A dull fury came to Ed Dukas. He might have guessed that all chances of their eluding surveillance would have been countered carefully. This birdlike mechanism must have followed them all the way from Port Smitty, keeping just out of sight.
Then a more hopeful idea hit him. But reason conquered it. "No," he said aloud, gripping Barbara's shoulder so that she could hear. "If the pseudo-canary was Uncle Mitch's guide for us, it would have revealed itself sooner, and the messages on paper would not have been necessary."
In a flash Ed drew his own Midas Touch and fired it at the place among the broken rocks where the canary had just vanished. At a little distance there was the usual spurt of incandescence, fringed now with red dust. But from the projecting boulders near its base, a small yellow form spurted with a faint and musical twitter of mockery. Then a heavy voice spoke—one which neither Ed nor Barbara recognized just then:
"Better luck next time, robot lovers. Lead on!"
Thereafter, the false canary was careful not to show itself. And Ed was left with his frustrated anger, and with other uncertain thoughts. What if the written messages had not come from Mitchell Prell at all, but from someone else with an unknown purpose? Or, what if they were from Uncle Mitch, but had been prepared long ago and left to be presented to him, Ed Dukas, by means of some mechanical agent? What if—well—many things.
Using his tiny portable radar unit to locate the bird drew only a blank. Perhaps the little mechanism with a radio speaker for a voice was effectively shielded against such detection, even at short range.
To attempt evasive action would be a waste of time and waning energy. There was nothing to do but go on, see what developed, and trust to luck. There was the certainty that real pursuit would come, but what shape it would take remained unknown.
As Ed and Barbara plodded on through the day, their minds became fuzzy with weariness. Once, in a kind of retreat from present harsh facts, Ed's thoughts touched a vivid daydream that he'd had before, of a planet of some star. He looked down at imaginary dry ground under imaginary feet and saw that each pebble under the strange, brilliant sunshine had a little hole in it. And something shaped like a cross, with four rough, brownish-gray arms that could bend in any direction, scrabbled away, flat against the soil, its equipment glinting. The thickets all around were stranger than those of Mars.
Yes, it was just a daydream, originating from within himself, like an old, half-buried hope of some distant exploration. He wondered if it could ever still have any fulfillment, or if that even mattered any more? Perhaps, for all he knew, his wife and he were now headed for an even stranger region.
Ed shook his head to clear it. He did not want to disturb the envelope in his pouch too often. To expose the ink to the dried-out Martian air, while the writing was in progress at hour-hand speed, might spoil a vital message. But at last he chanced it. It seemed that the writer was not much troubled by the presence of the bird-thing or what it might mean.
Barbara and Ed read avidly: "Base of capped granite rock before you. Lab."
Barbara nodded toward a formation which loomed a half mile ahead in the freezing cold of late afternoon. The slab, balanced crosswise on a slender pinnacle, identified it beyond doubt, though there were other similar spires around it. It cast its shadow on the sunlit dunes. Or was all of that dark, irregular patch shadow?
Ed Dukas and his bride had not enjoyed the luxury of natural sleep for a long time. But summoning their flagging strength, they hurried forward. Ed felt that at last he was approaching the solution of ten-year-old enigmas.
The darker area at one side of the capped rock was not all shadow. But the Dukases had scant attention for the bluish masses of plushy stuff that grew in this aridity. At another time it might have been fascinating, for it was vegetation related to the android as moss is related to a man. It was a growth of vitaplasm—another of Mitchell Prell's experiments. But Ed and Barbara had no chance to ponder this.
They located an eighteen-inch cleft at the rock's base. Edging into it, they found an irregular stone pivoted on steel hinges. To their touch, it closed behind them, and bolts clicked. From the outside now the outline of the door would seem merely a pattern of natural cracks in the granite pinnacle.
Atomic battery lamps lighted the passage, and there were more heavy doors, some of them of steel, for Ed and Barbara to bolt behind them. The place was like a small, secret fortress. At the bottom of a spiral stair, beyond a small airlock, was Mitchell Prell's latest and perhaps last workshop.
He must have blasted it from the crust of Mars without help. It was a series of a half-dozen rooms and was no larger than a fair-sized apartment. Smallest of all was the combined sleeping room and kitchen; and there the evidence of months or perhaps years of absence was plainest. The bunk was thick with dust, and food remnants were blackened on unwashed plates. The air, of earthy density, smelled of decay and a strange pungence. The floors and walls were crusted with patches of the tough, bluish growths seen outside. It was suggestive at once of both fungus and moss but was really like neither. It had a pretty color under the lamps, which had certainly been burning for a long time.
