"All right, Eddie," she conceded. "I guess I'm persuaded. Proud girl, me. I've got a smart boyfriend. And your uncle--he skips blithely from the bigness of the interstellar regions in his thoughts to the smallness of dust! And he seems, _actually_, to have done the latter--in person! Is that what we're supposed to accept as truth? If so, he must have been with you all the time, or at least for quite a while. On Earth, even. And he must have come out to Mars with us. He was right in your pocket, riding with the paper and pen. To write, he must have gunked himself up good with the ink inside the pen point. Ugh--what a thought! And maybe he's still in your pocket right now. He--or a tremendously shrunken equivalent of him. Does all this stack up right in your eyes, Ed?" A pallor had crept through Barbara's tan. "Pretty much so," Ed replied heavily. "So what do we do now, Ed? Try to follow your uncle's path--down?" Ed's flesh tingled. To follow Mitchell Prell _down_--a course more weirdly remote than traveling to the stars. He did not answer Barbara. He unzipped his pocket. He could not tell whether a minute android emerged or not. There were no further messages on the envelope. But from a sound cone in a shadowy corner of this workshop, there suddenly came tones that a decade had not rubbed from his memory: "Nipper-hello! Or is it always Ed now? So we've come to Mars together. And you with Barbara! Well, maybe that is an agreeable complication! Now we can talk. Here I have the right amplifying apparatus. I need help, and you always seemed the best--and enough like me. I know your doubts about science, and I don't blame you. But I'm still the same--wanting to learn everything that I can, feeling that everything should work out right." The stillness closed in again. Ed and Barbara looked at each other. Technology was full of tricks--the possibility of a thousand illusions. Could he even trust a voice, made so like Mitchell Prell's used to be? And could he trust the mind behind it? Even if it truly was his uncle's? "Work out right!" Ed growled mockingly. "That sounds almost pious! If you are what you say you are, you were on Earth and have seen everything. You know then how right things have been! I was around when the Moon blew--remember? And no scared hotheads caused that. But there are plenty of them now. And from here on Mars, I've expected to see Earth momentarily puff up into a little nova."