
The interne's hand jerked. I was hurled toward the ceiling. But I heard his bone-jarring roar:
"Hey—Fletch! Dave! Look at this!"
If they didn't understand or believe, still they would be alert and interested. There would be no breakdown of their struggle to keep those bodies living.
I went back to the pallid thing that had been I, and did what was necessary, after I had cached the parchments I carried, and most of my equipment, in a groove in the molding on the wall. I allowed myself to be inhaled. Deep in the lungs, I cut my way into a capillary with a diamond splinter. It was an insignificant wound, really. Then, in a rushing flood, while dim, reddish light penetrated to my eyes, I was borne along. I knew by a violent turbulence that I passed through the heart. Then there was a sense of rising. Absolute gloom meant that I was inside the skull. There I lodged myself in as small and unimportant blood vessel as I could find.
The rest was simple after that. I merely relaxed. It seemed that I went to sleep. But I was in my own brain. Encouraged by a natural affinity, the little energy-node or whatever it was that was my awareness and my ego, went home. It was, shall we say, a wanderer's return.
When I awoke it was mid-morning. The mental pictures of recent events remained vivid, yet they had assumed almost the character of a dream. Beyond my window were maples and pines. A robin was scolding. It was very pleasant, indeed, until I thought of Jan and Doc.
"Mr. Harver, you're awake!" a nurse exclaimed. "We knew from last night's tests that you were suddenly much better! There had been a message written in an impossible way...." Here, the girl looked frightened.
"Never mind!" I growled. "How is my wife? And Dr. Lanvin?"
"Mrs. Harver is still asleep. But even her color is far better, and she smiles to herself. Dr. Lanvin is much improved, too, though he is still very weak, and has not regained consciousness."
I sighed with relief. They'd gotten back just as I had. Yet, with what we'd brought back, this was not an end but a tense and wonderful beginning. The android secret. Improved man, large or small. A revolutionary fact to be thrust on our mortal race, with all its doubts and enthusiasms and prejudices; to be pushed into the age-old familiar sequence of birth, death, happiness, suffering, and decay of our kind! It was monumental in its possibilities for triumph and disaster; and for a weak moment I had a mighty wish not to disturb the peace, and to let all of this sleep forever.
Of course doctors and newscast men talked to me that day:
"... The message? 'I have returned....' Just what, in plain language, did that mean?... What did you find in your explorations in miniature? There is a story from somebody named Scharber on the way to Earth from the Jovian system, now. A yarn about a race that made itself unbelievably small. Yes—to hide itself, I suppose."
"You might like the story when and if you hear all of it," I answered. "Let Dr. Lanvin, my superior, talk, when he is able."
Late that day I was on my feet briefly. I held my wife in my arms, saw her smile, heard her say: "Well, here we are, and what now, Charlie? I even wonder if folks will be disturbed to know that tiny Xians have been visiting Earth for ages, unnoticed. It's kind of creepy."
Doc grinned up at us wanly from his bed. "This carcass of mine seems pretty well spent from the strain of my absence," he laughed. "Oh, I guess the damned thing could be patched up some more. But why bother? When I can have another body, same size, same shape, same organs, including a brain duplicated to the last filament of a brain-cell—no special principle required, as in The Small—all built of tough protoplast, and with a few things straightened for a youthful appearance and advantages? Not a robot any more than a man is a robot, but a human of firmer flesh, capable of all that a human is capable of, but much more. Glad to see you two up and around."
Yeah, Doc had always been a progressive. Oh, he'd had his doubts, too; but now, if the Great Change fazed him at all, he didn't show it.
VIII
Jan and I soon left the hospital and set up housekeeping in an apartment of our own. But with all that medical science could do, Doc still had to stay in bed for a month. But he started directing the forces of destiny, almost as soon as he could give orders.
I was in on the deal, of course, as were several doctors from the hospital, and Bowhart, and Scharber when he arrived on Earth from Ganymede.
"Gonna do it, Doc, aren't you?" Scharber said, when he first saw him lying there, pale and wasted. "You lugs scared me plenty once. Now, though, I feel foolish. Big words you need for this! It's the dawn of the demigods!"
My blood thrilled with a mighty promise, too. At night, going to sleep, I'd exert my will. Lodged inside my head was a micro-android. I'd will myself into it again. And so, for a little while, I'd escape from my own mountainous form, to float free in the air and consult the notes and drawings on the parchment that I'd hidden on a molding in my hospital room.
