Spacetime Donuts by Rudy Rucker Page B

worked? Isolation from his fellows? There was no decision to make. Vernor scrambled into the scale-ship as the hum of the VFG cones turned to a whine. The Professor was speaking rapidly to Mick Turner who then started towards the scale-ship as well.
    The field was building up and already the objects in the laboratory seemed to be growing. Mick looked eight feet tall, and although he was running, his progress was slow and dream-like. The Professor had disappeared and the police were drawing closer.
    As Turner drew nearer, the effects of the virtual field shrank him to something like Vernor's size. Vernor leaned out of the hatch and tried to pull him inside with one hand, while fumbling for the controls with the other.
    The police had arrived at the main work area. The scale-ship had shrunken enough so that they looked twenty feet tall. Vernor was seized with an irrational fear that they would stomp on him. This was impossible, of course; as a foot approached the ship it would enter the field and shrink in size.
    A last heave and Mick was in the ship. "Crank it up, Vernor!" he yelled with some enthusiasm. "I always wondered what atoms looked like."
    Vernor had disconnected the timer switch and was, indeed, cranking it up. The laboratory looked like the Grand Canyon, and a loach near them loomed upwards like the Statue of Liberty. He did not appear inclined to approach any closer, but it certainly felt bad to have an enemy that big.
    "Looks like they're scared to come after us," Turner observed. "While they're watching, the Professor can make his getaway."
    "That's what he's going to try?"
    "Yeah, he always knew the loach'd be here some day, so he set up some hideouts and secret exits for himself. He'll be O.K. And we ought to be just about invisible pretty soon."
    Vernor nodded, "Since the VFG cones are shrinking with us, I think the field isn't going to reach out and warp anything much. We will be invisible."
    It was getting hard to see the things in Kurtowski's laboratory as distinct objects any more . . . there were just huge color areas with fuzzy edges. Diffraction effects surrounded sharp corners with pale rainbows, and it was hard to say exactly where the ceiling was. The scale-ship probably looked like a grain of sand to the police. One of them seemed to have decided to come after them, but his legs were moving as slowly as the hands of a clock. They were safe. Vernor was sitting in the pilot's seat in front of the control panel, and Mick was leaning against the base of the lower VFG cone, his legs stretched out on the lattice of molybdenum tubes and nyxon cables. "What happens next?" he asked.
    "Pretty soon we're going to be at the cellular level. Not that we're likely to see any life . . . it's too dry here." The ship had settled into the floor a little bit. The small irregularities of what had seemed to be perfectly smooth plastic made the floor around them look like a gullied desert.
    The scale-ship was slowly skidding down into one of these gullies. The cushioning effect of the field kept them from rolling, so it was easy to watch their progress. Although tiny in size, the scale-ship retained much of its original mass, and thus continued sliding through any obstacles that appeared. Vernor and Mick's time was speeded up so much that their progress appeared slow to them, although in absolute terms they were sliding quite rapidly.
    The gully fed into a canyon like some gray and lifeless Alpine wasteland, high above the vegetation line. Sharp peaks were growing larger on both sides of them as they proceeded down the moraine. "You know," Vernor said, craning upwards. "I think I noticed this crack in the floor when we were building the ship. Look how fuzzy those mountains are getting—"
    But suddenly the peaks disappeared. Small, moving forms swarmed around the scale-ship. "Mick," Vernor cried, "what's happening?"
    "I thought you saw it coming. The lake at the bottom of the valley!"
    The truth dawned on Vernor.