Ten (Stories) to The Stars

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  Accelerating with the help of the pressure, we swept around Ganymede in an orbit; we waited until our direction reversed itself, as must always happen in circular motion. Then we really built up velocity with long bursts from our rods, and tangented sunward, breaking our last tie with the Jovian moon. We were on our way.

  I felt my hide stiffening defensively. Over long periods we were not entirely without need of shelter in the awful spatial dryness, so we kept watch. The void is not completely empty. It contains many scattered hydrogen and helium atoms, and a rarer sprinkling of cosmic dust. We were lucky. Gleaming like a planet reflecting solar light, we saw a lump of rock moving with us toward the sun. We jetted to it and clung, laughing silently in the vacuum.

  Doc's lips formed the words: "More speed. Time is short. Use up the cartridges of the rods. We have more."

  Any object, broken clear of the gravity of a planet or large moon, is free in space. Acceleration is resisted then only by inertia. A relatively small force can build velocity enormously.

  We were traveling at many miles per second when Doc mouthed: "Not too much. Eventually we must apply the brakes."

  We fused our way into the meteor with our rods, and hollowed it out. We closed the exit with the slag of our excavations. True, the sun's radiations were a source of energy to our android tissues; but they also hastened drying—our worst enemy here since our body fluid was water.

  As time went on, our skins hardened further, forming a kind of shell around the moisture in our vitals. And we had a small supply of water in steel cylinders. In a pinch, we needed little. We had food, too, similarly packed—Xian gelatins containing the radioactive and other minerals necessary to sustain protoplastic flesh, and give it a sure energy source in space.

  While we were burrowing into the meteor Jan did a whimsical thing. With a diamond-chip tool she inscribed over the entrance of our cave:

  "Dr. Shane Lanvin and Charles and Janice Harver traveling to Earth in the Miniature—2037 A.D."

  "There," she said in silent lip motion, for the reading of which we were gaining practice. "Maybe the inscription on that quartz-grain meteor you used to carry, Doc, was just as casual. Maybe it was carved, just on the spur of the moment, recording a journey of little Xians."

  "You happen to be right," Doc answered. "I knew those hieroglyphics by heart. I drew them once for Kobolah. He translated. Four micro-Xians were traveling the short distance from one of their inhabited asteroids to another."

  Later, the three of us fell into a kind of sleep. Or was it creeping death? It scared me. Our metabolism slowed. Consciousness left us. And so, time went very quickly. Maybe our tissues actually froze. I know now that this hibernation is a natural android function, conserving physical forces during long periods of inactivity. And it could not stop for good our rugged vitality. We revived when the sun was nearer, and warmed us more. Stiff with dryness, we drank water, and loosened up our muscles.

  We cleared the exit of our burrow, and crept out on the surface of the meteor. Rushing on in its elongated eclipse around the sun, it had come close enough to Earth to make the latter a disc of about one-quarter the apparent diameter of the Moon, as seen from Chicago on a clear night.

  "Our meteor probably won't get much closer," I mouthed. "So we might as well jump soon. No use wasting the energy of our rods, decelerating a meteor mass, too."

  Doc nodded.

  "Where will we be most likely to find our old selves?" we read from Jan's lips.

  "At the Space Medicine Research Hospital, near Chicago, I'd guess," Doc answered. "They send them nearest our homes. Or—peek over a shoulder at a newspaper, or into somebody's television. I think we are news. Are you both sure you know just what to do if that old protoplasm of ours hasn't got tired of waiting for us?"

  "Yes," Jan replied.

  "Fine," Doc commented. "So we'll drink some water, eat a little, limber up, and then start for home without the meteor."

  Much of our physical forces had returned with the prospect of activity. Like any awakening, it was a natural tuning up of body. But I think that even our android chemistry had suffered in our vast journey. Doc and Jan both looked thinned down. I hugged Jan in appreciation of her unwavering spirits.

  "Good kid," I said. "It shouldn't be long, now, with luck."

