"Of course not, Mr. Burke, you couldn't allow me to do such a thing, could you?"
"No I couldn't, and I'm damn glad you've got the sense to realize that."
"It
will
be necessary for me to stay in the lab and monitor the experiment, but the rest of you would be wise to leave," Vernor added.
"I agree," Burke responded. "And the Gajary woman?"
"She had the night guard let her leave this morning." Vernor said sadly. "We had a fight."
"Just as well, just as well," Burke said with some satisfaction. The technicians seemed to have completed their work. "All set?" Burke said to them. "O.K. men, let's go. And Maxwell, if you must stay, at least get behind the radiation shield." He indicated a chest-high barrier at the other end of the laboratory.
"Of course." They shook hands and Burke departed with the technicians. There was the sound of the heavy door to the laboratory being sealed, and all was silent.
Vernor stuck his head in the hatch of the scale-ship. "All set, Phizwhiz?"
"Everything checks out," the machine's voice responded. Was there a trace of excitement? "I'm ready."
Vernor picked up a bunch of hydroponically grown lettuce which Alice had left out. With some effort, he managed to rock the scale-ship over and wedge the lettuce right under it.
He looked around the lab, then switched on the VFG cones and hopped through the hatch into the ship.
"You're not supposed to come," the loudspeaker protested. "Didn't you hear Dr. Burke?"
"Fuck you," Vernor explained. Then, sticking his head out of the hatch, he shouted, "Come on, Alice get on in here!"
Alice hurried out from the bedroom. She was wearing shorts and body paint. She looked swell. The field was building up and she had to hurry to get in. She sat down on Vernor's lap and they kissed as the laboratory expanded around them. Alice loved outings.
The lettuce which Vernor had placed beneath the scale-ship soon was spread around them like the Elysian fields. When the undulating green started to show the graininess that indicated the imminence of the cellular level, Vernor reduced the field power so they could stop shrinking for awhile.
Alice had pieced together a picnic from the remains of last night's supper, and they took it out of the ship. The turgid green surface spread up on every side, and some leaves were high above them as well. The light itself was suffused with a delicate shade of green and the air felt cool and moist. The picnic was cloned salmon on fungus bread. It was delicious.
After eating, they lolled on the lettuce. The distant leaves were more magnified, and with a little squinting you could actually make out the cells. They were still alive and active.
"Life all around us," Alice said. "What a lovely outing."
He smiled into her warm eyes. "This is where I first realized how much I missed you. When I was on this level with Mick I was so horny I was ready to go bi. Maybe there's some type of orgone vibrations you pick up here . . . " He fondled her nipples. They were green.
"I still don't feel anything," Phizwhiz interrupted over his loudspeaker. "How am I supposed to feel?"
Alice burst into giggles. "Feel about what, Phizwhiz?"
"Vernor said that taking this trip was going to give me a soul. A nexus for paradox. All I've seen so far is unsafe and reckless behavior. I'm going to have to report all of this to the Governor."
Alice giggled harder, "You're a Sleeping Beauty, Phizwhiz, just waiting for Prince Charming to come around and
do
it." She turned to Vernor, "Anyway, I still don't see why going around the Circular Scale should make him be alive."
Neither did Vernor exactly, but gamely he explained. "My idea is that all paradoxes are basically the same . . . they all represent attempts to capture an infinite thing in a finite number of words. Infinite sequences like in Zeno's paradox, or infinite regresses like in trying to describe your state of mind. The paradox is right there in us, even though we can't put it into words. I figure that if Phizwhiz goes around the Circular Scale and finds for a fact that he's right there inside each of his smallest particles . . . I think then he'll have the kind of true and internal paradox which is the essence of higher consciousness."
"That's another thing," Alice continued, "I don't see how we can be inside each of our smallest particles."
"Yeah, I can't either, really. It will be kind of funny to have that extra loop in our brains."
Alice jerked her head. "You mean that this trip is going to change
us
?"
Vernor nodded. "I think so. I've had some pretty strange dreams ever since I got back from just going part way. And once we go all the way, I think our thoughts will be able to travel around the loop any time . . . "
Alice looked frightened. "What if I can't handle it Vernor? I'm not an Angel, you know."
