The Project Gutenberg EBook of Dawn Of the Demi-Gods, by Raymond Z. Gallun

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Title: Dawn Of the Demi-Gods

Author: Raymond Z. Gallun

Release Date: November 18, 2020 [EBook #63797]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DAWN OF THE DEMI-GODS ***




                         DAWN OF THE DEMIGODS

                         By RAYMOND Z. GALLUN

            As unheralded as ghosts, but as significant as a
         new dawn of history, there came to Earth from distant
          Ganymede's glowing crescent--three micro-androids,
      minuscule beings, carrying the moot treasure of immortality.

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                      Planet Stories Summer 1954.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


Somebody invented the first locomotive. Then came the nuclear bomb. I
guess that people were somewhat scared of newness both times.

Mostly, it has been worse ever since.

World War III was also before my day. But then fear, the protective
emotion, played a reasonable part. So no cities were actually
vaporized. But our side came out the victors with bombers so
high-flying that they were already atom-propelled rocket ships of
space. We had artificial satellites circling the Earth, and a fortress
on the Moon.

I missed the first exploration of the solar system, too. There was hot
Mercury, carbon dioxide-smothered Venus; Mars and its ruins and quiet
colors; and what was left of Planet X, whose people destroyed the
Martians in war, though their planet itself got blown all to bits in
the same struggle, its fragments now being known as the asteroids.

The moons of Jupiter and Saturn were also invaded by men, as were the
frozen-methane-and-ammonia blizzards of Uranus and Neptune, and the
frigid mountain peaks of Pluto, farthest world of all.

There were always yarns about "Little Men" and whatnot, of course.
Yet no contemporary intelligent races were found across space. There
were just queer skeletons and dried up corpses millions of years old.
Rusting on Mars, or floating free and broken among the Asteroids,
were the remains of inventions, and other cultural evidences. Space
ships had wandered as far as Pluto during those past ages, too; and
various relics were left on this sphere or that. Scientific study of
these things meant more speed for our technical progress in medicine,
atomics, metallurgy, almost anything you could mention.

Three cheers for us, and wasn't progress wonderful? But I guess plenty
of folks felt dumb and slow and confused.

I, Charles Harver, was born in Chicago, March 9th, 2014. But in my
earliest, murky memories, Earth was only a place known from television,
picture books, and the nostalgic remarks of my parents. We had a house
and a flower and vegetable garden under a transparent airdome of dark
blue plastic. The sun would shine among the stars for what I heard was
fourteen days; then, for another two weeks the solar lamps would burn
in the dome top.

The region where we lived was called the spaceward lunar hemisphere.
Earth never shone there, but life was good. There were other kids,
and school, and the usual dreams about being a bold space wanderer,
speeding out to find unimagined marvels.

Dad was a technician in the research labs, just a few miles from our
house by tube train. I could see the walls of the buildings in the
bleak volcanic distance.

Dad used to pretend he was wrestling with me. "Charlie," he'd say,
"a kid better grow up tough and flexible these days. Not mean but
rugged--ready for anything. Don't ever go soft on me, Charlie, with all
the temptations of modern comforts. You know one thing the labs are
looking for, _already_? Yeah, a way to reach the planets of the stars!
Maybe a means--and an engine powerful enough--really _will_ be invented
to force a shortened, interdimensional path across the light-years
if the structure of space itself doesn't burst under test! Keep your
head down, kid! The work is much too dangerous to be conducted on the
densely populated Earth. There could be an awful blow."

Dad was a big, dark man. Talking like that, he looked thrilled and
scared.

       *       *       *       *       *

Dad used to bring Dr. Shane Lanvin out to our house to enjoy Mother's
cooking, which, even considering the aid of a fine automatic kitchen,
was something special. Dr. Lanvin was a wispy little man with a ragged
blond mustache. He was much older than Dad; though Mom used to say that
even if he was a famous scientist, he was part child in his interests;
that he liked even toys.

"I always did enjoy things in miniature, Lillian," he'd admit.

Dr. Lanvin was an instrument specialist, which meant designing and
assembling parts that you could scarcely see, so small were they. Once
he made me a toy. It was a ball that absorbed the energy of sunshine,
and rolled after me wherever I went, in the plastic-sealed, tree-lined
streets of the lab staff housing area. Following the sounds of my
footsteps, it seemed half alive. Maybe it was a forerunner of all that
was to come.

Once Dr. Lanvin showed me a bit of quartz, like a grain of sand. It was
mounted in a little round case, fitted permanently to a powerful pocket
microscope. Through the scope you could see one flat face of the quartz
grain, glinting. Carved on it, unmistakable, were horizontal rows of
symbols.

My spine tingled. "Did you engrave them, Dr. Lanvin?" I demanded. I was
eight or nine, then.

"I could have, Buggsie," he answered, using my nickname. "With a
micro-manipulator and a diamond-chip. Only I didn't."

"Then who did?" I pursued.

"I wish I knew," he replied. "A friend of mine collected some
two thousand of these tiny, non-ferrous--not iron-bearing, that
is--meteors, floating free in the asteroid belt, and mailed them to
me. My microscope revealed this unusual one. The symbols are about
the same as those used by the beings of Planet X in their full-sized
inscriptions, before some vast nuclear charge from Mars blew up their
world. But no man can read such writing. That's about all I know--yet."

This remained almost our only information on this particular subject,
until years later.

We might all have been blown to Kingdom Come there on the Moon, had
any of the lab experiments gotten seriously out of control. There were
minor blasts. But I lived out my time there safely. I even worked
in those labs myself for several months, and by then even the stars
seemed technologically nearer. Dr. Lanvin had left the Moon, accepting
a professorship at the University of Chicago, and it was soon decided
that I'd be sent there to complete my education.

Mom said an odd thing as she and Dad saw me off at the Tycho spaceport:
"I wish we were going there, too, Charlie. I wish we had a little
country place, far off from everything, and a cow and some chickens."

"That's a primitive mouthful for a modern woman, with no idea of
modern farming, let alone such an antique setup," Dad chuckled. "Well,
sometimes I yearn for simplicity, too. We're weak, slow-adjusting
characters, left a little behind by the onrush of the times. So long,
Charlie, watch yourself. It seems funny that I, an Earthian, have a son
who'll actually have to get used to Earth."

Yes, that turned around situation, characteristic of our era, seemed
odd. I was nervous about my big, sophisticated, native planet, as if it
was an alien world! As a youngster, men had kidded me that I couldn't
even endure its huge gravity!

The new university outside Chicago proper was beautiful. As arranged, I
went to live at Dr. Lanvin's house. I adjusted to Terra, even though,
within twenty-four hours of my arrival, there was a catastrophe that
couldn't have happened in a previous age.

A freighter coming from Mars to the Chicago spaceport, couldn't
decelerate. Nobody knows completely what errors of human stupidity
were committed aboard the doomed ship under the goad of panic; but the
_Venetian Prince_ came down like a colossal meteor, fortunately in
almost open country miles from the port. Yet a town of fifteen thousand
nearby was wiped out. At Dr. Lanvin's house we felt the shock wave and
the hot wind. The western horizon glowed red. No doubt a crater will
stand for ages at the site of the crash.

As I watched from Doc's dooryard, all the loved romance of space and
the future seemed to turn sour on me.

"Disasters that afflict innovations always affect people about the
same, Charlie," Doc breathed heavily, not calling me Buggsie, now.
"Train wrecks, the sinking of an ocean liner, the crash of a great
plane. Now a space ship destroying a town. The magnitude just gets
bigger, more terrible. There'll be an investigation, terror, grief,
complaints; laws will be changed. But wider and better interplanetary
travel will go marching on, with everything else."

I got in on the ground floor of Dr. Lanvin's work in advanced robotics.
Robot devices had been used for various purposes for many years. But
Doc had invented some much improved ones. I tried handling several.
Then, like part of my obscure destiny, the chance came to really prove
one of them.

       *       *       *       *       *

Fire broke out in an unrenovated warehouse near the edge of the city
one night. Doc and I drove to the scene in his autocar. There was a lot
of inflammable and possibly explosive material. Someone shouted that a
watchman had been overcome by smoke inside the building.

"Get him out, Charlie," Doc said. "Your body is more agile than mine;
your control of an artificial one will be the same."

Sitting in the car, I put the control helmet over my head. In it there
was no old fashioned television screen, and no complicated guide
levers. What the helmet did was detect and sidetrack the motor impulses
from my brain, broadcasting their pulsations by short wave radio to
the robot, which I thus guided as if it were my own form. Similarly,
sensory impressions were radioed back to the helmet, there to be
reconverted into impulses directly perceptible to the sensory centers
of my brain, without the intervention of my eyes, ears, and other sense
organs.

So, in effect I was living in a shape not handsome in a human way,
stronger than my own, and far less limited. Like a demon I stepped
out of the rear seat of the autocar on asbestos-shod feet. Propelled
by steel muscles energized by a motor drawing current from an atomic
battery, I walked past less intricately robotized fire-fighting
equipment. Through smoke that would have strangled an unprotected man,
I climbed a ladder and went through a window from which a plume of
flame belched. I felt no inconvenience whatsoever. There was a thrill
in that--like being something super.

After that I was a bit lost. But a voice growled instructions near
me--in the car, that is; I had almost forgotten that I was really
there, and not in the blazing warehouse. Muffled and harrassed, it
reached my own ears through the control helmet:

"Walk your robot inward, kid, for cripes sake! Follow a beam if there's
no floor left! There'll be a little office room...."

I knew that it must be some chief of the fire fighters who was giving
me directions.

With flames all around, I--or the machine--scrambled along a steel
support, and through an opening in an inside wall. Flames had not
penetrated there, and automatically I saw through the opaque smoke by
radio waves sent out by, and bouncing back to eyes that belonged to
the robot; parabolic antennas, they were. The images were visual and
unblurred, and lacked only color.

I found the office, and the man who had collapsed there. I pressed an
oxygen mask from my insulated pack over his face, and wrapped him in an
asbestos blanket that I carried.

"Rush to the main door of the building, kid!" the voice growled again.
"I think the wall of flame is less deep there!"

Doing it was a cinch, though I went through a hundred feet of pure fire
in two great leaps. I dropped the guy on a stretcher outside the door.
Let the medics work on him. I had to remind myself that he had been
rescued, not by me, but by a product of science.

Back at the car I made the robot polish the soot off itself with a
cloth, and then climb into the rear seat to assume an inert position
for transport, again. After that, I removed the helmet.

"Well, Charlie, another foretaste of the future, eh?" Doc said from
behind the wheel. "Make way for tomorrow...."

"Yeah," I grunted raggedly. "Like being more than human."

The guy who had been giving me directions still stood beside the car.
Somehow, I sensed that our innocent remarks were wrong things to say in
his presence. I studied him from my six-feet-three height. Growing up
in low lunar gravity, a fellow shoots up amazingly.

His face, topping a massive body, was beefy and rough and kind; but now
there was fury in it. He was like a tame bear after being baited and
confused for too long. And he'd just been through some nerve wracking
minutes of responsibility for a man's life.

"Okay, kid," he rumbled. "You and science saved that man. Thanks.
Otherwise, it's all the same. Tomorrow, and more gadgets! Nothing stays
put so a guy can understand it! The world just rushes on, till maybe
not even gravestones mean anything anymore--except when a spaceship
rubs out a town, killing my brother, his wife, and their four kids,
among the others! Pretty soon you think that the whole universe is
going to fall apart, with all the junk in it, and that there aren't
going to be any real folks anymore! When all you wanted was peace for
your family. Then you get all mixed up, and want to kill and smash
whoever and whatever makes this so. Damn! Dammit all!..."

I held my hands poised to grab him if he tried to jump me. Only his
grief kept me from calling him a fool. Yes, he might have attacked me,
except that now he went all to pieces. Big sobs wracked him.

Doc and I didn't have to do anything because two cops came and led him
away.

Doc shrugged sadly. "Neurasthenia. It's getting commoner, Charlie,"
he said. "A straw just broke another camel's back. Our friend has had
a tough time. Besides, he's one of the slow ones. Slow to adjust and
grow with his civilization. Oh, he'll probably straighten out. Or
the cerebral specialists will fix his brain. He'll be an easy going,
untroubled individual. Is it right and democratic to tamper with a
man's mind? Well, would you let him be insane, poignantly miserable,
for keeps?"

Again I had a primitive qualm. The Earth was all around me, strange,
teeming, overpopulated in spite of colonies across space. The crowd,
jubilant over the robot's demonstration, was all around us. But I bet
that every one of those people was at least a little bewildered by the
times.

"Let's drive home, Doc," I urged sharply.


                                  II

As we whizzed along, Dr. Lanvin smirked at me like a sly elf. "To what
our poor friend complained about, I owe much," he remarked. "Consider
my birth-date, January 23rd, 1932. It's now 2033. Yes, I'm a hundred
and one, though I look and feel fifty by old standards. It's common
enough. Wizardry? No. Let's face facts, Charlie. Something like
immortality has been sneaking up on the human race for well over a
century. First, diseases were conquered one by one. Meanwhile, surgery,
replacing worn out organs with new ones grown artificially, went far
ahead. Hormone therapy was developed. The final degenerative disease,
senility, is proving to be just as conquerable as cancer. Remove its
causes--accumulation of minerals and certain fatty acids among other
things, and tone up the machine--and it just isn't there anymore!"

Doc paused for breath, then went on:

"Yes, there's plenty that we don't yet know about the wonderful
mechanism of the human body. But we don't need to know everything to
keep it living on and on. Because, with a little help, it restores
itself. The trouble with our viewpoint is that death has been the
destiny of all life on Earth for so long that it seems like an
inviolable tradition. A silly attitude, don't you think? Now, have
I disoriented you some more, Charlie? Don't be embarrassed. I feel
somewhat that way myself. Maybe your mood is right for me to go a step
further into the murky Destiny of Man, eh?"

My hide was tingling with something like dread. But I was eager. "I'm
ready for anything, Doc."

We got back to his old house under the trees of the campus. From a
cabinet in his quiet living room he took a plastic box. In it was a
small, oblong bar of pinkish substance that wriggled slightly, as if it
were animated.

"Touch it," Dr. Lanvin commanded.

I obeyed. The stuff was warm, and in response to contact with my
finger, it writhed violently. "Unh--what in hell!" I grunted.

"It's something a big commercial laboratory managed to produce for
abstract reasons," he answered. "It isn't any one substance, but
its structure does include quite a few complex silicone compounds.
Chemically it's not static. Processes and structural changes are going
on inside it constantly. Its microscopic texture is cellular, like
animal tissue. Pour, say, sugar dissolved in water on it, with the
addition of certain salts, and it absorbs the solution slowly, along
with oxygen from the air, to produce a kind of tissue-combustion, heat
and movement. But it can convert sunlight, or simple heat from an
outside source, or electricity, into motion, too. And it grows. Cut
a piece of it off, and that will grow, too, as if reproduction had
occurred. So--would you call it life of a sort? It's a lot more rugged
than common life. Here, I'll show you, Charlie...."

Doc picked up a small soldering tool. When its point glowed red hot he
held it close to that pinkish oblong. It did not recoil from the heat.
Instead, as if impelled by some inherent automatism or instinct, it
curled itself around the tool, and, hissing softly, seemed to enjoy the
warmth. When Doc switched off the current, it uncoiled itself as if in
disappointment. It wasn't burned.

"Cold it is equally resistant," Doc remarked. "Especially when its
vital fluid, moistening it inside and out, is changed to something
with a lower freezing temperature than water. Alcohol, for example,
or liquefied air or ammonia gas. Then its chemistry, and the flow of
energy continue on a different temperature plane, for it is supremely
adaptable, Charlie."

