This was the first time Vernor had ever seen Mick Turner look uptight. "Shrink, Vernor, shrink!"
"No sweat, Mick, the field extends a little way outside our skin, remember? Anything that actually touches us has to shrink as much as we have . . . and if that thing shrinks as much as we have then it sure as hell isn't going to swallow us—"
But then the blimp was upon them, its oral pouch a hairy dome above them. It struggled to touch them and Vernor tensed as it bulged towards them, even though, as the hairs came closer they dwindled in size.
Turner had regained his composure. "I guess you were right about that field protecting us," he drawled. "You think that thing is trying to
eat
us or maybe just give us a kiss?" Vernor grinned and relaxed a little.
Soon the ciliate protozoan gave up on them, and they continued sliding down the slope. A huge shining wall seemed to lie ahead of them. "What's that?" Mick asked. "It's so smooth."
Vernor shrugged. They'd find out soon enough. Right now they were in the midst of the herd of capsules. Bacteria. "These are shit germs, Mick," Vernor said, "technically known as Escherichia coli in honor of their discoverer, T. Escherich. Some honor, eh? It's not everyone who gets a strain of fecal bacteria named after him."
"How'd they get
here
? I mean, the lab wasn't
that
messy."
"I was just wondering that," Vernor said. "This water must have seeped up from a broken sewer line." The presence of these human symbiotes was somehow comforting. It was like being in a flock of sheep. The shining wall they had wondered about was coming closer, but before Vernor could comment on it, his attention was caught by a motion to their right.
One of the E. coli had exploded, disgorging something like a hundred smaller organisms from its inside.
"What are those?" Mick asked, "Baby shit germs?" But these new organisms certainly didn't look like the bacteria. Each of them had a large, faceted head, a shaft-like body and a few small hairs at the bottom of the shaft.
"Those are viruses," Vernor exclaimed. "T
2
viruses, I believe. Watch them go after those poor bacteria." In fact several of the viruses were now descending on the nearest bacterium. Vernor and Mick watched the closest virus as it settled down, tail first, on the bacterium's skin. The little hairs at the end of the virus's shaft dug into the cell wall, and there was a pause while the virus punched a hole in the wall. Then the virus's shaft telescoped abruptly, and it ejaculated the contents of its head out through the shaft and into the E. coli's endoplasm. The virus's body was an empty husk on the bacterium's cell wall now; but the genetic material which had been sent into the cell proper was busy turning the cell into a virus factory. In twenty minutes the bacterium would rupture, and out would come a hundred more viruses.
Several of them seemed interested in the scale-ship, but now there was something more important happening. Mick and Vernor had reached the shining wall they had noticed earlier. It bulged with their weight, and suddenly they popped through it, leaving viruses, bacteria, and protozoa behind. Once again they could see the lunar landscape of the floor's plastic, and a smooth dome rose high over their heads. They were inside a tiny air bubble stuck to the plastic beneath the water in a crack of Professor Kurtowski's laboratory floor.
The skidding had stopped. The floor inside the bubble was level. They were still shrinking. The molecular level would be coming up soon.
"Did you pack any food?" Turner asked.
"Sure. You know where it is. Wait, I'm going to cut the power. I'm hungry too." Vernor turned down the power of the VFG field so that they would stop shrinking, but left it on high enough to prevent their size from drifting back up. If he cut the power completely they would instantly snap back to normal size. Conceivably such an abrupt change in the field structure would generate lethal synchrotron radiation. And, of course, even if they did survive the snap the police would be waiting up there. "What do you think the loach will do?" Vernor asked.
Turner was squeezing the contents of a food tube into his mouth. "Mmmpsf ul nnf a flm flm smpfmh," he responded, then elaborated. "They don't know that this is a
scale
-ship. So they don't realize we've got to come back to the same place we left. I figure they'll spend about a week in the lab . . . ripping things off, taking notes for Phizwhiz, making the place nice and safe, and waiting just in case we do come back. After a week they'll probably decide we're gone for good."
