The ringing of the doorbell woke Claire from her reverie. 'There's Theresa.' she sighed as she buzzed the door open.
Lisa looked up hesitantly as Theresa made her entrance and held the door ajar. 'Things look good next door.' she announced. 'Saturation is 90 something and going up nicely. Doug guesses it should get to 95%, maybe more. How tall are you, Lisa? 5-5? 5-6?'
'5-4.' Lisa replied woodenly. 'What's that matter to you?'
Theresa had produced a calculator and punched some figures. 'Well, the process has a side effect, not too serious a one. See, we're going to shrink you to Claire's size.' Lisa grimaced at that. 'Then we'll bring you back in two or three days. Only we can't bring all the way back to your original height. At 95%, you'll be, let's see, about 5-1. You'll have a good time buying a new wardrobe. Didn't Claire explain this to you?'
'I was starting to, but I didn't get a chance to tell her everything.' Claire piped up.
'I suppose you didn't tell her about the focus effects, then, either.' Theresa turned back to Lisa. 'There are other effects, really nice ones. Basically, the process smoothes out imperfections in the subject. Expect to lose any minor blemishes you have, even scars, old injuries, things like that. Takes any residual drug traces out of your system too. You'll be healthier when this is over. It'll also, um, improve you, give you a little better body. A better figure probably, sexier legs, things like that. It made my voice a lot clearer, too, although it didn't affect Claire that way. Honest, Lisa, this is really the best thing that could happen to you. Ready to go?'
'No, not really. Please don't make me go through this. I don't want to shrink.' Lisa's voice took on a wild tone, although she spoke no louder. 'You can't can't do this to me.' She looked down at Claire, who was listening impassively. 'Tell her she can't do this, please tell her,' she implored.
Claire sighed and shook her head. 'I can't stop her, not like this.' She looked down at her miniature body and up at Theresa, who was smiling faintly but grimly. 'I'm afraid you're trapped. Nobody knows you're here that can help you. Buck up, kid. It really is an amazing experience, honest, you will enjoy it, you can't help it. And afterwards, I'll be here, I'll help you. And then, in a few days, they'll bring you back to normal. It'll be okay.' She smiled as encouragingly as she could.
'Touching,' Theresa scowled at both of them. 'Enough of that,
though. Let's go, Lisa. We don't want to keep Al waiting.'
She took Lisa's arm and urged her to her feet. 'You sure you don't
want to come along?' she inquired, glancing down over her shoulder at Claire,
who shuddered and shook her head emphatically. 'Let's go, then.'
She steered the numb, terrified girl to the door and looked back again.
'Al said it'll be slower with the new equipment. It'll probably
be the better part of an hour before I bring her back.'
As Theresa led her into the lab, a seemingly unorganized maze of consoles and wires, Lisa dully tried to get her bearings. Nothing was familiar, not the equipment, not the two men, one fairly young, one middle aged, who were hovering over the glowing panels and screens, muttering to each other. What finally caught her eyes was a simple framework of greyish silver rods forming an open cube, perhaps eight feet on a side. Wires connected each corner to one of the consoles. A pile of boxes was stacked inside, with some folded clothes lying on top of one of them. Her pulse began to race as she recognized the clothes as hers, the contents of the travel bag she had left in her rented car. The fog of unreality which had clouded her perceptions since she first met Claire and learned she was going to be shrunk in turn began to clear away as she realized with certainty that these people meant business, that they fully intended to subject her to their process, that she really was trapped.
'What's that...thing, that box there?' she asked in a quavering voice. The younger man looked up at her cheerfully.
'We call it the target cube. This one's brand new, you'll be the first one to get to use it.' She felt his gaze pass over her, not so much cheerfully now as hungrily. 'We got your stuff from your car and put it in there. The supplies for Claire are in there too.' He reported this last to Theresa, deferentially.
'I suppose I should introduce you all,' she growled. 'Lisa, that other gentleman is Dr. Al Froendlich. And this,' her lip curled in mild distaste, 'is Doug Winters. He's a fan of shrinking things, people especially.'
'Yeah, I love it,' he affirmed happily. 'And we haven't done anybody since we shut down the old place two months ago. We'll be ready for for you, Lisa, is it, we'll be ready in ten minutes.'
'Five,' grunted the older man, looking up from his controls impatiently. 'The cells are about as charged as they're going to get. The new alloy is saturating a little lower than I thought . Barely 93% right now. I don't think it'll even get to 94. Go ahead and get her in there, Ms. Steiner. We're almost ready to go.' His eyes went back to the console before him and his hands fussed with a row of knobs. Doug joined him and the two conferred in muttered low tones. Doug stepped to the edge of the target cube and gestured for them to come over. Theresa maintained her grip on Lisa's arm and eased her to the cell.
'Just make yourself comfortable on those boxes and sit tight. And don't be scared. You're in for the greatest experience of your life.' Lisa let herself be forced into the little cube and hesitantly rearranged the boxes to form an impromptu seat. As soon as she had Lisa in the cube, Theresa jumped away, as though she was afraid it might somehow suck her in. Doug stood nearby, beaming. Lisa saw him actually lick his lips in anticipation.
She was resigned now to her fate, whatever that was going to be, but that in no way lessened her terror. Her heart was racing and tears were stinging her eyes. What had she done to this, to be turned into a miniature, a freak. She opened her mouth to protest again, to beg to be let go, but she couldn't force out a sound. Beads of sweat glistened on her face.
