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People Minus X

<h2>VII</h2> The colossi were piling Mitchell Prell's movable equipment into a corner, where Midas Touch pistols, turned low, could play neutron streams against it. Then they would no doubt scour walls, floors and ceilings with the same corpuscular beams. The air itself would heat up considerably. Combustible floating dust, would burn to finer dust. Drafts would seem blasting hurricanes. "There's a way out—if we hurry," Mitchell Prell said. "Imitate my movements." And so they swam in the atmosphere. But without other aid it would have been slow going indeed. But the motion of dust particles revealed the direction of air currents that could be gotten into and used to cover distance. Still, progress back to the shelf and the microscopes, and the tiny workshop from which they had been blown but a few minutes before, was agonizingly slow. By luck and scanty concealment offered by the jar, this paraphernalia had not yet been discovered or moved by Loman and his men. Ed and his companions came to rest at last on the rough glass surface where little machines were arranged around the vats and their apparatus. "Tools that we can use," Ed said. "And materials that we can work. We've got to try to take some things along. To make weapons. Could we contrive Midas Touch pistols that we could hold?" "Maybe," Prell answered. "I hope so. Take this, and that—and that over there. Hurry." Creatures of vitaplasm, with its complex combinations of silicon compounds paralleling the hydrocarbons, and its internal metabolism that could even involve transmutation and subatomic energy release, still could die under sufficiently violent conditions. The three tiny androids scrambled to gather supplies and to equip themselves. Ed was awkward in the new conditions, where even the atmosphere tried to tear him away from any firm foothold. But he loaded himself down. Before they were finished gathering all that they could use, the rattle and flare of Midas Touch weapons, turned low so as not to damage Mitchell Prell's various apparatus, but strong enough to destroy any clinging speck of synthetic life that Carter Loman might suspect the presence of, began behind them. Prell's experimental plant life withered slowly. "Lead on!" Ed Dukas shouted. And so, though hurricanes had begun for them, they crept across the glazed surface beneath the barrel of the little electron microscope and dropped into the air at its edge. It was like leaping from a cliff. But it was different, too. For if they had not been so heavily burdened, they might not even have fallen. Being such small objects, they had a greater exposed surface than large objects, in proportion to their bulk. This greater surface, like a sail presented to the wind, offered a larger area for speeding molecules to hit; hence, without the equipment, they would have been as buoyant as dust particles. Still lashed together by their joining strand of floss, the three fugitives drifted slowly down to the rear of the shelf. "An inch more to go," Prell shouted, in grim humor. "A rather long one, I'm afraid." Again they crept. Rough stone of the cupboardlike compartment rose around them, seemingly taller than buildings they had known. And it glowed reddish-violet. Fluorescence, it must be, from the scattered radiations of the Midas Touch weapons. Tediously the three crawled toward escape, as if through a night of fire and violence. Finally they reached a minute steel door in the corner of the cupboard, half hidden in the roughness of the stone. They closed the door behind them and refastened its crude bolt. The space around them now was narrower—more in proportion to their own size. And there was a glow here—at least to their final eyesight. Perhaps there was a trace of radioactive ore in the rock causing the glow. The walls were as rough as a cave's. "Just a chink in the stone," Barbara commented. "Yes," Prell replied. "A crevice leading out to the face of the rock formation. Feel the draft of Martian night air? It would smother and freeze you if you were as you were born. But our flesh not only resists cold, it can create plenty of warmth within itself. We will be perfectly comfortable here, and safe—I think. Do you want to rest?" "No," Barbara told him. "We don't really need that, either, do we? So let's begin what must be done. What are our plans, Ed?" "We'll make a few things, if we can," Ed replied. "Then get to a spaceport somehow. I suppose that if we pick the right wind at the right time, it will blow us there—eh, Uncle Mitch? Then we'll do as you did—drift into a space liner and get a free ride back home to Earth. There—well, we'll see. If we're very, very lucky, we might even get our old selves back." Just then that recovery seemed to be his greatest, most desperate yearning, with many, many obstacles in its way. Even their personal recordings were in enemy hands now. Small though those cylinders were, they were far too huge for them to move or to think of recapturing. "Where can we start to work?" Ed said to his uncle. "Farther along the cleft," Prell told him. "I've already cached some supplies there. And there's a level space in a side cleft protected from these constant air currents." Now they leaped upward and let the draft carry them. The muted quivers of destruction in the chambers from which they had just escaped, they left behind them. They arrived in the work area and got busy at once. <hr class="tb" /> Near dawn they felt the quiverings of unusual sounds. So they followed air currents, betrayed by drifting particles of fluorescent dust, to a crack that showed starshot