Ed and Barbara removed their oxygen helmets and began a swift exploration of the premises. The rooms had all the marks of lone bachelor occupancy by a man too fearfully busy with his own deep pursuits to waste time on more than the barest attempts at housekeeping. Apparatus was everywhere. There were even recognizable parts of a helicopter—the one, no doubt, which had brought Prell and his equipment to this refuge.
At first they thought that he might since have fallen victim to some violence or accident. And then they found his body in a rectangular, plastic-covered tank, submerged in a cloudy, viscous fluid. It was a standard sort of vat, much used in laboratories in repairing extensive injury and restoring a destroyed body from a personal recording—either in protoplasm or vitaplasm. Near by, there were three similar vats, which, when opened, proved to contain only fluid.
Barbara and Ed looked for a long moment at Mitchell Prell's forever young face. It was peaceful in death that was not quite death; for of the latter you could never be sure any longer, unless it was the death of the species.
If there were guile behind that gentle face, it did not show. If there were darkness of purpose, or stubborn unwillingness to recognize errors that he had committed in a civilization that tottered as it reached for greatness, it could not be seen. But in this refuge, one fact was plain: Mitchell Prell had gone on with his work in a super-biology.
Ed wandered over to a beautiful microscope of a standard make. Its attachments also started out from a familiar design. It was fitted with dozens of special screws and levers. When Ed, and then Barbara, peered into its eye-piece, they found that each of these screws and levers could manipulate a tiny tool, almost too small to see with the naked eye. There were minute cutters, calipers and burnishing wheels. Set up under the microscope there was even what seemed to be a tiny lathe. In fact, there was an entire machine shop on an ultra-miniature scale. And there were tiny, tonglike grasping members, intended to serve—on such a reduced scheme of things—as hands, where the human hand, working directly, would have been hopelessly mountainous.
In addition to this equipment, there were exact duplicates of the vats across the room and their attendant apparatus, except that each entire assembly was less than a half-inch long. In one vat there was a human figure much smaller than a doll, yet perfect.
Barbara laughed nervously. Even in this century of wonders, the human mind had its limitations for making swift adjustments. The laugh was a denial of what her eyes beheld.
Ed Dukas's wide face looked at once avid and haggard. Beside the tiny vats there was also another microscope, complete in every detail, yet of the same relative dimensions as the little figure in the vat. But this lesser microscope was of the electron variety. It had to be. For at this reduced size light waves themselves were too coarse in texture to be effective for close-range work.
Ed turned slowly toward his young wife, whose eyes were alert and wonder-filled in spite of her weariness. He noticed the pleasant wave in her hair. He noted the charming curve of her brow, the tiny and pleasing irregularity of her nose. And what was all this attention but a clinging to an object of love when facing a strangeness so great that it scared him as he had never been scared before. Ed Dukas knew that his face must have gone gray.
Now his words came slowly and precisely: "Babs, I've told you that I watched part of Mitchell Prell's first message being written. That in the moving speck of wet ink, for an instant something looked like a man the size of a mote! I thought I'd imagined it. But is that what Uncle Mitch is now? An android so small that the only way for him to write a note to a person of usual dimensions is to surround his own body with a droplet of ink and to drag himself across the paper, making the lines and loops of script?"
Barbara looked at him obliquely, doubting his seriousness.
"Aw, now, Eddie-boy, take it a little bit easy," she said. "Please do."
He didn't answer her. He let his unchanging expression and many seconds of silence do the answering for him. His pulses drummed in his ears.
At last he said, "No, darling, I mean it. There's no reason why an android no bigger than the smallest insects can't exist. And the signs of what Mitchell Prell did in this laboratory are plain enough.
"Working at first with the larger microscope and the miniature tools and machinery under it, he duplicated a now common kind of biological apparatus in half-inch size. In its tank he caused to grow the simulacrum of himself that you can see. Aside from the difference in dimensions, that much has been both possible and fairly common practice for years. Its brain having been stamped with all phases of his memory and personality, it became him when it awoke. His own body he left inert and preserved in the large vat. But he was not finished. He had made just one step toward the degree of smallness that he wanted to reach. So he started over from scratch, constructing first another microscope and then relatively minute machinery and tools, fine beyond our sight. Under that tiny electron microscope I'll bet there's another, smaller machine shop, and a smaller tank from which a mote-sized Mitchell Prell emerged. It must all have been quite a job. It's not hard to see where those ten years went."
