Ed Dukas began to adjust to littleness. But to see boulders with their stratified layers of mica floating lazily through the thin air never lost its wonder. Crazy beauty was all around: strange, rich colors; keening musical notes—fine overtones of normal sounds. Sometimes, in the daylight, near cracks open to the outdoors, you saw living things seldom bigger than yourself: Martian life; little pincushions of deep, translucent purple veined with red and pronged with cilia of an indescribably warm hue. These were Martian microorganisms blown in by the breeze.
And once there was something else that Ed and Barbara both saw: something like the smallest of Earthly insects, but not that, either. A thing of steel-blue filaments and great eyes, and vibrating vanes as glossy as transparent plastic. Ed knew that he could shatter it with his hands. It rested in the sunshine for a moment; then it was gone.
"I suppose that there are star worlds as odd as this," Barbara commented.
She was strange herself—an elfin being that floated in the air, her form dimly aglow whenever there was shadow or darkness. To Ed, she was part of his vast separation from Earth. In accustoming himself to an environment where even the simple act of walking was a memory, it seemed that Earth dimmed away, easily yet frighteningly, like a dream, until Ed knew that, degree by degree, his mind was becoming different than it had been, and he not quite the same person. And it seemed more so with Babs.
"Bacon and eggs for breakfast, Eddie," she teased once, lightly. "Walks under old trees beside a river. The Youth Center. Teachers I used to know. Yes, I remember. But the memory tries to get dim. And I want to hold on. Got to, because there are things to be done. But sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't regret the duty. I think of swimming in raindrops or floating high over trees—being as whimsical as children and poets can imagine. We could do it! It's part of being super, isn't it? And I used to be scared of becoming an android!"
It was fun, and relief from grimness, to hear her talk like that. And now, too, he half agreed that being of synthetic substance was not so bad. Yet part of him still ached savagely for his old dimensions. And here in smallness he sometimes felt that she was changing so much that he was losing her—that she would let herself be blown away into the vastness, never to be seen again.
They ate a food-jelly, which Prell had prepared long ago for his sojourn here, and radioactive silicates. In it you could see the thready molecular chains and the beads of moisture between. Viscosity complicated etiquette. Everything tried to stick to you. You laughed and shook it off as best you could.
But even in fantastic moments grim facts didn't truly fade. Hard work helped sustain them. Murder and loss were too new. The danger on Earth was still too plain—perhaps poised on hours or weeks of time. Speed was the keynote.
Only once the three micro-beings peeped back into the lab that had belonged to Mitchell Prell, colossus. It was empty now, glowing with the taint of radiation left by the Midas Touch pistols. No one had troubled to neutralize it, as had surely been done with the removed equipment.
Mitchell Prell had built a radio, like one he had owned before. A flake of quartz dust, a few rough strands of metal, an insignificant power supply. Simple, compact. Certain crystals were sensitive to radio waves. And at these tremendously reduced dimensions, they could convert tiny induced electric currents almost directly into fine sound waves that infinitely refined ears could hear.