CHAPTER IV

Into the Robot's Lair

Perry lay prone in the high grass. He was panting and tired, and he felt a little sick again. He knew that whatever chances he had of accomplishing any good here, would be diminished if he waited. There were dozens of ways of getting uselessly killed. So far he hadn't encountered any of that corrosive gas, but hisses, and distant human screams from the flats along the river, told him that it was being used. And though he had his oxygen mask, his clothing and skin could be eaten away and his blood poisoned. Two bombers burst overhead, their powdered wreckage silvery in paths of searchlights. Perry knew he might even be destroyed by the weapons of his own countrymen.

[Illustration: Wilcox slipped stealthily past the great robot gun.]

So his gaze settled feverishly on the nearest opening in the ground. It wasn't far away, and its depths were lost in darkness. But twice he saw crawling mechanical things emerge from it. It must lead, then, toward the heart of the mystery he was trying to probe.

At the next opportunity, he made a dash for the pit. He lost his balance in the loose soil at its edge, and tumbled to its bottom. But except for a few scratches, he was unhurt. He picked himself up and hurried down a steep passage. Except for lights far ahead, it was dark as Erebus. But he advanced as rapidly as he could, his purpose only to explore, and to take advantage of opportunity, if it came.

Once he heard the growl of machinery, as a great crawling automaton came down the passage, moving in his direction. The headlamp threw him into full view. And there was no place to hide. But remembering what Rod Murgatroyd had told him about these automatons, and making use, too, of his own experience with them, Perry flung himself against the crumpled alloy wall and froze rigid as stone, his heart thumping madly.

The robot stopped. Its mechanical eyes must have seen his movement. Perhaps the delicate maze of wheels and cams and instruments, which was all it had for a brain, had responded to the stimulus of his moving form, and was forced, by the way it was planned and built, to wait and search for other evidence of a hostile presence. But finding none, the robot whirred on. As it passed Perry, he felt the heat of its driving mechanism. Through a quartz glazed spyhole in its flank, he saw a white, blazing globe within it--perhaps a mass of material throwing off atomic energy.

Perry's lips, sweat-daubed behind his mask, curved in a haggard smile at his oddly miraculous escape. He continued on his way.

He had an odd, tense idea of being followed by something that was not quite mechanical. Behind him, in the darkness, and even above the confined din of the factories, he thought he heard, now and then, the patter and slither of footsteps.

And so he hurried on, along the main tunnel, reaching at last a faintly lighted, circular compartment.

In the center of the room a vat, a hundred and fifty feet across, was sunk into the floor. Its cone-shaped interior was full of a greenish liquid, and was covered over by an immense sealing disk of glass. There were grids, like colossal battery plates, in the liquid. Bus-bars, penetrating beneath the sealed edges of the glass disk, attached the grids to an apparatus standing at the vat's circular rim. The apparatus resembled an electrical transformer.

Just for a moment Perry was able to look. Then the light in the chamber began to fade.

There came a rattle of opening doors as the light died completely. He tried to hold perfectly still, as he heard the soft, heavy footfalls of great robot-guardians released. He should be able to fool them too, by keeping perfectly quiet.

Now, again, he heard those lighter footfalls, that had seemed to be following him. They advanced to the entrance of the chamber. Instantly there was an answering rush of elastic-shod feet. And then a woman's scream!

Perry was petrified for a moment of utter consternation. Then he rushed toward the sound of the scuffle there in the weird dark. The slithering of his own feet betrayed him. There was a clanking rush in the gloom. Cold metal claws closed firmly about his shoulders. He struggled. The oxygen mask was scraped from his face. But the gripping members held him firm at last, and he desisted in his futile efforts to escape.

"Who's there?" he growled, panting.

"It's me--Troubles," came the answer, half sobbing.

Perry Wilcox was stunned. "How did _you_ get here?"

"Same way you did," the girl choked. "When you ran away from the hospital, I sent an orderly to follow you, and bring you back. He didn't get to you; but he saw you dive off the dam with the oxygen mask on. When he told me, I guessed right away what you were trying to do. So--I got leave, found myself a mask in the operating room, and--tagged after you."

"In the name of sense, _what for_?" Perry demanded.

"For a lot of good reasons--Mister!" she said more decisively. "I used to be an ambitious newspaper woman, for one thing--always hunting up trouble and hoping for a scoop. You can believe it's that way, if you want to. Or you can believe that I'm the little girl that used to keep clippings of all the Wilcox-Murgatroyd exploits, and that you're still my hero--if you're conceited and crazy enough. I don't care!"