Barbara was silent for a long time. Finally, she said, "It sounds reasonable—superficially. But still, is it possible? Consider a brain. It can come in many sizes, from an ant's to a human being's. But all are made of molecules of the same dimensions. And it has been pretty well determined that a brain must be always about as big as a human being's to be truly intelligent. Trying to cram such intelligence into a smaller lump of gray matter—composed of the familiar molecules—would be like trying to weave fine cloth out of rope. How can you get around that, Ed?"
"Maybe I can guess," he said. "With smaller units. How about the electron, Babs? Far smaller than the molecule, certainly. And it's been the soul of the best calculators—thought machines—for a couple of centuries. There isn't any doubt that a brain of microscopic size could function by far finer electronic patterning. No, it probably wouldn't work in natural protoplasm. But we already know the flexibility of vitaplasm: easy to redesign, capable of drawing its energy even from a nuclear source. Well, you figure it out. What have we here but other android advantages? I think my uncle once told me that he meant to go where no one could go exactly as a human being."
"All right, Eddie," she conceded. "I guess I'm persuaded. Proud girl, me. I've got a smart boyfriend. And your uncle—he skips blithely from the bigness of the interstellar regions in his thoughts to the smallness of dust! And he seems,actually, to have done the latter—in person! Is that what we're supposed to accept as truth? If so, he must have been with you all the time, or at least for quite a while. On Earth, even. And he must have come out to Mars with us. He was right in your pocket, riding with the paper and pen. To write, he must have gunked himself up good with the ink inside the pen point. Ugh—what a thought! And maybe he's still in your pocket right now. He—or a tremendously shrunken equivalent of him. Does all this stack up right in your eyes, Ed?" A pallor had crept through Barbara's tan.
"Pretty much so," Ed replied heavily.
"So what do we do now, Ed? Try to follow your uncle's path—down?"
Ed's flesh tingled. To follow Mitchell Prelldown—a course more weirdly remote than traveling to the stars. He did not answer Barbara. He unzipped his pocket. He could not tell whether a minute android emerged or not. There were no further messages on the envelope.
But from a sound cone in a shadowy corner of this workshop, there suddenly came tones that a decade had not rubbed from his memory:
"Nipper-hello! Or is it always Ed now? So we've come to Mars together. And you with Barbara! Well, maybe that is an agreeable complication! Now we can talk. Here I have the right amplifying apparatus. I need help, and you always seemed the best—and enough like me. I know your doubts about science, and I don't blame you. But I'm still the same—wanting to learn everything that I can, feeling that everything should work out right."
The stillness closed in again. Ed and Barbara looked at each other. Technology was full of tricks—the possibility of a thousand illusions. Could he even trust a voice, made so like Mitchell Prell's used to be? And could he trust the mind behind it? Even if it truly was his uncle's?
"Work out right!" Ed growled mockingly. "That sounds almost pious! If you are what you say you are, you were on Earth and have seen everything. You know then how right things have been! I was around when the Moon blew—remember? And no scared hotheads caused that. But there are plenty of them now. And from here on Mars, I've expected to see Earth momentarily puff up into a little nova."
There was a sigh from the sound cone. "So I'm to blame—at least partly—for helping to give those fools something to be furiously right or mistaken about," Mitchell Prell's voice replied. "Well, I was what I was, and I am what I am, Ed. I'm sorry about many things that happened. But I can't erase them. I've urged you to come here to help me try to counteract them. I don't think you'll stay angry with me, Ed. Come where I am—you and Barbara. It can be done quite quickly now. I have two forms prepared. They will take the lines and personalities of anyone. Just set the dials above two of the unoccupied vats at one hundred—full energy. Lower yourselves into the fluid. Clothes, or lack of them, won't matter. Your own bodies will sink into suspended animation."
Again the voice from the sound cone faded out. Ed's and Barbara's eyes met in a tense congress of thought. They were being asked to leave their natural, physical selves behind and to become beings of vitaplasm. To many, that was horror in itself, even without a radical change in size. Then there was the fear of loss of identity. To be an exact duplicate in mind and memory might not necessarily mean to be the same person. Here was a metaphysical problem elusive and hard to answer. What others of experience might have told you could never quite satisfy you. You had to learn for yourself.
