Three

For those concerned about such things, the mouse survived, and in fact lived almost twice as long as normal, to a quite hearty old age. The only trouble we could notice while it was alive was that its prolonged lessening of mass had weakened its muscles to some extent, and in the end it began to hate the "rest periods" I gave it of normal mass; and the autopsy after it died--performed by Michele--revealed considerable interesting changes in the internal organs, but nothing that seemed to be dangerous.

She did a number of experiments on animals, in the course of the year that followed, all, as far as we could tell, without having anyone suspect what was being done, and finally the next April she told me, "Well, I guess it's settled in my own mind; It looks safe to try on humans."

We were in our apartment; we had had one room converted into a minor biology lab. "No, you don't," I said, aware of what she had in mind. I suppose each of us had been preparing for this moment, because when I produced a version of the circuit, which by this time we had put on a chip and made the size of a dime, that had a watch strap attached to it, she showed me one almost like it that she had been ready to strap on herself. "I thought as much," I said. "It was still my idea, and I get first dibs."

I put on the apparatus, making sure that the tiny contacts touched the back of my wrist. You could adjust it by turning what would correspond to the face of the watch if it were a watch. Very gradually I gave it power.

Suddenly, I felt a jolt through my whole body, and I thought my heart was going to burst through my chest.

"Are you all right?" cried Michele, seeing my face.

"I hope so," I panted. My heart was still beating wildly, but seemed to be calming down. "This isn't something for a person with a weak heart to fool around with!" and I described my experience, which she took notes on. "Man! But it's getting more or less okay now."

Very gingerly, I added a bit more power, and began to get that sensation you have when your car tops a rise at high speed, except that it was sustained. My heart seemed all right, except that fear, I suppose, was making it beat fast; but it didn't give that enormous leap inside me again.

I was still on the ground, but almost lighter than the surrounding air. Very carefully, so as not suddenly to hit the ceiling, I twisted the face of the instrument.

It was just a trifle too much, and I flew upward, though not fast, and gently bumped my head, and then ricocheted down, barely touching the floor with my feet, and then back up and down for several minutes, until I finally came to rest with my feet about a meter off the floor.

"How do you feel?" said Michele, half laughing, but with a worried look.

I was gasping for breath. The air in the room had suddenly become real and thick to me, like an ocean I was submerged in, and I had the feeling I was drowning; but that began to subside as soon as my body realized it could breathe this liquid.

When I could speak, I said, "I think . . . I'm just scared, mostly . . . it's not like being up in a balloon or anything, because there's nothing to hold you up, and you feel you're going to fall." And I described the drowning sensation for the record. It felt vaguely familiar, however, and it was only later that I realized I was associating it with some dreams I had had (which I discovered were rather common), where I would move my arms in a certain way and rise off the ground and float.

As I grew used to being up in the air, it began to be rather fun, and I was experimenting to see if I could move around by swimming; but the air was so thin that, even though I was practically massless, it was not very successful. I could rise a little by treading air, and was trying this out when the furnace went on, and a current of air blew my feet from under me and sent me flying like an arrow toward the cold air return. I went crashing into a lampshade, and grabbed frantically at it as I bounced off.

"Turn off that damn thing!" I shouted, feeling like an idiot, holding onto the shade for dear life and fluttering in the breeze like a flag.

Michele could only shriek "If you could see yourself!" between fits of laughter, rolling on the floor. I screamed that it was no joke, but she was helpless; but the thermostat decided after a minute or so that that torture was enough, and when the wind died down, the weight of my shoes brought me back to an upright position--which has a great deal to be said for it, all things considered.

I felt my shoulder. "That lampshade felt like steel," I said. It was heavy paper.

"I imagine it would," said Michele, wiping the tears away. "You've got to weigh less now than a speck of dust; you couldn't have done it any damage no matter how hard you hit it. Did you hurt yourself?"

"It doesn't look like it," I said, moving my arm around. "But I'll bet there'll be a nice bruise there. Look, see to that thermostat, will you, so this doesn't happen again."

"Okay, but you come down now," she said as she turned it down. "It's my turn."

"I think before we do any more of this, we'd better get a fine-tuning adjustment on--"

What cut me off was that the door opened. I was standing with my back to it, and suddenly felt as if someone had punched me in the solar plexus and simultaneously grabbed me by the seat of the pants. As I flew, doubled and rear-end foremost, through the door, I caught a glimpse of Mike Wang, one hand on the knob, dodging the flailing arms and legs as I shot by, and saying, "What? What?" his eyes round as a Caucasian.

"Catch him!" cried Michele. "He'll hurt himself!" But he was too stunned to move, and I was too doubled up to grab him as I went by, down the corridor.

He had left the corridor door open too, which was what caused the wind in the first place; and the gentle April breeze blew me like a tornado out into the open air. I could hear Michele running after me shouting, and then Mike's voice right behind her. I didn't dare try adjusting the mass-reducer, for fear I'd either crash into the ground with my full weight, or go sailing over the rooftops, and there was nothing at the moment to grab onto.

