'My wife,' he said, 'doesn't understand me.'

Patrice didn't smirk, she didn't laugh, she didn't frown.  It took every bit of will power that she had but she didn't roll her eyes to heaven either.  Of course she'd heard that line before; she'd used the feminine variant of it herself once or twice, before her big D came through.  Still, though, still it would have been nice to hear a more imaginative line.  'I see,' she muttered, not contributing much originality to the occasion herself.

She had about made up her mind to go to bed with Bryan, although not just yet, not tonight.  He was attractive enough, generous enough, safe enough.  And, truth to tell, her opportunities were getting a little further apart, not scarce yet, but not so common as they used to be either.  She'd play Bryan along a little while longer, accept the attention, the small favors, let him work at it a while.  'I understand,' she told him.

************* **************** **************

Bryan's wife Gwen wouldn't understand.  Well, actually, she might.  Right now though, she had other concerns.  Like this odd object she was holding.  She hefted it in her hand.  Metal, certainly: color a dull silver, cold to the touch, not particularly heavy.  Cone shaped: rounded at the tip and around the base.  She inspected it closely.  The phone message had implied some sort of status displays and controls but where were they?  She peered at the base again and saw a faint rectangle appear near the edge.  Its edges grew darker, more distinct.  Another shape appeared near it, another rectangle, then a smaller oval formed near the far edge.  Inside the first rectangle glowing red letters lines of  began to emerge, at first faint but soon bold enough to read.

ALPHA 0
BETA 40
GAMMA 60

As she watched the numbers changed.

ALPHA 0
BETA 35
GAMMA 65

So she was too late.  Gamma was over 50 and rising.  From what she understood from the message, gamma would increase as beta decreased until gamma was 100.  After gamma had  reached 50, the process was irreversible.  So she waited a couple of minutes, watching as the numbers changed until finally:

ALPHA 0
BETA 0
GAMMA 100

Now what? she wondered.  She reached into her jacket pocket and felt the answering machine tape she had removed from the machine at home.  There just might be a tape player in here that she could use to listen  to it again but there was no need.  She'd played it over and over at home until she knew it by heart.
 

'Mr. Watson?  Bryan Watson?'  A young woman's voice, a girl's voice.  'You lose the bet.'

A man's voice sounded in the background, speaking words Gwen couldn't make out.  The girl spoke a few words in answer, in a language Gwen didn't know or even recognize.  The man's voice spoke again, his language unknown but clearly a command.

The girl spoke again.  'The tests here are over.  They were successful.'  As she said this, her voice broke into a curious quaver, almost a wail.  The man's voice spoke again, sharply, and the girl's voice choked briefly, then resumed.  'The data have been sent to you.  You should stop your attempts for now since you can't win.  If the, the...' Her voice trailed off and Gwen heard still another voice.

'Beta to gamma'  A different voice, a woman's but older.  Older and stronger.

'Beta to gamma.'  The girl repeated.  'If the beta to gamma hasn't transformed past 50%, you can stop it.  You can use it next month, learning from our experience here.'  The girl's voice broke again and the man's laughter cut through her sobs.  A harsh  laugh, a cruel laugh.  The memory of it made Gwen shiver.

The laughter subsided and the girl spoke again.  'If the transform goes through, you can, you can use it...'  Her voice paused as the man in the background spoke again, in the same unknown language.  She spoke again, more surely now.  'You can use it three times.  You must use it three times in the time limits or it will discharge itself.  It might even discharge to you.  The first will surely be temporary.  The second might be temporary for your subject but it wasn't here.'  Her voice rose as she spoke the last few words, rose in what was surely fear, and she sobbed again.  'It wasn't temporary here.  The third, the third will surely be longer, maybe permanent.  If you can wait until next month, you should.'

The man's voice spoke again and the girl continued.  'But if now you must use your, your...'  She broke off uncertainly and Gwen heard the second woman's voice in the background again.  'Your device.  Use your device on strangers first.  Save your wife for last.'  She began to gasp, to wail gently as the man laughed and laughed.  Gwen thought he was mocking her, enjoying her obvious terror.  And then both voices cut off as the call terminated.
 

