People Minus X

by Raymond Z. Gallun

Ed and Barbara removed their oxygen helmets and began a swift exploration of the premises. The rooms had all the marks of lone bachelor occupancy by a man too fearfully busy with his own deep pursuits to waste time on more than the barest attempts at housekeeping. Apparatus was everywhere. There were even recognizable parts of a helicopter—the one, no doubt, which had brought Prell and his equipment to this refuge.

At first they thought that he might since have fallen victim to some violence or accident. And then they found his body in a rectangular, plastic-covered tank, submerged in a cloudy, viscous fluid. It was a standard sort of vat, much used in laboratories in repairing extensive injury and restoring a destroyed body from a personal recording—either in protoplasm or vitaplasm. Near by, there were three similar vats, which, when opened, proved to contain only fluid.

Barbara and Ed looked for a long moment at Mitchell Prell's forever young face. It was peaceful in death that was not quite death; for of the latter you could never be sure any longer, unless it was the death of the species.

If there were guile behind that gentle face, it did not show. If there were darkness of purpose, or stubborn unwillingness to recognize errors that he had committed in a civilization that tottered as it reached for greatness, it could not be seen. But in this refuge, one fact was plain: Mitchell Prell had gone on with his work in a super-biology.

Ed wandered over to a beautiful microscope of a standard make. Its attachments also started out from a familiar design. It was fitted with dozens of special screws and levers. When Ed, and then Barbara, peered into its eye-piece, they found that each of these screws and levers could manipulate a tiny tool, almost too small to see with the naked eye. There were minute cutters, calipers and burnishing wheels. Set up under the microscope there was even what seemed to be a tiny lathe. In fact, there was an entire machine shop on an ultra-miniature scale. And there were tiny, tonglike grasping members, intended to serve—on such a reduced scheme of things—as hands, where the human hand, working directly, would have been hopelessly mountainous.

In addition to this equipment, there were exact duplicates of the vats across the room and their attendant apparatus, except that each entire assembly was less than a half-inch long. In one vat there was a human figure much smaller than a doll, yet perfect.

Barbara laughed nervously. Even in this century of wonders, the human mind had its limitations for making swift adjustments. The laugh was a denial of what her eyes beheld.

Ed Dukas's wide face looked at once avid and haggard. Beside the tiny vats there was also another microscope, complete in every detail, yet of the same relative dimensions as the little figure in the vat. But this lesser microscope was of the electron variety. It had to be. For at this reduced size light waves themselves were too coarse in texture to be effective for close-range work.

Ed turned slowly toward his young wife, whose eyes were alert and wonder-filled in spite of her weariness. He noticed the pleasant wave in her hair. He noted the charming curve of her brow, the tiny and pleasing irregularity of her nose. And what was all this attention but a clinging to an object of love when facing a strangeness so great that it scared him as he had never been scared before. Ed Dukas knew that his face must have gone gray.

Now his words came slowly and precisely: "Babs, I've told you that I watched part of Mitchell Prell's first message being written. That in the moving speck of wet ink, for an instant something looked like a man the size of a mote! I thought I'd imagined it. But is that what Uncle Mitch is now? An android so small that the only way for him to write a note to a person of usual dimensions is to surround his own body with a droplet of ink and to drag himself across the paper, making the lines and loops of script?"