Chapter VI

Stripped of their boots and vacuum armor, they set the controls and lowered themselves into the gelatinous contents of the tanks. A warm, tingling numbness flowed into them at contact with the viscous, energized fluid. Weariness stabbed into their muscles. Their knees buckled, and they sank deeper into the gelatin.

“All okay, Babs?” he asked.

“Okay, Ed.”

Then their faces went under that surface. Their minds numbed and were blotted out. They no longer needed to breathe.

The journey downward into a smaller, or, in a sense, a vaster region, was made without their awareness, in a single step. There was no need to pause at middle size, represented by the tiny but easily visible doll-like figure in the minute tank. Mitchell Prell’s labors in two size levels need not be done again, for that work was finished. The direct path was prepared. There was a flow of impulses, like that of the old-time transmission of photographs over wires. Gelatins already roughly of human form responded, swirled and moved tediously, and took sharper shape, in a still-smaller vat. And it was the same with the brains meant to harbor mind, memory and personality. They also were repeated in a finer medium, and by a different principle than their originals--but nonetheless repeated. So, in slightly more than an hour, the essences of two human beings were re-created in the dimensions of motes of dust.

Awareness returned gradually to Ed. At first it was like a blur of dreams, out of which came realization of a successful transformation, and of where he must be. Panic followed, but briefly. He was struggling violently in a thick, gluey substance. His entire body, even his face, was imbedded in it. He was certain that he would smother--yet the impulse to breathe was subdued.

Fighting the sticky stuff, he knew that he possessed great strength--relatively. Some of this was the android power in him. Perhaps more of it was the increased relative toughness of everything, in lesser size. An ant was relatively stronger than a man--a phenomenon of smaller dimensions. And here, even a gelatinous fluid seemed like heavy glue, its molecular chains long and tough. Water itself, not lying flat, but beading into dewdrops, would have seemed almost as sticky.

Ed Dukas, or his tiny likeness, got clear of the vat and its contents, though much of the latter still clung to him. On all fours he dragged it with him, leaving a trail of it in his wake on a rough, glassy surface. He kept spiraling around and around until he rid himself of most of the gelatin.

With avidness and wonder and dread, his mind scrambled through a moment of time to grasp the truths of his present state and to test them. Even the act of existing in the body he now inhabited was indescribably different. His mouth was almost dry inside. He still could draw air into his nostrils, but breathing became unnecessary before some source of energy that was probably nuclear. His hands and his nude body still looked slender and brown to him. And he retained memories--of people he knew, sights he had seen, and of things he had learned. Here he seemed to remain himself. Those memories were clear enough; but were they already losing a little importance, were they too gigantic to be concerned about in this place?

That thought, again, was panic at work--a sense of separation from all that he held familiar. For the ato lamp towering over him seemed as remote as the sun. The form of the less-than-miniature electron microscope seemed a metal-sheened tower. And in his mind there was even the certainty that his present form must be of a wholly different design inside to meet different conditions. He knew that he could feel the thump of a heavier heart, circulating relatively more viscous fluids.

And something about his vision had changed. Close by, everything was slightly blurred, as if he were far-sighted. Farther off, objects became hazed, as by countless drifting, speeding dots that weren’t opaque but that seemed--each of them--to be surrounded by refractive rings that distorted the view of what lay beyond them. And because there were so many tiny centers of distortion constantly in motion, vision at this middle-distance never quite cleared but remained ashimmer. Were those translucent specks perhaps the auras of air molecules themselves?

At a greater distance, clarity came again. For there the haze which was not haze at all but which consisted merely of seeing too much detail--in too coarse a grain, as under too much magnification--was lost. Light and dark, and familiar rich colors. And he saw the whole room around him almost as he used to see it, except for its limitless vastness.

For a little while Ed wondered further about his new eyes. They were responsive to familiar wave lengths of light. Those wave lengths were not too coarse--at least when reflected from farther objects. For nearer things, he was not at all sure that he could see even as well as he could by ordinary light. Was his vision, in this segment, perhaps electronic, then? Did he see, close at hand, fringed hints of strange, beautiful hues? Were these electronic colors? Or were there infinitely finer natural wave lengths, far above the known spectrum, which too-massive instruments had been unable to detect?