Even now, Gwen's flesh crawled at the memory of that message.  She'd known immediately that this must be from one of Bryan's colleagues, probably the horrible man in the background.  So she'd known that this device, whatever it was, must be in his workshop, across town here where she had come.  And this must be it.  She looked at the display on the back and saw that it had changed again.  The alpha-beta-gamaa display was gone replaced by numbers -0588.  She watched as the numbers changed -0587, 0586.  About once a second, she guessed, like a clock.  Like a countdown.    Could it be counting down the time limit in the message?  Somehow, she knew it was.  And what was the effect of the discharge the message had warned against?  She didn't want to find that out the hard way.  Gwen considered dropping the thing back onto the cradle it had been in originally and running off, driving home.  But what might happen?  And anyway, that would put Bryan in charge again.  Her blood ran cold when she thought of that.

Okay, fine.  Use the damn thing three times, like the message said.  But how?  She inspected it again.  The other shapes on the base had changed too.  The rectangle next to the countdown square had a single yellow number in it.  3.  Easy enough to guess what that meant.  And the interior of the oval shape now flashed continuously, pulsing in time with the changing numbers on the counter, now down to 568, oops, 567.   The oval was about the size of a fingertip.  Maybe a switch, an operations button.

She took a deep breath and held the cone at arms length with her left hand while lightly touching the button  with a finger of her right.  Nothing.  She pressed it again,  harder.  No response.  Irritated, she held it a little closer and jammed the button hard.  Abruptly the countdown display changed, the decreasing numbers disappearing, to be replaced by a few words.

DISCHARGED FAILED
NO AVAILABLE SUBJECT

She considered that as the message glowed steadily before her, then blinked twice and disappeared, the old numbers coming back.  540, 539.  The thing needed a subject, did it.  She pointed it in the general direction of an office chair and stabbed the button.

DISCHARGED FAILED
NO AVAILABLE SUBJECT

She tried touching it to the chair, to a notebook, to a wall.  No matter what she tried, same result.

DISCHARGED FAILED
NO AVAILABLE SUBJECT

And the counter was down to 480.  Whatever this thing did, whatever it was going to do, maybe it only did it to something live.  Maybe, she thought as  a sick lump formed in her stomach, maybe it only worked on people.  The message had said, clear as day, that Bryan was going to test it on her, the bastard.  433, 432.  It looked like it was counting seconds, 60 seconds a minute.  423, 422.  Seven minutes.  419.  Less than seven minutes.  Find somebody, find somebody quick.  Maybe there was somebody outside this evening, a panhandler maybe, somebody more expendable than her.

She let the workshop door shut behind her as she strode down the hall, through the gauntlet of closed doors to empty offices and work areas.  All closed, all dark, all empty.  She hurried past a side corridor and then suddenly stopped, backed up, looked down the corridor.  Her glimpse had been right.  There was an open door down there, light spilling out of it across the floor.  Somebody else was in the building.  Somebody working late?  She looked at the timer.  385.  Whoever it was, he'd have to do.

She moved quietly and cautiously  to the open door and peeked around the frame.  There was a figure in there, all right, only a couple of feet from the door, back turned,  working over a low bench.  She was packing things in boxes from the look of it.  A woman.  Gwen had expected a man for some reason but  didn't care much.  If this thing would discharge onto a person, a woman was as good as a man.  Anybody but Gwen.  She looked at the timer.  308.  Barely five minutes.  Her heart  beating fast now, her hands shaking slightly, she raised the cone and pointed it at the still unsuspecting woman.  This time, when she pressed the button, its light flashed green for a second and Gwen heard a low POP.

The woman heard the sound too and turned  to the door in surprise.  Her expression turned to alarm as she registered this strange woman pointing something at her.  Not a gun, from the look of it.  Whatever it was, she couldn't see it clearly because a white haze obscured it.  The haze seemed to be spreading across the space to her, reaching toward her waist.  She waved her hands forward as if to fend it off while her mouth opened in protest.

As the young woman spun around, Gwen could see the rounded tip of the device glow brilliantly for a split second and then begin to emit a white beam that reached through the doorway.  It was like watching a beam of light in utter slow motion, motion so slow that her eyes could watch the white wavefront migrate across the short space.  At the same time, the device shifted in her hand, aiming itself at its target.  Gwen flinched and would have dropped the cone but it remained in place as if suspended in midair.  By now the tip of the beam, spread to a few inches in diameter, had reached its victim.  For an instant it illuminated a circle on her blouse between her waist and breast before the cloth in the circle vanished, leaving the surprised woman's skin exposed.