  We all jumped, then, and broke our velocity in one direction with our rod-blasts, bending our course toward Earth, now only hours away, even at steadily declining speed. And so, as unheralded as ghosts, but as significant as a new dawn of history, we came in.

  Yes, we still hit the fringes of the atmosphere a bit too fast. The floss bond, holding us joined, burned in the heat of friction. Thereafter, there was no keeping together in tumultuous vastness, that, though it was just the Earth's air, seemed infinite to our tininess. I could cry out for Doc, and more especially for Jan; but there could be no answer. Really, it was the first bad break we had had.

  I was high over a coastline. And a circumstance, particularly effective in The Small, helped me to orient myself. I found a bit of quartz-dust floating near me. I clung to it. Yes, I had heard of quartz crystals functioning sometimes as natural radio receivers. But my tiny ears were much better designed than the human to pick up minute sounds.

  For more than an hour I listened to overlapping broadcasts. But the most powerful station I heard was in Frisco. So that was the city beneath me. I heard several newscasts. Parts of them were significant:

  "... Dr. Shane Lanvin, micrologist, and the Harver couple, his associates, seem near death now in Chicago. For almost five months a spark of life has been sustained by intravenous feeding and other therapy. Dr. Lanvin's party was sent to investigate certain threatening micro-phenomena in the vicinity of Jupiter. Should any credence be given to a fantastic radiogram sent from Ganymede by another member of the party about a micro-race of supermen? Perhaps not; but it has been the thing that sparked the special effort to sustain life in these three during the past six weeks."

  I was already jetting, riding the prevailing winds high in the stratosphere, and at last grabbing a lift on the skin of a passenger rocket-plane. From high up Chicago looked almost as it did from normal human eyes. There was no feeling of being lost in enormity, at least. That was how I found the Experimental Hospital, and descended toward it. The rest was easy. I had only to follow the newscast men to the three rooms.

  Hovering in the air, I felt the thunderous vibration of a doctor explaining wearily for perhaps the thousandth time:

  "Tissues and organs have no fundamental defect; some repair and replacement has even been made. There should be consciousness, but there is not. The rest is mystery."

  I went to Jan's room first. How long had it been since I had seen her real face? It was waxen, now. All the color faded, as in an old painting. Never mind how I felt; it was bad enough. I drifted to Doc's room. His eyes and cheeks were sunken. Hovering high over him, I could not tell that he breathed. Then I saw myself, gigantic and pallid. The embarrassment of seeing this corpselike thing was lessened by the fact that it resembled my former lusty self only slightly.

  "Hurry back, Jan, please," I urged aloud, though no one could hear me. "Hurry back, Doc."

  I heard things in that room. Physicians conversing in thunderous undertones: "I'm getting tired of this. Interesting case, but it has been too long. Can't last much longer. Yes, sometimes it seems an unkindness to try to maintain life in something doomed to die."

  Now that there was a chance at last, the help of those doctors might be wavering.

  I found an interne writing at a table in the corridor. It occurred to me that, had it been necessary, I would even have dunked my entire body in ink from his pen-nib, and written him a message by dragging myself across the paper of the form he was filling out. But I still had my jet rod, so I clung to his knuckle, and scribbled on the form in a charred line left by a needle of atomic fire:

  I have returned. So have the others. Please continue your efforts. Thanks.

  Cha
rles Harver.

  The interne's hand jerked. I was hurled toward the ceiling. But I heard his bone-jarring roar:

  "Hey—Fletch! Dave! Look at this!"

  If they didn't understand or believe, still they would be alert and interested. There would be no breakdown of their struggle to keep those bodies living.

  I went back to the pallid thing that had been I, and did what was necessary, after I had cached the parchments I carried, and most of my equipment, in a groove in the molding on the wall. I allowed myself to be inhaled. Deep in the lungs, I cut my way into a capillary with a diamond splinter. It was an insignificant wound, really. Then, in a rushing flood, while dim, reddish light penetrated to my eyes, I was borne along. I knew by a violent turbulence that I passed through the heart. Then there was a sense of rising. Absolute gloom meant that I was inside the skull. There I lodged myself in as small and unimportant blood vessel as I could find.