It was a torrent of words that would have startled Perry Wilcox if he wasn't so amazed already, here in this dark hole of a place, with metal monsters clutching him.

"Okay--Troubles," he stammered.

The robots restraining him were motionless. Nearby there were hollow clankings. Trying to catch the significance of the sounds, Perry was sure that the cover of the great vat was being raised. Cold prickles raced over his body. What was it that would happen now?

Lyssa Arthurs was talking again, out of the dark. "Perry," she said more gently, though just as intensely as before. "Just when I started out it came over the radio that Kerwin was appointed Provisional Director of Defense. And--and there's danger that the hospital will be stormed by a mob--to get Murgatroyd."

Before he could answer, Perry felt his feet hoisted from the floor. He was swung in metal arms, then tossed free. He flew through the air. Warm fluid closed about him. It was like water, only it stung his flesh--made his nerve-ends numb.

He heard the girl give a startled, involuntary cry, as she too splashed into the strangely energized fluid in the great vat. Automatically he tried to swim toward her; but the numbness was quickly creeping over his nerves and muscles. He could hardly move.

His voice was hoarse with half paralysis when he choked: "Keep your courage, Troubles...."

Perry's head went beneath the fluid. His brain was spinning. He thought he heard a click of switches being turned on. The numbness increased suddenly, like a jolt of electricity. But he managed to hold his breath. He had a curious sensation of shrinking, of being pressed together.

* * * * *

He emerged at last from unconsciousness, knowing at least that he was alive. He was coughing, as though his lungs had been partly full of fluid. His head ached intolerably, and his heart was laboring like a rusty engine.

He sat up on the wet surface on which he sprawled, and tried to look about. His vision was blurred at first, and he squinted to focus his eyes. He looked around a square room, one end of which was open. Its walls were like rough, black glass. Behind him was a dark opening, like a door, from which, judging from the wetness around him, he had recently been ejected, along with a considerable quantity of fluid.

He saw the girl, Lyssa Arthurs, sprawled beside him. Worriedly, Perry scrambled over to her. She was still unconscious, though breathing raggedly. Her rubber oxygen mask was intact, except for the metal and glass parts, which were curiously pitted and malformed. By some unknown transformation the oxygen tanks strapped to her shoulders, were similarly distorted and useless. They were full of holes, and had lost their compressed content. Perry had parted with his mask during his scuffle with the robots, and now his tanks had broken loose from his shoulders somewhere too. He noticed that even the metal buttons of his shirt were rough and out of shape.

He ripped the useless, ill-fitting mask from Troubles' face, unfastened the crooked buckles that held the oxygen flasks in place, and applied artificial respiration.

Meanwhile he searched his surroundings. What had been done to Troubles and himself, and where had they been taken? He looked again toward the open end of the compartment. Beyond was a gigantic, beautiful cavern, apparently many miles in extent. It was walled with coarse, jagged glass. Through a system of lenses in its azure roof, light was streaming down. It must be artificial, but it was just about like reddish sunlight. The floor of the cavern was like a beautiful, wild valley, crowded with strange, exotic trees and plants; and white buildings peeped through the foliage.

What had happened looked almost simple to Perry Wilcox then. He and Troubles had merely passed down through the vat, to a vast, habitable, artificially excavated cavern below. But he couldn't accept this idea, somehow. It was _too_ simple. And there was an elusive strangeness, disquieting and hard to identify, about everything he saw and felt. It was more than just the oddity of the vegetation and the buildings.

After a minute, Lyssa Arthurs sighed and tried to rise. She looked about, confusedly. "Where are we?" she demanded.

"Your guess is as good as mine, Troubles," Perry returned, awedly. "But we must be at the final center of things--at the place the robots up there were meant to guard. Whatever that may be."

They rested several minutes, not saying much. Then Troubles arose shakily. "Come on. Let's explore, fella," she urged.

Perry supported her unsteady steps as they walked out of the open-ended chamber. The ground around them was covered with a kind of coarse, shaggy moss. Trees, formed like oversized bushes, reared up over them, bearing strange fruits. The light which came from above, was warm, like sunshine.

"Kind of like a heaven here, isn't it?" the girl asked.