Gwen half expected to see the woman's midsection disappear as well, her body disintegrating as the beam cut through her, but instead the circle of white light remained in place, neither moving or growing.  The circle of vanished cloth expanded rapidly though, like a miniature grass fire that disintegrated, vaporized the blouse instead of burning it.  In a matter of seconds, the blouse was gone, leaving the young woman wearing only her bra and skirt.  She tried to jump aside but her feet slipped out from under her as her arms and legs flailed wildly.  Instead of falling though, she hung in mid-air, the brilliantly lit circle on her torso shining steadily at the end of the beam of white light reaching from the cone Gwen still held her hands around.

The now thoroughly terrified young woman shrieked out at last.  She tried to regain the floor but for some reason couldn't make her feet touch the floor.  The beam suspended her in the air like a struggling insect on a pin.  'What are you doing to me?' she demanded but Gwen gave no answer, since, for one thing, she didn't know herself.  The cone was emitting a beam of light, the light was trapping the woman in mid-air, it had destroyed her blouse, but what else?  Surely there was something else.  Gwen forced herself to calm down slightly and watched more closely.  The beam was apparently spreading wider, expanding.  Whereas it had initially only covered a small circle of skin between her bra and the waist of her skirt, now it lit almost the whole width of her body, and nearly extended to her bra.  A second later its edge reached the bra, which flashed away the same way the blouse had, leaving the girl naked from the waist up.  And then naked from the waist down as the light caught her skirt and it too evaporated as a wave of disappearance spread down and across it.  Her shoes had already been kicked from her feet as she desperately flailed in mid air, so the desperately writhing girl now hunk totally unclothed in the air.  'Who are you?' she pleaded.  'And why me?  What are you doing to me?'

Gwen still made no answer, although now she could see what the true effect of the beam was.  It hadn't expanded at all, it hadn't enlarged itself to destroy the helpless girl's clothes.  Instead, the girl had shrunk until her clothes had fallen in the beam's path.  Her feet didn't touch the floor because they didn't reach the floor; they swung several inches above it.  And Gwen could see that the young woman, who a moment before had been about her own height, now had to twist her head up to try to see her attacker.

As her feet thrashed a full foot off the floor, the frantic girl became aware of what was happening to her.  She could feel and see the room growing around her and knew certainly that the room, and its contents, and the woman who was assailing her so strangely, weren't growing, that they weren't expanding.  Not at all.  This white, cold light  was shrinking her.  A wave of questions surged through her terror.  How small would she get?  Or would she shrink to nothingness, disappear?  Or...what?

'Please stop.  Please help me.'  She begged for mercy, knowing she wouldn't get it but trying in desperation anyway.  'Please stop.'

Gwen felt sorry for this innocent young woman but she couldn't help her.  She had no idea of how to stop the process or even for a certainty what the process was.  Certainly this device was shrinking her but there was no way to know if that was all it would do.  She watched in horror herself and also in fear.  For she remembered well the words in the message about Bryan's wife, about herself.  She could easily have been the one  panicking as she hung in the air, shrinking.  The white beam still held its target in space and now shone  brightly onto almost the entire body of the still struggling girl.  The beam was engulfing her ankles now and her neck.  Both her feet blazed in the light and she clenched her eyes shut as the brilliant light reached them.  The her entire body had shrunk until it was entirely within the few inches of the beam's diameter.

For a second she hung there and then the light began to fade.  Gwen felt the cone sag in her hands, no longer supporting its own weight and she lurched forward in surprise to catch it.  The shrunken girl's eyes opened in surprise when the light dimmed, just in time to watch the floor move up as she fell to it.  She lay limply where she had fallen, unhurt, even relieved now that the horrible shrinking beam had released her.  She staggered to her feet and looked at her enormous but still familiar surroundings before she was struck by the full appreciation of her new reality.  She was tiny now, helpless, above all bewildered.  Was she trapped like this forever.  She tried to look into the eyes of the woman who had done this to her but the giant woman's face was a distant blur, hidden in the relative darkness of the hall.

'Now what are you going to do with me?' she asked fearfully.

'I'm not sure,' Gwen slowly said, the first words she had uttered since she fired the device.  'I won't hurt you.'