'We ready, Al?' Theresa asked from a safe distance.
'Ready as we're going to get. Saturation is slightly over 93% but that's as far as it's going to go.'
'All right, Doug,î Theresa ordered, ėstart the process.'
He grinned happily as he flipped a couple of switches. Then he reached for a slider bar and slowly pulled it to him, never taking his eyes off the target cube and its cowering occupant. As he pulled the slider, a faint violet grid filled all the spaces between the edges of the cube, brightening and intensifying as the slider moved. Finally, he had pulled it to its limit, at which point he stood away from the controls and watched the scene before him with rapt anticipation.
As soon as the colored grid reached full intensity, the girl in the cell started as she and the boxes she was sitting on gave a slight jolt and rose a fraction of an inch from the floor. She frantically looked down and about her as she and the boxes very slowly began to rise. Lisa could now hear her heart pound in her ears and she pulled her knees to her chin, as if trying to curl up into a ball. She continued to slowly rise, drifting up toward the center of the glowing cube, no longer sitting on the boxes that drifted beneath and beside her.
'How much slower will this be than before, Al?' Theresa couldn't hide her nervousness.
'Oh, the new cells are considerably weaker, it'll take a little longer for the cube contents to stabilize, three minutes maybe, instead of one before.' He peered at Lisa's terrified form dispassionately, as he might look at an equipment schematic or mineral specimen. 'The shrinking will take the same amount of time, of course, another three minutes or so. What's really going to take longer now, I think, is we'll have to wait for everything to stabilize again. That used to take just a few seconds with the old LanthPal cells. The charge from these new ones is going to take a long time, ten minutes at least, maybe a half hour. This'll be my first chance to time it., you know.'
'Am I, is everything okay?' Lisa's voice faintly pleaded from where her obscured body slowly continued to rise in the cell. 'I don't feel different. I don't feel any...smaller.'
'You're fine, everything is perfectly normal.' Theresa assured her. 'Just relax. You'll know it when the process actually starts.' It appeared to her that Lisa and the collection of boxes was clustered very near the center of the cube. In the meantime, Doug hadn't stirred, maintaining his stance, trying to take in every detail of the scene in the target cube.
Lisa's voice quavered out again. 'I don't like floating like this in here. This is too creepy. Please, won't you please...oh!' Her voice took on a different quality, more of wonder than fear. 'Ohhh. That's not so bad. You were right. This doesn't hurt after all. Ohhh, yes.' She gave a low cry, of contentment still tinged with fear.
At the same time, the grid color began to shift, losing its intense violet hue, gaining a more bluish tint. The grid pattern was shifting as well, separating from the edges of the target cube, the squares contracting as the entire cube of light began to shrink, taking its contents with it. At the cube's center, Lisa's body straightened out as she relaxed from the ball she had curled into. Her cries were now of delight. 'God, this is GREAT. This is the best.' She wriggled, or maybe writhed, in delight, moaning with pleasure as she diminished in size with the shrinking cube.
Al looked up from his gauges. 'Wow, she's really getting into it. I wonder if it's really that good.' He looked to Theresa for a response.
'It's that good, yes it is,' she said slowly. 'Maybe it's better than good. It's better than drugs, sex and rock-and-roll; that's why she's in there. I never could describe it. It's like every pleasure nerve in your body is firing at once.' She looked on as the delirious girl shrank, now perhaps to half her original size. 'Only I never let myself go like that, jeez, I didn't know anybody could.' They continued to watch, fascinated, as Lisa continued to shrink, exploding in great waves of passion, screaming out in maniacal joy.
The grid shrank further as its color shifted from the original violet through every shade of blue and finally to near green. The grid contraction slowed at last and then stopped, leaving a small glowing cube a little over a foot on a side suspended in the center of the framework of the much larger target cube. The shrunken contents of the cube hung in the air, including Lisa, now cooing happily, stretched out in midair, barely moving.
'Now we have to wait while the saturation level freezes in the LanthPal cells. Then we can let the remnant pseudocharge discharge over the next few days, then we can reestablish a new one.' Dr. Froendlich never once raised his eyes from his control console during his narration.
Theresa threw an exasperated glare at him; of course he never noticed. 'What is all that supposed to mean? Doug, turn that into English. Doug, look over here. Talk to me.'
Doug struggled to tear his eyes from the floating, shrunken woman in her luminous cage, which had begun a slow descent toward the floor. 'Oh, yeah, ok.' His eyes darted from Theresa back to Lisa and then, with an effort, back to Theresa. 'Well, the new LanthPal composition is cheaper, but it behaves differently. To get something's size to bounce back with this, we have to let the original saturation ëfreezeí in the cell structure. Maybe leave a memory is a better term. That should take a few minutes. She'll float to the ground while it's happening.' His eyes kept flickering from Theresa to Lisa. 'Then we have to let what's left of the shrinking charge leak out. We think that'll take a couple of days. Then we can build a new charge to match the saturation. We can enlarge her then.' His gaze returned to Lisa, who was still cooing and giggling, eyes closed, oblivious to their presence. 'God, that was great. Do you think I could...' He took a step toward the target cube.
Al glanced up for a second. 'Don't interfere with it, you fool.' his voice rapped sharply.
'Yeah, you stay away from her. Get back to work. Help Al.' The strain of being in the same room with the shrinking apparatus, not to mention Doug, was beginning to wear on Theresa. 'Look, I need a break from this. If this is going to take a while, I'll be next door with Claire. I'll be back in a few minutes.'
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