sky and the undulating desert. Thus they saw Carter Loman's caravan start back toward Port Karnak, with its booty of all that Mitchell Prell had made here: the fruit of a man's mind. But to Loman it was also the worst of the world's inventions. Loman was an android and also, obviously, a central figure, a personage of some importance, or he would not have been sent on this mission. But his mind remained that of a bigot. Just then Ed Dukas found a savage pleasure in shaking one of the smallest fists ever to exist at the three retreating tractor vehicles. "Loman, Granger and the rest of you," he said, "there'll come a time. You've been fools. You were born too late." The work went on for days—more tediously than Ed could have imagined, even with only hand tools to use. The same old metals seemed unbelievably hard at this size level—and coarse in texture—as if the atoms themselves had expanded. Barbara could scrub and scrub with a bit of abrasive mineral, achieving only what seemed a poor excuse for a polish. Hammering did little good in shaping such metals, though Ed Dukas and Mitchell Prell were relatively so much stronger than they had been. Only cutting and pressure tools were effective, when aided by the softening heat of a forge—a tiny speck of nuclear incandescence maintained by a neutron stream and carefully screened, though vitaplasm, being actively or latently radioactive itself, was far less endangered by radiation than protoplasm. But at last they produced three rough, cylindrical devices and their fittings. Ed Dukas began to adjust to littleness. But to see boulders with their stratified layers of mica floating lazily through the thin air never lost its wonder. Crazy beauty was all around: strange, rich colors; keening musical notes—fine overtones of normal sounds. Sometimes, in the daylight, near cracks open to the outdoors, you saw living things seldom bigger than yourself: Martian life; little pincushions of deep, translucent purple veined with red and pronged with cilia of an indescribably warm hue. These were Martian microorganisms blown in by the breeze. And once there was something else that Ed and Barbara both saw: something like the smallest of Earthly insects, but not that, either. A thing of steel-blue filaments and great eyes, and vibrating vanes as glossy as transparent plastic. Ed knew that he could shatter it with his hands. It rested in the sunshine for a moment; then it was gone. "I suppose that there are star worlds as odd as this," Barbara commented. She was strange herself—an elfin being that floated in the air, her form dimly aglow whenever there was shadow or darkness. To Ed, she was part of his vast separation from Earth. In accustoming himself to an environment where even the simple act of walking was a memory, it seemed that Earth dimmed away, easily yet frighteningly, like a dream, until Ed knew that, degree by degree, his mind was becoming different than it had been, and he not quite the same person. And it seemed more so with Babs. "Bacon and eggs for breakfast, Eddie," she teased once, lightly. "Walks under old trees beside a river. The Youth Center. Teachers I used to know. Yes, I remember. But the memory tries to get dim. And I want to hold on. Got to, because there are things to be done. But sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't regret the duty. I think of swimming in raindrops or floating high over trees—being as whimsical as children and poets can imagine. We could do it! It's part of being super, isn't it? And I used to be scared of becoming an android!" It was fun, and relief from grimness, to hear her talk like that. And now, too, he half agreed that being of synthetic substance was not so bad. Yet part of him still ached savagely for his old dimensions. And here in smallness he sometimes felt that she was changing so much that he was losing her—that she would let herself be blown away into the vastness, never to be seen again. They ate a food-jelly, which Prell had prepared long ago for his sojourn here, and radioactive silicates. In it you could see the thready molecular chains and the beads of moisture between. Viscosity complicated etiquette. Everything tried to stick to you. You laughed and shook it off as best you could. But even in fantastic moments grim facts didn't truly fade. Hard work helped sustain them. Murder and loss were too new. The danger on Earth was still too plain—perhaps poised on hours or weeks of time. Speed was the keynote. Only once the three micro-beings peeped back into the lab that had belonged to Mitchell Prell, colossus. It was empty now, glowing with the taint of radiation left by the Midas Touch pistols. No one had troubled to neutralize it, as had surely been done with the removed equipment. Mitchell Prell had built a radio, like one he had owned before. A flake of quartz dust, a few rough strands of metal, an insignificant power supply. Simple, compact. Certain crystals were sensitive to radio waves. And at these tremendously reduced dimensions, they could convert tiny induced electric currents almost directly into fine sound waves that infinitely refined ears could hear. So Ed Dukas heard the interplanetary newscast again: "... Android groups are still massing in large numbers to seek safety among their own kind and perhaps to carry out their own plans. There is a superficial calm. Fear of consequences so far seems to have kept both sides in check. We hope that it can hold." Later there was a broadcast from Port Smitty: "... This information was withheld but has now been released. The mystery of Mitchell Prell's disappearance is believed solved after ten years. What