  The rest was simple after that. I merely relaxed. It seemed that I went to sleep. But I was in my own brain. Encouraged by a natural affinity, the little energy-node or whatever it was that was my awareness and my ego, went home. It was, shall we say, a wanderer's return.

  When I awoke it was mid-morning. The mental pictures of recent events remained vivid, yet they had assumed almost the character of a dream. Beyond my window were maples and pines. A robin was scolding. It was very pleasant, indeed, until I thought of Jan and Doc.

  "Mr. Harver, you're awake!" a nurse exclaimed. "We knew from last night's tests that you were suddenly much better! There had been a message written in an impossible way...." Here, the girl looked frightened.

  "Never mind!" I growled. "How is my wife? And Dr. Lanvin?"

  "Mrs. Harver is still asleep. But even her color is far better, and she smiles to herself. Dr. Lanvin is much improved, too, though he is still very weak, and has not regained consciousness."

  I sighed with relief. They'd gotten back just as I had. Yet, with what we'd brought back, this was not an end but a tense and wonderful beginning. The android secret. Improved man, large or small. A revolutionary fact to be thrust on our mortal race, with all its doubts and enthusiasms and prejudices; to be pushed into the age-old familiar sequence of birth, death, happiness, suffering, and decay of our kind! It was monumental in its possibilities for triumph and disaster; and for a weak moment I had a mighty wish not to disturb the peace, and to let all of this sleep forever.

  Of course doctors and newscast men talked to me that day:

  "... The message? 'I have returned....' Just what, in plain language, did that mean?... What did you find in your explorations in miniature? There is a story from somebody named Scharber on the way to Earth from the Jovian system, now. A yarn about a race that made itself unbelievably small. Yes—to hide itself, I suppose."

  "You might like the story when and if you hear all of it," I answered. "Let Dr. Lanvin, my superior, talk, when he is able."

  Late that day I was on my feet briefly. I held my wife in my arms, saw her smile, heard her say: "Well, here we are, and what now, Charlie? I even wonder if folks will be disturbed to know that tiny Xians have been visiting Earth for ages, unnoticed. It's kind of creepy."

  Doc grinned up at us wanly from his bed. "This carcass of mine seems pretty well spent from the strain of my absence," he laughed. "Oh, I guess the damned thing could be patched up some more. But why bother? When I can have another body, same size, same shape, same organs, including a brain duplicated to the last filament of a brain-cell—no special principle required, as in The Small—all built of tough protoplast, and with a few things straightened for a youthful appearance and advantages? Not a robot any more than a man is a robot, but a human of firmer flesh, capable of all that a human is capable of, but much more. Glad to see you two up and around."

  Yeah, Doc had always been a progressive. Oh, he'd had his doubts, too; but now, if the Great Change fazed him at all, he didn't show it.

  VIII

  Jan and I soon left the hospital and set up housekeeping in an apartment of our own. But with all that medical science could do, Doc still had to stay in bed for a month. But he started directing the forces of destiny, almost as soon as he could give orders.

  I was in on the deal, of course, as were several doctors from the hospital, and Bowhart, and Scharber when he arrived on Earth from Ganymede.

  "Gonna do it, Doc, aren't you?" Scharber said, when he first saw him lying there, pale and wasted. "You lugs scared me plenty once. Now, though, I feel foolish. Big words you need for this! It's the dawn of the demigods!"

  My blood thrilled with a mighty promise, too. At night, going to sleep, I'd exert my will. Lodged inside my head was a micro-android. I'd will myself into it again. And so, for a little while, I'd escape from my own mountainous form, to float free in the air and consult the notes and drawings on the parchment that I'd hidden on a molding in my hospital room.

  Doc and Jan would do the same. They, too, following the plan we had made in space, had similarly cached their portions of his notes. But now we had assembled the complete record of the android process in Doc's house.

