Chapter VII

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.”