If the loop was going to make Phizwhiz come alive, what would it do to Vernor and Alice? Vernor was picking up Alice's fear. "We can handle it together," he insisted, hoping he was right. "You're strong, Alice. We're strong together."
They climbed back into the ship and Vernor turned up the VFG field. Soon they'd slid into one of the lettuce leaf's breathing pores. Cells were all around them, and the greenness was no longer evenly distributed. They could make out chloroplasts as green lumps inside the relatively clear protoplasm around them.
Nothing seemed that eager to eat them this time. Soon they were nestled in a dent in the hide of a lettuce cell. There were many long molecules, as before, but they seemed to be more strongly regimented than the plastic had been.
Soon they were too small to interact with photons any longer, and the strange eyeless "seeing" began. Vernor had played down the terror of nuclear capture when he'd described his trip to Alice, and he was glad that this time it didn't appear that they'd be drawn into an atom.
Instead, they reached the nuclear level smoothly, floating near, but outside of, what appeared to be a carbon atom's electron. To Alice it definitely looked like a large yellowish sphere, to Vernor somewhat less so. Curious, he asked Phizwhiz what it looked like to him.
Phizwhiz was "with" them by means of a battery of sensors attached to the instrument panel . . . cameras, microphones, meters, and the like. This instrument package was connected to the computer proper by a thick black cable leading out through a small hole in the synthequartz skin. As it led away from the scale-ship, the cable became larger and larger, finally becoming a large dark cloud. If someone had looked into the laboratory, they would have seen a cable leading from the console at the end of the room and then seemingly tapering to an invisible point.
"I don't see
any
thing," Phizwhiz complained. "There aren't any photons around."
"How about the wave function? The probability density? There's an electron here, and the VFG field is focusing its field right on your sensors."
"Yes, I have a reading on that," Phizwhiz responded. "Do you want the numbers?"
"No, goddammit, I don't want
numbers
. Look, Phizwhiz, what you have to do is let the numbers interact with your core storage. Generate a tensor-valued field to fit the pattern, and see what
that
looks like."
Phizwhiz was silent for a few seconds. "I have a readout," he announced. "Internal display state spherical intensity pattern code ELECTRON."
"What does he mean?" Alice whispered.
"He sees the electron," Vernor answered. Then, louder, "Don't you?"
"Yes," the machine answered distantly. "You could say that."
Soon they'd reached the level where the four-dimensionality of space became evident. They were surrounded by hyperspheres as before. Vernor breathed a sigh of relief, then answered Alice's questioning glance. "I was scared that there wouldn't be any of these shiny balls unless we were inside a nucleus, but I guess the hyperspheres are inside electrons, too. And maybe even in empty space."
Phizwhiz spoke up. "The foam-like fine structure of the vacuum. Space is supposed to be like a mass of bubbles at this scale. That's probably what those things are."
Vernor was pleased. "Where do you get that?"
"Just now I was scanning all the papers in my storage which discuss space on the sub-atomic level. I can't find any papers on the insides of the bubbles, though. Could you suggest some references?"
"Just pay attention," Vernor replied. One of the hyperspheres was drifting closer. "The big rush is coming up. Be still. Don't scare it off."
Abruptly the hypersphere disappeared, moving "under" the ship. Alice squeezed Vernor's hand convulsively, and then they were inside the bubble's hypersurface.
"It's alive!" Alice exclaimed. There was a ceaseless flowing of light and curvature in and around them.
"This is the Universe, Alice. This is all there is."
"But what about the outside . . . where we just were?"
"That's inside," Vernor answered. "Inside every particle."
Alice was quiet, lost in space. "Can we go further?" she asked presently.
"We're on our way down already," Vernor said. He raised his voice. "You get it Phizwhiz? Universe inside every particle? And inside every tiny piece of space?"
The machine was silent for some time, then it responded. "Yes. I can model such a state of affairs. It feels . . . paradoxical. But it is only a model."