This question was dropped quickly, because there was too much more. Now he looked again, very briefly, out into the depths of air, full of drifting debris--jagged stones that glinted, showing a crystalline structure, twisted masses like the roots of trees, though they had the sheen of floss. All of it was dust of one kind or another. Ed could even hear the clink and rattle as bits of it collided. Everywhere there were murmurings of sound, which made a constant, elfin ringing never heard in the world he knew.

Gingerly now he crept across the rough glass surface, back toward the vat from which he had emerged and its companion. Barbara was his first concern. There she was, in the second vat, imbedded in a bead of gelatin. Already she was trying to fight free. He reached both arms into the stuff and tugged at her shoulders to help her. He lifted her out easily and helped scrape away the adhering gelatin, while he worried about how she might react to a tremendous change. To counteract the shock of it, he kept up a running flow of talk, in a voice that even seemed a little as it used to be:

“ ... We made it, Babs. Down to rock bottom, you might say. I don’t think that any conscious human shape could be made much smaller. Or any machine, for that matter. Remember some old stories? Little men lost in weed jungles, fighting spiders and things? Strange, unheard-of adventure, in those days! Maybe we can even try it sometime. Except that a spider, or even an aphid, wouldn’t notice us. We’re too small.”

A little pink nymph with a rather determined jaw, she seemed only half to listen as she stared around with large eyes.

Later, like two savages, they were clothing themselves crudely in scraps of lint torn from what looked like a sleeping pallet. A fiber was knotted across it in a way that reminded Ed of the safety straps by which passengers of planes and space ships attached themselves to their seats during take-offs and landings. Here, Prell, the tiny android, must take his rare moments of rest. Some of the lint was far finer than spiderweb, but it was still coarse to Ed and his wife in their present state, as they wound its strands around them.

“You look beautiful, darling,” he said. “You’re just as you were.”

Barbara smiled slightly. “Even here I’m vain enough to respond to compliments, Eddie,” she answered. “Where’s Prell?”

Her voice was a thin thread in the keening murmur of sounds. And it was worried. Ed and Barbara both craved the reassuring presence of someone of experience here, where everything was changed--where minute gusts of air seemed bent on hurling you upward, so that you would float helplessly, like a mote. You stood up gingerly, meaning to try walking a step. But that mode of locomotion seemed not only unsafe here but impractical. You could be swept away, and in the vastness all around, how could one mote find another again? Too much of what you were used to was lost already. Even the habit of walking no longer functioned properly. The air was a buoyant, resisting substance, a prickling presence of individually palpable molecular impacts, and there was little traction for one’s feet. Perhaps, then, here you swam in the air.

Ed spoke at last: “My uncle can’t be far away. He’ll come to us. It’s been only a moment.”

Barbara clung to him, afraid. “Eddie, am I me anymore? Can I even find old ways of talking, and old subjects to talk about? Here? Everything seems too different. Damn--I never could accept the idea of there being two of anyone! Us up in those other tanks--giants asleep. And yet us here! Maybe we’re different already--shaped by other surroundings! And remember how little we are and how helpless. Moving a couple of inches would be like walking a mile. And we came here to see if we could find a way to straighten out the giant affairs at home. We’re androids now, aren’t we? A special kind. But we still have the capacity for the old emotions. Damn it again, Eddie, everything around us in this place is so strange. But it’s beautiful, too.”

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

Suddenly there was a rumble, like distant thunder. In a more familiar size level, it would have been a clink and a thud, coming through many yards of granite. They both recognized it. Ed even chuckled.

“Whoever or whatever was following the canary machine,” he said. “Remember?”

Just then Mitchell Prell’s simulacrum appeared, a comic, bearded figure wrapped in a few strands of lint that suggested woven twigs. He swam out of the depths of atmosphere--the fall-guy of an era that had stumbled over its own achievements. And in several of those very achievements, he had taken refuge.