Dr. Lanvin's sly expression matched the chill along my back.

"Okay," I growled. "Now tell me what you're _really_ thinking."

He shrugged. "Oh, nothing definite, Charlie. Someday reaching the
stars in another figurative sense, maybe. As is, this stuff isn't of
much use. Call it 'protoplast' as its creators do--a tougher, upstart
brother of protoplasm--life. It isn't molded. But what if, in a vastly
improved form, if could be someday?"

I frowned. "An animal?" I questioned. "Artificially made? Or--a man? An
android, that is? Pure fantasy, of course, yet. A robot, with a robot's
ruggedness, but made completely in human form. Servants maybe?"

Doc Lanvin's mild grin turned crooked. "Servants?" he challenged. "Is
that all? What if we were living the last century of man's existence
as original man? No, I don't necessarily mean the often dreamed-up
possibility of a robot conquest of humanity by force! But what of the
'improved model' principle, applied by humans to themselves, with the
transfer of mind and ego to a body that could live without harm in the
cold vacuum between the planets, or in an inferno; a body unaging, and
destructible only by absolute violence? No, Charlie, this development
must normally be a long ways ahead. But what if?"

A cold tingling had started around my heart, spreading inexorably to
the tips of my fingers, toes, and tongue.

"Doc, I don't know," I said slowly. "To the flexible of
viewpoint--wonderful. But it might be the ultimate shock to those who
want tomorrow to be understandably and reliably like today and last
year. To them it might be a hell; the death of everything reasonable,
and a catastrophe to resist with all the weapons in the modern armory,
and with the last fury of dying brain and muscle."

"I thought you'd react something like that," Doc sighed.

My laugh was unsteady. "Then why don't scientists stop digging? Nature
can bite back."

"We can't stop, Charlie. Like everything, man is part of nature. He
was given wits and curiosity to know the whys and wherefores of
everything. It's like a religion--trying to learn a little more about,
and get a little closer to, Whatever It Is That Keeps The Cosmos
Running. Or you can say that all of man's works are works of nature,
with him as the tool. That is our oneness with the universe which we've
got to grow with. The fears are often childish. I feel the scare, too,
Charlie, but I think you're like me."

"I hope I am," I stated.

"Thanks. Go to bed, Charlie. We've gabbed enough for now."

"Nix," I answered. "I think that maybe you have been leading up to some
mention of your own work, Doc."

       *       *       *       *       *

Dr. Lanvin's fingers tightened on the arm of his chair. "All right,
Charlie," he said. "Down at dust-grain size is my own segment of the
universe--my miniature region to explore--as others mean to explore the
planets of the stars. It's a weird zone where familiar physical laws
are curiously altered in their effects by relativity. Humans can't go
there in their own flesh, at least not yet. But I believe that there
may be a simple if difficult way to build a tiny metal proxy, operated
the same as you operated that fire robot. Then, perhaps some compelling
mysteries will be solved."

"For instance?" I prompted.

Doc nodded toward a photograph on the wall beside the old fashioned
picture of his former wife. The first photograph showed his tiny
pink meteor. Its much magnified hieroglyphics seemed to wink at us
enigmatically.

"How that writing got there," Doc answered. "And now, more. Government
authority has asked me to help, Charlie. From Ganymede, largest moon
of Jupiter, comes a report of a cache of tools in a chest that itself
is of almost microscopic dimensions. Finding it, several men were
afflicted with dizziness and fainting. One died. Autopsy revealed many
little seared, reddish lines crisscrossing inside the cortex of his
brain. Also, in the asteroid belt, several space ships have gone out
of control, the finest parts of their most delicate control mechanisms
severed as if by intense heat."

"Beings," I breathed awedly. "The implication is clear but crazy. Why,
a being no smaller than a rat couldn't have human intelligence. The
molecules of matter remain of the same size. Building a truly sentient
brain at such an extreme of smallness, using those same molecules,
would be like trying to make fine pottery out of coarse sand!"

"Who said anything about molecules?" Doc demanded almost angrily.
"When--just for instance--the flow of far smaller electrons has been
the soul of complicated calculating devices for a century? But who
knows anything? Maybe, before long, I'll let you in on my project, if
you have the courage and interest. But you need more general education.
Now, not another word. Go to bed. Answering your whys and whats, I'd be
mostly guessing, too."

I went to my room where I lay for hours with a tingle in my guts, aware
of the frosty stars, the squawking katydids, the universe big and
little, and buzzes from Doc's workroom. And I thought of how the human
body conformed to the laws of machines. Hence it was a natural robot.
It was near dawn before I slept.

Thereafter, life went on in the sunshine and shadow of a campus,
idyllic and gentle, masking unrest. There were my instructors and
the classrooms and labs, and the faces of my contemporaries, easy
going young faces, matching a languid attitude of body coupled with
latent strength, as a cat's languidness is coupled with the capacity
to galvanize into lightning speed. For them the times held a pleasant
spark of fright, and the rich red meat of coming triumph. In all
fairness, I was one of them.

Minden, Fellows, Bowhart, Griswold, Scharber, and the others--the
rhythm and meaning of their voices and words was usually the same:

"Hi, Charlie! How was the astrogation quiz?" Or: "Yesterday, I
rocketted the training ship two thousand kilometers over Lake Michigan,
and it was a cinch!..." Or: "Could any course be dopier than this
'Suggested Techniques For Establishing Friendly Relations With Possible
Extra-Terrestrial Intelligences?'" Or: "So long, Charlie! I'm going out
to help build Pallas City for the asteroid miners!..."

Or it might be Mars, Venus, Mercury, or the well remembered Moon,
where huge, fantastic starcraft were already in the blueprint stage.

Yes, all this was my life, too; though already it seemed half diverted
to another, much stranger destiny.

       *       *       *       *       *

And there was Janice Randall whom I first spotted in Astrogation
Lecture.

But I really met her in the company of George who had a special room up
in the top of the University Library. It was an eerie place, suitable
for such an entity. George was more than an electronic calculator;
he was a Giant Brain. He was also a student's and research worker's
oracle. You could ask him questions.

One day, with Doc Lanvin's remarks sharply in mind, I went up there and
waited my turn at George's microphone.

"Can a true android, with all the human attributes of mind and feeling,
be made, George?" I asked.

George rustled inside his unpretentious black cabinet and replied in a
bass voice:

"I believe that it can and will be done. Like space travel, it is part
of the natural course of history."

"What is the most difficult phase of doing so?" I enquired further.
"Building the brain?"

"No. Building the brain should be relatively simple. Giving an android
a consciousness, an awareness of self, should be much more difficult.
Philosophers have had trouble even defining consciousness."

I chanced a third question, the answer to which I already knew: "Don't
you have a consciousness, George?"

"It is understood that no means yet exists to provide Earthly
mechanisms with such a thing," George replied evenly. "I am no more
aware than the first crude adding machine thinking out the sum of
five and seven. A question to me merely sets a search and a reasoning
process for a reply in motion. It is not necessary that I _know_ that I
do this."

Someone spoke from behind me: "Unaware thought. It even happens in our
own subconscious minds. But it's hard to believe that George doesn't
know his own reality. He's so human."

I turned. It was Jan Randall, coloring a little. "Oh, I'm sorry Mr.
Harver. I didn't mean to eavesdrop," she said.

"Eavesdrop?" I chuckled. "There was nothing private about my question.
Go ask yours. I'll wait out of earshot."

"I haven't any," she answered with a smile. "I come here often just for
the mood. This place feels like a temple; as if God and all nature were
here. George isn't much of all that, but he seems the best contact.
Now, shall we both laugh?"

"Let's feel awed and humble, instead," I replied.

After a pause, I asked lightly: "George, is it all right for Janice
Randall and I to have dinner together?"

George was small. Always, he refused to give out social advice. "This,
I am not permitted to answer," he rumbled.

Jan and I laughed gayly together as we turned to leave. Jan was
unobtrusive, but very pretty. Her hair was light brown, her features
were fine, her nose turned up, her height reached to the center of my
chest. And she had her eyes on a spacewoman's career.

From beside the door a pair of slightly fanatical eyes under a high
forehead smirked at us. The jaw was strong; the smile was crooked,
humorous, gentle.

"Hi, Cope," I greeted. "What brings you here?"

"This I have to watch, Harver," he answered. "The machine telling the
man--already. Screwballs! Where will it end?"

"Who was that?" Jan asked as we were going down stairs.

"An English-Lit classmate of mine," I answered. "One who believes that
all virtue is the past's. Call him the conscience of the human race.
Armand Cope."

Little hard glints showed in Jan's eyes before she said, "Oh," mildly,
and laughed.

After dinner I took her to meet Dr. Shane Lanvin. Six months later he
said to both of us:

"Like a hiring officer picking a starship crew, I have to look for
guts, wits, and certain other qualities, in prospective helpers for
what I am attempting. There may be danger. And I wouldn't want anyone
to go soft and back out later. So here's your chance--part-time for the
present. But I want a final yes or no."

Mild Doc Lanvin could be hard. But he knew Jan's quality. She had taken
courses of study and training, of which nine-tenths of the students
were masculine. Her reactions to tests for quick thinking, emotional
ruggedness, and physical stamina, were all good. Moreover, she had
excelled in the study of instrument making, with which we had both
occupied much time. Her manual precision was better than mine.

"On your terms, count me in, Dr. Lanvin," she said quietly.

"Even without Jan, I think I'd be a foregone conclusion, Doc," I told
him.

So, with every minute that we could spare from our regular studies,
we were working with the great specialist of the miniature, trying to
push another frontier downward into The Small. Doc had his duties to
the University, but he had his nights and weekends, and the additional
drive of the odd and grim reports which had already come from deep in
space.

Do you know what a micro-manipulator is? It begins with a simple, high
powered microscope. But in its field of view are mounted little slide
rods, fitted with hand operated vernier screws, by which they can make
movements so fine that a gesture of a thousandth of a centimeter may
seem the widest of swings. Attached to the slide rods are forceps, and
measuring and cutting instruments, some too small to be visible to the
unaided eye.

Under one microscope Doc had even set up a real, power driven lathe, a
quarter-inch long. Under another was a sort of assembly area. There,
a shiny robot, half an inch high, with all the intricate control and
circuits combined into it, was taking form. Cables were as fine as
spiderwebs.


                                  III

Reproducing that first robot in triplicate was easier than it might
seem, for when we had set up all the small machinery to make the parts,
duplication was almost automatic. But assembly remained a tedious
chore. On the other hand, the control hoods were almost of the standard
type used for much larger automatons.

Still, it was eight months before Doc announced on a Saturday
afternoon: "Step one completed. Now to repeat in step two!..."

We had test proved all three robots as soon as each was ready. But now
that each of us possessed a metal proxy, we could all go as a group on
that first step down into The Small.

Sitting in chairs in Doc's workroom we put on our control hoods. Then,
sensory illusion seemed to make us leave our real bodies behind. The
top of the work table spread suddenly around my tiny, artificial
eyes becoming a vast, cluttered plain. The ceiling was our sky. The
fluorescent lights were multiple suns. Doc and Jan were shining,
man-tall monsters, exactly like myself. I couldn't tell them apart,
until manner of speech betrayed Jan.

"Look at us!" she shouted gleefully in a thin, buzzing voice from a
tympanum in her chest. "Coming this far is like dropping into an abyss,
half way to the bottom! And see the _real_ us! Great, hooded colossi,
sitting as if asleep, in the distance!"

"Yeah, I know, Honey," was all I said.

In this moment of half realizing a goal, Doc's love of miniature things
became tense impatience.

"All right, my worthies!" he buzzed. "Supper and being ourselves again
is only a few hours away. So let's get started on tougher step two!"

We hurried to a clear plastic box (of building-size to us now) and
inside its drilled doorway our materials were waiting.

There were the roughed out beginnings of other micro-manipulators,
except that now, for work on pieces smaller than the width of a single
light wave, the microscopes would have to be of the electron variety.
Their parts had to be polished and fitted together here; for even
that was labor beyond the direct doing of a man in his own flesh.
Now we had to finish a whole array of super-fine micro tools and
equipment--lathes, heaters, shapers of glass.

Not until then could the real work proceed--making robots of which
only the largest pieces yet existed, still in the rough. They would
be robots bearing the same size-relationship to our present half-inch
selves, as those same selves bore to human beings!

"Specks, dust particles, dimensions on the order of the smallest
insects," Doc's new self buzzed. "Down near the barrier, the limit of
smallness, beyond which metals become, by relativity, too hard, and
too coarse-grained to be shaped. Small objects are always relatively
stronger than large ones. Yes, you'd have to decrease the strength of
materials in proportion to size to achieve a constant there. Take an
ant, far smaller than a man, but able to lift many times his own weight
because the substance of his muscles is relatively tougher!"

"Well, power for polishing comes first, doesn't it?" I said, and we
went to work.

The days went. Tediously our work progressed. Another spring came, and
we lived two lives, with almost two sets of identities. There were
classes and friends, and walks around the campus for Jan and me. Then
we were down again, where flecks of lint floating in the air looked
like twisted twigs, and where metal surfaces were difficult indeed to
burnish.

One evening, with grim excitement in his voice, Doc gave us some news:

"Again the Government is asking us for a favor. Small space ship
and everything provided! There have been more mysterious breakdowns
of equipment, and strange illnesses reported. So we're going out to
Ganymede! Sorry, check out of the U; get your gear together, tighten
your belts--because this is it! See a justice, maybe, if that's in your
minds. Take a few days off."

My hand tightened protectively on Jan's shoulder. Somehow, before the
unknown, I felt that marriage would be like a shield for us both,
though we were still pretty young.

"Time to get hitched, Jan," I said later. "If you've made up your mind.
Or should we consult George?"

Her eyes twinkled with a flare of recklessness. She lowered her voice
and mocked humorously: "'This is a question which I am not permitted to
answer. Unghh!'"

       *       *       *       *       *

For a few days we were away from Doc Lanvin. Our brief honeymoon was on
the Moon with my folks. Jan's parents had died in a rocket crash years
before. It was good to see Mom and Dad and the old house again. Out
beyond the sprawling buildings of the expanded labs, the skeleton of a
huge hull was taking form. The stars, that meant, though the problem of
overdrive, speeds greater than light, promised no early answer after
all. A journey to the nearest stars would take a long, long time.

Within a week Jan and I were back on Earth, packing equipment. Armand
Cope, whom I've mentioned, was one of those who came to bid us
good-bye. His cynical mouth twisted as if he were both sorry for, and
contemptuous of us.

"Maybe I was just born too late," he said. "I don't know just what
you're after, but there are rumors. Well--honestly--keep safe."

"Thanks, Cope," I said.

"Yes, from me, too," Jan added gently. Then she threw a mild jibe at
him: "Still trying to hold back tomorrow, Cope?"

Two guys I knew slightly, Bowhart and Scharber, were selected as
crewmen for our ship, the _Intruder_.

"Bow and I are trained for simple space stuff, Charlie," Scharber said.
"We won't stick our noses into this micro-robot business."

Scharber was broad and easy going. Bowhart was short and dark and
serious.

Jan changed to the rough coverall, acceleration suit, and boots of a
space wanderer. Maybe there was a regret for the difference, but it
also brought a new jauntiness.

On a Sunday night our ship blasted off from the New Mexico desert. When
our acceleration was completed, our ringlike hull began to rotate, to
give us a centrifugal substitute for gravity. The outer silence closed
in, and two months of monotonous journeying provided only a new setting
for our efforts to build us metal forms that could stand beside an
inscription on a sand-grain meteor as a man stands beside a monument.
All of Doc's home workshop had been transferred to the _Intruder_.
There, in the lab compartment, Doc, Jan and I sat hour after hour,
wearing our control hoods, but living in metal bodies half an inch
high that bent intently over an even far finer and more difficult
craftsmanship.