"But it's
not
only a model," Vernor insisted. "That's what this trip is all about."
The networks of light were clearly visible now. Again, powerful patterns drifted and merged through the networks' paths. "Mick called this God's brain," Vernor told Alice.
She nodded, silent and absorbed. "Where
is
Mick?" Vernor put a finger to his lips and rolled his eyes towards Phizwhiz's sensors.
The network pattern grew, and once again Vernor could make out bright nodes at the points where the network filaments intersected. Each of the nodes was a cloud of bright particles around a brilliant central point, a quasar or white hole.
Quickly Vernor went to the control panel. "Phizwhiz, this is where I could use some help. Last time we hit a black hole at this level and had to turn back. I think if we go slowly, and quickly increase our size whenever we get near a hole, we might make it through. I want you to keep analyzing the gravitational field strength and warn me whenever it starts looking sinister."
Phizwhiz did Vernor's bidding, and by carefully backing up, waiting, and then reshrinking whenever a black hole drew near, they were able to find their way down to the next size level.
"Are we safe from now?" asked Alice.
"I think we're small enough so that we're unlikely to run across another bad hole," Vernor replied. "What we have to worry about now is whether we've moved off course enough to miss our galaxy."
They were inside the outer region of one of the nodes now. The node's incredibly bright center was a good distance away, and they were surrounded by roughly spherical glowing clouds. The clouds seemed to ooze out of the core, and then go into orbit around it.
Soon they could see that the nearest cloud was composed of bright flecks of varying shape. Some were spherical, some looked like small rods, and some appeared to be tiny spinning pinwheels. They were still shrinking.
"This could go on forever," Alice remarked.
"It could," Vernor admitted. "But I'm inclined to think that we're looking at a cloud of galaxies. Those little pinwheels?"
"Vernor is right," Phizwhiz put in. "The spectra and other radiation characteristics indicate that we're just outside the Local Group."
"Local Group?"
"That's what they call the cluster of galaxies which
our
galaxy, the Milky Way, belongs to," Vernor explained. One of the galaxies was quite close now, a large spiral rotating slowly like a whirlpool of light.
"Milky Way right under us," Phizwhiz exclaimed, then added with apparent satisfaction, "It's going to take me a year to process all the new data I'm getting."
The galaxy was like a huge roulette wheel, turning below them, and they were a ball about to drop into a slot. Billions of slots. How could they hope to end up on Earth? And the galaxy takes 100 thousand years to rotate once, Vernor suddenly recalled . . . and he'd been watching it spin for ten minutes. Would there even be an Earth left anymore?
The Milky Way filled most of their visual field by now. They could make out some individual stars as well as the brighter star-clusters. The spin rate was slowing down as their size decreased. They were about a tenth as large as the galaxy, and the bottom of the scale-ship's sphere seemed to be resting on the galactic disk.
Suddenly Vernor felt an extremely unpleasant series of jolts . . . as if something were alternately squeezing and stretching him. Alice screamed, and he called out, "Phizwhiz, what's happening?"
"You're crossing a band of strong gravitational radiation, emitted beacon-like by the polarized fields at the galactic center."
Grimly Vernor and Alice clung to each other as the terrible
internal
bumping continued. Gradually it diminished, and they relaxed again. They were now so small that the galaxy no longer looked so much like a single object. Individual stars and nebulae were scattered about beneath the scale-ship.
And now they were inside the galaxy, with stars on all sides. Their apparent motion had slowed to a crawl. "The sun should be visible by now," Vernor said. "Assuming that it's still here. Do you see it, Phizwhiz?"
"Not at this time." The machine paused, then continued, "I feel I should tell you that I have notified the Governor and Dr. Burke of your unsafe conduct in bringing an unauthorized person on the ship, Vernor. Indeed, you yourself were expressly forbidden to come. The Public Safety Officers will be waiting outside the laboratory."
Vernor eased back on the shrinking. "You are going to
stop
doing things like this once you get a mind of your own, Phizwhiz." Easy, now. "Alice and I are your
friends
. We are helping you to wake into newness of life.
You
are going to help us
escape
when we get back to the lab."