"But as long as we're down on this scale, our time is so much faster than theirs," Vernor replied. "We could starve to death or die of old age before the loach's exciting week in the mad professor's laboratory has become just another happy memory." Crankily, he seized a food tube. Aaahhhhh, at least it was Green.
After eating, they lay around on the tensegrity lattice relaxing. Vernor was full and the air recycler made a low hum. As he gazed absently out through the synthequartz, his thoughts turned to sex.
It had been almost a year since he had gotten laid. For the zillionth time, he cursed himself for not having called Alice immediately after leaving the jail. The scale-ship's strange passage down to air beneath water had reminded him of the Inquarium. He'd made love there with sweet Alice.
"It's too sad. You're not the same person." Her last words to him echoed in his mind. She had been right, about him taking too much dope, but he
needed
it . . . or did he? In jail he hadn't really missed dope . . . in jail he'd been a different person, he'd had no expectations, no desires, no physical life at all. And getting out had been such a trip . . . these two weeks in the lab he'd never really come down, but now . . . now he was resting at the bottom of a shitty crack in the floor, surrounded by mile-high policemen who would be around for years of his time.
The only hope of escape was the slightly dubious possibility that scale is circular. And like an asshole he hadn't called Alice from Waxy's. He'd imagined he had lots of time. Alice, Dallas Alice. A slight moan escaped Vernor's lips. He slipped his hand into his pants and squeezed his aching cock.
"Need some help?" Mick asked. Vernor looked into Mick's outlaw face. The question was natural enough; many Dreamers were bi. Turner drew closer.
"No," said Vernor. "I'd rather just sneak and beat off when you're asleep." He paused. Why? "I'm scared you'd eat my brain."
"Eat your brain? Well, all right." Turner didn't seem to much care either way. "How do you shit in this thing?" he asked after a minute.
"Well, what do you
think
? You go outside with the E. coli."
"Won't the air rush out?"
Vernor shook his head. "The Professor said it wouldn't. The field should hold it in pretty well. The synthequartz is just to prevent the long-term diffusion of the air. If we didn't have it, most of the air would be gone in a couple of days."
Mick opened the hatch door. No whooosh. Kurtowski knew his field theory. The floor in the immediate area of the tensegrity sphere looked normal, as it was shrunk to the same scale as them. The floor sloped up on all sides of the ship, becoming rougher and more magnified with distance.
"Hey, Vernor," Mick shouted after a few minutes. "Give me those empty food tubes."
"What for?"
"I'm going to try and throw this thing out of the field. It'll shake up those one-celled hammond organisms and put some odor on the loach's shoe." Only Mick would have thought of that, Vernor mused, handing out the flattened food-tubes. Turner used them to pick up his turd and hurl it away from the scale-ship. As it receded from them it grew in size and seemed to slow down. Soon it was hanging in their field of vision like a slowly waxing brown moon. Before long it would break out of the air bubble and ooze up from the crack in the laboratory floor. Turner climbed back into the ship well pleased with himself.
"It'll be up to life-size in a few days of our time," said Vernor. "One minute loachal time. They'll never figure out where it came from. I'm glad you came along, Mick."
Mick examined the instrument panel. "How is this circular scale jive supposed to work? How can we get bigger by getting smaller?"
"You want the whole story?" asked Vernor.
"Tell me."
"O.K." said Vernor. "Basically the idea is that space-time plus scale looks like a doughnut. Say you have a doughnut lying on the table in front of you. Now, if you laid a square of cardboard on top of the doughnut it would touch the doughnut in a circle." He looked at Mick for a response.
"Right. A circle on the top of the doughnut."
"Yeah. This circle is like made up of the points on the doughnut which are the highest," Vernor emphasized.
"Go on."
"Now if the points on this circle start sliding down into the hole, what happens to the circle?"
"It gets smaller," Turner replied.
"It gets smaller," Vernor agreed. "So we've got the circle staying horizontal and kind of sliding down into the doughnut hole, shrinking all the time. When is it the smallest?"
"When it goes right around the inside of the hole. When it's like the circle where your finger would touch if you stuck it in the hole."
"Good. Now dig, Mick, when the circle goes down below the hole it starts to grow."