We passed Mars' orbit without seeing the new man-made airdome cities
among the ruins. We saw nothing of the asteroid belt where fortunes
were being made in metals from the heavy core of an exploded planet.
Our quest had a different goal.

When we finished three super-micro-manipulators, we were better
prepared to finish our tools and equipment to make parts. But our
tedious job was less than half done when we arrived on Ganymede, cold
and bleak, its tenuous atmosphere composed mostly of unbreathable
methane gas.

Scharber brought us down on the landing stage of Port Hoverton. The
settlement itself was under domes nearby.

And Jan said: "Hurdy-gurdies, Charlie! Hey, Doc! Scharber! Bow! Beer,
music, games. A last fling, like the spacemen and miners! Let's have
it!"

So we did for a few hours. Then we had us a good sleep. Then we
found a guide. Boom Harlow, he called himself. Oldish, cheerful as a
gravedigger.

"Sure I'll take you to where that little tool chest was found," he
said. "If you stay, likely you'll never come back."

He blasted off with us for a thousand-mile jaunt in our ship, arcing
above the stratified mists of half-congealed gases that hovered over
the Ganymedean landscape, and after we had landed at his command, he
pointed out stone structures that looked both very old and very odd.

"There you are!" he said through the helmet phones of our space suits.
"Maybe the last camp of the last survivors of Planet X, came here
millions of years ago, before their world went ffttt--before there
were asteroids. But there's something here yet, I'm tellin' yuh! Now,
after you pay me, I'll get my mono-wing out of your hold, and fly back
to town, and I hope I won't stop long before I rocket back to Seattle.
Keep alive if you can. So long."

Boom Harlow was gone, then, riding a jetted metal triangle high against
the thin murk. The rest of us were left with the creeps and the wonder,
and all the work we had to do.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was an ancient shelter of glassy rock, metal-lined, and once
sealed, for there was an airlock. A dried, age-blackened form, its
claws clenched, its queer, vertical ribs sticking through the
skin, was crumpled in one corner of the shelter. Around him was his
gear--tools and weapons like those in museums. Perhaps no one had dared
to take them, for a curse was supposed to be here.

But you could tell that he had been moved; and the even cones of dust
on the floor showed that every bit of it had been carefully sifted,
no doubt after prospector Jeffers had found that tiny box of glinting
tools. He had shown the box to reliable people; but then, by later
report, had somehow lost it.

The mummy was an Xian. With what sadness at the loss of a home world,
had he awaited death under the bleak sky of Ganymede?

None of us spoke. At last Jan kicked dust over the corpse in a gesture
of kindness.

"It may be safer in the ship," I offered.

Scharber and Bowhart had the _Intruder_, and the simpler wants of the
rest of us to look after. Doc, Jan, and I kept working on the smaller
micro-robots. But during an occasional spare hour we'd send our
half-inch alter-bodies out into the cold to look around the ancient
camp. We found nothing of interest except a splinter of diamond set in
a metal shank. A cutting tool?

But within a month, certain phenomena began to appear inside the ship
itself. As humans, we couldn't have noticed. But being half an inch
high, it was different.

"Whispers in dark corners, and shadows that move," Jan said. "And
tinkles. Or are spatial solitudes affecting my mind?"

We had just put down her control hood, so she was speaking as strictly
herself. She looked alert and curious, not overwrought.

"I thought I noticed something vague, too," I admitted. "Funny, the
ship is sealed. Even the air is constantly being filtered. But who's
complaining if there are developments so soon?"

"It would be best even to sleep in our armor," Doc advised. "Scharber
and Bowhart, too. Yes, I thought I heard a muttering and chirping.
And just now, as we worked on that final assembly, I was sure I saw
something hide in a bit of floss that was adrift in the air. But
they never come too close; they just hover near and wait. And only
miniature microphones, like those of our robots, could ever pick up the
sounds they make."

My hide was coldly atingle again. "Darn!" I laughed. "Why does the idea
of smallness and beauty always suggest fairyland, unreality? Small
things are just as factual as large ones."

"Fairyland is a dream, Charlie," Jan chuckled. "Something which many of
us in humdrum surroundings wish was so. But a yearning can sometimes be
made to come true."

Though we felt that we were being watched, nothing came to interrupt
our hard work. At last we won our fight with materials when we arrived
at the microscopic size-level limit of the workability of metals.
We now had three true micro-robots. They were like their half-inch
creators, except that they had two coordinated sets of eyes--a lensed
pair to see by ordinary light, and another pair, fitted with magnetic
focusing rings, to see by the rebounding of electrons from objects at
close range, where detail was less than the span of a single light-wave.

Step two, down into The Small, was made like step one. We used the same
control hoods, adjusted slightly, while we sat at our work table in the
shop aboard the ship.

"To the bottom of the pit!" were Jan's final words as a woman.

We put on our hoods and plunged. It seemed infinite, this time. The
gleaming walls and girders of the shop appeared as distant as planets.
The surface on which we sprawled became pitted and scored from our
new viewpoint. Polish was gone with magnification. An eerie, elfin
ringing--perhaps the finer overtones of normal sounds--reached our
tiny, tympanic ears.

We arose unsteadily. Our mechanical fingers joined, till we were a
chain of three, moving toward the door of the box as a group. Then we
were out on the undulating porcelain expanse of the table top. An air
current, magnified to a hurricane by our minuteness, lifted us up till
we floated free, still clutching each other's hands.

One peculiar thing about difference in size, is that the smaller an
object is, the larger is its exposed surface in proportion to volume
and mass. That greater surface in relation to weight, allows the
bombardment of passing air molecules to lift anything of dust-grain
dimensions and density into wingless flight. It also can give a sense
of helplessness, as if the atmosphere has become a treacherous medium
full of irresistible currents.

We tumbled, we laughed, and would have been panic stricken except for
knowing that our real selves were in normal circumstances. Nearby, the
air seemed to shimmer. A gnarled thing floated close--floss, looking
like a twisted tree-stump, to which clear ovoids clung--some common
form of microscopic life. A chunk of mineral dust came drifting nearer,
its sheared-off side glinting like quartz strata. Our two pairs of eyes
still were not developed to distinguish colors. Yet Jan had reasons
when she exclaimed in tinkling tones:

"Beautiful, truly beautiful! We came--we got here! In a sense, it's
farther than the stars! But now what happens? Where are--_they_?"

"I don't believe they'll be long in coming," Dr. Lanvin said at last.
"To write, to make tools, and to get into our sealed ship requires a
capacity to think and plan. So, about us, they must be following a set
purpose."


                                  IV

Tension mounted in me. As we drifted in the air, I looked at our human
selves, seated giants in armor, cowled, brooding, and of legendary
height. Here was a chance for a meeting with entities of another shape,
flesh, and history. For the Martians and Xians seemed as extinct as the
dinosaurs. Their artifacts and mummies were known; but their voices,
movements, and real selves, were elusively beyond imagining.

In most of the old imaginative stories of the future, beings from
another region spoke and thought like men. But a recent University
course had pointed out how deeply different must be races sprung from
wholly separate chains of evolution, not only in form but psychology;
how there would be no helloes or similarity of custom on the other
side, and how one must wait with perfect self-control and mind utterly
open, until an equal horror of alienness lessened in the alien beings,
too....

Jan said, "Look." The word was a single, flat, undramatic note. But we
saw them. A mass of lint, gray to our colorblind vision, drifted toward
us like twisted branches. Out of it, as from shrubbery, a dozen pair
of eyes peered--lenses with a moist glint, fuzzed at the edges; here I
thought not so much of lashes as of strange, misplaced antennae. The
creatures were like rough-hewn dolls, with craggy, almost triangular
heads. Yet these were not metal robots. Their skin was rough, as from a
coarse binding of spherical cells, still small, yet almost large enough
to be seen individually.

These beings possessed two arms and two legs. Yet, in still another way
they were familiar. They took all their major details from the mummied
bodies of the Xians, though those original Xians had been of human
size. What strange retreat, or advance, was implied here?

I was trying to answer everything about tremendous mysteries at once.
But I heard Jan tinkle out words matching my own awe:

"Charlie.... Doc.... Other intelligent beings.... Real.... See their
clothing, and the metal devices at their belts and in their grasp.
Seeing something completely hidden previously, is getting closer to the
Ultimate Secret of the universe, isn't it?"

The little robot that represented Doc, holding onto the right hand
of Jan's proxy as I clutched its left, had things to say, too, as we
floated free, waiting for whatever would happen:

"Critters as little as these micro-robots of ours--and intelligent,
and of flesh. But there couldn't be an intelligent brain working on
the familiar human principle in so small a size. The molecules are
simply too coarse to achieve such compactness. For that and other
reasons, these strangers have to have flesh of some advanced form of
protoplast with its possible flow of many types of energy, submolecular
or electronic. This might well apply to brain function, making its
countless patterns not inconceivable in an almost infinitely smaller
package."

Just for a second, Doc paused, before he brought his topic to an avid
point: "Androids," he said. "Micro-androids, or the equivalent,
in relation to beings not human! Is that what they are? Then it is
another demonstration of the advantages of this improved, lab-developed
basis for life--venturing into space unprotected, being almost
indestructible--even going down into The Small!... Or could it have
evolved naturally?"

The chill in my mind sharpened and turned more eager. But now Dr.
Lanvin's groping words faded out.

For, warily at first, our opposite numbers in this strangest of
historic meetings, at last went into action. As a group, each with a
purpose, they leapt from that floating mass of floss, their graceful,
swimming motions in the air aided by the reaction of hot flickers from
little jet-tubes they carried.

Swiftly, as if taking a citadel, they surrounded us, and held us in
their explorative, yet strong clutch. Now was the moment of blundering,
of attempted communication, across the great, mysterious gulf of
difference.

Doc addressed them: "Now what do I do or say? Who learns whose way of
conversing? Or would it be trite to think that you might be telepathic?"

Could these beings even recognize Doc's friendliness? Well, we were in
for a surprise. They had a spokesman. Out of his thorax came a slurred
buzzing, struggling to mimic human speech:

"Telepathy? No, Mister. Not so good for us with you people. Funny?
Maybe.... Learn conversing? One can always learn more.... But we have
been visiting Earth, mostly unnoticed--since--before--there were--men."

Here was English, idiomatic to the point of slang. Yet, to add an
eeriness, there were pauses, as if the effort to think in a human
manner was more difficult for this trained but outworldly psychology
than the speech itself!

So, the simplicity of communication was like in some of the old,
imaginative stories. Well, why not, if these little people had
been haunting human stamping grounds for ages? Besides, could
extra-terrestrial thought, dealing with common physical facts, be so
totally different? That University course had exaggerated.

Doc cursed happily: "Dammit, things'll be easy, now!"

"Easy," came the cheerfully buzzed answer. But soon I suspected that a
cheerful tone was pure mimicry of a human way, without, necessarily, a
real, corresponding emotion. For now our escort gripped us roughly, and
drew us along through the great gulf of air, using hand-held jet-tubes
for propulsion.

       *       *       *       *       *

Doc's shouted, "Hey, what goes on?" and my equivalent complaints,
were ignored. Our escort broke in two, six of its members, including
the leader, continuing to lift Doc, Jan, and me upward through the
air inside our ship, the other six, bearing what looked like massive
equipment, falling behind.

In the ceiling of our lab compartment there was a circle, still edged
with the rough scale of a tool cutting with intense heat, and there
was a hinged, circular door of metal. They had cut through the skin of
our ship, and had installed an airlock, quite like our own variety in
principle, yet so tiny that our human eyes had missed it entirely.

Helplessly we were drawn through it, and onward into the murky night of
Ganymede, over which Jupiter and his other scattered moons held sway.
Our robot-selves of course did not feel the cold, which approached
absolute zero. Nor apparently did our unarmored hosts. Nor did they
seem compelled to breath oxygen.

"Charlie! Doc!" I heard Jan call. "I hope they're not taking us
too far! The radio control hoods, keeping us in contact with our
micro-robots, here, are of limited range. We could lose the robots!..."

"Not very far," came the answer from the being who had spoken before.
"But Kobolah--myself--says it makes no difference to you."

Perhaps that strange little monster meant to reassure us. By now I had
him identified as an individual. The irregular filaments around his
eyes were longer and paler than those of his henchmen.

A Ganymedean wind wafted us along, our escort perhaps using it to cover
distance, righting it only as much as necessary, with their spitting
jet-tubes. Our course turned downward into the shadows of knotty rock
masses near the old Xian camp.

We went through another airlock, and into a tapered, cylindrical
chamber. Figures like the others were there, craggy, yet obliquely
charming in form. There was what must have been a propulsive mechanism,
perhaps refined by ages of development, until matter was totally
converted to energy.

And there was a crystal vat in which complicated grids were suspended
in gelatin. Deep in the menisculous, pearly medium were shapes, hardly
seen, though suggestive.

Kobolah spoke again: "You three even built small robots with great
pains to pay us a visit. So we thought that maybe you should truly
come. We shall see...."

I saw that odd, triangular head. I could fathom nothing from the eyes,
except perhaps a cold interest. But I felt tricked and trapped. As
far as our senses were concerned, we were here, not back in our ship.
Forgetting that, we had been off-guard there!

Can a robot have a fearsome headache? Suddenly I had one. Dizziness
and a blurring of consciousness was followed by panic. Suddenly I was
back in the _Intruder_, frantically unfastening the helmet of my space
armor, then casting off the control hood.

I staggered erect. Dr. Shane Lanvin grunted beside me. His usually mild
face was contorted. Jan gave a thick cry, her gloved hand on her brow.
Doc and she had also torn off their helmets and hoods.

I floundered to Jan, heard her say, "Charlie...."

Then I saw a hole, like a tiny cigarette burn, at the fabric-and-wire
elbow joint of my armor's left arm.

"Scharber! Bowhart!" I yelled. It was a thin wheeze. I wished that they
knew more about Doc's work so they could help us. My final awareness
was of the rush of their footsteps.

Time became timeless. Then I had a sense of struggling upward toward
light. The effort was mental. A minute might have passed, or a year. I
had a body which seemed to turn lightly on a mattress of coarse sticks.
I felt like myself, clothed in real flesh. The light around me might
have been diffused sunshine, and I saw colors, the familiar ones, plus
what might be the indescribable paleness of ultra-violet, unknown to
man as himself, and another nameless hue that perhaps was the sensory
effect of electronic vision.

I didn't fully guess all this at once; but its ghost was in the back of
my mind, and at the edge of panic.

I had sat up easily. I realized that I was still in the region of
The Small. Once experiencing that environment denies any failure to
recognize it later. Oh, there was the roughness of the glassy walls of
the room, pleasingly decorated with geometric patterns like those of
old tiles brought back to Earth from the asteroid belt. But I refer
more to the insecure sense of buoyancy, of ease with which one might
float in the air or recline upon it, after a tiny push at the floor.
It is a feeling quite apart from the weightlessness experienced in
space; and though there was certainly very little gravity here, too,
the difference remained palpable. And now I even felt a tingling in my
skin--the impact of molecules, perhaps, as they tried to lift and carry
me away.

My body seemed to conform to such a dimensional plane. It was me with
some details blurred or omitted. I was clad in stiff imitations of the
slacks and shirt I had worn inside my space armor. My hands, rough
in texture, lacked the fine hairs, as if they had been left out in a
process of transformation. Was the stiff, wirelike hair on my head
still black? I fumbled at my face. The nose, large jaw, and brow,
seemed the same, except for a certain shortness and roundness, as in
a doll-like simulacra. Corresponding to this was the length of lashes
around my eyes--or had electronic sense-organs been added, necessary
here for close vision?