Doc and Jan would do the same. They, too, following the plan we had made in space, had similarly cached their portions of his notes. But now we had assembled the complete record of the android process in Doc's house.
And so the beginning was made. When Doc was able to get around again, things really got under way. He obtained a government grant. A whole lab and a large staff of workers, was set aside for us. Retorts, pressure-vats, and other apparatus to produce the basic materials, were constructed and installed.
Ours was a major project, coinciding in time with another major project. For the first real starship was finally under construction on the Moon. Three more years it would take to be completed.
But our enterprise reached practical fruition in fourteen months. I was among the men present when Dr. Lanvin lowered himself into a tank of special gelatins.
He was nude and emaciated; yet he kept his humor, and a certain dignity. A thin hand made a slight gesture. To Scharber and me and the others, he said:
"This will be the easiest trick, learned among the micro-Xians. Simple tissue-replacement, cell by cell. Improved protoplast in place of protoplasm. That's all. Well, wish me luck."
The anesthetic that had been injected into his veins worked. He slumped down gently. The gelatins closed in over his face, and the month of slow gestation toward rebirth began. I saw his body at various stages of the process; little changed in appearance except for much increased robustness.
Other duties intervened, so I did not observe his actual removal from the tank nor his reawakening. But Jan and I met him a few hours later, as he left the small hospital of our lab. The old gray suit he wore, hardly fitted him. He still had his ragged blond mustache. You could tell that he was he—with many years subtracted. He looked about as old as I was—twenty-three. But these were the only signs.
He grinned like a kid, jubilant, but a bit self-conscious. He said, half joshing:
"Look me over—the miracle of the era, the successor to natural man; and no casual observer could ever tell that I'm not as humans have always been. I eat, I breathe oxygen; I need some foods with a different mineral content, it is true. I sleep if I want to. Given a mate of like substance, I can reproduce my own kind. But I won't age. Cut a finger off me, and it would manage to live independently for a long time. Wound me terribly, and I'd probably manage to heal up someway. Deprive me of air, or common chemical foods, and my body would try to seek out other sources of energy—sunlight, radioactivity, or whatever is available. Even change my basic tissue fluid from water to—"
It sounded a little like bragging, so Jan cut in with a feminine tease: "Yes, Dr. Lanvin. But put on your overcoat. People will think it odd that you're carrying it on such a sharp winter afternoon."
Doc laughed back, and obliged her almost with embarrassment, and we were three old friends together.
"People get injured," I said, "or just grow old; and though limited rejuvenation and repair is possible, this is a far better way. That's how it should go, Doc; and you'd think that no one with sense would want to stop it. In months there'll be thousands of androids. But here we are again—unsure of how it'll all be taken. Like you say, this is succession to natural man. It can be conceived of as the old Threat of the Robot idea, with refinements. A force of staggering newness, wonderful to the point of being terrifying. We're almost certain that there'll be trouble."
The story of all we'd learned among the micro-Xians, and its repercussions here at home, was mostly regarded as a fantastic rumor at first. It was talked of lightly on the newscast, and wherever people gathered:
"Little People that have been around all the time, watching us? Shucks, even my Irish grandmother knew that! So we're gonna become wonderful, artificial critters! Homo ex Machina! Well, well!... Okay—take me—I was always one for improvements!"
Yes, it went something like that. And when people first truly knew, their reactions were mild, curious, and friendly. One incident I remember particularly.
Jan and I and Doc and a very pretty girl were walking in a quiet street near the University. The girl was someone I had known from a picture. Shelookedlike the picture, again, now. That is, she had become like Doc. For the sake of youth and beauty, women can be more bold than men. She was Irma Tandray Lanvin, Doc's former wife—returned. And maybe she'd learned something about her man—that her rival, science, was part of him, and that she'd better take him as he was. Maybe he'd also learned the need of being attentive to a woman. Anyway, they both looked devoted, now, and I hoped it was so.
But what I meant to tell about was our neighbors. First we met Corbison, the mechanic, saying:
"Hi, Professor Lanvin. A fella'd hardly know you."
"It's still me," Doc answered.
Others gathered around as we paused to talk.
"How do you feel, Doctor?" asked an elderly woman. And when he replied, "Fine!" she said, "Think of it! I'm glad!"
There was even a pooch, who began with a prolonged sniffing at Doc, which progressed to a puzzled yelp, a wrinkling of brow above soulful and humorous brown eyes, then a licking of his hand, and a caper. In my mind the thought sprouted that a dog could become android, too.
