by Rudy Rucker
The Professor was in a talkative mood. "I'm very proud of you Vernor," he said. "This is the kind of thing I wanted to use my VFG for—not miniaturizing factories or shrinking doctors to clean out rich Users' arteries. Daring scientific research by a fellow initiate, this is worthy of my machine. And if you never return, if you never return, Mick and I will tell the world of your bold attempt to travel around Circular Scale."
"'At's right, man, you're right on," chimed in Turner.
"How long do you think it will take for me to complete the trip?" Vernor asked, hoping to change the subject.
"This is an extremely difficult question. We have the problem that we do not know how many scale levels there are. We do not know if you will move from one level to the next at a uniform rate. And, last, we have the difficulty that your time will run faster than ours when you are very small, and slower than ours when you, it is hoped, become very big. So I cannot tell you. Maybe ten minutes, maybe ten days, maybe ten billion years."
"Ten billion years," Vernor echoed. "Well. Look, if it feels like I'm not getting anywhere, I can always reverse the polarity and just expand back the way I came, can't I?"
"This can be done," Kurtowski agreed. "But you should not do it prematurely. Such a reversal, if carried out abruptly, could well produce a radiation field of a perhaps too great intensity."
"Perhaps too great," Vernor murmured. They were just about through attaching the panels of synthequartz. Tomorrow was the day. Maybe he should sneak out during the night. He was ashamed to have such a thought about the greatest adventure in history. But maybe? One thing, though, the loach was probably looking for him by now. The prison monitor must have noticed that there was no life in his old cell. They had probably sent up a robot doctor and found Vernor missing. How hard would they look for him? Pretty hard, he guessed. They would be looking for him in many ways: Simple surveillance by cameras and detectives; theoretical modeling of his projected behavior by Phizwhiz; and, most insidious of all, careful analysis of the data from the Dreamers' sleeping brains. If enough of them knew where he was, it would show up.
"Mick, did you tell anyone that we were coming out to the lab?"
"I don't know, man, that was weeks ago." Mick lit a stick of seeweed. The last panel was in place. "Look at that thing. You're really lucky to be the one in it tomorrow, Vernor." Turner laughed with just the faintest hint of a jeer. "Seriously, if you don't make it back, I'll get the Professor to send me after you." He passed the reefer to Kurtowski.
"I was just worrying about the police coming after me was all," Vernor said. "Cause if they're not I got a good mind to leave while you guys are sleeping tonight." They didn't answer and Vernor thought about it some more. It seemed certain that the loach would be after him. "Let's test the fucking thing a little bit at least." He drummed on the hull nervously. "Give me that reefer, Prof, I thought you didn't smoke anymore, anyway."
Kurtowski exhaled a lungful and handed the stick to Vernor, with a chuckle. "Smoke, no smoke, what's the difference. We exist. Once you're born the worst has already happened to you. You've been so worried about dying, but have you thought about what you'll do if your trip is . . . successful?"
"I don't know. Smash the government, I guess. Like that's the thing to do, isn't it?"
The others nodded. Sure. Smash the government. "That's what Andy wanted," Kurtowski said.
"Yeah," Mick put in. "Remember? He said 'Just tell them I was a martyr for the Revolution.' You think he's still alive inside Phizwhiz?"
Nobody knew. They smoked in silence for a few minutes. Finally the Professor spoke up. "Did I ever tell you the way I discovered ZZ-74?" he said, turning to Mick.
"I been waiting for you to bring it up. You got any?" Turner was lolling against a panel of instruments, looking through the remaining drugs in his pockets. "I haven't had any in six months," he lied.
"Do I have any? Ja, that's the question. Do you know what it looks like?" Kurtowski asked Vernor. This was good seeweed. The air seemed to be made of a transparent substance more rigid and more clear than air. ZZ-74?
"Well, the stuff we were taking was usually a clear gelatin capsule. It was like there was either some gas or a very small pinch of powder inside."
Kurtowski smiled and shook his head. "No gas, no powder. Didn't you take it on the street once?"