Again I looked around the room. One wall was absent. But the square
left for ventilation was crossed by interwoven diagonals--bars which
must have been incredibly fine wire from another viewpoint.

Beyond this barrier was an egg-shaped chamber, so huge to my present
minuteness that it was like a mountain valley, its sides curving up in
shade and lushness; though through its vitreous, natural roof, light
streamed. Everywhere, bright green foliage peeped over garden walls.
Sometimes it was shaggy and filamented, sometimes massy and spheroidal
on thin stalks. Along streets rising in angular charm, were geometric
masses in pastel tints, some unknown to man, before. There were cubes,
pyramids, even spheres--buildings, obviously--yet of such simple oddity
that a child might have designed them.

Water did not lie flat as in a lake, but gathered in great glistening
dewdrops, burying a house or hill fantastically, but with startling
beauty.

But all this moved with the daily life of a teeming
civilization--living, manufacturing, buying and selling in the market
place. The air was full of craggy shapes, some propelling themselves
with arm and leg movement, others using jet rods. High on a slope
there was a continuous electrical flicker, a bluish spark. Perhaps the
furnace of a metallurgical process.

       *       *       *       *       *

The springy stuff on which I sat, gross as brushwood, would have been
cotton wool to normal-sized human touch. Perhaps it was vegetable fibre
of that order. Crouching near me was a girl, clad in coarse blue fabric
which in reality would have shamed our finest textiles. The details of
her face were simplified in a doll-like blurring of line. But still she
was recognizable, even with the lashlike filaments around her eyes.

Somehow I still spoke with my lips. "Jan." My voice seemed a miniature
bass bell. I crept to her side.

Her courage and sense of humor were intact.

Her laughter was a tinier bell. "I'm all right, Charlie. At least, yet.
Maybe I just don't realize. One thing we've talked about has happened,
hasn't it? You look sort of cute, Charlie, like a puppet in a show.
Doc, too." Jan laughed again.

Beyond her, dressed like myself, was the reduced image of Dr. Shane
Lanvin, though his inner self remained unchanged, his triumphant smile
just faintly edged with doubt.

"Hi, Doc!" I greeted. "Congratulations for success in a venture which
began with you. Now, for the record, let's hear your version of just
what has happened."

He smirked good-naturedly. "All right," he chuckled. "You can't get
back to any control hoods, our former human-size selves. I've tried.
So our whole identities must have been transferred to these far
smaller forms. Somewhere in our adventures the structure of each of
our brains must have been exhaustively charted, down to the finest
wavering of cell-filament, and the least variation of chemical state.
Thus must have been captured every phase of our minds, memories, and
personalities. This might have been done by something analagous to
our focused radar or X-ray photography, penetrating deep, and making
an instant record. From this record, the pattern of our brains must
have been rebuilt, with all the complex channels of association and so
forth, but in a totally different medium, capable of a far finer and
more compact flow of energy than mere nerve impulses. In a brain of
protoplast, I think it could happen."

"Loose ends still dangle," I chuckled. "For instance, I remember a
machine called George, and a statement by him that consciousness,
awareness of self, was even difficult to define. How about transferring
that?"

Doc Lanvin shrugged. "Maybe the consciousness--the true self--is
inherent in the brain channels, like the memory, and would also be
transferred simply by copying them precisely," he said. "Or could the
awareness be a kind of spark, capable of being captured and transported
by an appropriate apparatus, as an electric spark can be captured in
an electroscope? I don't know, Charlie. But I noticed some of the
equipment carried by these Xians when they took us; and I thought of
that."

Silence seemed to close in as Doc finished; and it grew heavy with
monumental implications, almost apart from mentioned things. I
breathed, which suggested that my present form was getting energy in
the familiar way--by the combustion of food substances. But as I held
my breath for a prolonged moment, there was only a brief flutter,
as of a heart quickening its beat inside me. I wondered eerily if
this was evidence of a casual change-over, as if my android flesh
could so quickly convert to some other energy supply, perhaps that of
radioactive salts naturally in its substance. Such minerals were fairly
common on the Jovian moons, and far commoner among the asteroids.

I was compelled to breath again to speak.

"More could be remarked about, Doc," I said. "We know that the Xians
were once of human-size, and of the same order of life. So somewhere
in their long and checkered history, their survivors invented this new
vital principle, and changed themselves. There may be various reasons
why they chose to be tiny. Hiding, for instance. But as you once said,
that's just part of the android advantage, and not the real issue. Here
is a step in scientific development probably as much to be expected
as television. If micro-androids can be made, so can larger ones!
There's your pending problem on Earth, Doc, natural man versus his far
tougher, more flexible competitor! Ultimate newness. It can be real!
And wonderful! But to many it will be a fearful thing."

Doc's doll-like visage fairly shone. "The warning, eh, Charlie?" he
chuckled. "The demigod dream coming to a head in eagerness and cold
tension. Shock of the utterly novel versus tradition, even instinct! No
ills; practical indestructability. Immortality, perhaps. The old, human
hope! And yet?... But should or can progress ever be stopped?... Damn,
if we can only take this process of conversion home!"

"You two talk of going home, and of lots of big things," Jan
complained. "But do we even know where we are? Just where is this room,
and those houses and gardens out there, in a great hollow space like
a bubble cavity in a glassy clinker? Of course such a cavity, a few
inches across, would seem enormous to us."

Dr. Lanvin studied her soberly. "You're sharp, Jan," he said at last.
"A bubble cavity, like in an old clinker. Umhm--m--many asteroids have
that sort of structure, maybe formed by the sudden relief of a planet's
internal pressure, when X was blown up. Steam and air made the bubbles
in the molten, glassy lava. But when it cooled and solidified, the air,
and the condensed water of the steam, remained sealed inside, unable
to escape into space. Explorers have found microscopic green plantlife
growing in many of those cavities, for through the glassy lava sunlight
can penetrate, as it seems to do here. Thus, a perfect natural
environment for living things in miniature was created. And a perfect
retreat. By gosh, Jan, I believe you're right!"

Doc had always had almost a child's love for small objects. But my own
enthusiasm was less complete. Call us all super-mites, placed beyond
most of the physical ills of men; but Jan and I were still prey to
nostalgia and panic and claustrophobia, for these are things of the
mind. Hard men have gone mad in space, because they felt cut off from
everything familiar. But at least they had their normal forms and size,
and a known way back home. They weren't caught in a clinker cavity
beyond a barrier of magnitudes that appeared more insurmountable than a
hundred light-years of distance.

It was a treachery of our primitive thought patterns, I knew. It was
against progress, and the explorative impulse. Yet I knew that it would
have to be reckoned with.


                                   V

Jan seemed about to answer Doc a little sadly. But then the grating
over a circular doorway at one side of the room opened and Kobolah
floated into our presence, and alighted before us. Uncertainly, Doc
and I arose. No human yet could have read the expressions of Kobolah's
queer, angular face, limpid filament-framed eyes, or palped mouth
orifice. The ages of history, and alien thought structure behind that
visage, were lost in enigma. But now his voice-tympanum buzzed; words
came out with an effort, but their arrangement and apparent thought
mimicked the human almost comically.

"Bubble cavities," he buzzed. "You are fine guessers. We are in a very
small asteroid. But it is not in the asteroid belt. The great explosion
long ago hurled it into an orbit around Ganymede. It is one of our
many retreats. We wanted to conquer Mars. We attacked terribly. But
they destroyed X. The few Martians still surviving tried to hunt our
even smaller numbers down. But we found a way; we became little to be
concealed. Later, we were at peace, safe. But being small was a habit
not needing change. We bore offspring, as we could before. We built
things up again, and multiplied, very few dying. We made more refuges
in the solar system, then in the systems of the stars. We are strong
and hidden. We have a good way. We are peaceful, except when there is
danger. But you three have come--differently. All right, we can watch
and learn from you, too. Yes, I have listened to all that you have
said, but to learn is good, and not unkind. Right? Now I have answered
some of your questions."

The buzzing voice ended in the slurred imitation of a laugh, which
tautened whatever now served me as nerves. For to laugh is a specially
human, Earthborn thing, not to be mocked. But here I was in the awesome
dark of complete novelty.

Doc, however, gripped Kobolah's corresponding tactile member. "Does one
do this, after all, among your people, Friend?" he asked. "Or express
thanks? If so, here it is. As for the rest, about the technology of
transformation--"

Doc did not even make it an apparent question. Yet the question was
there. Dr. Shane Lanvin had to learn what he could.

Kobolah mocked up a human chuckle. But his monster's gaze was cold.
"This is not for my decision," he buzzed. "But it could be as you wish.
Yes, I overheard what you want. Some I could show you now. You and your
companions--Charlie, Jan. The apparatus you could see."

"Of course!" Doc replied quickly.

I looked at Jan. Her jaw was set grimly, as if to fight the strain in
her eyes. I didn't have to ask her what it was. I felt it myself. All
the strangeness around us, beating at, grinding at, our minds. Physical
laws turned topsy-turvy, till nothing was the same. Could an android
go mad--if the mind in it remained human, and reacted even against the
unfamiliar substance of the arms and legs that it controlled? Too long
already it had been so. We were realizing what we were. There needed to
be some relief from the harsh thought.

"Wait!" I insisted. "Our own forms--are they dead?"

"Alive, sleeping, mindless, where they fell in your ship," Kobolah
answered. "I believe--safe...."

My arm was around Jan. "There!" I said triumphantly. "That's better
already, isn't it? You go with him, Doc. Jan and I need another mood,
now. Ko-bo-lah--" I struggled to pronounce the name as he did. "Are we
guests or prisoners? Can we go and come as we please?"

Finally he replied after what seemed an emotionless scrutiny: "I am
chief of a project to observe you. Proceed as you like until stopped.
There are common devices for propulsion there in the corner. The
controls are easy. Have fun. Come along, Doc."

Dr. Lanvin took a proffered propulsion rod from our host. "Yeah--" he
said a little dazedly. "Have fun. Be seein' yuh."

He still looked puzzled and amused as he followed the monster from the
room. The grill of the circular door was left ajar. Down a passage
beyond, daylight showed.

The little bell of Jan's laughter rang out, fringing hysteria. I patted
her shoulder. "Easy, Honey," I urged.

She began to regain control. "Common expressions from a buzzing demon
who might even be a good guy!" she said. "And around here you don't
even walk, you glide through the air! Everything's crazy! And all
the scientific explanations, while you get more and more homesick
for your own self! Darn it, Charlie, I'm a weak fool! But it's still
all wonderful, beautiful! It should be enjoyed. That's the way to
counteract fear and strain, isn't it, by enjoyment? No more deep
theories for now! Let's go out there to the city, see the sights,
follow our noses, try to have fun!"

"Right, Jan," I enthused. "Call us visitors in some exotic port. I
guess we'll need practice using these jet rods."

       *       *       *       *       *

In a moment we were out there in that lush, valley-like cavern, which
really was a bubble, a few inches across, in the glassy crust of a
fragmentary asteroid. The jet rods flamed and gave thrust in our hands
as we maneuvered clumsily in the air, learning, hands joined to keep
from being separated.

First we shot up to the immense roof through which sunlight streamed.
Then we drove ourselves down over the gardens and towers of the city.
Soon a curious crowd floated around us. They plucked at us, and their
voices buzzed; but none of these Xians seemed to know our language.

"Does it really matter, Charlie?" Jan asked, her eyes beginning to
shine, now, some of the strain already disappearing. "Here's an old,
old civilization, hidden, grown esthetic, maybe even a little decadent,
but extending far. You know it, feel it! Here are beings changed to
an android life-basis so long ago that it seems natural--hardy flesh
healing if injured, children being born as in the old flesh! Even death
almost a myth! Gosh, I hope we can get used to all that, Charlie!
Peoples multiplying, spreading to the stars."

"Don't paint it too bright, Jan," I laughed. "Come on. Let's explore
farther."

I don't remember how many hours we spent on that long excursion, or all
that we did. There was more than one bubble cavern; there must have
been thousands connected by artificially drilled passages in double
arrangement for traffic moving in two directions. In those passages,
currents of air carried one along swiftly. It was a perfect transit
method for a micro-world.

In some caverns were other cities. But there were more where tiny
agricultural machines, with limbs like a beetle, crawled across
miniature fields. Here we ate strange, sweet fruit, that surely
contained the carbohydrates of familiar food. But no doubt it also
contained radioactive salts from the soil in which it grew. As we had
been, it would have poisoned us. As we were, it was a double source of
vital energy, chemical and subatomic.

Other caverns were murked with the fumes of electric foundries,
self-operating, close to the mine-tunnels that bored deep into the
natural, nickel-steel core of the asteroid. In still other caverns
there were low buildings full of lathes, drills, presses, among those
that we could name--all automatic, too. Then there were caverns where
stood lines of square containers, enormous to our eyes, and joined by
a network of cables. This must be a power source--banks of nuclear
batteries.

And in several adjacent bubble cavities we saw where an enormous metal
cylinder was being built, each oblong segment being welded into place
by mechanisms of the true robot variety. From any one cavern only a
small part of the curving side of the tube could be seen.

"Some kind of jet engine?" I asked almost rhetorically. "For their
further expansion toward the stars? Like moving a whole planet to them,
eh?"

"Your guess, there, can be mine, Charlie," Jan said.

We felt no physical tiredness in spite of all our activity. "Let's
get back to a more idyllic surface bubble, Jan," I suggested, "and go
swimming in water if natural law, here, allows it."

"Crazy!" she responded gleefully.

Air, rising in a vertical shaft, bore us aloft for the few feet that,
to us, stretched into seeming miles. Against what appeared to be a
green hillside, we soon found what we sought, a great, clear ovoid,
glinting like a lens in diffused sunshine.

It almost proved true that we could not swim, here; for the relativity
of smallness gave water a terrific surface-tension. It was difficult
even to get wet! You could lunge at the dewdrop, and it would throw you
back like a net of rubber. Even with android strength, we tried several
times before we penetrated it. But then things went well.

Jan glided like a little pink nymph, silvery bubbles clinging to her
face. We did not breathe. The greater relative viscosity of water did
not trouble us. Our eyes did not need to close. Inside the dewdrop swam
Xians who had followed us. And extending in crystal vistas were the
furry green bulks of water algae.

Maybe there was no moment or place, yet, as beautiful as this. We
enjoyed ourselves immensely. But grim questions about our future
remained in my mind, though here and now the charm of fantastic
difference reached a pinnacle.

"Now I'd like to go up and out on the surface of the asteroid, Jan," I
said when we had emerged from the water. "The real test. Game?"

"Why not?" she answered.

So we found our way upward to a surface airlock. It's Xian guard did
not stop us. The lock's mechanism was automatic. We crept out onto
bleakness, with harsh space all around. Icy stars, silence, deep, dry
cold. Huge Jupiter, gray-white, and streaked. The far-off but still
dazzling sun. And blotting out a third of the sky by its nearness,
Ganymede, murked by its moving surface mists, almost congealed.

"A test for the android--unprotected in the raw void," I said.

No sound came from my mouth; the vacuum made it impossible. Speech was
purely a matter of lip reading, here.

But Jan nodded.

All I felt of an energy change-over was a protective tightening of my
skin, and that quickened, momentary throbbing inside me. There was
no sense of cold or suffocation, no pangs of blood boiling under the
release of pressure. Perhaps our outer flesh now served as a sealing
shell.