Beyond all that, there was that drop, down and down into tininess, to where physical laws themselves must seem warped by the relativity of size levels, and to where nothing remained quite the same. Could one's mind even endure the difference?
For a moment Ed felt cornered and panicky. But something eager and questioning came into him. For the first time he wished that Barbara had not come with him.
Finally he said, "I've got to go down, Babs. There just isn't any other way."
"What's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose, Ed," she said. "With us, that was settled a while ago."
He didn't protest. She was resourceful. She'd be a help, not a trouble. And he knew that love of adventure was as strong in her as in himself. So the decision was made.
Suddenly they heard a distant clink and hammering. Metal against stone. The canary had followed them to Mitchell Prell's underground fortress. And of course the little mechanism had been merely a scout for some larger party farther to the rear.
Again the words came from the sound cone, but in a whisper, "I was pretty sure you'd be followed, Ed. But we should still have considerable time. It'll be hard for them to break into here—without destroying everything. And I think they'll want to see what I've got."
Ed Dukas had never before considered his brilliant tireless uncle in any way impractical. But now he was sensing a certain inadequacy and felt that Mitchell Prell truly needed him. If it was Mitchell Prell, of course—if the voice itself wasn't a trick. But now Ed was at least more confident that he was not being fooled. What doubt remained had to be part of many calculated risks.
"All right, Uncle Mitch," he said.
Barbara smiled at him rather wanly, but her eyes held a glint. He kissed her.
"So here goes, eh, Eddie?" she said.
"Be seein' yuh, sweetheart," he said, taking her in his arms.
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 ofexistingin 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'reandroidsnow, 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.
The colossi were piling Mitchell Prell's movable equipment into a corner, where Midas Touch pistols, turned low, could play neutron streams against it. Then they would no doubt scour walls, floors and ceilings with the same corpuscular beams. The air itself would heat up considerably. Combustible floating dust, would burn to finer dust. Drafts would seem blasting hurricanes.
"There's a way out—if we hurry," Mitchell Prell said. "Imitate my movements."
And so they swam in the atmosphere. But without other aid it would have been slow going indeed. But the motion of dust particles revealed the direction of air currents that could be gotten into and used to cover distance.
Still, progress back to the shelf and the microscopes, and the tiny workshop from which they had been blown but a few minutes before, was agonizingly slow. By luck and scanty concealment offered by the jar, this paraphernalia had not yet been discovered or moved by Loman and his men.
Ed and his companions came to rest at last on the rough glass surface where little machines were arranged around the vats and their apparatus.
"Tools that we can use," Ed said. "And materials that we can work. We've got to try to take some things along. To make weapons. Could we contrive Midas Touch pistols that we could hold?"
"Maybe," Prell answered. "I hope so. Take this, and that—and that over there. Hurry."
Creatures of vitaplasm, with its complex combinations of silicon compounds paralleling the hydrocarbons, and its internal metabolism that could even involve transmutation and subatomic energy release, still could die under sufficiently violent conditions.
The three tiny androids scrambled to gather supplies and to equip themselves. Ed was awkward in the new conditions, where even the atmosphere tried to tear him away from any firm foothold. But he loaded himself down.
Before they were finished gathering all that they could use, the rattle and flare of Midas Touch weapons, turned low so as not to damage Mitchell Prell's various apparatus, but strong enough to destroy any clinging speck of synthetic life that Carter Loman might suspect the presence of, began behind them. Prell's experimental plant life withered slowly.
"Lead on!" Ed Dukas shouted.
And so, though hurricanes had begun for them, they crept across the glazed surface beneath the barrel of the little electron microscope and dropped into the air at its edge. It was like leaping from a cliff. But it was different, too. For if they had not been so heavily burdened, they might not even have fallen. Being such small objects, they had a greater exposed surface than large objects, in proportion to their bulk. This greater surface, like a sail presented to the wind, offered a larger area for speeding molecules to hit; hence, without the equipment, they would have been as buoyant as dust particles.
Still lashed together by their joining strand of floss, the three fugitives drifted slowly down to the rear of the shelf.
"An inch more to go," Prell shouted, in grim humor. "A rather long one, I'm afraid."
