Ed's flesh tingled. To follow Mitchell Prell down—a course more weirdly remote than traveling to the stars. He did not answer Barbara. He unzipped his pocket. He could not tell whether a minute android emerged or not. There were no further messages on the envelope.
But from a sound cone in a shadowy corner of this workshop, there suddenly came tones that a decade had not rubbed from his memory:
"Nipper-hello! Or is it always Ed now? So we've come to Mars together. And you with Barbara! Well, maybe that is an agreeable complication! Now we can talk. Here I have the right amplifying apparatus. I need help, and you always seemed the best—and enough like me. I know your doubts about science, and I don't blame you. But I'm still the same—wanting to learn everything that I can, feeling that everything should work out right."
The stillness closed in again. Ed and Barbara looked at each other. Technology was full of tricks—the possibility of a thousand illusions. Could he even trust a voice, made so like Mitchell Prell's used to be? And could he trust the mind behind it? Even if it truly was his uncle's?
"Work out right!" Ed growled mockingly. "That sounds almost pious! If you are what you say you are, you were on Earth and have seen everything. You know then how right things have been! I was around when the Moon blew—remember? And no scared hotheads caused that. But there are plenty of them now. And from here on Mars, I've expected to see Earth momentarily puff up into a little nova."
There was a sigh from the sound cone. "So I'm to blame—at least partly—for helping to give those fools something to be furiously right or mistaken about," Mitchell Prell's voice replied. "Well, I was what I was, and I am what I am, Ed. I'm sorry about many things that happened. But I can't erase them. I've urged you to come here to help me try to counteract them. I don't think you'll stay angry with me, Ed. Come where I am—you and Barbara. It can be done quite quickly now. I have two forms prepared. They will take the lines and personalities of anyone. Just set the dials above two of the unoccupied vats at one hundred—full energy. Lower yourselves into the fluid. Clothes, or lack of them, won't matter. Your own bodies will sink into suspended animation."
Again the voice from the sound cone faded out. Ed's and Barbara's eyes met in a tense congress of thought. They were being asked to leave their natural, physical selves behind and to become beings of vitaplasm. To many, that was horror in itself, even without a radical change in size. Then there was the fear of loss of identity. To be an exact duplicate in mind and memory might not necessarily mean to be the same person. Here was a metaphysical problem elusive and hard to answer. What others of experience might have told you could never quite satisfy you. You had to learn for yourself.
Beyond all that, there was that drop, down and down into tininess, to where physical laws themselves must seem warped by the relativity of size levels, and to where nothing remained quite the same. Could one's mind even endure the difference?
For a moment Ed felt cornered and panicky. But something eager and questioning came into him. For the first time he wished that Barbara had not come with him.
Finally he said, "I've got to go down, Babs. There just isn't any other way."