       *       *       *       *       *

A sense of personal power came over me--android power. The thrill
contradicted my darker dreads.

Somehow I wondered how much I had had to be redesigned inside. In any
tiny body the relative viscosity of liquids imposes a definite strain
on the heart. Were my blood vessels now made especially wide to reduce
circulatory drag? I had heard that the littlest insects have to be
somewhat special in their inner construction for this same reason.

More confidently, my mind reached out to all distance, and all
unknowns. The demigod mood was on me.

It was then that a crowd of Xians emerged from the airlock. Horny
digits clutched us.

We were drawn back into the interior of the asteroid, where the hoarded
warmth of the sun was augmented by the decay of radioactive minerals.
The crowd buzzed around Jan and me. Through tunnel and shaft we were
guided back to the cavern and house of our first arrival, mistily
illuminated, now that night had fallen.

Dr. Lanvin and Kobolah met us. Doc looked excited.

"Well, Charlie and Jan," he said, "I've met the real ruling force of
this world, and have made my appeal. Come along for the answer!"

Kobolah led the way down a shaft that must have reached the center of
the asteroid, the most protected place. Here there was a cylindrical
chamber, the native nickel-steel of its walls gleaming silvery in
the bluish fluorescence. Aerially, and on the floor, the chamber was
crowded.

I looked up at a globe mounted on a spindle that traversed the central
axis of that great round room. It gave off a faint blue glow. Its
surface showed thousands of facets; but it was not rigid like a
crystal. In its translucent milky mass were countless dark veins that
pulsed.

"Think of George," Doc said softly. "The same thing in purpose, only
far more so. Not a ruler, only an adviser whose opinion the populace
respects more than its own. This is a great organized lump of androidal
brain tissue of the same order as the condensed stuff now in our
heads, according to Kobolah. It has the same volume efficiency, though
millions of times larger. And it has all of the knowledge of this far
scattered civilization at its command."

Jan smiled. "Poor old George," she mused. "I used to feel that his room
over the library felt like a temple to Everything. Well, we've seen a
few more mysteries, haven't we? And the feeling is here now."

There was a dry rustle in that steel chamber. First the message came in
Xian. Then in English:

"Generally, the technologies of the peoples throughout the cosmos will
achieve a sounder, more lasting state of the body as soon, or sooner,
than it is deserved, and can be handled intelligently. When it is
new, often there is fear, confusion and sometimes disaster. On Earth,
the native invention of a process of this sort cannot be more than
a century off. In each case it should come at about the time of the
first journeys to the stars. But the perfected invention, as it exists
here, is better than a crude beginning, which will add to danger.
Essentially, Earthians are about as ready emotionally as they will be
in a short hundred years. The universe seeks to improve its awareness
as rapidly as it can. There will be danger; this is a warning. But
it is recommended that the conversion method be demonstrated to the
Earthians as a gift."

The rustling voice clicked off.

"Thank you," Doc said solemnly, his gaze directed upward at the great
globe. "Thank you, too, for pointing out risks."

Then he turned toward Jan and me. "Yes," he said, "Kobolah tells me
that it has a consciousness, unlike old George. And I'll take a chance,
in spite of a man at a fire, fuddled in a world changing too fast for
him. Anyway, what else can we do? Scientists can't stop studying and
learning any more than they can stop breathing."

Kobolah's filamented eyelids blinked. "Then come," he said.

We reached the labs where our intensive instruction, which was to last
more than an Earth-month, began. There we found our three micro-robot
bodies of metal, kept as in a museum. In other rooms were the furnaces,
subjecting silica, hydrogen, and other chemicals to great pressure and
heat.

We became acquainted with the vats in which readied substances were
held in solution. Next, under Kobolah and Nintan, his superior,
we studied the shaper grids and power sources, and the intricate
regulating devices attached.

Finally, an insect-like animal of natural protoplasm, native to these
bubble caverns, was made the subject of a demonstration. He was
bigger than we were, and tolerant to the radioactive poisons of his
environment. Otherwise, he was of the same vital principle as humans.

Anesthetized, he was immersed in a gelatin-like solution. Power flowed.
Slowly, the substance and chemistry of his tissues was altered, cell
by cell, without change of form, and never losing the inner motion of
living. It was a process remotely akin to electrolysis.

This was the simplest change that could happen. But there were others.
A body, or its three-dimensional simulacra made in any size, could be
used as a pattern for a protoplastic form, and made to grow in another
vat. But necessary alterations could be interjected too.

The nature of consciousness remained obscure to me, even under
instruction. But the idea of a special indivisible spark or node of
energy seemed to remain an at least tolerable analogy. Doc Lanvin's
comprehension here was a lot better than mine.

"About the awareness, the philosophers were almost right, Charlie and
Jan," he said one day. "But science can touch it too, reverently, as
it touches a beating heart, which is a pump, easily understandable by
physical law. So it is with the awareness, too. Who would want it any
different? Who would want the soul to be merely a formless miracle of
command, when Divinity must be logic and order, and completeness of
understanding?"


                                  VI

Somewhere along the way, this and other matters became too profound for
me. I absorbed what I could; but my field is action and feeling, not
deep penetration, like Dr. Lanvin's. He pursued androidal conversion
down to its last secret. Drawings and formulae, changed to Earthly
terms, went down on parchment, and into his head. He toyed with the
wondrous slimes of another kind of life, and at last understood them.

Jan and I were lesser beings. Buffaloed and a little dazed, we would
wander off from the labs. Often we swam and laughed. Part of our
personalities was adjusting to the fantastic region of The Small. But
we worried, too. About our original bodies, and about a reticence
before questioning, on the part of even Kobolah. Then Jan expressed
another thing:

"Have I learned to read suspicion in the manner of the local folks,
Charlie? Their minds are beyond us. But to them, recently, we have been
strange giants beyond easy imagining. Now, do they especially resent
having their greatest secret given to us? Do they object to the advice
of their version of George, that we should have it? I feel a danger,
Charlie. They could destroy us, or keep us here. Already they won't
let us go up to the surface of the asteroid, though gosh knows what we
could do there."

Jan and I were crouching in a little glade, in a lush cavern where the
sun shone. No one else was near. I said softly:

"From the surface, I think we might get back to Ganymede and the
_Intruder_, and maybe to ourselves, if it's not too late."

Jan looked at me with a wondering frown. "Yes, she mused. A few inches
is a mile to us. Some ways, our movements are terribly limited. But in
other respects, we're more free. With only a jet rod, we might travel
those thousands of miles."

"It's an idea to keep in reserve," I said. "But there's another
trouble. We've been here for about two months--counting one for the
changing of our forms. Would our own bodies, even if they are still
alive, or our ship and Bowhart and Scharber, still be where they were,
after so long?"

A trapped, icy feeling came over me.

Jan was a real pal. You didn't have to hide your fears from her. She
was a courageous realist. Her little rounded face only looked sort of
stern.

"What to do, Charlie?" she answered. "Wait and see, I guess. Funny how
important old familiar circumstances are. But we'll get along--even
always being what we are, now. Darn Doc, though, never thinking about
anything but his studying. Double-darn our Xian sponsor, Kobolah! Hint
about our personal futures, lately, and he gets as elusive as all the
history of his kind!"

I chuckled bitterly, and then quoted some of the things Kobolah had
buzzed at us: "'Leaving soon? How soon is soon? To a long life, a
century is nothing. Are you not happy?...' Yeah, that's Kobolah! A
demoniac cross between something we'll never quite understand, and a
kid denying with naive aplomb that he stole the cookies."

Yes, an elusive inertia of suspicion was all around us now, like a
barrier.

Jan and I got through to Doc Lanvin at last, penetrating his studious
fog. An overtone of grimness came into his mild expression.

"I've noticed the change in Xian attitude, too," he admitted. "It's a
shame to be wanting to skip out on them, now that I've learned all that
is necessary. But with the biggest piece of potential human history in
my possession, I could hardly let minor qualms deter me much, could I?
We'll find a road to freedom."

Yet it turned out less easy than Doc hoped. Time after time we
approached various surface airlocks. Redoubled Xian guard-groups
pushed us back gently. Neither stealth nor violence had any chance
of being effective. We were constantly watched and outnumbered.
Twice we tried hiding in metal boxes, full of parts destined for the
surface-assemblies of the tiny world's slowly developing star motors.
Both times we were promptly discovered, and pulled forth with emphasis.
Xian voices buzzed. Their eyes were cold. After that second try, Doc
had a wild look, like somebody with a treasure that he can't use.

"No star trips for us, yet," he growled. "Not with another bigger
purpose back home. Somehow I'll get there, or stop living!"

       *       *       *       *       *

A little later we were back in the familiar laboratories. It was night,
deepened by the fact that the sun was now eclipsed by Ganymede. But
in the windowless lab with its electron lamps, this couldn't matter.
Kobolah puttered in a corner. No one else was with us.

Keyed up and angry inside, I noticed a rather unobtrusive combination
of circumstances--three new jet rods in a corner; small nets of fine
wire, containing steel cylinders of supplies. Casually stuck to a metal
prong on the wall was a parchment map, showing a vertical shaft leading
to an airlock--the lab's private exit. Beside the map, a little used
grille was slightly ajar.

Excitement became a kind of panic inside me. I looked at Jan. Her
long lashes blinked knowingly. Doc nodded and walked casually away.
The parchments of the secret he had gained were nearby. As if only to
add further notes, he took the vast sheaf out of its compartment and
carefully divided it into three. Midway in this operation, Kobolah
turned toward us. Millions of years of difference in background, and
in physical, mental, and emotional form, looked at us from great,
cold eyes. A nervous chill came over me, both from the bleakness of
discovery and frustration, again, and from the namelessness of that
gaze.

Finally the monster imitated a harsh laugh. "Call this outburst
peculiar," he buzzed. "Coming from nothing. But I happened to think
that it is easy to be a fool, and often one will never know which way
is foolish. Remember that."

He turned his attention back to the sputtering electrical apparatus
over which he had been working.

"Thank you, Kobolah," Jan said nervously. He did not reply.

We divided the parchment among us, gathered up the equipment, and
slipped quietly past the exit grille. An air current lifted us up the
shaft to an unguarded airlock, whose control devices were readily
responsive.

"Somebody stacked the deck for us," Doc whispered. "The scientist's
logic, against popular doubts, maybe? Better to let us escape, than
to release us openly, eh? I hope he doesn't get into trouble with his
people. Or is there a deeper trick? Well, we'll soon know."

We emerged onto the deserted surface. We were micro-androids in space;
dust-grain things matched against the universe, and the future of man.
But we were part of both.

In the shadow of the asteroid world's eclipse by Ganymede, there was
still soft light from Jupiter. Now we joined ourselves like mountain
climbers, with a thoughtfully provided floss cable. Then, with small
bursts from our jet-tubes, we leapt.

Soon we were falling toward Ganymede, accelerated by its attraction.
It was a trip of many hours. Our jet rods checked our speed while we
were still in space, and the satellite's atmosphere became a supporting
cushion. We had an advantage over full-sized people--we could not fall
to destruction. Instead we had to search for downdrafts to help force
our descent with the rods.

Completing our journey, however, was not especially difficult. In
Ganymede's glowing crescent we located a foamy dot--the airdomes of
Port Hoverton. From this reference point it was easy to determine
where we had left the _Intruder_. We got down into a prevailing wind.
Thereafter our progress was swift.

After a few more hours, and some jockeying with our jet rods, we knew
we were over the right place. We could speak audibly again, now.

Doc's grin was a bit forced. "You can even see its circular imprint in
the dust," he said. "But the _Intruder_ is gone."

Jan pointed below. "There's a space tent, Charlie!" she exclaimed. "The
little brown dot! See? And somebody's standing before it!"

Swiftly we jetted down toward that bulging, inflated tent, fitted with
its zippered airlock compartment. It stood alone in frigid desolation.
"_S.S. Intruder_" was lettered on its side.

We alighted on the plastic face window of the armored figure, and clung
to scratches in the material.

From this position we looked at the face of the man, huge, handsome
to our former view, but made ugly by magnification. The skin-pores
were craters. Individual scales of the epidermis, with the living
cells beneath, were all visible, on forehead and nose, and around the
colossal eyes, in which the separate flecks of pigmentation could be
seen. It was an impressive, belittling vista.

The colossal jaw worked slightly: the narrowed gaze looked grim.

"It's Scharber!" Jan said. "He stayed here to keep watch, hoping for a
sign from us, I'll bet! He knew part of what we were doing. But now he
doesn't even notice us, any more than you notice motes on a windowpane.
And how can we talk to him? He could never hear our voices directly.
How can we get anything across?"

The riddle faced us tautly, as if we were trapped forever in a lesser
dimension, even beyond communication with our own kind.

"The jet rods again!" Doc shouted. "He'll see the spark of blue fire!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Doc braced himself in a scratch ridge in the plastic and squeezed the
trigger of his rod. At a little distance, the glassy surface boiled up
in dazzling flame. When the thread of intense atomic heat was broken
off, a smoldering pit was left in the outer surface of Scharber's face
window. A mere pinprick.

But plainly Scharber had observed, and added it up. His great eyes
widened; the plateaux that were his cheeks, paled. In the canyon-like
ridges of his brow, came the sweat of fear. Drops of it were bulging
lakes, rushing down past the lopped-off redwood trunks of the blond
bristle along his jowls.

It was then that I found that another's fear of the unknown can inspire
fear--which was easy to feel, anyway, when looking up at that mighty
visage. Here was I, minute before this Atlas. I felt outclassed beyond
measure.

There came suddenly a great shock of sound. Almost, it was more a heavy
vibration, like an earthquake. Quivering with it, Jan, Doc and I clung
to the roughness of Scharber's face window. Yet it had the beat of
recognizable words. Scharber was speaking:

"So you've come, damn you, whoever you are! Like you came for some part
of Lanvin and Charlie Harver and his wife. Well, their bodies, still
in deep coma, were shipped back to Earth a week ago on the _Jovian_!
We have scientists to figure out what you've done to my pals. Bowhart
has gone to help the scientists with what we know! So look out! We're
strong on Earth. We can fight and punish. So--to hell with you!"

Scharber was terrified before the unknown, but defiant and brave. The
oldest human virtue was there, and it gave me a lift.

"I wish we could thank him for that kind of talk," Jan said.

"Maybe we can," Doc answered. "But our big problem is to get home fast,
now. Ships from Ganymede to Earth run only every two months, and if
the _Jovian_ left only a week ago, there aren't any ships here! And
how long before coma becomes death? When it has already gone on for so
long? I know how you two must feel. With me, maybe it's not quite so
bad. But darn, I still need that carcass of mine!"

I looked again at Scharber's frightened face. I had hoped that he could
help us. But without space craft, that was unlikely. Oh, a call might
be sent for a rescue vessel. But it would be sixty or so Earth-days in
arriving, even if involved explanations of our peculiar position could
be made by interworld radio.

"There's a way to communicate with Scharber," I said. "We could
probably get him to have a message sent to Bowhart to recall the
_Intruder_. But to turn a fully accelerated space ship around in
mid-trajectory is no simple trick. Anyhow, there'd still be a bad
delay."

"So, beyond trying to locate some small craft at Port Hoverton, there's
just one other thing for us to do," Doc said grimly.

Jan expressed it for us: "Use the same method that we used to come here
from the sub-moon of the Kobolah's people? Go without a ship at all?
Achieve a high velocity; trust ourselves to something over four hundred
million miles of empty void unprotected? Is that what you mean, Dr.
Lanvin?"

Her small face looked pinched and awed.