"Yeah," Turner nodded.
"And when it goes down further to become the circle where the doughnut touches the table it's even bigger. And when it begins to crawl up the outside of the doughnut it gets bigger than it was to start with!"
"Man, what are you
talking
about with this doughnut story?" exclaimed Turner.
"Don't you see? We have 'getting smaller' turning into 'getting bigger' . . . continuously. By starting to shrink and then continuing in the same direction, the circle ends up growing bigger than it was when it started. And if it continues . . . if it continues in the same direction it shrinks on around to the starting position."
"Space-Time Do-Nuts on my mind," Mick said. "And that's supposed to be the universe or what?"
Vernor continued enthusiastically. "It's like each one of those circles is a size level. The first level is human level, then you shrink on down to the atomic level, the little circle around the hole. Next you get up to the level of the big universe when you hit the equator—the circle around the outside of the doughnut."
"What about that other human-sized level on the bottom of the do-nut?" Mick asked suddenly, "what about that?"
"Well, that
is
a difficulty with the doughnut model," Vernor admitted. "I feel that the doughnut model must be discarded at this point. The model's usefulness is simply to show that it's conceivable to have continued shrinkage turning into expansion. It might be better now to just draw a clock-face and call 12: human level, 2: cellular level, 5: sub-atomic, 7: galactic, 10: planetary, and back to 12: human level . . . " His voice trailed off.
"What happens at 6, Vernor?" Turner asked with an edge to his voice. "You got us into this and I'm not sure you know what the fuck you're talking about."
They sat in silence for a few minutes. What would the transition from the smallest monadic level to the largest universal level be like? Would it actually work?
Finally Vernor spoke, "I don't know, Mick. I guess I never thought it would actually get to the point where my theories had something to do with saving my personal ass." He sighed. "We might as well go further down."
Vernor seated himself at the control panel and turned on the power. He'd taken a dump outside the ship, too, and before long the two turds were like misshapen twin planets beneath an unimaginably distant celestial sphere. The floor material continued to develop new complexities of structure; as they shrank, new peaks and mounds of the plastic rose around them.
Vernor stared at an outcropping near them. A few minutes ago, the edges of the formation had begun to vibrate, and now the whole thing was to be alive with color and motion . . . like a pile of flickering snakes. He slowed the rate of shrinkage to enjoy the spectacle.
They were now small enough to actually see the long chain-like molecules which composed the plastic floor of Professor Kurtowski's laboratory. The molecules were continually writhing and twisting, now joining together, now splitting in two.
It was hard to believe that the molecules were not alive. One in particular caught Vernor's attention. It was viciously attacking its fellows, seizing them by the middle and then snapping itself backwards to break them in half. It hesitated in its rhythmic task of destruction and seemed to be feeling for something in the air—like a caterpillar looking for its next leaf. Now it was moving towards them. Could it be after the scale-ship? Impossible, a molecule had no mind, but yet . . . perhaps their charge, polarization, or field pattern was capable of triggering a tropism.
The lighting had become spotty and varicolored. They were so small that the corpuscular nature of light was evident. When Vernor looked at the molecular landscape, he did not see by a uniform illumination . . . instead it looked rather like a badly turned Hollowcast.
"Why does it look so funny?" Mick asked. "Is it nighttime already?"
"
That
question I can answer," Vernor replied. "For us to see something, a photon has to come from it to us. Now, any given atom in one of those molecules will bounce or shoot a photon in our direction only occasionally. And any given photon has only one fixed wavelength."
"I dig," Turner replied. "The flickering is because we're small enough to actually notice the different positions that the photons come from, and it's colored because each photon is a flash of just one color—" His voice changed suddenly, "
Look
at that fucker!"
The molecule which had caught Vernor's attention before was quite close now. Turner's outburst was prompted by the fact that this molecule had reared back and struck at them like a rattlesnake. Again, they were safe from assimilation, since before the molecule could actually reach them it would have to enter the VFG field . . . which would, of course, shrink it down to nothing. Nevertheless, it was unsettling to have this flaring Chinese dragon flying towards them.