He alighted near Ed and Barbara and wrung their hands cordially. Then words spilled out of him excitedly: “Ed. Barbara. We’ve got to hurry. But first we should put our minds straight about one another. I know that back home you were on the side of responsibility and good sense. Well, so am I. There haven’t been many new quirks added to my viewpoint since you first knew me, Eddie. I want knowledge to blossom into all that it can give us. I think you do, too. Now tell me how you feel.”

Mitchell Prell could still inspire Ed Dukas. Even here, at this opposite, smaller end of the cosmos, he imagined again his splendid towers of the future.

“There were moments when I felt pretty bitter,” he said, in not too friendly a fashion. “But in the main I’m with what you just said--all the way. I put my life on it as a pledge.”

Barbara nodded solemnly.

“Thanks,” Prell answered, the breath that he’d drawn for speech sighing out of him. “I’m more grateful than I can tell. You two may think that we’re too tiny--that our size makes us powerless. I don’t believe that’s true. I was on Earth as I am, you know. I went there and back--undetected--on space liners. But while on Earth I missed many opportunities to act against danger. Maybe I’d been here too long, down close to the basic components of matter, studying them. And I went to Earth poorly equipped in both materials and experience. Well, I think you can see how it was. Let it go for now. Visitors are at our door. I suppose we’ve got to try to meet them in the manner that they deserve.”

“Call the shots!” Ed said impatiently.

Mitchell Prell smiled rather wistfully. “The main part is done,” he replied. “I set the small remote controls of the large vats for revival of the bodies in them--our larger selves. That was why I was delayed in getting to you here. They are colossi. They cannot hide. And they must be defended. I’m sorry, they are better able to defend themselves than we are to defend them. At least they will have a better chance alive than inert. Revival takes a little time, but in a moment you will see.”

Ed did not quite know what to think about this action on his uncle’s part--whether to agree to it or to suspect that it was somehow a mistake. Circumstances were too strange here, and he was too inexperienced. And the whole situation itself was fraught with confusion for him. Two selves, both named Edward Dukas? It was not a new circumstance in the ideas of the times. You knew that it could be. Yet it remained a muddle of identities hard to straighten out. Barbara clung to him again, her feelings doubtless similar to his own.

“It’s happening,” she whispered.

And it was. From their perch on the scored, glassy surface under a miniature electron microscope, they looked out past the minute tanks and the attendant cables, crystals and apparatus that had given them special being, and across the shimmering void of air, they saw those other vats, glassy, too, and tall as mountains.

It seemed then that the mountains opened, unfolded, grew taller, disgorged Atlases that stepped dripping over a cliff wall. There was no connection of mind now--these three giants were other people, for the link had been broken in the past. There was no blending of consciousness.

Now there were vibrations almost too heavy in this miniature region to be called sounds. They were more like earthquake shocks. But Ed realized that they were just the noises of normal human movement--the giants Ed, Barbara and Mitch putting on their boots, the grind of their footsteps. Meanwhile they conversed, it seemed; but their voices were only a quiver, a rattle, with a hint of worried inquiry. The giant Mitchell Prell seemed to make suggestions.

The lesser Prell must still have understood what was being said. For now he gripped a roughly made microphone and talked into it. His words were amplified to a seismic temblor as they emerged from the sound cone on the far wall; but to Ed and Barbara they were still directly audible from the speaker’s own lips. “You’ve come down to me successfully. Now we must see what will happen. Ed, if it is only the police at our gates, perhaps it would be best simply to present yourselves as citizens. You and Barbara have rights. And you’ve fulfilled your pledge to them. They can’t harm you. Beyond this, I must apologize to you both. You have made a difficult journey to what must seem to you a frustrating blank wall--without experiencing anything very new. That is a defect of being duplicated. And there is no time now to blend into your minds the memories of the descent into smallness. I’m sorry. Mitchell Sandhurst Prell--yes, you, my overgrown former identity--show them what to do. But for heaven’s sake, move this workshop of mine to a slightly less exposed place!”

Because he was like his old self, the smaller Ed Dukas still thought as his original did. So, after all, there was that much contact. He understood the frustration that had just been mentioned, plus the confusion of not having seen the reality of another size level. This failure could even involve suspicion of his uncle’s purposes. But there was loyalty and belief, too. From the basis of parallel minds, the lesser Ed felt all these emotions personally.