Part 7

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 Prell _down_--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.

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.