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People Minus X

<h2>VI</h2> 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. <hr class="tb" /> 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. 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. <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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