Again they crept. Rough stone of the cupboardlike compartment rose around them, seemingly taller than buildings they had known. And it glowed reddish-violet. Fluorescence, it must be, from the scattered radiations of the Midas Touch weapons. Tediously the three crawled toward escape, as if through a night of fire and violence. Finally they reached a minute steel door in the corner of the cupboard, half hidden in the roughness of the stone.
They closed the door behind them and refastened its crude bolt. The space around them now was narrower—more in proportion to their own size. And there was a glow here—at least to their final eyesight. Perhaps there was a trace of radioactive ore in the rock causing the glow. The walls were as rough as a cave's.
"Just a chink in the stone," Barbara commented.
"Yes," Prell replied. "A crevice leading out to the face of the rock formation. Feel the draft of Martian night air? It would smother and freeze you if you were as you were born. But our flesh not only resists cold, it can create plenty of warmth within itself. We will be perfectly comfortable here, and safe—I think. Do you want to rest?"
"No," Barbara told him. "We don't really need that, either, do we? So let's begin what must be done. What are our plans, Ed?"
"We'll make a few things, if we can," Ed replied. "Then get to a spaceport somehow. I suppose that if we pick the right wind at the right time, it will blow us there—eh, Uncle Mitch? Then we'll do as you did—drift into a space liner and get a free ride back home to Earth. There—well, we'll see. If we're very, very lucky, we might even get our old selves back."
Just then that recovery seemed to be his greatest, most desperate yearning, with many, many obstacles in its way. Even their personal recordings were in enemy hands now. Small though those cylinders were, they were far too huge for them to move or to think of recapturing.
"Where can we start to work?" Ed said to his uncle.
"Farther along the cleft," Prell told him. "I've already cached some supplies there. And there's a level space in a side cleft protected from these constant air currents."
Now they leaped upward and let the draft carry them. The muted quivers of destruction in the chambers from which they had just escaped, they left behind them. They arrived in the work area and got busy at once.
Near dawn they felt the quiverings of unusual sounds. So they followed air currents, betrayed by drifting particles of fluorescent dust, to a crack that showed starshot sky and the undulating desert. Thus they saw Carter Loman's caravan start back toward Port Karnak, with its booty of all that Mitchell Prell had made here: the fruit of a man's mind. But to Loman it was also the worst of the world's inventions. Loman was an android and also, obviously, a central figure, a personage of some importance, or he would not have been sent on this mission. But his mind remained that of a bigot.
Just then Ed Dukas found a savage pleasure in shaking one of the smallest fists ever to exist at the three retreating tractor vehicles. "Loman, Granger and the rest of you," he said, "there'll come a time. You've been fools. You were born too late."
The work went on for days—more tediously than Ed could have imagined, even with only hand tools to use. The same old metals seemed unbelievably hard at this size level—and coarse in texture—as if the atoms themselves had expanded. Barbara could scrub and scrub with a bit of abrasive mineral, achieving only what seemed a poor excuse for a polish. Hammering did little good in shaping such metals, though Ed Dukas and Mitchell Prell were relatively so much stronger than they had been. Only cutting and pressure tools were effective, when aided by the softening heat of a forge—a tiny speck of nuclear incandescence maintained by a neutron stream and carefully screened, though vitaplasm, being actively or latently radioactive itself, was far less endangered by radiation than protoplasm.
But at last they produced three rough, cylindrical devices and their fittings.
Ed Dukas began to adjust to littleness. But to see boulders with their stratified layers of mica floating lazily through the thin air never lost its wonder. Crazy beauty was all around: strange, rich colors; keening musical notes—fine overtones of normal sounds. Sometimes, in the daylight, near cracks open to the outdoors, you saw living things seldom bigger than yourself: Martian life; little pincushions of deep, translucent purple veined with red and pronged with cilia of an indescribably warm hue. These were Martian microorganisms blown in by the breeze.
And once there was something else that Ed and Barbara both saw: something like the smallest of Earthly insects, but not that, either. A thing of steel-blue filaments and great eyes, and vibrating vanes as glossy as transparent plastic. Ed knew that he could shatter it with his hands. It rested in the sunshine for a moment; then it was gone.
"I suppose that there are star worlds as odd as this," Barbara commented.