is claimed to be his body—much damaged, since he and his confederates, one of whom is supposed to be a close relative, resisted capture and had to be shot down—was brought in to Port Smitty and is now en route to Earth, along with some mysterious equipment. The man who tracked Prell down is Carter Loman, a scientist in his own right, who has had a brief but brilliant career in Interworld Security. Detailed information is under seal, but Prell, a known advocate of 'improved mankind,' has been wanted for questioning and possible indictment for a long time. It has been suggested that his researches had gone further than most would dare to imagine." Mitchell Prell, micro-being, chuckled. "The funny part," he remarked, "is that I never became a full-size android myself. My old carcass seemed good enough. Or I didn't get around to a change." But Ed didn't smile at this. And he looked savage when one of Tom Granger's speeches was rebroadcast: "Prell ended? Can we believe it? There is an evil that could restore him in known ways. Now are there unknowns, too? Haven't we had enough? Some things from drunken visions are destroyed, but others come, to make our nights hideous. A creature with a fifty-foot wingspread swoops down on a house, and people die. Are androids any different from what they create? But we are fortified, armed. If we must, we'll fight to the last." No doubt there was truth behind the melodramatic oratory—at least as far as the horror was concerned. Barbara smiled sadly. "He's earnest, I think," she offered. "So there's that much glory and courage in him, if there isn't any control. And you keep wondering, Is he half right?" "I know," Ed answered with some contrition. "But I'd rather have what he considers a scientific hell than nothing. Well, we'll soon be en route back to Earth—unseen. Then maybe we'll find out and accomplish something. Lack of sense, like Granger's, or the muddled way in which laws are often interpreted now, will never work. That's one fact I'm sure of, even in a booby-trapped situation." Ed was trying to be optimistic. In three weeks they had made equipment that they thought they could use. The three cylinders were Midas Touch pistols—neutron blast guns that could explode a few of the atoms of any solid or liquid that their beams touched. They also had a dozen grenades of the same principle and tubes to carry scant rations. There was a radio for each of the three—for reception, but also limitedly useful as transmitters. And there were knapsacks and clothing made from linten fiber pounded and divided as Prell had never bothered to do. "We'll catch the first Earth-bound ship that we can," Prell said. "Queer, isn't it? If we could truly walk, going a mile would seem impossible. But the prevailing winds and a little jockeying will get us to Port Karnak. The tube train will take us to the space ships." Prell had spoken too soon. Within that same hour, listening to the newscast, they learned: "For security reasons, interplanetary traffic has been indefinitely suspended." Ed Dukas winced as if in pain. He and Barbara and Prell looked at one another. In Ed's strange, small body, frustration and bitter anger fairly hummed. "Security reasons." That could be a blanket excuse—minus explanations—for almost anything. Loman, knowing of something inimical and microscopic, and guessing at an intended journey from Mars, could well have had a hand in the suspension order. He was wary, and not sure that he had destroyed his hidden enemies. The three stared down at the equipment that they had toiled so hard to produce. But Ed, like many another man before him who had been cornered, couldn't have quit even if he had willed it. Stubborn spunk, fear, need to regain losses, self-preservation and the awareness of the danger of millions of well-intentioned individuals, both android and human, all took part in the reason. And you could add the ancient and primal lust for revenge. Ed crouched with the others on the rough floor of their chink in the rock. "Wait," he said at last. "Haven't small objects crossed space naturally—at least in hypothesis? Yes! Spores—living dust, their vital functions suspended. The old Arrhenius Theory of the propagation of life from world to world and solar system to solar system—throughout the universe. A spore, drifting high in an atmosphere, achieves escape velocity through molecular impacts and perhaps the pressure of solar light. It's driven into space, and onward. Uncle Mitch, couldn't the same thing happen to us far more readily, since we're not inert and we have minds to help direct our movements? Since we have beams of massive neutrons from the Midas Touch weapons? And aren't we more rugged than the first androids? Wouldn't we have a middling chance to endure raw space itself?" Mitchell Prell eyed him quietly. Perhaps even his android cheeks blanched a trifle. "Something like that occurred to me once—a long time ago, Ed," he remarked at last, his voice very calm. "I didn't think it through. I guess it seemed just too out of the ordinary even for me. And there wasn't any need to try it. Perhaps I was scared." "There's need now," Ed said. Barbara's expression was a study of eagerness and half fear. "Eddie, have you maybe discovered something?" she exclaimed. "Uncle Mitch, if there is any chance that it would work, I'm game to try it!" After a moment the scientist nodded. "I believe that there's a good chance it will work," he said. <hr class="tb" /> Before the next sunup they were ready. Clothed in garments of linten fiber, they looked like savages from fifty thousand years before. Yet their present condition could have belonged