Isaac Asimov (10 page)

To those inside the
Proteus
, the geometrically riddled disc was clearly visible, approaching like a pockmarked monster.

Michaels’ forehead and bald head were unpleasantly beaded with perspiration. “That,” he said, in a muffled voice, “is the miniaturizer.”

Grant opened his mouth, but Michaels added hurriedly, “Don’t ask me how it works. Owens knows, but I don’t.”

Grant cast an involuntary glance up and back toward Owens, who seemed to be tightening and growing rigid. One of his hands was clearly visible and was grasping a bar which, Grant guessed, was one of the ship’s more important units of control; grasping it as though the sensation of something material and powerful lent him comfort. Or perhaps the touch of any part of the ship he had himself designed was consoling. He, more than anyone, must know the strength—or the weakness—of the bubble that would keep them surrounded by a microscopic bit of normality.

Grant looked away and found his eye stumbling over Duval, whose thin lips were faintly stretched into a smile.

“You look uneasy, Mr. Grant. Is it not your profession to be in uneasy situations without being uneasy?”

Darn it! For how many decades had the public been fed fairy tales about undercover agents?

“No, doctor,” said Grant, levelly. “In my profession to be in an uneasy situation without being uneasy is to be quickly dead. We are expected only to act intelligently, regardless of the state of our feelings. You, I take it, do not feel uneasy.”

“No. I feel interested. I feel saturated with—with a sense of wonder. I am unbearably curious and excited. —Not uneasy.”

“What are the chances of death, in your opinion?”

“Small, I hope. And in any case, I have the consolations of religion. I have confessed, and for me death is but a doorway.”

Grant had no reasonable answer to that and made none. For him, death was a blank wall with but one side, but he had to admit that however logical that seemed to his mind, it offered little consolation at the moment against the worm of uneasiness that (as Duval had correctly noted) lay coiled inside that same mind.

He was miserably aware that his own forehead was wet, perhaps as wet as that of Michaels, and that Cora was looking at him with what his sense of shame immediately translated into contempt.

He said, impulsively, “And have you confessed
your
sins, Miss Peterson?”

She said, coolly, “Which sins do you have in mind, Mr. Grant?”

He had no answer for that either, so he slumped in his chair and looked up at the miniaturizer which was now exactly overhead.

“What do you feel when you are being miniaturized, Dr. Michaels?”

“Nothing, I suppose. It is a form of motion, a collapsing inward, and if it is done at a constant rate there is no more sensation in that than in moving down an escalator at constant speed.”

“That’s the theory, I suppose,” Grant kept his eyes fixed on the miniaturizer. “What is the actual sensation?”

“I don’t know. I have never experienced it. However, animals in the process of miniaturization never act in the slightest bit disturbed. They continue their normal actions without interruption, as I have personally noted.”

“Animals?” Grant turned to stare at Michaels in sudden indignation. “
Animals?
Has any man ever been miniaturized?”

“I’m afraid,” said Michaels, “that we have the honor of being the first.”

“How thrilling. Let me ask another question. How far down has any living creature—any living creature at all—been miniaturized?”

“Fifty,” said Michaels, briefly.

“What?”

“Fifty. It means the reduction is such that the linear dimensions are one-fiftieth normal.”

“Like reducing me to a height of nearly one and a half inches.”

“Yes.”

“Only we’re going far past that point.”

“Yes. To nearly a million, I think. Owens can give you the exact figure.”

“The exact figure does not matter. The point is it’s much more intense a miniaturization than has ever been tried before.”

“That is correct.”

“Do you think we can bear up under all the honors we are being showered with in the way of pioneering?”

“Mr. Grant,” said Michaels, and from somewhere he
dredged up the touch of humor that marked his words, “I’m afraid we must. We are being miniaturized now; right now; and obviously you don’t feel it.”

“Great guns!” muttered Grant, and looked up again with a kind of frozen and fixed attention.

The bottom of the miniaturizer was glowing with a colorless light that blazed without blinding. It did not seem to be sensed with the eyes, but with the nerves generally so that when Grant closed his eyes, all actual objects blanked out but the light was still visible as a general, featureless radiance.

Michaels must have been watching Grant close his eyes uselessly, for he said, “It’s not light. It’s not electromagnetic radiation of any sort. It’s a form of energy that is not part of our normal universe. It affects the nerve-endings and our brain interprets it as light because it knows of no other way of interpreting it.”

“Is it dangerous in any way?”

“Not as far as is known, but I must admit that nothing has ever been exposed to it at this intense a level.”

“Pioneering again,” muttered Grant.

Duval cried out, “Glorious! Like the light of creation!”

The hexagonal tiles beneath the vessel were glowing in response to the radiation and the
Proteus
was itself ablaze both within and without. The chair in which Grant sat might have been made of fire, but it remained solid and cool. Even the air about him lit up and he breathed cold illumination.

His fellow passengers and his own hand were frigidly aglow.

Duval’s luminous hand marked out the sign of the cross in a sparking movement and his shining lips moved.

Grant said, “Are you suddenly afraid, Dr. Duval?”

Duval said softly, “One prays not only out of fear, but out of gratitude for the privilege of seeing the great wonders of God.”

Grant acknowledged himself, inwardly, to be the loser of that exchange, too. He wasn’t doing at all well.

Owens cried out, “Look at the walls.”

They were drifting away in all directions at a visible rate of speed now and the ceiling was moving upward. All ends of the large room were shrouded in thick, increasing gloom, all the thicker for being seen through shining air. The miniaturizer was now an enormous thing, its limits
and boundaries not quite visible. In each indentation of its honeycomb there was a fragment of the unearthly light; a regular marching of so many brilliant stars in a black sky.