She was strange herself—an elfin being that floated in the air, her form dimly aglow whenever there was shadow or darkness. To Ed, she was part of his vast separation from Earth. In accustoming himself to an environment where even the simple act of walking was a memory, it seemed that Earth dimmed away, easily yet frighteningly, like a dream, until Ed knew that, degree by degree, his mind was becoming different than it had been, and he not quite the same person. And it seemed more so with Babs.
"Bacon and eggs for breakfast, Eddie," she teased once, lightly. "Walks under old trees beside a river. The Youth Center. Teachers I used to know. Yes, I remember. But the memory tries to get dim. And I want to hold on. Got to, because there are things to be done. But sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't regret the duty. I think of swimming in raindrops or floating high over trees—being as whimsical as children and poets can imagine. We could do it! It's part of being super, isn't it? And I used to be scared of becoming an android!"
It was fun, and relief from grimness, to hear her talk like that. And now, too, he half agreed that being of synthetic substance was not so bad. Yet part of him still ached savagely for his old dimensions. And here in smallness he sometimes felt that she was changing so much that he was losing her—that she would let herself be blown away into the vastness, never to be seen again.
They ate a food-jelly, which Prell had prepared long ago for his sojourn here, and radioactive silicates. In it you could see the thready molecular chains and the beads of moisture between. Viscosity complicated etiquette. Everything tried to stick to you. You laughed and shook it off as best you could.
But even in fantastic moments grim facts didn't truly fade. Hard work helped sustain them. Murder and loss were too new. The danger on Earth was still too plain—perhaps poised on hours or weeks of time. Speed was the keynote.
Only once the three micro-beings peeped back into the lab that had belonged to Mitchell Prell, colossus. It was empty now, glowing with the taint of radiation left by the Midas Touch pistols. No one had troubled to neutralize it, as had surely been done with the removed equipment.
Mitchell Prell had built a radio, like one he had owned before. A flake of quartz dust, a few rough strands of metal, an insignificant power supply. Simple, compact. Certain crystals were sensitive to radio waves. And at these tremendously reduced dimensions, they could convert tiny induced electric currents almost directly into fine sound waves that infinitely refined ears could hear.
So Ed Dukas heard the interplanetary newscast again: "... Android groups are still massing in large numbers to seek safety among their own kind and perhaps to carry out their own plans. There is a superficial calm. Fear of consequences so far seems to have kept both sides in check. We hope that it can hold."
Later there was a broadcast from Port Smitty: "... This information was withheld but has now been released. The mystery of Mitchell Prell's disappearance is believed solved after ten years. What is claimed to be his body—much damaged, since he and his confederates, one of whom is supposed to be a close relative, resisted capture and had to be shot down—was brought in to Port Smitty and is now en route to Earth, along with some mysterious equipment. The man who tracked Prell down is Carter Loman, a scientist in his own right, who has had a brief but brilliant career in Interworld Security. Detailed information is under seal, but Prell, a known advocate of 'improved mankind,' has been wanted for questioning and possible indictment for a long time. It has been suggested that his researches had gone further than most would dare to imagine."
Mitchell Prell, micro-being, chuckled. "The funny part," he remarked, "is that I never became a full-size android myself. My old carcass seemed good enough. Or I didn't get around to a change."
But Ed didn't smile at this. And he looked savage when one of Tom Granger's speeches was rebroadcast: "Prell ended? Can we believe it? There is an evil that could restore him in known ways. Now are there unknowns, too? Haven't we had enough? Some things from drunken visions are destroyed, but others come, to make our nights hideous. A creature with a fifty-foot wingspread swoops down on a house, and people die. Are androids any different from what they create? But we are fortified, armed. If we must, we'll fight to the last."
No doubt there was truth behind the melodramatic oratory—at least as far as the horror was concerned. Barbara smiled sadly.
"He's earnest, I think," she offered. "So there's that much glory and courage in him, if there isn't any control. And you keep wondering, Is he half right?"
"I know," Ed answered with some contrition. "But I'd rather have what he considers a scientific hell than nothing. Well, we'll soon be en route back to Earth—unseen. Then maybe we'll find out and accomplish something. Lack of sense, like Granger's, or the muddled way in which laws are often interpreted now, will never work. That's one fact I'm sure of, even in a booby-trapped situation."
Ed was trying to be optimistic. In three weeks they had made equipment that they thought they could use. The three cylinders were Midas Touch pistols—neutron blast guns that could explode a few of the atoms of any solid or liquid that their beams touched. They also had a dozen grenades of the same principle and tubes to carry scant rations. There was a radio for each of the three—for reception, but also limitedly useful as transmitters. And there were knapsacks and clothing made from linten fiber pounded and divided as Prell had never bothered to do.
