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.