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 disappe
aring. "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.
All I felt of an energy change-over was a protective tightening of my skin, and that quickened, momentary throbbing inside me. There was no sense of cold or suffocation, no pangs of blood boiling under the release of pressure. Perhaps our outer flesh now served as a sealing shell.
A sense of personal power came over me—android power. The thrill contradicted my darker dreads.
Somehow I wondered how much I had had to be redesigned inside. In any tiny body the relative viscosity of liquids imposes a definite strain on the heart. Were my blood vessels now made especially wide to reduce circulatory drag? I had heard that the littlest insects have to be somewhat special in their inner construction for this same reason.
More confidently, my mind reached out to all distance, and all unknowns. The demigod mood was on me.
It was then that a crowd of Xians emerged from the airlock. Horny digits clutched us.
We were drawn back into the interior of the asteroid, where the hoarded warmth of the sun was augmented by the decay of radioactive minerals. The crowd buzzed around Jan and me. Through tunnel and shaft we were guided back to the cavern and house of our first arrival, mistily illuminated, now that night had fallen.
Dr. Lanvin and Kobolah met us. Doc looked excited.
"Well, Charlie and Jan," he said, "I've met the real ruling force of this world, and have made my appeal. Come along for the answer!"
Kobolah led the way down a shaft that must have reached the center of the asteroid, the most protected place. Here there was a cylindrical chamber, the native nickel-steel of its walls gleaming silvery in the bluish fluorescence. Aerially, and on the floor, the chamber was crowded.
I looked up at a globe mounted on a spindle that traversed the central axis of that great round room. It gave off a faint blue glow. Its surface showed thousands of facets; but it was not rigid like a crystal. In its translucent milky mass were countless dark veins that pulsed.
"Think of George," Doc said softly. "The same thing in purpose, only far more so. Not a ruler, only an adviser whose opinion the populace respects more than its own. This is a great organized lump of androidal brain tissue of the same order as the condensed stuff now in our heads, according to Kobolah. It has the same volume efficiency, though millions of times larger. And it has all of the knowledge of this far scattered civilization at its command."
Jan smiled. "Poor old George," she mused. "I used to feel that his room over the library felt like a temple to Everything. Well, we've seen a few more mysteries, haven't we? And the feeling is here now."
There was a dry rustle in that steel chamber. First the message came in Xian. Then in English:
"Generally, the technologies of the peoples throughout the cosmos will achieve a sounder, more lasting state of the body as soon, or sooner, than it is deserved, and can be handled intelligently. When it is new, often there is fear, confusion and sometimes disaster. On Earth, the native invention of a process of this sort cannot be more than a century off. In each case it should come at about the time of the first journeys to the stars. But the perfected invention, as it exists here, is better than a crude beginning, which will add to danger. Essentially, Earthians are about as ready emotionally as they will be in a short hundred years. The universe seeks to improve its awareness as rapidly as it can. There will be danger; this is a warning. But it is recommended that the conversion method be demonstrated to the Earthians as a gift."
The rustling voice clicked off.
"Thank you," Doc said solemnly, his gaze directed upward at the great globe. "Thank you, too, for pointing out risks."
Then he turned toward Jan and me. "Yes," he said, "Kobolah tells me that it has a consciousness, unlike old George. And I'll take a chance, in spite of a man at a fire, fuddled in a world changing too fast for him. Anyway,
what else can we do? Scientists can't stop studying and learning any more than they can stop breathing."
Kobolah's filamented eyelids blinked. "Then come," he said.
We reached the labs where our intensive instruction, which was to last more than an Earth-month, began. There we found our three micro-robot bodies of metal, kept as in a museum. In other rooms were the furnaces, subjecting silica, hydrogen, and other chemicals to great pressure and heat.
We became acquainted with the vats in which readied substances were held in solution. Next, under Kobolah and Nintan, his superior, we studied the shaper grids and power sources, and the intricate regulating devices attached.
Finally, an insect-like animal of natural protoplasm, native to these bubble caverns, was made the subject of a demonstration. He was bigger than we were, and tolerant to the radioactive poisons of his environment. Otherwise, he was of the same vital principle as humans.
Anesthetized, he was immersed in a gelatin-like solution. Power flowed. Slowly, the substance and chemistry of his tissues was altered, cell by cell, without change of form, and never losing the inner motion of living. It was a process remotely akin to electrolysis.
This was the simplest change that could happen. But there were others. A body, or its three-dimensional simulacra made in any size, could be used as a pattern for a protoplastic form, and made to grow in another vat. But necessary alterations could be interjected too.
The nature of consciousness remained obscure to me, even under instruction. But the idea of a special indivisible spark or node of energy seemed to remain an at least tolerable analogy. Doc Lanvin's comprehension here was a lot better than mine.
"About the awareness, the philosophers were almost right, Charlie and Jan," he said one day. "But science can touch it too, reverently, as it touches a beating heart, which is a pump, easily understandable by physical law. So it is with the awareness, too. Who would want it any different? Who would want the soul to be merely a formless miracle of command, when Divinity must be logic and order, and completeness of understanding?"
Ten (Stories) to The Stars Page 22