"We'll catch the first Earth-bound ship that we can," Prell said. "Queer, isn't it? If we could truly walk, going a mile would seem impossible. But the prevailing winds and a little jockeying will get us to Port Karnak. The tube train will take us to the space ships."
Prell had spoken too soon. Within that same hour, listening to the newscast, they learned: "For security reasons, interplanetary traffic has been indefinitely suspended."
Ed Dukas winced as if in pain. He and Barbara and Prell looked at one another. In Ed's strange, small body, frustration and bitter anger fairly hummed.
"Security reasons." That could be a blanket excuse—minus explanations—for almost anything. Loman, knowing of something inimical and microscopic, and guessing at an intended journey from Mars, could well have had a hand in the suspension order. He was wary, and not sure that he had destroyed his hidden enemies.
The three stared down at the equipment that they had toiled so hard to produce. But Ed, like many another man before him who had been cornered, couldn't have quit even if he had willed it. Stubborn spunk, fear, need to regain losses, self-preservation and the awareness of the danger of millions of well-intentioned individuals, both android and human, all took part in the reason. And you could add the ancient and primal lust for revenge.
Ed crouched with the others on the rough floor of their chink in the rock. "Wait," he said at last. "Haven't small objects crossed space naturally—at least in hypothesis? Yes! Spores—living dust, their vital functions suspended. The old Arrhenius Theory of the propagation of life from world to world and solar system to solar system—throughout the universe. A spore, drifting high in an atmosphere, achieves escape velocity through molecular impacts and perhaps the pressure of solar light. It's driven into space, and onward. Uncle Mitch, couldn't the same thing happen to us far more readily, since we're not inert and we have minds to help direct our movements? Since we have beams of massive neutrons from the Midas Touch weapons? And aren't we more rugged than the first androids? Wouldn't we have a middling chance to endure raw space itself?"
Mitchell Prell eyed him quietly. Perhaps even his android cheeks blanched a trifle. "Something like that occurred to me once—a long time ago, Ed," he remarked at last, his voice very calm. "I didn't think it through. I guess it seemed just too out of the ordinary even for me. And there wasn't any need to try it. Perhaps I was scared."
"There's need now," Ed said.
Barbara's expression was a study of eagerness and half fear. "Eddie, have you maybe discovered something?" she exclaimed. "Uncle Mitch, if there is any chance that it would work, I'm game to try it!"
After a moment the scientist nodded. "I believe that there's a good chance it will work," he said.
Before the next sunup they were ready. Clothed in garments of linten fiber, they looked like savages from fifty thousand years before. Yet their present condition could have belonged to no primitive era. They were united by a tough line of twisted strands, and their equipment was lashed to their backs. To human eyes they would have been as invisible as spirits. Were they to demonstrate, even unintentionally, android superiority in yet another field? Maybe, maybe not.
From the outlet of the crevice in the rock, they flung themselves into the atmosphere above the gray desert. Their great advantage at this stage was that, at the Martian dawn fringe, there were many updrafts, for the air, chilled fearfully at night, was already warming. At once they were sucked upward, as if by a vertical wind. Still, the first phase of their climb took many hours. They kept watching for upward-moving motes to guide them. Short, rocketlike bursts of heavy neutrons from their Midas Touch cylinders provided the reaction or kick to get them into the swiftest vertical currents.
Mars dropped far below, a dun plain marked here and there by the straight, artificial valleys or "canals." The relative vastness of a world to beings of pinpoint dimensions was nullified by the distance of altitude, until it looked no more extensive than it would have to the eyes that used to be theirs. Mars developed a visible curvature and a rim of haze, fired to redness by the rising sun. The sky above darkened from hard, deep blue toward the blackness of space, and the stars sharpened. The sun blazed whitely, and the frosty wings of its corona began to show. The thinning atmosphere seemed to develop a definite surface far beneath the three voyagers.
They had spoken little in their ascent; but now the free movement of sound was smothered by the increasing vacuum, and there were only gestures and lip movements to convey meanings.
But there was not much that really needed to be said. The plan remained simple: get into trains of upward-jetting molecules, marked by small blurs or warpings of light. Absorb some of that upward surge into yourselves. How often had this same thing happened, without conscious design? Molecules move fast in a high vacuum. Molecular velocity was heat, wasn't it? But here it could not burn. For heat is chained to matter, and here there was just not enough matter to be hot.