Grant found himself losing his nervousness in the excitement of it. With an effort, he glanced hastily at the others. All of them were looking upward, hypnotized by the light, by the vast distances that had been created out of nowhere, by a room that had enlarged into a universe, and a universe that had grown out of ken.

Without warning, the light dimmed to a dull red and the wireless signal sounded in staccato bursts with a sharp, echoing ring. Grant started.

Michaels said, “Belinski at Rockefeller said subjective sensations must change with miniaturization. He was largely ignored, but that signal certainly sounds different.”

Grant said, “Your voice doesn’t.”

“That is because you and I are both equally miniaturized. I’m talking about sensations that must cross the miniaturization gap; sensations from out there.”

Grant translated and read out the message that had come in: MINIATURIZATION TEMPORARILY HALTED. IS ALL WELL? REPLY AT ONCE!

“Is everyone all right?” Grant called out, sardonically. There was no answer and he said, “Silence gives consent,” and tapped out: ALL WELL.

Carter licked lips that remained dry. He watched with painful concentration as the miniaturizer took on its glow and he knew that everyone in the room down to the least essential technician was doing the same.

Living human beings had never been miniaturized. Nothing as large as the
Proteus
had ever been miniaturized. Nothing, man or animal, living or dead, large or small, had ever been miniaturized so drastically.

The responsibility was his. All responsibility in this continuing nightmare was his.

“There she goes!” came an almost exultant whisper from the technician at the Miniaturization button. The phrase came clearly over the communications system, as Carter watched the
Proteus
shrink.

It did so slowly at first, so that one could only tell it was happening by the change in the way it overlapped the hexagonal structures that made up the floor. Those that
were partially revealed beyond the edge of the ship’s structure crept outward, and eventually tiles that had earlier been completely hidden began to show.

All around the
Proteus
, the hexagonals emerged, and the rate of miniaturization accelerated until the ship was shrinking like a patch of ice on a warm surface.

Carter had watched miniaturization a hundred times, but never with quite the effect upon himself that he was experiencing now. It was as though the ship were hurling down a long, infinitely long, hole; falling in absolute silence and growing smaller and smaller as the distance increased to miles, to tens of miles, to hundreds …

The ship was a white beetle now, resting upon the central hexagon immediately under the miniaturizer; resting upon the one red hexagon in the world of white ones—the Zero Module.

The
Proteus
was still falling, still shrinking, and Carter, with an effort, raised his hand. The glow of the miniaturizer faded to a dull red and miniaturization stopped.

“Find out how they are before we continue.”

They might conceivably be dead or, just as bad, unable to perform their tasks with minimum efficiency. In that case, they had lost and it would be well to know now.

The communications technician said, “Answer returned and reads: ALL WELL.”

Carter thought: If they’re unable to operate, they might be unable to realize they’re unable.

But there would be no way to check that. One had to pretend all was well if the crew of the
Proteus
said all was well. Carter said, “Elevate the ship.”

Slowly, the Zero Module began to lift from the floor, a smooth hexagonal pillar, with red top and white sides, bearing the inch-wide
Proteus
upon itself. When the top was four feet above the floor it stopped.

“Ready for Phase Two, sir,” came the voice of one of the technicians.

Carter looked briefly at Reid, who nodded.

“Phase Two,” said Carter.

A panel slid open and a handling device (a gigantic “waldo”—so named by the early nuclear technicians from a character in a science fiction story of the 1940’s, Carter had once been told) moved in on silent air-jets. It was fourteen feet high and consisted of pulleys on a tripod; pulleys which controlled a vertical arm, dangling down from a horizontal extensor. The arm itself was in stages, each shorter and on a smaller scale than the one above. In this case, there were three stages and the lowest one, two inches long, was fitted with steel wires a quarter-inch thick, curved to meet each other in interlocking fashion.

The base of the device carried the CMDF insigne and below it was the inscription: MIN PRECISION HANDLING.

Three technicians had entered with the handling device and behind them a uniformed nurse waited with visible impatience. The brown hair under her nurse’s cap looked overhastily adjusted as though on that one day she had other things on her mind.

Two of the technicians adjusted the arm of the waldo directly over the shrunken
Proteus
. For the fine adjustment, three hair-thin beams of light reached from the arm support to the surface of the Zero Module. The distance of each beam from the center of the module was translated into light intensity upon a small circular screen divided into three segments, meeting in its center.

The light intensities, clearly unequal, shifted delicately as the third technician adjusted a knob. With the skill of practice, he brought the three segments to equal intensity
in a matter of seconds; equal enough to wipe out the boundaries between them. The technician then threw a switch and locked the waldo into position. The centering lines of light flicked off and the broader beam of a searchlight illuminated the
Proteus
by indirect reflection.

Another control was manipulated, and the arm sank toward the
Proteus
. Slowly and gently it came down, the technician holding his breath. He had probably handled more miniaturized objects than anyone in the country; possibly than anyone in the world (although no one knew all the details of what was going on Over There, of course) but this was something unprecedented.

He was going to lift something with a greater normalmass by many times than he had ever done before, and what he was going to lift contained five living human beings. Even a small, barely visible tremor might be enough to kill.

The prongs below opened and slowly slipped down over the
Proteus
. The technician stopped them and tried to have his eyes assure himself that what his instruments told him was true. The prongs were accurately centered. Slowly, they closed, bit by bit, until they met underneath the ship and formed a close-knit, precision-adjusted cradle.