People Minus X

by Raymond Z. Gallun

With avidness and wonder and dread, his mind scrambled through a moment of time to grasp the truths of his present state and to test them. Even the act of existing in the body he now inhabited was indescribably different. His mouth was almost dry inside. He still could draw air into his nostrils, but breathing became unnecessary before some source of energy that was probably nuclear. His hands and his nude body still looked slender and brown to him. And he retained memories—of people he knew, sights he had seen, and of things he had learned. Here he seemed to remain himself. Those memories were clear enough; but were they already losing a little importance, were they too gigantic to be concerned about in this place?

That thought, again, was panic at work—a sense of separation from all that he held familiar. For the ato lamp towering over him seemed as remote as the sun. The form of the less-than-miniature electron microscope seemed a metal-sheened tower. And in his mind there was even the certainty that his present form must be of a wholly different design inside to meet different conditions. He knew that he could feel the thump of a heavier heart, circulating relatively more viscous fluids.

And something about his vision had changed. Close by, everything was slightly blurred, as if he were far-sighted. Farther off, objects became hazed, as by countless drifting, speeding dots that weren't opaque but that seemed—each of them—to be surrounded by refractive rings that distorted the view of what lay beyond them. And because there were so many tiny centers of distortion constantly in motion, vision at this middle-distance never quite cleared but remained ashimmer. Were those translucent specks perhaps the auras of air molecules themselves?

At a greater distance, clarity came again. For there the haze which was not haze at all but which consisted merely of seeing too much detail—in too coarse a grain, as under too much magnification—was lost. Light and dark, and familiar rich colors. And he saw the whole room around him almost as he used to see it, except for its limitless vastness.

For a little while Ed wondered further about his new eyes. They were responsive to familiar wave lengths of light. Those wave lengths were not too coarse—at least when reflected from farther objects. For nearer things, he was not at all sure that he could see even as well as he could by ordinary light. Was his vision, in this segment, perhaps electronic, then? Did he see, close at hand, fringed hints of strange, beautiful hues? Were these electronic colors? Or were there infinitely finer natural wave lengths, far above the known spectrum, which too-massive instruments had been unable to detect?

This question was dropped quickly, because there was too much more. Now he looked again, very briefly, out into the depths of air, full of drifting debris—jagged stones that glinted, showing a crystalline structure, twisted masses like the roots of trees, though they had the sheen of floss. All of it was dust of one kind or another. Ed could even hear the clink and rattle as bits of it collided. Everywhere there were murmurings of sound, which made a constant, elfin ringing never heard in the world he knew.

Gingerly now he crept across the rough glass surface, back toward the vat from which he had emerged and its companion. Barbara was his first concern. There she was, in the second vat, imbedded in a bead of gelatin. Already she was trying to fight free. He reached both arms into the stuff and tugged at her shoulders to help her. He lifted her out easily and helped scrape away the adhering gelatin, while he worried about how she might react to a tremendous change. To counteract the shock of it, he kept up a running flow of talk, in a voice that even seemed a little as it used to be:

"... We made it, Babs. Down to rock bottom, you might say. I don't think that any conscious human shape could be made much smaller. Or any machine, for that matter. Remember some old stories? Little men lost in weed jungles, fighting spiders and things? Strange, unheard-of adventure, in those days! Maybe we can even try it sometime. Except that a spider, or even an aphid, wouldn't notice us. We're too small."

A little pink nymph with a rather determined jaw, she seemed only half to listen as she stared around with large eyes.

Later, like two savages, they were clothing themselves crudely in scraps of lint torn from what looked like a sleeping pallet. A fiber was knotted across it in a way that reminded Ed of the safety straps by which passengers of planes and space ships attached themselves to their seats during take-offs and landings. Here, Prell, the tiny android, must take his rare moments of rest. Some of the lint was far finer than spiderweb, but it was still coarse to Ed and his wife in their present state, as they wound its strands around them.