"Wouldn't the word be 'canoid?'" Jan teased, knowing me well enough to be sometimes almost clairvoyant.
"Ah, the language struggles to keep up with progress!" a bookish youth commented lightly.
One of two small boys with their father fumbled with my fingers. "Aw, it feels just like anybody's hand, Mister," he growled, disappointed.
"That's a case of mistaken identity, young fella," I pointed out. "Iamanybody—yet."
Irma Tandray Lanvin took his grubby mitt, and laughed. "Is that the same, Joey?" she questioned. "It shouldn't be, but I'll bet it is."
The kid looked as if his leg was being pulled.
There was just friendly interest and wonder among all those people, then.
"What they reminded me of," Irma said later, "was some kind of simple natives on a lost island, being shown a mirror for the first time—before they think of black magic. Is that what we all are, basically, at first? Simple? Trusting?"
"That's a good question," Jan commented.
And so it was for months more. But all the elements of catastrophe were present. Earth was a crowded but beautiful place. Technology had done much to give it an idyllic mood, and to shelter its inhabitants in cotton-wool. But that same technology that could build so miraculously, still held a devilish potential, if it served minds motivated by hate and fear. Need one even remember, here, the asteroids that were the fragments of Planet X, or the glassy, fused-down ruins of Mars, still slightly tainted with radiations of nuclear fusion and fission?
The drives of intellect, of whatever origin, seem always to have a sullen, combative streak, constructive in one sense, since it is the force that brings peoples up from nothing. But the stubborn taking of sides also harbors deadly danger.
Almost unobtrusively at first, the threatening clouds began to gather throughout the world. At our busy and expanding lab, Bowhart, who, with Scharber, had been crewman aboard theIntruder, came to represent one phase of the opposition to the Great Change.
I remember what he said to me one day, his earnest face serious, his brow crinkled with the effort to be reasonable:
"Charlie, I could be all wrong. But for some time I've been thinking. Already there are twenty thousand once near-dead people who have been changed over; not to mention five thousand others who were in good health. Part of me admires the humanitarian angles here. But then there's that feeling of a slow, creeping invasion, so far unopposed. I can't exactly put my finger on just what makes it horrible; but at night I wake up sweating cold all over. Maybe I've got a blind spot in my head. All I know is that most everything about this remarkable duplication of humanity goes against the instincts in my slow Neanderthal guts. No, don't argue, Charlie. I've heard all of Dr. Lanvin's counter-points, and I just can't feel right about the whole thing. So I'd be a hypocrite if I worked in this lab any longer. I'll leave today, with the best of wishes to you and yours, and Dr. Lanvin. Tell him, will you?"
"All hail, Bow," I said, shaking his hand. "Thanks for the honesty. I know what you mean. I've felt it all myself, even though I don't quite agree."
Scharber, his former buddy, was also present in my office. They shook hands almost formally, now. For Scharber had moved all the way to the other side of the fence. He'd become the thrilled, eager kind.
"Poor Bow," he growled after Bowhart was gone. "A good guy, a gentleman. But mixed up, like some tough kid, afraid to ride on a merry-go-round. Feeling a black-rat-brown-rat difference. A primitive terror of being crowded out by something far more vigorous, and different from what he has always conceived of as human. Which brings up the reason why I'm here to see you, Charlie. I've screwed up my nerve to change the quality of my bones and meat. As far as I'm concerned, the process might as well start tonight. Okay?"
I nodded. "Okay. Fine, Scharber," I said.
If folks had all been like Scharber, there would have been no obstruction of progress. If they had all been like Bowhart, there would at least have been no danger. But as always, there were other types. Among them were those who like to speak out against something.
Among these, now, was an old classmate of mine, whom I have mentioned before, one Armand Cope. Already he was becoming minorly famous, laying down the "facts" with a definite oratorical talent. I think that he was, in the main, honest in his beliefs. But pledged and prejudiced to one point of view, he was blindly violent toward its opposite number. Cope was a fanatic. And now, with the smokes of fear curling in many minds, nothing could have been more dangerous than his activities, and the activities of the numerous individuals who were like him.