'Won't hurt me!' screamed her miniaturized victim.  'You won't hurt me.  Look what you've done to me.'  She raised her arm as if to demonstrate its length.  Gwen shrugged and stepped forward, reaching down to scoop this little being off the floor with one hand while she gripped the shrinking device in the other.  Somehow this little creature wasn't a woman any more, a person.  She was a being of a different sort now, too tiny to be thought of as human.  Gwen pitied her as she picked her up but she felt a thrill too at the touch of the girl's smooth cool skin and the tense muscles underneath.  She had total power over this little being and, whether or not she'd admit it, she liked it.

Looking around for a place to put her living burden, she saw the open boxes this young woman had been filling only a few minutes ago.  The nearest one was only half full and only a layer of packing paper showed over whatever else it held.  She held the small figure, petrified with fright, over the edge of the box and gently dropped her in.  'That should do for you for a while,' she said.  'Look, I'm sorry I did this to you but I didn't have much choice.  I...'  Gwen suddenly pursed her lips.  She didn't have to give this creature any explanation of her actions.  In fact, now that she thought of it, the less this transformed girl knew, the better.  What she didn't know, she couldn't tell.  Sooner or later, others would learn about this, would question this shrunken girl.   Gwen shuddered at the thought of what the consequences of that might be.  Still, though  Gwen was a ruthless woman in her way, she was no murderess.  What to do, what to do.

Gwen thought back to the phone message.  'The first will surely be temporary.'  The frightened voice on the tape rang in her mind.  Maybe there was a way out of this.

'What's your name, girl?' she asked the box in front of her.  Listening intently she heard a sniff.

'Marianne.' came a quavering wail from the box.  'And who are you?'

'Never you mind who I am, Marianne,' Gwen told her.  'Now  listen.'  Her mind raced with practiced speed to come up with some reasonable lies.  'I'm going to change you back to your full size.  But you can't tell anybody about this, about what happened to you.  Pretend it was all a dream, a hallucination.  If you do tell anybody, I'll hear about it and I'll come back.  And I won't be so nice the second time.'

'Oh, I won't tell,'  Marianne gushed.  'I won't breathe a word.  Don't, just don't leave me like...'  Her voice broke and she burst into wracking sobs as the realization of her condition overwhelmed her.  Why had this happened to her?  She had only been trying to work an extra couple of hours, to help out with some back orders.  She hadn't done anything to deserve this, to be shrunk down to the size of a child's toy, to be stripped naked, to be made so helpless.  She gave herself over to her grief and lonely fear.  Gwen peered cautiously into the box and saw the tiny girl huddled the center of it,  oblivious for the moment of the giant looking down on her.  A moment's search of the room located a stack of paper napkins.  She lightly dropped a couple onto the miserable girl and saw her reach for them to wrap around her.

A half hour later, Gwen checked the box again.  Marianne had cried herself to sleep and now lay peacefully wrapped in her paper napkins.  She stirred slightly and Gwen saw one of her feet emerge from under the makeshift covers.  The napkins were too short.  But they weren't too short, they had been ludicrously large when... She realized with a surge of relief that Marianne was indeed growing.  She was at least half again as tall as she had been.  At this rate she'd be back to full size in a few hours.  It wasn't even 10 o'clock yet; she'd be full sized by morning.  At least Gwen hoped so but she wasn't going to stick around to find out.  She hoped Marianne would regain her full height by the end of the night, she very sincerely hoped nobody else would stumble on her until then, she hoped that Marianne was a resourceful girl, that she'd able to find some sort of clothes to wear out of here.

She hoped for all of that but it was time for her to go.  She'd checked the base of the shrinking device right away as soon as Marianne's miniaturization had been complete.  The activation oval was pulsing again.  The yellow number had changed to 2; Gwen was sure that was how many more shrinking charges were left.  And the countdown timer was counting down.  This time though, it wasn't counting down from a few hundred seconds but from several thousand.  The red numbers had been over 8000 when she'd put  Marianne in her box, they read 7742, 7741, 7740 now.  Over two hours.  Not enough time to watch Marianne revert to full size but more than enough time to get out of here and get home.  Home to Bryan.  Bryan who'd planned to use this device with her as the subject.  The fear she'd had of that, though, was long gone.  Somebody else was going to find out about fear, very soon.  She looked at the timer again.

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