Ed thought that they must be getting close to the Martian velocity of escape now. Only three-point-two miles per second. They might have attained it more simply by making greater use of their Midas Touch cylinders. There was scarcely any reactive thrust more efficient than that of neutrons hurled at almost the speed of light. But there was a pride in accomplishing it in a more difficult way. Besides, the energy supply for the weapons must be conserved.
But now Prell signaled with his hand, and they began to use the cylinders in earnest, shifting their course little by little from the vertical and in the direction of the sun. For it was time to curve inward—earthward. Swiftly now, there was no molecular distortion around them at all. Sense of motion faded out. Their high velocity was demonstrated only by the rapid shrinking of Mars behind them; unless, from sunward there came a minute, resisting thrust. Light pressure? But it would take a longer time in space than they meant to be to slow them down at all.
"We've done this much!" Ed said with his lips, but without a voice.
Barbara nodded and tried to smile, and he reached out and pressed her hand. Prell looked awed and bemused.
Ed tried then to read part of their fortunes in the reactions of his strange, minute body to the rigors of space. It was an atomic mechanism more than it was a chemical one. Therefore, it needed no breath. And the strong, radiant energy of the sun warmed it a little, so he did not feel cold. Hard ultraviolet light seemed not to harm it. There was only a sensation as of the shrinking of its hide—perhaps an adaptive reaction of its demoniac vitality—to protect the trace of moisture within it against the dryness of space. The fluid within vitaplasm could be alcohol or liquid air—it was that adaptable. Prell had said this recently. Such fluids did not freeze easily. But they evaporated. So water remained the best body fluid in dry space. For in the full light of the sun, and with a nuclear metabolism, freezing was not a great danger.
Several days out from Mars the three contacted a small meteor swarm—maybe a fragment of a comet moving sunward and earthward. They moved with the swarm and landed on a chunk of whitish rock perhaps eight inches through at its largest diameter. But to them it was an airless world into which they could burrow, blocking the entrance to their shelter with chalky dust—a fortunate thing, for in the open the sun's glare and aridity of space were drying out even their android tissues and blurring their minds.
The meteor proved not quite lifeless, for on it clear crystalline needles crumbled and rose again. Call it silicon biology, proving that one could never know where something might thrive. In a fall into any atmosphere, such growth would surely be burned away without a trace.
Ed and Barbara and Prell learned to understand silent speech by watching lip movements. The need for hurry still beat in their minds, but drowsiness crept over them—perhaps another androidal adaptability was functioning here, related to the hibernation of animals in winter. It lessened loss of vitality when conditions were not too favorable. But you could resist its compulsions if you applied your will.
The meteor moved on swiftly in the general direction of Earth. The journey would take weeks, and though Ed felt that never had there been a crossing of distance as eerily strange as this one, still the passage of time, and the events it held, was always with him and his companions.
There was a way for them still to experience real sounds, even here. The quartz-flake radio sets, pressed tight to their ears, transmitted vibrations through their own substance, when there was no air. They heard fragments of broadcasts coming from Earth. Pictures of what was happening there came to mind:
A score of monsters destroyed by hunting parties. A side issue, really. For in guard post and sketchily fortified line, man faced the hardier likeness that his knowledge had produced. When there were no clearly defined geographical boundaries to separate the poised forces, you never knew just where those lines would be.
But the scared, the pleading, the exhorting voices, faint in the distance, gave the mood, if not the clear view. Tom Granger was there, and others like him. The latest claim was that vitaplasm gave off poisonous radioactive radiations—not very true on Earth, where its vital energy remained mainly chemical.
Those with sense also tried to be heard. And there were other voices calling for the retreat to simplicity and the doing of work by hand. Such a pastoral of white clouds, green hills and sunshine could have its appeal. But how could its philosophy and inefficiency feed billions? Even if it were not just a bright vision seen before the last battle?
And in the midst of all this babble, there was another voice that was faint thunder: "... Got things of our own now, here in the woods! Even our own newscast station. Damn, we've taken enough! We Phonies won't go back no further! Time to be stubborn—even if we all die for it and never come back! They say folks would like to hang me—which shows how much wits they've got! Even if they got the chance, it wouldn't work!"