Across the street I flew, still about a meter off the ground, but beginning to climb as the wind currents began to go round the buildings on the other side. It blew me between them, over an outdoor basketball court by one of the dorms, and I yelled to our seven-foot senior "Grab me!" as my feet sailed past his head. He dropped the ball and stared. I reached for the basket, but missed.

There were trees on the other side of the court, however, and I was able to grab a limb of one of them before I got blown in among the branches, turn off the mass-reducer, and drop to the ground. I walked back across the court, with my legs like jelly, without saying a word to the students, who gave me a rather wide berth. I noticed later a rather different attitude in my classes--not that they studied any harder, unfortunately.

Mike and Michele were waiting back across the street, so that no explanations would be needed, and the three of us went back inside.

"A few adjustments are in order," I said shakily, once I had taken the fiendish machine off and sat down with a drink. "And locked doors, and no furnaces."

"You ought to know better than to try something like that without me around," said Mike.

"Well, it was either do it myself or let Michi beat me to the punch," I answered. He gave her a look which could have been either concern or contempt. In spite of the fact that he was born here, he seemed to have inherited something of the Oriental inscrutability along with his looks--certainly as far as Michele was concerned.

"What I want to know is about that first feeling you had with your heart," said Michele. She had got out the sphygnometer we keep in the cabinet and was strapping it on my arm. "Blood pressure's 128 over 72, which is fine," she said. "At the moment," she added, wrapping up the instrument. "What was it like?"

"Well," I answered, "I've never really had a violent electric shock, but it felt something like what I'd expect that to feel like. My heart gave two or three tremendous beats, and something went all through me; but then it settled down. It came all at once, too."

"That would account for the shudder the mice and the chimp gave when we hooked them up," she said. "It didn't seem dangerous to them, though."

"I wouldn't think it was dangerous, exactly," I said; "any more than a violent scare would be. It's the same kind of sensation."

"I have to try it,"

""Now wait a minute!" said Mike.

"Oh, come off it, Mike. You know you're going to try it yourself in a minute. I at least have some purpose in mind. Check the thermostat, will you, Paul?"

With some misgivings, I saw her strap on the mass-reducer and twist the dial. Her eyes widened suddenly, and she took a couple of deep quick breaths as she rose off the ground. "You're right," she said. "It's not so bad, especially if you're ready for it. But what a wierd sensation!"

The rest of the day, and for that matter, the week afterward, was interesting for us, but would be tedious to put down here. There were no more adventures like flying over basketball courts; but we learned a lot.

Things settled down for most of the rest of that semester; except for the strange looks I mentioned that I got in class, we seemed to have kept our secret intact. No one ever said anything to me, and neither Mike nor Michele reported that anyone had any suspicions.

Some time in early May, however, Mike went off to an astronomer's convention in Washington (he had mainly been in astrophysics), and asked me to take over proctoring his final exams while he was away. This left me too busy to do anything until he came back.

He seemed rather preoccupied during that hectic week when all the tests had to be graded and marks turned in; but I didn't put it down at first to anything more than having to catch up. But the day after everything was done, he came over to my office, sat down on the side of the desk, and said, "Paul, do you remember Keith Jackson?"

"Jackson? Jackson?" I said, thinking over students I had had.

"The kid that used to live down the street from you."

"Oh, him. Yeah. I haven't seen him for--twenty years, I guess."

"Neither did I since we left Summit Country Day--until last week in Washington. I think he's in the CIA now."

"Oh yeah? Was he wearing a cloak or something?"

"I'm sorry, Paul, but this isn't going to be funny. He's in something in the government that's connected with secret operations of some kind, and apparently that flying episode of yours was noticed, and somebody's been asking questions and finding out that the three of us have been spending lots of time together--with a bunch of animals and circuit diagrams and so on."

"Good God! They haven't got hold of any, have they? We've been so careful!"

"I would guess not. I mean, it's impossible to get a meaningful sentence out of him, but why would he have looked me up specially and been pumping me the way he did if he already had it? And did he pump me!"

"Did he get anything out of you?"

"I don't think so--nothing that he didn't already know. I admitted that you'd flown over the basketball court, but I didn't say I knew how you did it. He didn't believe me, of course, but what could he say if I just denied it and asked him why he wanted to know?"

"Wait a minute. Let's get Michi in here. This could be serious."

I called her lab, and in about five minutes she came in, still in her lab coat. "What's the problem now?" she asked, and I told her. She looked over at Mike a little skeptically, and he said, "Don't blame me! It was your beloved brother that let the cat out of the bag if anyone did."

"I'm not blaming anybody," she said.

"No, you never do."

"Okay, you two," I broke in. "The question is what are we going to do about it."

"Well, you know, Paul," said Mike, "I was thinking about this on the flight home, pretty hard. I don't think realistically--especially now--we're going to be able to keep mass reduction a secret forever. Who knows but what this room is already bugged?"