"That's exactly what I mean," Doc replied. "As things are, I believe
that it is considerably the best way. Oh, we can still die, I imagine,
under certain circumstances! But the stakes are pretty big. I'd suggest
that you stay behind, Jan, until we could send for you. But the form
that was you is also one of those in a coma; and time is undoubtedly
precious. Yes, there's desperation of at least a minor kind in what I
suggest. But I think we've got all that we will need. And being as tiny
as dust gives us certain definite advantages."

Jan looked at me soberly. "Sometimes small, inert objects actually
leave worlds on their own, don't they, Charlie?" she mused. "Not only
atmospheric molecules achieving escape velocity, but sometimes much
more massive particles? At least, there was the Arrhenius theory of
the propagation of life throughout space--by means of spores torn from
the upper air of one world by the light-pressure of its mother star,
and propelled by the same force across the interstellar regions to the
planets of other suns. About ourselves--well--aren't we about the right
size and toughness to travel in approximately the same way?"

I looked at Jan, gulped hard, breathed "Okay," raggedly. Then I
returned my attention to the enormity that was Scharber's face.

He had hardly moved; his eyes continued to search the curve of his face
window, as if needing another sign from out of the unknown--as if, in
fascination, he feared to miss such a sign. But his sweat of terror, at
least, was subsiding.

"He can help us, a little," I said. "But staying here, he's unhappy,
and can't do any good."

Doc nodded.

"So we do the right thing," I chuckled. "First we change position;
mount to the top of the metal flange that frames his face window. Just
let go of this plastic surface, you two."

My jet rod flashed. The cable of floss which joined us all, drew Jan
and Doc after me, as I shot outward through the air to the crest of the
flange. There we clung. I had to hold on tight to resist the kick of
the rod, which would have hurled us far out into the air again, as I
used it for a pencil to etch a message on Scharber's face window with
its long needle of atomic heat.

It was like writing on the sky. My arm swung wide. But the range of
about half an inch, with the rod's energy roaring at full, was about
right to give me a normal-sized script. The jet's kick was trying to
break my arm, otherwise it wasn't too hard to do.

I even tried writing backwards so that Scharber could read my message
normally from inside his helmet. Where the needle of heat touched,
plastic seethed, and a visible line was left.

I wrote:

    _It's us, Scharber. Lanvin, the Harvers. Changed. Micro-androids
    now--like race of Xian origin. Friendly. Go home, Scharber. But
    please send radiogram. Urge imperative need to keep our bodies
    alive. Will return to them. A million thanks for everything._

The eyes of the Atlas who was our friend, stared again. Lakes of
nervous reaction came into them. The plains of the cheeks whitened, as
with some strange frost.

[Illustration: _The eyes of the Atlas who was our friend stared ...
stared fearfully at the message being inscribed so mysteriously on his
plastic helmet._]

The earthquake spoke:

"Charlie? Or am I going space nuts? Maybe this could be.... But who
ever heard of it!..."

Panic at his own thoughts made Scharber move suddenly. The movement
threw Jan and Doc and me from the frame of his face window. As we
tumbled in the thin, methane atmosphere of Ganymede, I heard Doc laugh.

"Scharber will probably be all right," he said. "It's the shock of
difference, again. But the message won't vanish from the plastic. He
won't think that madness made him dream it. He's tough and young. He'll
straighten out.... Come on, let's get started--for Earth!"


                                  VII

We were lifted upward toward the limits of the atmosphere by the jets
of our rods, aided by natural updrafts, which we sought out. Joined
together as a group by the floss cable, we were certainly far heavier
than any of Arrhenius' theoretical spores; but we had the advantage of
intelligence to seek out forces to help us. We were not inert particles
to be buffetted by chance impulses of nature.

We attained the high ionosphere of Ganymede where the sky was almost as
black as space, where accelerated residual molecules beat against us,
giving us some of their upward motion, and where sound had almost been
smothered by the vacuum. There, Doc clutched mine and Jan's hands for
sonic contact, and said thinly:

"Last chance for vocal speech. We'd better know how we all feel. In
the parchments we carry we have about the greatest possible material
gift to man, a dream of his from his beginnings. Practical freedom
from death, from physical affliction. Immensely increased range of
possibilities. The universe, in almost all of its phases, can truly
become his stamping ground, now. It's a treasure that men would kill
to have. To me it is an inevitable and wonderful step of progress.
But there's a confusion in it, based on a split in human nature.
You've seen and felt how it works. The mistrust of old instincts for
the completely different and revolutionary. Fear and even horror
that invokes a savage compulsion to fight back. There's trouble
ahead--between the two halves of man's character--represented by
eagerness and revulsion. We know how it is from our own feelings. The
android bodies we now have are the substance of the treasure, the gift.
We exult at its legendary advantages; yet we have a terror of a strange
exile, if we can't get back to our weak, natural flesh! The answer, on
Earth, when the Big Change really comes, will be emotional adjustment,
acclimation, time. Right?"

I answered Doc quickly: "You're looking for possible treachery in our
nerves--opposition. Don't worry, Doc. I know every feeling you've
mentioned. But the balance is all on the side of belief that progress
is inevitable and good. I say this as a pretty average guy, Doc. Let
Jan speak for herself."

My wife smiled. "Charlie knows I agree," she said. "So let's get the
show on the road...."

We rose still higher in the atmosphere, to a place where the rising
sun's rays were like a thin wind blowing against us. It was the
pressure of light, the same thing that makes the vanes of an antique
photometer spin. Gently, but with increasing speed, we were urged
into space. One thing was wrong. Our Earthward course was to sunward,
against that minute thrust of solar light. But there was a way to
correct part of this.

Accelerating with the help of the pressure, we swept around Ganymede in
an orbit; we waited until our direction reversed itself, as must always
happen in circular motion. Then we really built up velocity with long
bursts from our rods, and tangented sunward, breaking our last tie with
the Jovian moon. We were on our way.

I felt my hide stiffening defensively. Over long periods we were not
entirely without need of shelter in the awful spatial dryness, so
we kept watch. The void is not completely empty. It contains many
scattered hydrogen and helium atoms, and a rarer sprinkling of cosmic
dust. We were lucky. Gleaming like a planet reflecting solar light, we
saw a lump of rock moving with us toward the sun. We jetted to it and
clung, laughing silently in the vacuum.

Doc's lips formed the words: "More speed. Time is short. Use up the
cartridges of the rods. We have more."

Any object, broken clear of the gravity of a planet or large moon,
is free in space. Acceleration is resisted then only by inertia. A
relatively small force can build velocity enormously.

We were traveling at many miles per second when Doc mouthed: "Not too
much. Eventually we must apply the brakes."

We fused our way into the meteor with our rods, and hollowed it out.
We closed the exit with the slag of our excavations. True, the sun's
radiations were a source of energy to our android tissues; but they
also hastened drying--our worst enemy here since our body fluid was
water.

As time went on, our skins hardened further, forming a kind of shell
around the moisture in our vitals. And we had a small supply of water
in steel cylinders. In a pinch, we needed little. We had food, too,
similarly packed--Xian gelatins containing the radioactive and other
minerals necessary to sustain protoplastic flesh, and give it a sure
energy source in space.

While we were burrowing into the meteor Jan did a whimsical thing. With
a diamond-chip tool she inscribed over the entrance of our cave:

"Dr. Shane Lanvin and Charles and Janice Harver traveling to Earth in
the Miniature--2037 A.D."

"There," she said in silent lip motion, for the reading of which we
were gaining practice. "Maybe the inscription on that quartz-grain
meteor you used to carry, Doc, was just as casual. Maybe it was carved,
just on the spur of the moment, recording a journey of little Xians."

"You happen to be right," Doc answered. "I knew those hieroglyphics by
heart. I drew them once for Kobolah. He translated. Four micro-Xians
were traveling the short distance from one of their inhabited asteroids
to another."

Later, the three of us fell into a kind of sleep. Or was it creeping
death? It scared me. Our metabolism slowed. Consciousness left us. And
so, time went very quickly. Maybe our tissues actually froze. I know
now that this hibernation is a natural android function, conserving
physical forces during long periods of inactivity. And it could not
stop for good our rugged vitality. We revived when the sun was nearer,
and warmed us more. Stiff with dryness, we drank water, and loosened up
our muscles.

       *       *       *       *       *

We cleared the exit of our burrow, and crept out on the surface of the
meteor. Rushing on in its elongated eclipse around the sun, it had come
close enough to Earth to make the latter a disc of about one-quarter
the apparent diameter of the Moon, as seen from Chicago on a clear
night.

"Our meteor probably won't get much closer," I mouthed. "So we might as
well jump soon. No use wasting the energy of our rods, decelerating a
meteor mass, too."

Doc nodded.

"Where will we be most likely to find our old selves?" we read from
Jan's lips.

"At the Space Medicine Research Hospital, near Chicago, I'd guess," Doc
answered. "They send them nearest our homes. Or--peek over a shoulder
at a newspaper, or into somebody's television. I think we are news. Are
you both sure you know just what to do if that old protoplasm of ours
hasn't got tired of waiting for us?"

"Yes," Jan replied.

"Fine," Doc commented. "So we'll drink some water, eat a little, limber
up, and then start for home without the meteor."

Much of our physical forces had returned with the prospect of activity.
Like any awakening, it was a natural tuning up of body. But I think
that even our android chemistry had suffered in our vast journey. Doc
and Jan both looked thinned down. I hugged Jan in appreciation of her
unwavering spirits.

"Good kid," I said. "It shouldn't be long, now, with luck."

We all jumped, then, and broke our velocity in one direction with our
rod-blasts, bending our course toward Earth, now only hours away, even
at steadily declining speed. And so, as unheralded as ghosts, but as
significant as a new dawn of history, we came in.

Yes, we still hit the fringes of the atmosphere a bit too fast.
The floss bond, holding us joined, burned in the heat of friction.
Thereafter, there was no keeping together in tumultuous vastness, that,
though it was just the Earth's air, seemed infinite to our tininess. I
could cry out for Doc, and more especially for Jan; but there could be
no answer. Really, it was the first bad break we had had.

I was high over a coastline. And a circumstance, particularly effective
in The Small, helped me to orient myself. I found a bit of quartz-dust
floating near me. I clung to it. Yes, I had heard of quartz crystals
functioning sometimes as natural radio receivers. But my tiny ears were
much better designed than the human to pick up minute sounds.

For more than an hour I listened to overlapping broadcasts. But the
most powerful station I heard was in Frisco. So that was the city
beneath me. I heard several newscasts. Parts of them were significant:

"... Dr. Shane Lanvin, micrologist, and the Harver couple, his
associates, seem near death now in Chicago. For almost five months
a spark of life has been sustained by intravenous feeding and other
therapy. Dr. Lanvin's party was sent to investigate certain threatening
micro-phenomena in the vicinity of Jupiter. Should any credence be
given to a fantastic radiogram sent from Ganymede by another member
of the party about a micro-race of supermen? Perhaps not; but it has
been the thing that sparked the special effort to sustain life in these
three during the past six weeks."

       *       *       *       *       *

I was already jetting, riding the prevailing winds high in the
stratosphere, and at last grabbing a lift on the skin of a passenger
rocket-plane. From high up Chicago looked almost as it did from normal
human eyes. There was no feeling of being lost in enormity, at least.
That was how I found the Experimental Hospital, and descended toward
it. The rest was easy. I had only to follow the newscast men to the
three rooms.

Hovering in the air, I felt the thunderous vibration of a doctor
explaining wearily for perhaps the thousandth time:

"Tissues and organs have no fundamental defect; some repair and
replacement has even been made. There should be consciousness, but
there is not. The rest is mystery."

I went to Jan's room first. How long had it been since I had seen
her real face? It was waxen, now. All the color faded, as in an old
painting. Never mind how I felt; it was bad enough. I drifted to Doc's
room. His eyes and cheeks were sunken. Hovering high over him, I could
not tell that he breathed. Then I saw myself, gigantic and pallid. The
embarrassment of seeing this corpselike thing was lessened by the fact
that it resembled my former lusty self only slightly.

"Hurry back, Jan, please," I urged aloud, though no one could hear me.
"Hurry back, Doc."

I heard things in that room. Physicians conversing in thunderous
undertones: "I'm getting tired of this. Interesting case, but it has
been too long. Can't last much longer. Yes, sometimes it seems an
unkindness to try to maintain life in something doomed to die."

Now that there was a chance at last, the help of those doctors might be
wavering.

I found an interne writing at a table in the corridor. It occurred to
me that, had it been necessary, I would even have dunked my entire body
in ink from his pen-nib, and written him a message by dragging myself
across the paper of the form he was filling out. But I still had my jet
rod, so I clung to his knuckle, and scribbled on the form in a charred
line left by a needle of atomic fire:

    _I have returned. So have the others. Please continue your efforts.
    Thanks._

    _Charles Harver._

The interne's hand jerked. I was hurled toward the ceiling. But I heard
his bone-jarring roar:

"Hey--Fletch! Dave! Look at this!"

If they didn't understand or believe, still they would be alert and
interested. There would be no breakdown of their struggle to keep those
bodies living.

I went back to the pallid thing that had been I, and did what was
necessary, after I had cached the parchments I carried, and most of my
equipment, in a groove in the molding on the wall. I allowed myself
to be inhaled. Deep in the lungs, I cut my way into a capillary with
a diamond splinter. It was an insignificant wound, really. Then, in a
rushing flood, while dim, reddish light penetrated to my eyes, I was
borne along. I knew by a violent turbulence that I passed through the
heart. Then there was a sense of rising. Absolute gloom meant that I
was inside the skull. There I lodged myself in as small and unimportant
blood vessel as I could find.

The rest was simple after that. I merely relaxed. It seemed that I went
to sleep. But I was in my own brain. Encouraged by a natural affinity,
the little energy-node or whatever it was that was my awareness and my
ego, went home. It was, shall we say, a wanderer's return.

When I awoke it was mid-morning. The mental pictures of recent events
remained vivid, yet they had assumed almost the character of a dream.
Beyond my window were maples and pines. A robin was scolding. It was
very pleasant, indeed, until I thought of Jan and Doc.

"Mr. Harver, you're awake!" a nurse exclaimed. "We knew from last
night's tests that you were suddenly much better! There had been
a message written in an impossible way...." Here, the girl looked
frightened.

"Never mind!" I growled. "How is my wife? And Dr. Lanvin?"

"Mrs. Harver is still asleep. But even her color is far better, and she
smiles to herself. Dr. Lanvin is much improved, too, though he is still
very weak, and has not regained consciousness."

I sighed with relief. They'd gotten back just as I had. Yet, with
what we'd brought back, this was not an end but a tense and wonderful
beginning. The android secret. Improved man, large or small. A
revolutionary fact to be thrust on our mortal race, with all its doubts
and enthusiasms and prejudices; to be pushed into the age-old familiar
sequence of birth, death, happiness, suffering, and decay of our kind!
It was monumental in its possibilities for triumph and disaster; and
for a weak moment I had a mighty wish not to disturb the peace, and to
let all of this sleep forever.

Of course doctors and newscast men talked to me that day:

"... The message? 'I have returned....' Just what, in plain language,
did that mean?... What did you find in your explorations in miniature?
There is a story from somebody named Scharber on the way to Earth
from the Jovian system, now. A yarn about a race that made itself
unbelievably small. Yes--to hide itself, I suppose."

"You might like the story when and if you hear all of it," I answered.
"Let Dr. Lanvin, my superior, talk, when he is able."

Late that day I was on my feet briefly. I held my wife in my arms, saw
her smile, heard her say: "Well, here we are, and what now, Charlie?
I even wonder if folks will be disturbed to know that tiny Xians have
been visiting Earth for ages, unnoticed. It's kind of creepy."