I heard him speak over the radio and television. Always his words drummed on the same points:
"Friends, the craze for gadgets has become a folly, an insult to man's dignity. The proof has become brutally plain today. All we ever wanted was to live an uncomplex life—having houses that we build, and crops that we raise, with simple materials and simple work of our muscles, as nature intended. Science? Much of it should have stopped before it ever started. It was a trap from the first, offering its benefits as bait, not letting us know that it led to this mechanical abomination, which seeks to sully our own natural being with a hideous slime of the laboratory! The prospect makes one's nerves crawl; death is better than the triumph of such a thing! We must fight and fall, if necessary! Let the maniacs and fools know the real strength of humanity!"
Plenty of people were eager to listen to Cope, and to cheer him on.
I gulped, and then grinned at Doc rather wanly. Jan and I were in his house that particular evening.
"It's like we thought it would be, before anyone on Earth even knew about what we were bringing them," Jan said.
"You're going to talk back, Shane," Irma, Doc's wife, commented, with a thread of steel in her voice.
"Of course I'm going to talk back," he answered. "But I'm afraid that that could never do enough good. There'll always be enough point to what Cope and his kind say, for scared, furious souls to cling to. I wish mightily that it could be different; but I suspect that what I say will only help to consolidate another fierce belief, to oppose Cope's believers. Yes, like two mighty armies being drawn up for battle. That is the real danger! Well, anyway I've got to try."
And so Dr. Lanvin was on television the following evening, speaking from the Civic Center of Chicago. Jan and I left to run the lab, listened from my office. It was a good speech:
"... I've never liked cheap, showy gadgets, performing some small function that a person might do as well, and as easily, and with less affectation, with his own head and hands. There, perhaps Mr. Cope and I agree, as, no doubt we do about a pastoral simplicity when it is possible—the smells of rain and woods and gardens. But Cope forgets that, crowded as the Earth is, with its billions of mouths to feed, such beautiful, rustic inefficiency is no longer possible, and hence beyond being argued for, reasonably, unless the starship brings us to other habitable worlds.
"Which presents the subject of inventions—natural products of natural minds which are too sublime to be called gadgets. The starship, for one. The android process, for another. Does Mr. Cope suppose that the benefits the latter represents, would ever encourage mankind as a whole to suppress it? It couldn't be suppressed, by law or by anyone, as long as there are people left to dream of vigor going on and on.
"Mr. Cope says further that his nerves crawl. This is nothing more than the mistrust of the new and unknown, which time will take away. Yet, worst of all, he speaks of fighting and falling. I hope that he does not mean it. For today, that can truly be a thing of horror, and final silence. Therefore, I plead that he, and all those who have been tempted to think in this manner, review their reasoning, and correct its defects."
I visited Cope at his home. "Look, Cope," I said, "we used to be friendly enough to live and let each other live. Don't you see that what you're doing now can end all that has been built, and finish the human race—natural and android—entirely? You're bucking a logic and a need for betterment that's far too big for anyone—the death of death, you might say. What do you want in its place? The death of everyone? You've got to stop talking as you do, Cope, pounding on the detonator of a world!"
His intellectual face went white with rage at what I had said. "You—Harver!" he growled softly. "You dare to talk to me like that! When you helped to turn this hellish development loose on Earth! Make every human being a snake, and it would not be half as bad. Yes, I was half your friend. But now get out of my house—out before I kill you!"
Further signs of danger were soon more definite, after that. Several days after Scharber's emergence from the process, I was walking with him in a Chicago street. A tactless acquaintance of his, of opposite inclinations and a dislike of him, previously entertained, ran into us in a theatre lobby.
"Hi, Scharber," he greeted. "I heard. You were born a robot, so why bother to change? And why didn't you at least order yourself a better face?"
Scharber retained a normal capacity for getting sore, and only a normal amount of self-control. "A robot is a machine, Powers," he said. "So is the old time protoplasmic man. So is the android. It's silly to make a distinction, based on silly pride at being what you seem to think of as exclusively human. And maybe your face could also benefit by some changes."
Sure, Powers had been brooding, too, and brewing up poison. The fact that he swung at my companion, proved it. Scharber ducked like lightning, and responded with a much-pulled return punch—if he'd given it half of full force, Powers' jaw would have been a mush of bone-splinters. Powers went flat; and it was some seconds before he started to scream and curse:
"Tin monsters!" he spat venomously and inaccurately. "Get them—both of them! Trying to crowd us off the Earth!"
Somebody with sense shouted, "Keep your heads!" But that, to some others, only represented the challenge of opposition. A half-dozen men came at us at once. I upset two of them all right; but being still just ordinary, I wouldn't have had much chance, if it wasn't for Scharber. Presently, with a pack gathering around us, we had to fight our way out of there, Scharber sprinting away at last, with me riding him pickaback. No protoplasmic man could have run a third as fast as he did then. I suspect that that display of speed scared and infuriated our attackers, further.