to no primitive era. They were united by a tough line of twisted strands, and their equipment was lashed to their backs. To human eyes they would have been as invisible as spirits. Were they to demonstrate, even unintentionally, android superiority in yet another field? Maybe, maybe not. From the outlet of the crevice in the rock, they flung themselves into the atmosphere above the gray desert. Their great advantage at this stage was that, at the Martian dawn fringe, there were many updrafts, for the air, chilled fearfully at night, was already warming. At once they were sucked upward, as if by a vertical wind. Still, the first phase of their climb took many hours. They kept watching for upward-moving motes to guide them. Short, rocketlike bursts of heavy neutrons from their Midas Touch cylinders provided the reaction or kick to get them into the swiftest vertical currents. Mars dropped far below, a dun plain marked here and there by the straight, artificial valleys or "canals." The relative vastness of a world to beings of pinpoint dimensions was nullified by the distance of altitude, until it looked no more extensive than it would have to the eyes that used to be theirs. Mars developed a visible curvature and a rim of haze, fired to redness by the rising sun. The sky above darkened from hard, deep blue toward the blackness of space, and the stars sharpened. The sun blazed whitely, and the frosty wings of its corona began to show. The thinning atmosphere seemed to develop a definite surface far beneath the three voyagers. They had spoken little in their ascent; but now the free movement of sound was smothered by the increasing vacuum, and there were only gestures and lip movements to convey meanings. But there was not much that really needed to be said. The plan remained simple: get into trains of upward-jetting molecules, marked by small blurs or warpings of light. Absorb some of that upward surge into yourselves. How often had this same thing happened, without conscious design? Molecules move fast in a high vacuum. Molecular velocity was heat, wasn't it? But here it could not burn. For heat is chained to matter, and here there was just not enough matter to be hot. Ed thought that they must be getting close to the Martian velocity of escape now. Only three-point-two miles per second. They might have attained it more simply by making greater use of their Midas Touch cylinders. There was scarcely any reactive thrust more efficient than that of neutrons hurled at almost the speed of light. But there was a pride in accomplishing it in a more difficult way. Besides, the energy supply for the weapons must be conserved. But now Prell signaled with his hand, and they began to use the cylinders in earnest, shifting their course little by little from the vertical and in the direction of the sun. For it was time to curve inward—earthward. Swiftly now, there was no molecular distortion around them at all. Sense of motion faded out. Their high velocity was demonstrated only by the rapid shrinking of Mars behind them; unless, from sunward there came a minute, resisting thrust. Light pressure? But it would take a longer time in space than they meant to be to slow them down at all. "We've done this much!" Ed said with his lips, but without a voice. Barbara nodded and tried to smile, and he reached out and pressed her hand. Prell looked awed and bemused. Ed tried then to read part of their fortunes in the reactions of his strange, minute body to the rigors of space. It was an atomic mechanism more than it was a chemical one. Therefore, it needed no breath. And the strong, radiant energy of the sun warmed it a little, so he did not feel cold. Hard ultraviolet light seemed not to harm it. There was only a sensation as of the shrinking of its hide—perhaps an adaptive reaction of its demoniac vitality—to protect the trace of moisture within it against the dryness of space. The fluid within vitaplasm could be alcohol or liquid air—it was that adaptable. Prell had said this recently. Such fluids did not freeze easily. But they evaporated. So water remained the best body fluid in dry space. For in the full light of the sun, and with a nuclear metabolism, freezing was not a great danger. <hr class="tb" /> Several days out from Mars the three contacted a small meteor swarm—maybe a fragment of a comet moving sunward and earthward. They moved with the swarm and landed on a chunk of whitish rock perhaps eight inches through at its largest diameter. But to them it was an airless world into which they could burrow, blocking the entrance to their shelter with chalky dust—a fortunate thing, for in the open the sun's glare and aridity of space were drying out even their android tissues and blurring their minds. The meteor proved not quite lifeless, for on it clear crystalline needles crumbled and rose again. Call it silicon biology, proving that one could never know where something might thrive. In a fall into any atmosphere, such growth would surely be burned away without a trace. Ed and Barbara and Prell learned to understand silent speech by watching lip movements. The need for hurry still beat in their minds, but drowsiness crept over them—perhaps another androidal adaptability was functioning here, related to the hibernation of animals in winter. It lessened loss of vitality when conditions were not too favorable. But you could resist its compulsions if you applied your will. The meteor moved on swiftly in the general direction of Earth. The journey would take weeks, and though Ed felt that never had there been a crossing of distance as eerily strange as this one, still the passage of