Dawn of the Demigods

by Raymond Z. Gallun

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.