Other androids came up against this same kind of experience, and their constant victories in such scuffles, sharpened their terrifying aspect in many minds, and the conviction that there had to be a battle to the death.
Nor was it only humans of the older order who gave way to outbursts of fury. Soon it was give and take. Androids retained all of the old capacities for various emotions. It seemed that each violent incident would be followed by something worse.
I saw one android blown to bits, his flesh still squirming hours after he had ceased to exist as a composite entity. One severed arm had drawn itself along the ground with clutching fingers, almost like a great slug crawling, for two hundred yards.
There was something demoniac about that, which, for the moment, almost made me agree with Armand Cope.
The fury of the conflict came to a head one night when our laboratory went up in a cloud of nuclear fire. Five hundred persons were wiped out in the blast. It was lucky, indeed, that the lab was outside of Chicago proper, or the casualty list would have been much longer. Of our inner circle of friends, only Scharber was in the blast, and he escaped flying fragments and incandescent heat by dropping behind some heavy masonry. Radiations couldn't hurt him at all, though for a time he must keep away from the rest of us. The others of our group were safe in town.
There was the cold rage in Scharber's face when I first spoke to him from a little distance at the edge of the ruins.
"Damn them all, Charlie!" he growled. "Stupid, thick-headed, backward fools!"
"Easy, Scharb," I said. "The government, and the considerable majority of saner people, are trying to restore order."
It was true. Police forces were everywhere. Our president pleaded for calm. A cache of nuclear munitions was discovered and put under guard. It might even have belonged to androids. Nobody knew. It was in an old Chicago cellar. But of one thing we were sure—that there had to be many other caches of hellstuff, undiscovered and available to the hotheads and jerks, hidden in caves and woods and various other places, throughout the world.
One thing wasn't done. Armand Cope, and other rabble-rousers like him, were not put under restraint. It could have been accomplished within the emergency provisions of democracy, though a willful connection between the speeches that they had made and the blowup of the lab, could not be proven. Maybe the government was afraid to restrain them—afraid that their arrest would make them martyrs—and that this martyrdom would trigger the bombshell in the taut nerves and frightened minds of their followers. This belief may well have been the truth.
IX
Jan and I went to Doc's house, inside a police cordon, for a discussion. We risked radiation by bringing Scharber along. We wanted to make sure that he wouldn't do anything vindictive, which might well have happened had we left him by himself.
Irma met us at the door. "Shane almost wishes now that the android process had remained just the property of the micro-Xians," she said. "That's how bad matters seem to him at this point."
Doc jumped to his feet as we entered his study. "Cope means to speak again tonight," he announced. "Cope, and about a hundred others of his crowd, from scattered radio and television stations. We know about what they'll say, more or less. Yeah—'Get rid of these mechanical demons while there are still less than thirty-thousand of them. Before it's too late! Kill the serpent! Return to simplicity! Do you know that even their radioactive metabolism is poisonous to us?'"
Doc paused and groaned. "The latter isn't even true," he went on. "At least not while an android is on Earth, breathing oxygen and living by chemical energy. Then the radiation of a subatomic tissue-process is suppressed almost to zero. But that's the way most of Cope's arguments go—they leap thinly to conclusions, without thinking matters out to any depth. But many people don't want to think deeply, or else they're too frightened. And tonight I suspect that Cope and his bunch will give the order to attack. Charlie, what are we going to do?"
I was in a cold sweat. "You know what we can try as a temporary relief measure, Doc," I said. "We can silence Cope and a few of the others—you know how. The only trouble is that there are so many of those loudmouths, and only you and I and maybe Jan who are in a position to do the only thing that can be done. We may not be able to shut up anywhere near enough of them to get over this danger spot, but we have to try."
Jan came over to me and pressed my hand, and it helped. She was always courageous and cool.
As it turned out, there were few speeches of Cope's kind made that night. Cope collapsed before the television lenses and the microphones. No, he didn't die; he had what looked very like an epileptic fit. He dropped before he uttered a word. He frothed at the mouth, he snored. He looked ridiculous, even mad.
Why all this happened was simple. It was an old Xian trick. A micro-android—Doc had transmigrated briefly again—was inside Cope's skull, tampering with his brain. The tiniest flash at lowest power from a jet rod directed against the proper nerve center, was how it was done.