time, and the events it held, was always with him and his companions. There was a way for them still to experience real sounds, even here. The quartz-flake radio sets, pressed tight to their ears, transmitted vibrations through their own substance, when there was no air. They heard fragments of broadcasts coming from Earth. Pictures of what was happening there came to mind: A score of monsters destroyed by hunting parties. A side issue, really. For in guard post and sketchily fortified line, man faced the hardier likeness that his knowledge had produced. When there were no clearly defined geographical boundaries to separate the poised forces, you never knew just where those lines would be. But the scared, the pleading, the exhorting voices, faint in the distance, gave the mood, if not the clear view. Tom Granger was there, and others like him. The latest claim was that vitaplasm gave off poisonous radioactive radiations—not very true on Earth, where its vital energy remained mainly chemical. Those with sense also tried to be heard. And there were other voices calling for the retreat to simplicity and the doing of work by hand. Such a pastoral of white clouds, green hills and sunshine could have its appeal. But how could its philosophy and inefficiency feed billions? Even if it were not just a bright vision seen before the last battle? And in the midst of all this babble, there was another voice that was faint thunder: "... Got things of our own now, here in the woods! Even our own newscast station. Damn, we've taken enough! We Phonies won't go back no further! Time to be stubborn—even if we all die for it and never come back! They say folks would like to hang me—which shows how much wits they've got! Even if they got the chance, it wouldn't work!" With a faint smile, Barbara's lips formed the name for her companions to read: "Abel Freeman...." Ed nodded, watching his uncle's quizzical interest over an individual and a legend that he had only heard them tell about. And Ed had his own reactions, compounded of admiration, humor and icy mistrust that came close to hatred. Whatever else he was, Abel Freeman was also a figure of power. Barbara's pixyish mouth—she was more than ever a pixy—shaped other words as they crouched at the entrance of a tiny cave that they had excavated into their meteor. Outside, the sunshine blazed. "I've almost said it before, Ed," she remarked. "All these things happening on Earth are still important to me—never fear. But I'm a little too different now to quite belong to it. It gets like a dream—kind of remote." Ed had been feeling this himself—almost with panic, because he was enough the person he had been to ache inside with the importance and tension of what happened at home. Yet somehow part of him was drifting away on its own special course. "Hold on, Babs, a little longer," he urged. They fell into torpid sleep after they had devised a mechanism to arouse them with an electric shock at an appointed time. It conserved their strength and allowed them to pass the long interval quickly. Ed Dukas's slumber was not altogether dreamless. Like shadows, people moved in his mind. His parents. His old friend Les Payten, who perhaps had shown the white feather and had been lost to a small viewpoint. Schaeffer, one of the greatest scientists, barricaded in his underground lab in the City. And Harwell, the efficient but daring adventurer—another legend of his boyhood, who sometime was supposed to command the first star ship. And perhaps most of all, there was that fantastic android bigot, Carter Loman, who aroused his black fury. Perhaps Ed slept lighter than the others and awoke more quickly to the tingling prickle of electricity, because he had to run the show. The major burden of responsibility was his. He shook his wife and his uncle awake and pointed to the blue-green bead that was the Earth, still several million miles away. Lashing their equipment to their shoulders and tying onto one another's waists like Alpine climbers, they leapt back into space one more, pushed by the neutron thrust of their Midas Touch cylinders. They had to make the rest of their trip apart from their meteor, which would not pass any nearer to Earth. When the home planet was expanded by nearness to a great, mottled, fuzzy bubble, Ed tugged at the line for attention and spoke without sound in the stinging silence: "We've talked everything over before," he said. "So we know generally what to do—though only generally. We'd like to stick together. But there is just no way to do that and work fast—which may be a vital point. So we'll soon have to scatter. But we'll listen on our receivers. At least one of us should be able to find a way to communicate back. Failing that, we still know where to meet. Remember—the oak by my old house. The valley made by the trunk and the lowest branch." Prell's brows knitted, his mind probably steeped in the swift, strange action to come. Barbara gave a soundless laugh. "The crotch of an oak!" her lips commented. "What a trysting place! But it seems natural enough. Are we mad, or were we once just dull?" Was her gaiety just bravado, or was she as cool as she seemed? Ed hoped that she was cool. Tugging at the linten line that joined them, Ed drew himself close to her. "You don't have to speak, Eddie," she told him. "I know what you're thinking. But why shouldn't I—and all of us—be all right?" Her face had sobered. She looked strong. And so he was somewhat relieved. He kissed her. Perhaps it was odd that dust-mote beings still could do that. <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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