"Yeah," Vernor said, remembering, "Sure. My first time. Andy gave it to me. It was a little white pill like an aspirin."
"Perhaps it said aspirin on it, no?" Kurtowski's smile broadened. What was he getting at? He continued the dialogue. "Why doesn't everyone take ZZ-74?"
"Because the Us can't get the formula to legalize it and go into production," Mick said. "God knows they'd like to."
Professor Kurtowski held out a closed hand and opened it. "This is ZZ-74" The hand was empty. As the truth hit him, Vernor felt the room around him recede. They were sitting in the light of a single lamp, magicians three, null and void. The wind of Eternity swept through him.
Mick reached out and took a pinch of air from the Professor's hand and snorted it. "A righteous hit, old man," he said, stretching out on his back.
Vernor popped a pinch of the air into his mouth. "The perfect drug cannot exist, lest it be dragged through the dirt by the infidel?" he questioned.
Kurtowski nodded. "Ja, I had this idea after watching what happened to LSD. You had squares taking it to improve their sex-life, even ad-men eating it for inspiration to sell cars—it was too accessible. These people would take it, but they would not see the sublime mystery, the white light, the All in Nothing . . . and then they would say that I lied when I said that LSD had showed these things to me. I began to doubt, and acid no longer worked for me. I went into the laboratory to create a better drug—I was a materialistic fool like the others. But one day, deeply absorbed in a synthesis, I dropped a beaker on the floor. As it shattered, so did my delusions and I saw the All in Nothing again. I was there and I had never left. To remember this moment I named it . . . ZZ-74. Later Andy had the idea of giving it to the people. Since there was nothing there, they could not destroy it."
Professor Kurtowski's voice seemed to come from somewhere inside Vernor's head. Immortality and freedom were man's birthright. ZZ-74. He lay down to enjoy the trip.
PART II
Chapter 10: Escherichia Coli
A shaft of sunlight slanting in through one of the laboratory's street-level windows woke Vernor. The other two were asleep on the floor near him, and the transparent globe of the scale-ship loomed over him. He was still high . . . on what? He smiled as he realized, saying the word softly to himself, "Nothing." Had Kurtowski been putting them on? ZZ-74. Last night they had taken it in its purest form. He was still high.
Mick Turner was rubbing his large mouth. He sat up and looked at Vernor. There was nothing to say. They sat watching flecks of dust float in the shaft of sunlight; then got some food out of one of the crates near the door. When they came back to the scale-ship, Kurtowski had vanished.
"Let's do a test before I get in, Mick."
"O.K."
They rigged a timer switch to the control board to send the scale-ship down for three minutes, local time, and then back up to normal size. Professor Kurtowski appeared from behind a mound of electronic components and watched silently, finally saying, "Ja, ja, a little test is all right." He seemed no more eager to talk than they. Everything was poised in such beautiful clarity that one hesitated to muddy the vibe with opinions, desires, facts and figures.
Vernor clicked on the timer switch. The VFG cones began to hum. The field would build up to appreciable strength in about sixty seconds.
Suddenly there were feet pounding down the stairs to the basement laboratory. At the other end of the huge room a door was blasted open. It was the loach. The leader was yelling, "We see you, Maxwell! Don't make a move! You too, Kurtowski!"
Back to prison? Never to find out if Circular Scale worked? Isolation from his fellows? There was no decision to make.
Vernor scrambled into the scale-ship as the hum of the VFG cones turned to a whine. The Professor was speaking rapidly to Mick Turner who then started towards the scale-ship as well.
The field was building up and already the objects in the laboratory seemed to be growing. Mick looked eight feet tall, and although he was running, his progress was slow and dream-like. The Professor had disappeared and the police were drawing closer.
As Turner drew nearer, the effects of the virtual field shrank him to something like Vernor's size. Vernor leaned out of the hatch and tried to pull him inside with one hand, while fumbling for the controls with the other.
The police had arrived at the main work area. The scale-ship had shrunken enough so that they looked twenty feet tall. Vernor was seized with an irrational fear that they would stomp on him. This was impossible, of course; as a foot approached the ship it would enter the field and shrink in size.