  And so the beginning was made. When Doc was able to get around again, things really got under way. He obtained a government grant. A whole lab and a large staff of workers, was set aside for us. Retorts, pressure-vats, and other apparatus to produce the basic materials, were constructed and installed.

  Ours was a major project, coinciding in time with another major project. For the first real starship was finally under construction on the Moon. Three more years it would take to be completed.

  But our enterprise reached practical fruition in fourteen months. I was among the men present when Dr. Lanvin lowered himself into a tank of special gelatins.

  He was nude and emaciated; yet he kept his humor, and a certain dignity. A thin hand made a slight gesture. To Scharber and me and the others, he said:

  "This will be the easiest trick, learned among the micro-Xians. Simple tissue-replacement, cell by cell. Improved protoplast in place of protoplasm. That's all. Well, wish me luck."

  The anesthetic that had been injected into his veins worked. He slumped down gently. The gelatins closed in over his face, and the month of slow gestation toward rebirth began. I saw his body at various stages of the process; little changed in appearance except for much increased robustness.

  Other duties intervened, so I did not observe his actual removal from the tank nor his reawakening. But Jan and I met him a few hours later, as he left the small hospital of our lab. The old gray suit he wore, hardly fitted him. He still had his ragged blond mustache. You could tell that he was he—with many years subtracted. He looked about as old as I was—twenty-three. But these were the only signs.

  He grinned like a kid, jubilant, but a bit self-conscious. He said, half joshing:

  "Look me over—the miracle of the era, the successor to natural man; and no casual observer could ever tell that I'm not as humans have always been. I eat, I breathe oxygen; I need some foods with a different mineral content, it is true. I sleep if I want to. Given a mate of like substance, I can reproduce my own kind. But I won't age. Cut a finger off me, and it would manage to live independently for a long time. Wound me terribly, and I'd probably manage to heal up someway. Deprive me of air, or common chemical foods, and my body would try to seek out other sources of energy—sunlight, radioactivity, or whatever is available. Even change my basic tissue fluid from water to—"

  It sounded a little like bragging, so Jan cut in with a feminine tease: "Yes, Dr. Lanvin. But put on your overcoat. People will think it odd that you're carrying it on such a sharp winter afternoon."

  Doc laughed back, and obliged her almost with embarrassment, and we were three old friends together.

  "People get injured," I said, "or just grow old; and though limited rejuvenation and repair is possible, this is a far better way. That's how it should go, Doc; and you'd think that no one with sense would want to stop it. In months there'll be thousands of android
s. But here we are again—unsure of how it'll all be taken. Like you say, this is succession to natural man. It can be conceived of as the old Threat of the Robot idea, with refinements. A force of staggering newness, wonderful to the point of being terrifying. We're almost certain that there'll be trouble."

  The story of all we'd learned among the micro-Xians, and its repercussions here at home, was mostly regarded as a fantastic rumor at first. It was talked of lightly on the newscast, and wherever people gathered:

  "Little People that have been around all the time, watching us? Shucks, even my Irish grandmother knew that! So we're gonna become wonderful, artificial critters! Homo ex Machina! Well, well!... Okay—take me—I was always one for improvements!"

  Yes, it went something like that. And when people first truly knew, their reactions were mild, curious, and friendly. One incident I remember particularly.

  Jan and I and Doc and a very pretty girl were walking in a quiet street near the University. The girl was someone I had known from a picture. She looked like the picture, again, now. That is, she had become like Doc. For the sake of youth and beauty, women can be more bold than men. She was Irma Tandray Lanvin, Doc's former wife—returned. And maybe she'd learned something about her man—that her rival, science, was part of him, and that she'd better take him as he was. Maybe he'd also learned the need of being attentive to a woman. Anyway, they both looked devoted, now, and I hoped it was so.

  But what I meant to tell about was our neighbors. First we met Corbison, the mechanic, saying:

  "Hi, Professor Lanvin. A fella'd hardly know you."

  "It's still me," Doc answered.

  Others gathered around as we paused to talk.