Perry grinned, though his head still ached. "What are you trying to do, pull my leg?--talking that kind of bunk!" he growled.

"Only it's so still and deserted-looking," Lyssa went on. "There's not a path anywhere. And look! That building!"

They had passed through a grove. Near them was a long structure of white stone. But it was like a ruin. Its rows of windows, with their carved decorations, some of them human figures, were sightless and empty, except for intruding masses of coarse, vinelike plants. Once, from its appearance, the building might have been a gigantic apartment house, teeming with inhabitants. And there were others like it, near, and far off on the high slopes of the cavern. But all had that same tenantless aspect.

* * * * *

Perry and Troubles were moving along a street of what might have been a village. At the farther end of the street was a domed edifice of glass of different colors.

And at the crest of the dome, standing firmly on a stubby cylinder which was evidently meant to represent some sort of ship, was the golden figure of a man, clad in flowing robes. The face of the colossus was stern and kindly as he stared off into the distance as if somewhere there he watched for the realization of a hope. The great staff he clutched, rested on his pedestal and rose straight upward to join with the roof of the cavern, above.

There was a steep stairway leading down to the sunken grounds of the domed edifice. Lyssa, hurrying ahead on still unsteady legs, and looking up too intently at the golden image above, lost her balance and pitched forward on the steep slant. She tumbled the full length of it. Perry gave a shout of concern and leaped after her, sure that she must have at least broken some bones.

But she got up quite nimbly and promptly. "Stumble bum!" she muttered, frowning. And then in a new and different kind of tone: "Perry--that was funny, wasn't it? I'm not hurt at all!" There was wonder in her dark eyes.

He was puffing with relief, but was startled, too. "Yeah, I see!" he said. "It's stranger than the desertion, here. I landed light myself. It was as though the air was holding me back--partly. As though it has a higher resistance, or something! But that's looney!"

They walked into the temple. The atmosphere there was cool and moist. Glass pillars, spiral in form, loomed in the shadows. Lyssa and Perry looked around intently, as if searching for the answer to a riddle.

In an indented portion of the blue grass floor, there was a cluster of spherical globes, crystal clear. They were maybe three inches in diameter.

Idly, yet with an odd and very significant thought lurking in the back of her mind, Lyssa kicked at one of the globes with her rough shoe. Immediately it broke, coalescing liquidly with several of its neighbors to form a slightly flattened ovoid. It was like a huge drop of quicksilver in shape.

Lyssa was thinking deeply, but then Perry got her off the track. "Look, Troubles!" he shouted. "The air resistance really is higher here!"

She turned her eyes toward where he pointed. Light shafted into the room through the high, arching entrance. Surrounding semi-darkness brought out the phenomenon plainly. Motes were floating in the path of the light. And long, fibrous things, like lint. Only the motes were as large as grains of sand, and the crooked strings of lint were as thick as lead pencils!

"The air resistance would have to be higher, or the rate of its molecular motion and bombardment would have to be a lot swifter than usual, to support such big particles," said Perry. "But how can that be? It seems the same old familiar air!" He halted, a startled scowl crinkling his sunbleached eyebrows. "Say!" he drawled at last, mounting incredulity in his tone. "Say!..."

* * * * *

Sensing that he was at the last barrier of the riddle that had begun with his discovery of the great triangular outline in Minnesota hills, he studied the glass walls around him. In the depths of their colored substance, he could see large bubbles, and flaws of exaggerated size. Then his gaze fell on the liquid, globular things that Troubles had kicked. They looked exactly as though it was ordinary water that composed them--as though they were dewdrops--except for their huge dimensions.

"That's the funny thing we noticed, but couldn't quite place," Lyssa offered. "That dew. That dust in the air. The flaws in glass. Such stuff is all bigger than it should be, Perry. But what does that mean?"

Perry was thinking as fast and as hard as he could, then, trying to put together all the puzzling pieces of his recent experience. Most significant was the odd, tightening, _shrinking_ sensation, he had felt, after the automatons had tossed him into the vat of liquid.

"Troubles," he said very slowly. "I--think--I've--got--it! _We've--been--reduced--in--size!_ We're Lilliputians, maybe an inch high, now! This cavern isn't the huge thing it seems to us. Comparatively, it's a toy cavern. The buildings are toy buildings; though they naturally seem gigantic to us, because we're so small too. But dew and dust, relying on universal physical laws of nature, remain normally--big!"