A last heave and Mick was in the ship. "Crank it up, Vernor!" he yelled with some enthusiasm. "I always wondered what atoms looked like."
Vernor had disconnected the timer switch and was, indeed, cranking it up. The laboratory looked like the Grand Canyon, and a loach near them loomed upwards like the Statue of Liberty. He did not appear inclined to approach any closer, but it certainly felt bad to have an enemy that big.
"Looks like they're scared to come after us," Turner observed. "While they're watching, the Professor can make his getaway."
"That's what he's going to try?"
"Yeah, he always knew the loach'd be here some day, so he set up some hideouts and secret exits for himself. He'll be O.K. And we ought to be just about invisible pretty soon."
Vernor nodded, "Since the VFG cones are shrinking with us, I think the field isn't going to reach out and warp anything much. We will be invisible."
It was getting hard to see the things in Kurtowski's laboratory as distinct objects any more . . . there were just huge color areas with fuzzy edges. Diffraction effects surrounded sharp corners with pale rainbows, and it was hard to say exactly where the ceiling was. The scale-ship probably looked like a grain of sand to the police. One of them seemed to have decided to come after them, but his legs were moving as slowly as the hands of a clock. They were safe. Vernor was sitting in the pilot's seat in front of the control panel, and Mick was leaning against the base of the lower VFG cone, his legs stretched out on the lattice of molybdenum tubes and nyxon cables. "What happens next?" he asked.
"Pretty soon we're going to be at the cellular level. Not that we're likely to see any life . . . it's too dry here." The ship had settled into the floor a little bit. The small irregularities of what had seemed to be perfectly smooth plastic made the floor around them look like a gullied desert.
The scale-ship was slowly skidding down into one of these gullies. The cushioning effect of the field kept them from rolling, so it was easy to watch their progress. Although tiny in size, the scale-ship retained much of its original mass, and thus continued sliding through any obstacles that appeared. Vernor and Mick's time was speeded up so much that their progress appeared slow to them, although in absolute terms they were sliding quite rapidly.
The gully fed into a canyon like some gray and lifeless Alpine wasteland, high above the vegetation line. Sharp peaks were growing larger on both sides of them as they proceeded down the moraine. "You know," Vernor said, craning upwards. "I think I noticed this crack in the floor when we were building the ship. Look how fuzzy those mountains are getting—"
But suddenly the peaks disappeared. Small, moving forms swarmed around the scale-ship. "Mick," Vernor cried, "what's happening?"
"I thought you saw it coming. The lake at the bottom of the valley!"
The truth dawned on Vernor. They were underwater, beneath the surface of a minute "lake" filling the bottom of the crack they had slid into. The lighting was good and he could make out four or five distinct types of organisms in the water around them.
The darting forms which had originally attracted his attention were flagellates, small teardrop-shaped fellows who pulled themselves along by fitfully twirling the hair, or flagellum, which projected out from their pointed end. They were still considerably smaller than the ship and seemed to pose no threat.
There was, however, a large amoeba near the ship, and Vernor was glad to note that they were skidding away from it.
It was a threatening sight, gray and branched like a stilled explosion of mucus, swirling on the inside. If you looked closely you could actually make out the last four or five things it had eaten . . . fungi apparently. One of its pseudopods was hungrily bulging towards the scale-ship . . . but the amoeba was slow and they were still shrinking. Already they were no larger than the flagellates.
A new type of organism was now visible, a herd of capsules vibrating together on the floor ahead. Soon they would join them. They looked somehow familiar . . .
"Look out!" Mick cried suddenly. Something that looked like a hairy blimp was speeding purposefully towards them. The hairs on its surface seemed to be the size of a man's legs, and they were beating in vigorous pulses. There was a sort of pocket near the blimp's front end. The hairs filling the pocket were more flexible and seemed to be wildly agitated. You could make out the struggling forms of one of the flagellates and several of the capsules inside. Apparently this was its mouth, and it was bent on swallowing the scale-ship as a third course.
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. "T2 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 turnin
g 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.
Chapter 11: Theory and Practice
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.