Doc silenced another character called Minton. I gagged another pair of flannel-mouths named Trefford and Donalds the same way. Jan managed to fix one called Parkhurst. That made five of the worst who had been operating around Chicago. But it still left over ninety others. It worried us badly, until we got back home, and into normal-sized bodies, once more. Scharber had been a good boy, staying out of trouble beside Doc's television, with Irma.
"Not one of the others said much either," he announced quietly. "They all fell on their faces the same way." He paused for just a second before he added, "I wonder why?" his eyes oddly aglow.
"There could be only one answer to that, couldn't there?" Irma hinted.
Doc grinned reminiscently.
Jan smiled. "The elves of legend, the helpful ones," she chuckled. "Well, who knows but what there's a connection with those old folk tales? Legends frequently have a basis in fact. It seems that I remember a strange, deep little guy who lives way out in space, and down near the limit of smallness. His name was Kobolah, and lots of his people didn't believe that Earthians should be trusted. He almost got into trouble over that. But it appears that he still has lots of friends among his own kind who'd like to see the android become successful among us. It seems, further, that if Kobolah's particular asteroid world took off for the stars, already, as appeared to be intended, he and some pals have so far stayed behind. Or else it was just some pals of his who helped us. But who knows? Maybe we'll see him again. Anyway, his world was as wonderful a place as you could imagine. I wonder if there's anything more strange in the whole universe?"
As Jan's musing words ended, I saw a strange, speculative look in Scharber's face. Doc's eyes were soft for a second.
"I guess that miniature things still intrigue me," he said. "But we're tied up with bigger facts now. I think we've won a temporary peace, but I'll bet that that's all it will be—temporary. Even if Cope and the rest of the same crop stop shouting, now, there'll be others to do just as they did. In a day or two we'll know for sure."
Doc was right. On the very next evening Armand Cope was on the air again, frightened, but determined. "This treachery of last night, even though I do not understand its method, makes me even better aware that this is a fight to the finish," he growled. "A fight against a hideous thing, to which there can be no end except victory or death. As long as I am a man, I shall be proud...."
Doc shrugged mildly. "I'd almost say 'Blah, tiresome fool!'" he remarked. "But it wouldn't be fair. Cope stubbornly believes what he says, I'm sure. It's etched into his nature. To a lesser degree with most, it's the same with many others. So, this is it."
The following evening, Doc made his suggestions over the air, speaking from his house:
"I am addressing those, who, in the eyes of some, have ceased to be human. But perhaps the term, 'android' should be dropped entirely. We are men in form, mind, emotion, aim, and pleasure—let there be no instinctive, sullen, backward doubt of that! Our shape and our organs are human. We have sprung from man's aspirations, and his quest for more knowledge and better living. Though the knowhow of our living was borrowed from another people, it would have come to men on Earth in time, and by their own efforts. We are thus, simply, a far hardier variety of what humans have always been. To those who are weaker, troubled by fear, less understanding, we should be generous, until more time lets them realize these truths. Therefore, I suggest that we leave the Earth to them, going outward where our powers permit us to go freely."
That is how it has been. Among the androids, as if the interstellar regions was their natural habitat, Dr. Lanvin's hint took hold at once. On Earth, tension eased gradually, until even Armand Cope's voice sounded puzzled, and then sank to silence.
But let me tell about a side-event. Doc found a toy-sized craft in his workshop, a ship with tapered bow and stern, and retractable airfoils. It was less than an inch long. Need I say how we boarded it—Doc, Jan, and I? Or how later, we and one Kobolah, conversed under the scope of a micro-manipulator, while Scharber and Doc's Irma took turns watching us through the lenses?
We thanked the tiny Xian for all his help. We saw his electronic visual filaments blink over his eyes when Jan suggested:
"Kobolah, you could be cast in a larger form like the old Xians. You could go with Dr. Lanvin in the first ship to leave for the solar system of Sirius."
"Maybe—someday," he buzzed in answer. "Not now. To Sirius? I'm going there, anyway with my own people soon. Time? There is plenty—for everything. May you make few errors."
Then, with his jet rod he blasted off into the air. Within a minute, his ship, aboard which were hundreds of his kind that we had seen, spat blue fire, and darted out of the open window.
Scharber chuckled almost wistfully. "Micro-androids," he said. "Strangest thing I ever saw. Why didn't he take me with him? Got to start seeing the outer-universe somewhere. Why not in miniature? Darn, androids can go anywhere."