Doc grinned up at us wanly from his bed. "This carcass of mine
seems pretty well spent from the strain of my absence," he laughed.
"Oh, I guess the damned thing could be patched up some more. But
why bother? When I can have another body, same size, same shape,
same organs, including a brain duplicated to the last filament of a
brain-cell--no special principle required, as in The Small--all built
of tough protoplast, and with a few things straightened for a youthful
appearance and advantages? Not a robot any more than a man is a robot,
but a human of firmer flesh, capable of all that a human is capable of,
but much more. Glad to see you two up and around."

Yeah, Doc had always been a progressive. Oh, he'd had his doubts, too;
but now, if the Great Change fazed him at all, he didn't show it.


                                 VIII

Jan and I soon left the hospital and set up housekeeping in an
apartment of our own. But with all that medical science could do, Doc
still had to stay in bed for a month. But he started directing the
forces of destiny, almost as soon as he could give orders.

I was in on the deal, of course, as were several doctors from the
hospital, and Bowhart, and Scharber when he arrived on Earth from
Ganymede.

"Gonna do it, Doc, aren't you?" Scharber said, when he first saw him
lying there, pale and wasted. "You lugs scared me plenty once. Now,
though, I feel foolish. Big words you need for this! It's the dawn of
the demigods!"

My blood thrilled with a mighty promise, too. At night, going to
sleep, I'd exert my will. Lodged inside my head was a micro-android.
I'd will myself into it again. And so, for a little while, I'd escape
from my own mountainous form, to float free in the air and consult the
notes and drawings on the parchment that I'd hidden on a molding in my
hospital room.

Doc and Jan would do the same. They, too, following the plan we had
made in space, had similarly cached their portions of his notes. But
now we had assembled the complete record of the android process in
Doc's house.

And so the beginning was made. When Doc was able to get around again,
things really got under way. He obtained a government grant. A whole
lab and a large staff of workers, was set aside for us. Retorts,
pressure-vats, and other apparatus to produce the basic materials, were
constructed and installed.

Ours was a major project, coinciding in time with another major
project. For the first real starship was finally under construction on
the Moon. Three more years it would take to be completed.

But our enterprise reached practical fruition in fourteen months. I was
among the men present when Dr. Lanvin lowered himself into a tank of
special gelatins.

He was nude and emaciated; yet he kept his humor, and a certain
dignity. A thin hand made a slight gesture. To Scharber and me and the
others, he said:

"This will be the easiest trick, learned among the micro-Xians. Simple
tissue-replacement, cell by cell. Improved protoplast in place of
protoplasm. That's all. Well, wish me luck."

The anesthetic that had been injected into his veins worked. He slumped
down gently. The gelatins closed in over his face, and the month of
slow gestation toward rebirth began. I saw his body at various stages
of the process; little changed in appearance except for much increased
robustness.

Other duties intervened, so I did not observe his actual removal from
the tank nor his reawakening. But Jan and I met him a few hours later,
as he left the small hospital of our lab. The old gray suit he wore,
hardly fitted him. He still had his ragged blond mustache. You could
tell that he was he--with many years subtracted. He looked about as old
as I was--twenty-three. But these were the only signs.

He grinned like a kid, jubilant, but a bit self-conscious. He said,
half joshing:

"Look me over--the miracle of the era, the successor to natural
man; and no casual observer could ever tell that I'm not as humans
have always been. I eat, I breathe oxygen; I need some foods with a
different mineral content, it is true. I sleep if I want to. Given a
mate of like substance, I can reproduce my own kind. But I won't age.
Cut a finger off me, and it would manage to live independently for
a long time. Wound me terribly, and I'd probably manage to heal up
someway. Deprive me of air, or common chemical foods, and my body would
try to seek out other sources of energy--sunlight, radioactivity, or
whatever is available. Even change my basic tissue fluid from water
to--"

It sounded a little like bragging, so Jan cut in with a feminine tease:
"Yes, Dr. Lanvin. But put on your overcoat. People will think it odd
that you're carrying it on such a sharp winter afternoon."

Doc laughed back, and obliged her almost with embarrassment, and we
were three old friends together.

"People get injured," I said, "or just grow old; and though limited
rejuvenation and repair is possible, this is a far better way. That's
how it should go, Doc; and you'd think that no one with sense would
want to stop it. In months there'll be thousands of androids. But here
we are again--unsure of how it'll all be taken. Like you say, this is
succession to natural man. It can be conceived of as the old Threat
of the Robot idea, with refinements. A force of staggering newness,
wonderful to the point of being terrifying. We're almost certain that
there'll be trouble."

The story of all we'd learned among the micro-Xians, and its
repercussions here at home, was mostly regarded as a fantastic rumor at
first. It was talked of lightly on the newscast, and wherever people
gathered:

"Little People that have been around all the time, watching us? Shucks,
even my Irish grandmother knew that! So we're gonna become wonderful,
artificial critters! Homo ex Machina! Well, well!... Okay--take me--I
was always one for improvements!"

Yes, it went something like that. And when people first truly knew,
their reactions were mild, curious, and friendly. One incident I
remember particularly.

       *       *       *       *       *

Jan and I and Doc and a very pretty girl were walking in a quiet street
near the University. The girl was someone I had known from a picture.
She _looked_ like the picture, again, now. That is, she had become like
Doc. For the sake of youth and beauty, women can be more bold than
men. She was Irma Tandray Lanvin, Doc's former wife--returned. And
maybe she'd learned something about her man--that her rival, science,
was part of him, and that she'd better take him as he was. Maybe he'd
also learned the need of being attentive to a woman. Anyway, they both
looked devoted, now, and I hoped it was so.

But what I meant to tell about was our neighbors. First we met
Corbison, the mechanic, saying:

"Hi, Professor Lanvin. A fella'd hardly know you."

"It's still me," Doc answered.

Others gathered around as we paused to talk.

"How do you feel, Doctor?" asked an elderly woman. And when he replied,
"Fine!" she said, "Think of it! I'm glad!"

There was even a pooch, who began with a prolonged sniffing at Doc,
which progressed to a puzzled yelp, a wrinkling of brow above soulful
and humorous brown eyes, then a licking of his hand, and a caper. In my
mind the thought sprouted that a dog could become android, too.

"Wouldn't the word be 'canoid?'" Jan teased, knowing me well enough to
be sometimes almost clairvoyant.

"Ah, the language struggles to keep up with progress!" a bookish youth
commented lightly.

One of two small boys with their father fumbled with my fingers. "Aw,
it feels just like anybody's hand, Mister," he growled, disappointed.

"That's a case of mistaken identity, young fella," I pointed out. "I
_am_ anybody--yet."

Irma Tandray Lanvin took his grubby mitt, and laughed. "Is that the
same, Joey?" she questioned. "It shouldn't be, but I'll bet it is."

The kid looked as if his leg was being pulled.

There was just friendly interest and wonder among all those people,
then.

"What they reminded me of," Irma said later, "was some kind of
simple natives on a lost island, being shown a mirror for the first
time--before they think of black magic. Is that what we all are,
basically, at first? Simple? Trusting?"

"That's a good question," Jan commented.

And so it was for months more. But all the elements of catastrophe were
present. Earth was a crowded but beautiful place. Technology had done
much to give it an idyllic mood, and to shelter its inhabitants in
cotton-wool. But that same technology that could build so miraculously,
still held a devilish potential, if it served minds motivated by hate
and fear. Need one even remember, here, the asteroids that were the
fragments of Planet X, or the glassy, fused-down ruins of Mars, still
slightly tainted with radiations of nuclear fusion and fission?

The drives of intellect, of whatever origin, seem always to have a
sullen, combative streak, constructive in one sense, since it is the
force that brings peoples up from nothing. But the stubborn taking of
sides also harbors deadly danger.

Almost unobtrusively at first, the threatening clouds began to gather
throughout the world. At our busy and expanding lab, Bowhart, who, with
Scharber, had been crewman aboard the _Intruder_, came to represent one
phase of the opposition to the Great Change.

I remember what he said to me one day, his earnest face serious, his
brow crinkled with the effort to be reasonable:

"Charlie, I could be all wrong. But for some time I've been thinking.
Already there are twenty thousand once near-dead people who have been
changed over; not to mention five thousand others who were in good
health. Part of me admires the humanitarian angles here. But then
there's that feeling of a slow, creeping invasion, so far unopposed.
I can't exactly put my finger on just what makes it horrible; but at
night I wake up sweating cold all over. Maybe I've got a blind spot
in my head. All I know is that most everything about this remarkable
duplication of humanity goes against the instincts in my slow
Neanderthal guts. No, don't argue, Charlie. I've heard all of Dr.
Lanvin's counter-points, and I just can't feel right about the whole
thing. So I'd be a hypocrite if I worked in this lab any longer. I'll
leave today, with the best of wishes to you and yours, and Dr. Lanvin.
Tell him, will you?"

"All hail, Bow," I said, shaking his hand. "Thanks for the honesty. I
know what you mean. I've felt it all myself, even though I don't quite
agree."

Scharber, his former buddy, was also present in my office. They shook
hands almost formally, now. For Scharber had moved all the way to the
other side of the fence. He'd become the thrilled, eager kind.

"Poor Bow," he growled after Bowhart was gone. "A good guy, a
gentleman. But mixed up, like some tough kid, afraid to ride on a
merry-go-round. Feeling a black-rat-brown-rat difference. A primitive
terror of being crowded out by something far more vigorous, and
different from what he has always conceived of as human. Which brings
up the reason why I'm here to see you, Charlie. I've screwed up my
nerve to change the quality of my bones and meat. As far as I'm
concerned, the process might as well start tonight. Okay?"

I nodded. "Okay. Fine, Scharber," I said.

If folks had all been like Scharber, there would have been no
obstruction of progress. If they had all been like Bowhart, there would
at least have been no danger. But as always, there were other types.
Among them were those who like to speak out against something.

       *       *       *       *       *

Among these, now, was an old classmate of mine, whom I have mentioned
before, one Armand Cope. Already he was becoming minorly famous, laying
down the "facts" with a definite oratorical talent. I think that he
was, in the main, honest in his beliefs. But pledged and prejudiced to
one point of view, he was blindly violent toward its opposite number.
Cope was a fanatic. And now, with the smokes of fear curling in many
minds, nothing could have been more dangerous than his activities, and
the activities of the numerous individuals who were like him.

I heard him speak over the radio and television. Always his words
drummed on the same points:

"Friends, the craze for gadgets has become a folly, an insult to man's
dignity. The proof has become brutally plain today. All we ever wanted
was to live an uncomplex life--having houses that we build, and crops
that we raise, with simple materials and simple work of our muscles,
as nature intended. Science? Much of it should have stopped before it
ever started. It was a trap from the first, offering its benefits as
bait, not letting us know that it led to this mechanical abomination,
which seeks to sully our own natural being with a hideous slime of the
laboratory! The prospect makes one's nerves crawl; death is better than
the triumph of such a thing! We must fight and fall, if necessary! Let
the maniacs and fools know the real strength of humanity!"

Plenty of people were eager to listen to Cope, and to cheer him on.

I gulped, and then grinned at Doc rather wanly. Jan and I were in his
house that particular evening.

"It's like we thought it would be, before anyone on Earth even knew
about what we were bringing them," Jan said.

"You're going to talk back, Shane," Irma, Doc's wife, commented, with a
thread of steel in her voice.

"Of course I'm going to talk back," he answered. "But I'm afraid that
that could never do enough good. There'll always be enough point to
what Cope and his kind say, for scared, furious souls to cling to. I
wish mightily that it could be different; but I suspect that what I say
will only help to consolidate another fierce belief, to oppose Cope's
believers. Yes, like two mighty armies being drawn up for battle. That
is the real danger! Well, anyway I've got to try."

And so Dr. Lanvin was on television the following evening, speaking
from the Civic Center of Chicago. Jan and I left to run the lab,
listened from my office. It was a good speech:

"... I've never liked cheap, showy gadgets, performing some small
function that a person might do as well, and as easily, and with less
affectation, with his own head and hands. There, perhaps Mr. Cope and
I agree, as, no doubt we do about a pastoral simplicity when it is
possible--the smells of rain and woods and gardens. But Cope forgets
that, crowded as the Earth is, with its billions of mouths to feed,
such beautiful, rustic inefficiency is no longer possible, and hence
beyond being argued for, reasonably, unless the starship brings us to
other habitable worlds.

"Which presents the subject of inventions--natural products of natural
minds which are too sublime to be called gadgets. The starship, for
one. The android process, for another. Does Mr. Cope suppose that the
benefits the latter represents, would ever encourage mankind as a whole
to suppress it? It couldn't be suppressed, by law or by anyone, as long
as there are people left to dream of vigor going on and on.

"Mr. Cope says further that his nerves crawl. This is nothing more
than the mistrust of the new and unknown, which time will take away.
Yet, worst of all, he speaks of fighting and falling. I hope that he
does not mean it. For today, that can truly be a thing of horror, and
final silence. Therefore, I plead that he, and all those who have been
tempted to think in this manner, review their reasoning, and correct
its defects."

I visited Cope at his home. "Look, Cope," I said, "we used to be
friendly enough to live and let each other live. Don't you see that
what you're doing now can end all that has been built, and finish the
human race--natural and android--entirely? You're bucking a logic and a
need for betterment that's far too big for anyone--the death of death,
you might say. What do you want in its place? The death of everyone?
You've got to stop talking as you do, Cope, pounding on the detonator
of a world!"

His intellectual face went white with rage at what I had said.
"_You_--Harver!" he growled softly. "You dare to talk to me like that!
When you helped to turn this hellish development loose on Earth! Make
every human being a snake, and it would not be half as bad. Yes, I was
half your friend. But now get out of my house--out before I kill you!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Further signs of danger were soon more definite, after that. Several
days after Scharber's emergence from the process, I was walking with
him in a Chicago street. A tactless acquaintance of his, of opposite
inclinations and a dislike of him, previously entertained, ran into us
in a theatre lobby.

"Hi, Scharber," he greeted. "I heard. You were born a robot, so why
bother to change? And why didn't you at least order yourself a better
face?"

Scharber retained a normal capacity for getting sore, and only a normal
amount of self-control. "A robot is a machine, Powers," he said. "So is
the old time protoplasmic man. So is the android. It's silly to make a
distinction, based on silly pride at being what you seem to think of
as exclusively human. And maybe your face could also benefit by some
changes."

Sure, Powers had been brooding, too, and brewing up poison. The
fact that he swung at my companion, proved it. Scharber ducked like
lightning, and responded with a much-pulled return punch--if he'd
given it half of full force, Powers' jaw would have been a mush of
bone-splinters. Powers went flat; and it was some seconds before he
started to scream and curse:

"Tin monsters!" he spat venomously and inaccurately. "Get them--both of
them! Trying to crowd us off the Earth!"

Somebody with sense shouted, "Keep your heads!" But that, to some
others, only represented the challenge of opposition. A half-dozen men
came at us at once. I upset two of them all right; but being still just
ordinary, I wouldn't have had much chance, if it wasn't for Scharber.
Presently, with a pack gathering around us, we had to fight our way
out of there, Scharber sprinting away at last, with me riding him
pickaback. No protoplasmic man could have run a third as fast as he did
then. I suspect that that display of speed scared and infuriated our
attackers, further.

Other androids came up against this same kind of experience, and their
constant victories in such scuffles, sharpened their terrifying aspect
in many minds, and the conviction that there had to be a battle to the
death.

Nor was it only humans of the older order who gave way to outbursts
of fury. Soon it was give and take. Androids retained all of the old
capacities for various emotions. It seemed that each violent incident
would be followed by something worse.

