"We'll make a few things, if we can," Ed replied. "Then get to a spaceport somehow. I suppose that if we pick the right wind at the right time, it will blow us there—eh, Uncle Mitch? Then we'll do as you did—drift into a space liner and get a free ride back home to Earth. There—well, we'll see. If we're very, very lucky, we might even get our old selves back."
Just then that recovery seemed to be his greatest, most desperate yearning, with many, many obstacles in its way. Even their personal recordings were in enemy hands now. Small though those cylinders were, they were far too huge for them to move or to think of recapturing.
"Where can we start to work?" Ed said to his uncle.
"Farther along the cleft," Prell told him. "I've already cached some supplies there. And there's a level space in a side cleft protected from these constant air currents."
Now they leaped upward and let the draft carry them. The muted quivers of destruction in the chambers from which they had just escaped, they left behind them. They arrived in the work area and got busy at once.
Near dawn they felt the quiverings of unusual sounds. So they followed air currents, betrayed by drifting particles of fluorescent dust, to a crack that showed starshot sky and the undulating desert. Thus they saw Carter Loman's caravan start back toward Port Karnak, with its booty of all that Mitchell Prell had made here: the fruit of a man's mind. But to Loman it was also the worst of the world's inventions. Loman was an android and also, obviously, a central figure, a personage of some importance, or he would not have been sent on this mission. But his mind remained that of a bigot.
Just then Ed Dukas found a savage pleasure in shaking one of the smallest fists ever to exist at the three retreating tractor vehicles. "Loman, Granger and the rest of you," he said, "there'll come a time. You've been fools. You were born too late."
The work went on for days—more tediously than Ed could have imagined, even with only hand tools to use. The same old metals seemed unbelievably hard at this size level—and coarse in texture—as if the atoms themselves had expanded. Barbara could scrub and scrub with a bit of abrasive mineral, achieving only what seemed a poor excuse for a polish. Hammering did little good in shaping such metals, though Ed Dukas and Mitchell Prell were relatively so much stronger than they had been. Only cutting and pressure tools were effective, when aided by the softening heat of a forge—a tiny speck of nuclear incandescence maintained by a neutron stream and carefully screened, though vitaplasm, being actively or latently radioactive itself, was far less endangered by radiation than protoplasm.
But at last they produced three rough, cylindrical devices and their fittings.