Part 8

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.

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.