I saw one android blown to bits, his flesh still squirming hours after
he had ceased to exist as a composite entity. One severed arm had
drawn itself along the ground with clutching fingers, almost like a
great slug crawling, for two hundred yards.

There was something demoniac about that, which, for the moment, almost
made me agree with Armand Cope.

The fury of the conflict came to a head one night when our laboratory
went up in a cloud of nuclear fire. Five hundred persons were wiped out
in the blast. It was lucky, indeed, that the lab was outside of Chicago
proper, or the casualty list would have been much longer. Of our inner
circle of friends, only Scharber was in the blast, and he escaped
flying fragments and incandescent heat by dropping behind some heavy
masonry. Radiations couldn't hurt him at all, though for a time he must
keep away from the rest of us. The others of our group were safe in
town.

There was the cold rage in Scharber's face when I first spoke to him
from a little distance at the edge of the ruins.

"Damn them all, Charlie!" he growled. "Stupid, thick-headed, backward
fools!"

"Easy, Scharb," I said. "The government, and the considerable majority
of saner people, are trying to restore order."

It was true. Police forces were everywhere. Our president pleaded for
calm. A cache of nuclear munitions was discovered and put under guard.
It might even have belonged to androids. Nobody knew. It was in an
old Chicago cellar. But of one thing we were sure--that there had to
be many other caches of hellstuff, undiscovered and available to the
hotheads and jerks, hidden in caves and woods and various other places,
throughout the world.

One thing wasn't done. Armand Cope, and other rabble-rousers like him,
were not put under restraint. It could have been accomplished within
the emergency provisions of democracy, though a willful connection
between the speeches that they had made and the blowup of the lab,
could not be proven. Maybe the government was afraid to restrain
them--afraid that their arrest would make them martyrs--and that this
martyrdom would trigger the bombshell in the taut nerves and frightened
minds of their followers. This belief may well have been the truth.


                                  IX

Jan and I went to Doc's house, inside a police cordon, for a
discussion. We risked radiation by bringing Scharber along. We wanted
to make sure that he wouldn't do anything vindictive, which might well
have happened had we left him by himself.

Irma met us at the door. "Shane almost wishes now that the android
process had remained just the property of the micro-Xians," she said.
"That's how bad matters seem to him at this point."

Doc jumped to his feet as we entered his study. "Cope means to speak
again tonight," he announced. "Cope, and about a hundred others of his
crowd, from scattered radio and television stations. We know about what
they'll say, more or less. Yeah--'Get rid of these mechanical demons
while there are still less than thirty-thousand of them. Before it's
too late! Kill the serpent! Return to simplicity! Do you know that even
their radioactive metabolism is poisonous to us?'"

Doc paused and groaned. "The latter isn't even true," he went on. "At
least not while an android is on Earth, breathing oxygen and living by
chemical energy. Then the radiation of a subatomic tissue-process is
suppressed almost to zero. But that's the way most of Cope's arguments
go--they leap thinly to conclusions, without thinking matters out to
any depth. But many people don't want to think deeply, or else they're
too frightened. And tonight I suspect that Cope and his bunch will give
the order to attack. Charlie, what are we going to do?"

I was in a cold sweat. "You know what we can try as a temporary
relief measure, Doc," I said. "We can silence Cope and a few of the
others--you know how. The only trouble is that there are so many
of those loudmouths, and only you and I and maybe Jan who are in a
position to do the only thing that can be done. We may not be able to
shut up anywhere near enough of them to get over this danger spot, but
we have to try."

Jan came over to me and pressed my hand, and it helped. She was always
courageous and cool.

As it turned out, there were few speeches of Cope's kind made
that night. Cope collapsed before the television lenses and the
microphones. No, he didn't die; he had what looked very like an
epileptic fit. He dropped before he uttered a word. He frothed at the
mouth, he snored. He looked ridiculous, even mad.

Why all this happened was simple. It was an old Xian trick. A
micro-android--Doc had transmigrated briefly again--was inside Cope's
skull, tampering with his brain. The tiniest flash at lowest power from
a jet rod directed against the proper nerve center, was how it was done.

Doc silenced another character called Minton. I gagged another pair of
flannel-mouths named Trefford and Donalds the same way. Jan managed
to fix one called Parkhurst. That made five of the worst who had been
operating around Chicago. But it still left over ninety others. It
worried us badly, until we got back home, and into normal-sized bodies,
once more. Scharber had been a good boy, staying out of trouble beside
Doc's television, with Irma.

"Not one of the others said much either," he announced quietly. "They
all fell on their faces the same way." He paused for just a second
before he added, "I wonder why?" his eyes oddly aglow.

"There could be only one answer to that, couldn't there?" Irma hinted.

Doc grinned reminiscently.

Jan smiled. "The elves of legend, the helpful ones," she chuckled.
"Well, who knows but what there's a connection with those old folk
tales? Legends frequently have a basis in fact. It seems that I
remember a strange, deep little guy who lives way out in space, and
down near the limit of smallness. His name was Kobolah, and lots of
his people didn't believe that Earthians should be trusted. He almost
got into trouble over that. But it appears that he still has lots
of friends among his own kind who'd like to see the android become
successful among us. It seems, further, that if Kobolah's particular
asteroid world took off for the stars, already, as appeared to be
intended, he and some pals have so far stayed behind. Or else it was
just some pals of his who helped us. But who knows? Maybe we'll see him
again. Anyway, his world was as wonderful a place as you could imagine.
I wonder if there's anything more strange in the whole universe?"

As Jan's musing words ended, I saw a strange, speculative look in
Scharber's face. Doc's eyes were soft for a second.

"I guess that miniature things still intrigue me," he said. "But we're
tied up with bigger facts now. I think we've won a temporary peace, but
I'll bet that that's all it will be--temporary. Even if Cope and the
rest of the same crop stop shouting, now, there'll be others to do just
as they did. In a day or two we'll know for sure."

       *       *       *       *       *

Doc was right. On the very next evening Armand Cope was on the air
again, frightened, but determined. "This treachery of last night, even
though I do not understand its method, makes me even better aware that
this is a fight to the finish," he growled. "A fight against a hideous
thing, to which there can be no end except victory or death. As long as
I am a man, I shall be proud...."

Doc shrugged mildly. "I'd almost say 'Blah, tiresome fool!'" he
remarked. "But it wouldn't be fair. Cope stubbornly believes what he
says, I'm sure. It's etched into his nature. To a lesser degree with
most, it's the same with many others. So, this is it."

The following evening, Doc made his suggestions over the air, speaking
from his house:

"I am addressing those, who, in the eyes of some, have ceased to be
human. But perhaps the term, 'android' should be dropped entirely. We
are men in form, mind, emotion, aim, and pleasure--let there be no
instinctive, sullen, backward doubt of that! Our shape and our organs
are human. We have sprung from man's aspirations, and his quest for
more knowledge and better living. Though the knowhow of our living
was borrowed from another people, it would have come to men on Earth
in time, and by their own efforts. We are thus, simply, a far hardier
variety of what humans have always been. To those who are weaker,
troubled by fear, less understanding, we should be generous, until more
time lets them realize these truths. Therefore, I suggest that we leave
the Earth to them, going outward where our powers permit us to go
freely."

That is how it has been. Among the androids, as if the interstellar
regions was their natural habitat, Dr. Lanvin's hint took hold at once.
On Earth, tension eased gradually, until even Armand Cope's voice
sounded puzzled, and then sank to silence.

But let me tell about a side-event. Doc found a toy-sized craft in his
workshop, a ship with tapered bow and stern, and retractable airfoils.
It was less than an inch long. Need I say how we boarded it--Doc, Jan,
and I? Or how later, we and one Kobolah, conversed under the scope of a
micro-manipulator, while Scharber and Doc's Irma took turns watching us
through the lenses?

We thanked the tiny Xian for all his help. We saw his electronic visual
filaments blink over his eyes when Jan suggested:

"Kobolah, you could be cast in a larger form like the old Xians. You
could go with Dr. Lanvin in the first ship to leave for the solar
system of Sirius."

"Maybe--someday," he buzzed in answer. "Not now. To Sirius? I'm going
there, anyway with my own people soon. Time? There is plenty--for
everything. May you make few errors."

Then, with his jet rod he blasted off into the air. Within a minute,
his ship, aboard which were hundreds of his kind that we had seen, spat
blue fire, and darted out of the open window.

Scharber chuckled almost wistfully. "Micro-androids," he said.
"Strangest thing I ever saw. Why didn't he take me with him? Got to
start seeing the outer-universe somewhere. Why not in miniature? Darn,
androids can go anywhere."


                                   X

The next day, Scharber's protoplastic form was found inert in his small
bachelor's apartment. When we were notified, Doc and I had a look at
the place. On Scharber's study table were many brief messages, written
on paper with a heat-charred line. The words were English, and spelled
correctly; but the script was strange. I knew the instrument of the
writing. I had written with it myself.

But Scharber had left a note of his own, written to us in ink:

    _Dear Dr. Lanvin, Mrs. Lanvin, Charlie, Jan. Everybody--So I
    win.... The Little Guy must have guessed. Anyway, he brought his
    ship here. Then he wrote his questions--though he could hear me
    answer. Do I want to come along? Yeah--look at the other
    papers--see for yourselves. You must have made a good impression
    out there--you who were there. So he likes Earthlings. For pets,
    maybe? Who knows? Well--I didn't say no.... Wish me luck, and the
    same to you. Do me a favor? Whoever goes first out to Sirius, take
    this big carcass of mine along--being android, it ought to keep
    for a long time. Maybe I'll need it after a while. Right now I'm
    getting a smaller edition. So long for maybe a hundred years, more
    or less._

    _Scharber._

Smiling like an elf, Doc looked at me. "How do you feel?" he asked.

"Same as you, I suppose," I answered. "Haunted...."

During the year that followed, that first starship was completed, and
ten others of the huge mile-long craft were begun. Jan and I saw them
all in their cradles when we went out to the Moon to visit my mother
and dad.

It was really meant to be a farewell trip. Jan and I hadn't expected to
get berthed on that first starcraft, the _Euclid_, but it happened. Not
all of the voyagers were of the new flesh.

"Farewell nothing," Dad told me slyly at the house. He looked more like
a slightly older brother of mine, than somebody paternal.

"We're going along, Charlie," Mom intimated. "We've always been ready
for new adventure, haven't we?"

In due course the _Euclid_ came to the New Mexico Spaceport to pick,
up its passengers, Jan and I and the folks had been on Earth for over
a month by then. We and Doc and Irma arrived at the port on the same
rocket plane, and as I looked up at the brooding hull of that colossus
I felt a little as if a kid dream of mine had come true--that I was
matching my lusty strength against the whole universe, and winning. To
fight and to win against something, has been a need in human blood and
bone for uncounted eons. But should I feel a bit puny and sheepish,
too? Comparing myself to Doc, for instance?

This was his special day. Back there behind us, as we approached
the starship--back there beyond the guardropes--were the crowds of
curious, thrilled, scared, envious humanity. Some cheered for what
the _Euclid_ meant to progress--or perhaps they cheered more for a
greater triumph--the thirty-thousand demigods who would be among its
passengers. But was some of the cheering given in relief at being rid
of them?

Bowhart was there, to shake hands with Doc and me and Irma and Jan, and
to meet my folks.

"Good luck to you all," he said. "No Great Change, yet, for you,
Charlie? So I hear. Funny, hunh? Dr. Lanvin--I want to give you special
best wishes. You look happy, so I guess if you're satisfied, nothing I
can say will be an offense. But I still wouldn't want to be you for a
million dollars."

Bowhart must have known that much, saying what he did; because Doc
wasn't at all offended--just airily nettled, like an ageless leprechaun
pitied by an urchin.

"Oh?" he asked lightly. "In the past many a millionaire would have
given more than a million for another week of life and vigor, and it
was no sale. The value is a lot bigger; but it doesn't cost that,
now--it doesn't cost anything except a little more growing up. What do
you want to do, Bow? Drink beer, eat ice cream, make love? I can do all
that, too. Someday you'll get it through your fuddled head that I'm
still human. I think you're catching on already. Yes, the androids are
leaving Earth; but you know that the process that makes them is still
here. Every day there are more labs. Because people get hurt terribly,
or wear out beyond reasonable repair. And what would you expect them to
want to do then, just die?"

Doc wasn't just talking to slow minded Bowhart, but to all humanity
that was like him. It was his final message. But there was another
touch to it that wasn't in words. It was a cocky gentle air that maybe
suggested the contrast of--say--eating a fine dinner, and then taking
a long dive, unclothed, through the vacuum of space--both with equal
relish.

Bowhart looked puzzled, and a bit sullen. Maybe he was beginning to
catch on at last.

Well, we made that enormous jump across the light-years to the Sirian
System. Seventy-nine years it took. I don't think that even an Xian
ship could have done much better. There's no overdrive or time-travel
in sight. Funny, isn't it--here, for once, nature resists us. But to
avoid boredom there was the older idea of suspended animation--natural
to the android, and capable of being induced in the older flesh by
special anesthetics and chilling. My wife and our friends passed the
first two years of the journey awake, to help operate the ship. The
other seventy-seven years passed as a moment.

We found us a world just slightly smaller than the Earth, and young and
beautiful. There was no native intelligence yet, comparable with the
human. The valley in which we live is rich and lush, and it slopes down
to the ocean. Like my dad and mother, Jan and I have a sturdy house of
stone; cleared fields, and livestock descended from the animals and
poultry brought out from Earth.

It's Mom's old rustic dream. It's even Cope's! It's an idyll.

A town is springing up fast nearby. It is one of the first colonial
settlements of what may become a great Earthborn interstellar union.

Doc is in the town with Irma, building it, planning, full of goodwill
for everyone. Scharber's normal-sized android body still sleeps in a
special vault under the town hall. But who knows at what moment he and
Kobolah may come?

Doc kids my folks and Jan; but especially he kids me:

"You're silly, Charlie, why don't you switch over to the android
level? What are you waiting for? Sure, I like to live in a house, too;
but sometimes I sleep out in the rain or the snow just for the hell
of it! Of course there's no real good in that kind of nonsense! But
changed over, a man has an average of a twenty per cent increase in
intelligence, simply on the basis of better energy and alertness! You
may think that you feel good, but even if no trials come to demand
superior stamina, you'll feel better; you'll do three times the work,
and never tire at all! Why, even on Earth, according to reports that
are relayed from starship to starship coming this way in a long string,
humans as they were are almost gone. So what are you--a diehard, a
stick-in-the-mud? Even--_you_?"

"Maybe it's the seventy-seven years lost, Doc," I josh back at
him. "I've got to catch up, perhaps. Of course I recognize all the
advantages. I've been through the mill. Just as with you, in my head,
lodged against my upper skull and doing me no harm, the medics say, is
a micro-android which my ego has inhabited, and which I almost never
use now. I remember what it is like to be super, Doc. I grant that it
is all the truth. But there's time. Just let me think some more."

Yeah, Jan and I think of all we've seen, that we never dreamed was
there. Beauty, strangeness, vastness, smallness, wonder, knowledge.
We've come a long awesome way.

You feel that you know a little more about the universe, and that
you're warmly and humbly a little nearer to its ultimate Mystery, and
are at peace. You know that the Great Change in man is right, and was
intended.

We've been stubborn, and I'm not entirely sure why. I know that we and
the others of the old flesh will yield to progress sooner or later.
Maybe we've been clinging sentimentally to the past of man. But deep
down, I believe I know the real reason. We're slow, we're human; just
give us time. It's hard to accept the responsible role of demigod.

We're just scared of so much newness.

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