In addition to this equipment, there were exact duplicates of the vats across the room and their attendant apparatus, except that each entire assembly was less than a half-inch long. In one vat there was a human figure much smaller than a doll, yet perfect. Barbara laughed nervously. Even in this century of wonders, the human mind had its limitations for making swift adjustments. The laugh was a denial of what her eyes beheld. Ed Dukas's wide face looked at once avid and haggard. Beside the tiny vats there was also another microscope, complete in every detail, yet of the same relative dimensions as the little figure in the vat. But this lesser microscope was of the electron variety. It had to be. For at this reduced size light waves themselves were too coarse in texture to be effective for close-range work. Ed turned slowly toward his young wife, whose eyes were alert and wonder-filled in spite of her weariness. He noticed the pleasant wave in her hair. He noted the charming curve of her brow, the tiny and pleasing irregularity of her nose. And what was all this attention but a clinging to an object of love when facing a strangeness so great that it scared him as he had never been scared before. Ed Dukas knew that his face must have gone gray. Now his words came slowly and precisely: "Babs, I've told you that I watched part of Mitchell Prell's first message being written. That in the moving speck of wet ink, for an instant something looked like a man the size of a mote! I thought I'd imagined it. But is that what Uncle Mitch is now? An android so small that the only way for him to write a note to a person of usual dimensions is to surround his own body with a droplet of ink and to drag himself across the paper, making the lines and loops of script?" Barbara looked at him obliquely, doubting his seriousness. "Aw, now, Eddie-boy, take it a little bit easy," she said. "Please do." He didn't answer her. He let his unchanging expression and many seconds of silence do the answering for him. His pulses drummed in his ears. At last he said, "No, darling, I mean it. There's no reason why an android no bigger than the smallest insects can't exist. And the signs of what Mitchell Prell did in this laboratory are plain enough.