Alf’s blaster crackled and the Martian moaned in high-pitched pain.
“Stop him! Stop him!” Elmer’s thoughts were sobbing now.
But there was no stopping him. The Martian already was in the ship, the port was swinging home.
Lathrop pulled himself to one knee, watched the port whirling, the ship already starting to grow small.
“There’s no use,” he said to Elmer.
“In a way,” said Carter, “that fellow is a hero. He’s throwing away his own life to save his race.”
“To save his race,” Lathrop echoed bitterly. “He can’t save his race. They’re lost already. They were lost the first time they did a thing and said that it was right, irrevocably right — that it couldn’t be wrong.”
“He can take his ship down into the sub-atomic,” argued Carter, “and then the jug will be subatomic, too. We’ll never find it. No one will ever find it. But he, himself, can’t get back into it. He’s barring himself from his own Universe.”
“It can be found,” said Lathrop. “It can be found no matter how small he makes it. Maybe it won’t even survive being pushed down into a state smaller than the subatomic, but if it does that only means the mass pushed into the fourth-dimensional direction will become longer or greater or whatever happens to mass in the fourth dimension. And that will make it all the easier for those chaps out on the stars to spot it.”
The ship was no bigger than the end of one’s finger when it rose into the air. In a moment it was a mote dancing in the light and then was gone entirely.