CHAPTER. 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."