"That is a thought. Where can we go?"

"Look," said Michele, "if it's bugged they already know we can reduce mass; and we're certainly not going to be saying how we can do it in a conversation. There's no need to go anywhere."

"I suppose you're right," I said.

"Yeah, but like I said," said Mike, "I was thinking on the way home and--and I hope they do hear me now, whoever they are--we might be able to finagle something if we play our cards right."

"What do you mean?" I said.

"Well, look at it this way. We've got to where we'd need to do really extensive testing on this mass-reducer, and not only don't we have the money, we'd have no way to keep it secret. Now these clowns have money like you wouldn't believe, and they know how to do things without anybody finding out."

"And they're connected with the military, no doubt," I added, "and what're we keeping this secret for if not to keep it from military uses?"

"Keep your shirt on. Suppose we let them know enough so that they can see what we're doing, and even give them circuit diagrams with a few vital components left out--I think I can see where to do it--and we get in on testing things, but keep the real secret to ourselves. Then we can get them to do our testing for us. We'd have to supervise the photographing of the chips, of course, and make sure they never got out of our sight, but I imagine that could be done if we gave them a kind of ultimatum and stood together on it."

"I don't know, Mike," I said.

"It's either that, the way I look at it, or have them on our backs for the rest of our lives; and eventually we'll make a mistake and they'll find it out. This way, we can keep control and maybe make them see that certain uses of this would be worse than Hiroshima."

"That almost sounds sensible, Mike," said Michele.

"Surprising, isn't it?" he quipped.

"Now that you mention it," she said.

"But that isn't all I've been thinking. You remember you said something once about space travel, Paul?"

A light dawned. "Yes," I said. "So what?"

"Well, I'd always had it in the back of my mind, too; but I gave up on it about ten years ago. But of course with mass-reducers, the whole thing would be a perfect cinch. I'm willing to bet there's an old Apollo space module hanging around somewhere, and there's certain to be one of the old rockets in mothballs. If we could talk these guys into arranging for us to use that for a tester, then we could fly all around the solar system on the fuel in one of those things. We could stay up for months! And they'd have no security problems with the two of us up there, and down here only Michele to worry about--"

"Hold it right there!" she broke in. What makes you think I'm just going to sit here knitting while you two go on a junket around the universe?"

"What difference does it make?" I said. "We'd never be able to persuade them."

"Don't be too sure of that," said Mike. "There were a couple of lectures at the meeting there about some radio signals that looked like what those kooks have been listening for--you know, not natural bursts of noise, but patterned, and very faint--coming from of all places Jupiter, and probably the Great Red Spot.

"Now as far as we know, that planet is nothing but a sea of hydrogen and some methane and ammonia, and the Red Spot is just turbulence; but nobody really understands why it stays more or less the same. Anyhow, I put out a feeler that wouldn't it be interesting if something or someone could actually get down into it to find out if there's intelligent life there--and Keith actually sounded interested."

"Intelligent life!" I said. "Good God, Mike!"

"Well what the hell," he said. "How's he to know? How're we, for that matter?"

"In liquid hydrogen and methane? On a planet where we'd weigh a thousand tons?"

"Exactly. If we had our present mass. See, the neat thing about a non-scientist is that he has no idea that something like this is absolutely ridiculous. I mean, those guys will believe anything at all is possible, as long as a scientist says it is, and especially if the scientist can show them a forty-page equation. And as a matter of fact, we could get into Jupiter's Red Spot, and we could look around and see what makes it tick. So they think we're looking for intelligent life. Let 'em. It won't be the first scientific expedition that came back with results that weren't what it was looking for."

"I think it's worth a try, Paul," said Michele. "I suppose this Jackson person is going to get in touch with you?"

"Oh, he'll be in contact. He didn't say how, but he made it very clear that we'd be hearing from him--and that he was to be hearing from us."

"Okay, but there's just one little detail," she said. "Those Apollo modules, as I recall, hold three people, not two, and--A--you're not going to let anyone else in on this, if I can help it, and--B--I have no intention of staying home and letting you people have the fun."

"Fun! It'll be the most dangerous--"

""And what does my sex have to do with that? That was thrashed out thirty years ago, Mike. There's nothing that a woman can't do in those space ships; there were even women astronauts or whatever you call them back in the days of manned space flight. Besides, suppose there is life there on Jupiter; you'll need a biologist along. Nope. I'll grant that it's all a dream and we'll never get off the ground, but if it's a dream, I'm dreaming along with the two of you."

"Look, Michele, be sensible!"

"Sensible! The whole idea is crackbrained! I personally think it's so crackbrained it just might work. But don't you go telling me to be sensible!"

"For heaven's sake, you two!" I said. "What's the point of fighting about something that's bound never to happen?"

But they fought, of course, nonetheless, for several hours. That brought the afternoon back to normal.