The youthful android looked good-humoredly awed. "They just stepped out," he added. "They'll be back in a minute."
Ed began to slide into his dungarees. He was grateful for his return to something like what he had been. His memories of an interlude when people were mountain tall were clear, yet they didn't seem quite to belong to himself.
He thought briefly of how he must have been brought back to normal size—his micro-form in one of the vats of similar proportions acting as a pattern, electronic brain and all. In another vat, which Freeman's specialists had connected, the gelatins must have filmed and solidified slowly, taking shape, while in brain cells and filaments—different from electronic swirls but capable of assuming the same connecting arrangements—a personality was reproduced without destroying the pattern. With Barbara and Prell it had been the same.
"The world goes on, I see," Ed remarked.
The android biologist smiled wryly. "Some of that is your fault, Dukas," he said. "A matter of advertising. You made enough old-timers half believe that the Earth will go on being theirs. That cooled them off some. As for our kind, what you said started lots of them thinking again along what ought to be a natural track. Certainly the prompt departure of almost all of us is the only answer that can really solve anything. Yes, if that isn't far too large an order! Though I rather wish it were possible.... Here come Prell and your lady. I'll disappear."
They looked almost as they used to look—before anything about them was changed. Blame the loss of some trifling birthmark or scar here and there on the simplification of details that had occurred during a step down to smallness. Yet Mitchell Prell's china-blue eyes were as good-humored as ever and Barbara's smile as bright and warm.
"So here we are, Eddie," she said gaily. "And what we recently were are still around somewhere—alive and aware, and the same as we were, though not quite us any more. Separate, but still helping, I'm sure. And if we all get through all right, well, their universe is as wonderful and even vaster than ours."
Prell scowled for a moment, as if he envied his lesser likeness the continued chance to study the structure of matter, down where molecules themselves seemed bigger and nearer. But then his shoulders jerked almost angrily, as if to shake off the scientist's woolgathering. "Come on, Ed," he snapped. "Abel Freeman has been pushing the idea you expressed, talking it around the world to all the androids. He says that, crazy though it is, he'll encourage it."
They emerged from the cavern into the afternoon sunshine of the camp. A sudden quiet had come over it. Eyes were staring up toward the east, while bodies tensed for a dive for whatever shelter was at hand. Something moved there with seeming slowness, though its gray hue, like a distant mountain peak, told that it was seen through all the murky heights of the atmosphere and was in free space beyond. Its motors were inactive. High sunshine brought metallic glints from its prow. It was certainly miles in length. Its presence could mean doomsday. But it was magnificent! If it could set human blood to coursing more swiftly, how must it affect an android?
"The star ship!" someone shouted. Others took up the cry: "The star ship.... The star ship...."