"But, Perry," she asked in the same awed tone he had used. "Is that possible--that we've been shrunken, and still remain alive afterward?"

"Why not?" he questioned in response. "Everything is practically the same--really--just scaled down.[1] Every cell in our bodies must have been correspondingly shrunken, of course, so that there are as many cells now as in the beginning. Otherwise we wouldn't be--ourselves. If there weren't somewhere near the normal number of grey cells in our brains, for instance, we'd lose our reasoning powers.

[Footnote 1: Judging from the vat in which Perry and Troubles were reduced, the apparatus attached to it, and the sensations of being in that green fluid, it would seem that the process of reduction is partly electrical. Perhaps similar to electroplating--the drawing away of substance from one electrode, and its transfer, in the form of ions, to the opposite electrode. Each cell in Perry's and Troubles' bodies, and in their clothing, could have been reduced that way. This isn't so startling when reduced to prime factors. The human body is simply chemicals. So are clothes. And life may be electrical in itself.--Ed.]

"We were thrown into the vat. Energy worked on us, drawing substance away from each living cell--fat, protein, sugar, water--and the cell-walls shrank, and we shrank with them. Our excess body substance was perhaps absorbed by the green fluid, maybe being preserved for a reversal of the process--a return to normal size. Only judging from what happened to our metal buttons and things, the trick doesn't work out very well for inorganic substances."

Perry halted, recalling something significant. "Remember how you fell down those stairs up there, without being hurt at all, Troubles?" he questioned. "That you weren't hurt is part of the relativity of being small. Take a mouse and drop him from a high place, and his injury doesn't amount to much. Drop a man from the same height, and he gets all smashed up."[2]

[Footnote 2: For a given shape and density of material, the smaller an object the higher the proportionate resistance it offers to the air. This is because, in relation to its bulk, a small object has a greater surface area than a large one. Hence, relatively more friction. Thus, in air, a mouse might be expected to fall slightly slower than a man.

But this is not the most important reason why small objects are not as easily damaged by proportionate forces as large objects. Take the model of an ocean liner. It seems very firm and rigid. Build a full-size ship under the same specifications--same steel, same relative thicknesses and lengths. If it was possible to pick such a ship up from either end, it would be in danger of breaking in two under its own weight!

Small objects are relatively stronger. In order to make a full-size ship as strong as its model, the strength of the materials used would have to be increased in proportion.--Ed.]

Lyssa Arthurs seemed to muse for a moment. "Yes," she said. "I see.... Whoever built the fortress must have built this miniature cavern before they reduced their size, since this building is constructed all in one piece, and not of blocks cemented together. And you wouldn't expect little people to do that very readily. Then they came down through the vat apparatus. But why, Perry? Why did they want to be small? What advantage was there in it? Who were they?"

* * * * *

Overhead, in the arching dome, Perry Wilcox noticed a picture. An ocean washing a jagged shore. It looked just like a modern ocean. Only, in the gorges between the jagged volcanic bluffs, there were bizarre, fernlike trees, such as had existed in the Terrestrial Carboniferous Period.

"I think," he said, "these people came from another planet. That ship looks like a space ship."

"Do you really think so?"

"Yes, and it was a tough world for a raw bunch of colonists," Perry went on. "So it was probably easier for them to make a small world of their own. One they thought they could regulate and control. Only--there was something wrong with it. That's why they're extinct."

"I guess you're right, Perry," the girl offered. "They built the fortress. It was their first encampment, within which they could make their preparations. Then, when they were ready to become small, they covered it over to hide it. The automatons were sealed up, with special apparatus to make them active--if there was danger--if some snooper came around. For instance you, Perry. Our being sent down here, was part of the plan too--captives or guests. Only the little people who were supposed to receive us, have disappeared."

It was obviously true. The valley of the cavern looked deserted to its farthest, verdure-clad reaches. The buildings, peeping white through the green, were skeletally silent. There was no sound.

The desolation got on Perry Wilcox's nerves. The vast futility of the mechanical debacle going on above. A dream that had soured. A science of miracles that had followed a Will-o'-the-Wisp to a dead end. And then Perry thought of something that changed his mood.

"They must have had a way to control the robots from here, Troubles," he said. "Everything else is too perfectly arranged for it to be otherwise. They wouldn't just lock themselves down here, blind to the upper world, would they? There must be a control room somewhere. And logically it should be in this building, since it's the most important-appearing one in the place."