Sitting in chairs in Doc's workroom we put on our control hoods. Then, sensory illusion seemed to make us leave our real bodies behind. The top of the work table spread suddenly around my tiny, artificial eyes becoming a vast, cluttered plain. The ceiling was our sky. The fluorescent lights were multiple suns. Doc and Jan were shining, man-tall monsters, exactly like myself. I couldn't tell them apart, until manner of speech betrayed Jan. "Look at us!" she shouted gleefully in a thin, buzzing voice from a tympanum in her chest. "Coming this far is like dropping into an abyss, half way to the bottom! And see the _real_ us! Great, hooded colossi, sitting as if asleep, in the distance!" "Yeah, I know, Honey," was all I said. In this moment of half realizing a goal, Doc's love of miniature things became tense impatience. "All right, my worthies!" he buzzed. "Supper and being ourselves again is only a few hours away. So let's get started on tougher step two!" We hurried to a clear plastic box (of building-size to us now) and inside its drilled doorway our materials were waiting. There were the roughed out beginnings of other micro-manipulators, except that now, for work on pieces smaller than the width of a single light wave, the microscopes would have to be of the electron variety. Their parts had to be polished and fitted together here; for even that was labor beyond the direct doing of a man in his own flesh. Now we had to finish a whole array of super-fine micro tools and equipment--lathes, heaters, shapers of glass. Not until then could the real work proceed--making robots of which only the largest pieces yet existed, still in the rough. They would be robots bearing the same size-relationship to our present half-inch selves, as those same selves bore to human beings! "Specks, dust particles, dimensions on the order of the smallest insects," Doc's new self buzzed. "Down near the barrier, the limit of smallness, beyond which metals become, by relativity, too hard, and too coarse-grained to be shaped. Small objects are always relatively stronger than large ones. Yes, you'd have to decrease the strength of materials in proportion to size to achieve a constant there. Take an ant, far smaller than a man, but able to lift many times his own weight because the substance of his muscles is relatively tougher!" "Well, power for polishing comes first, doesn't it?" I said, and we went to work. The days went. Tediously our work progressed. Another spring came, and we lived two lives, with almost two sets of identities. There were classes and friends, and walks around the campus for Jan and me. Then we were down again, where flecks of lint floating in the air looked like twisted twigs, and where metal surfaces were difficult indeed to burnish. One evening, with grim excitement in his voice, Doc gave us some news: