'Outstanding, just outstanding'

Claire had never heard  Stan use that term before but she knew it wasn't  meant literally.   From the sound of it, it meant something unpleasant was about to hit the fan, or roll downhill, or something.  Since nobody else was in the room, she could pretty well guess that her quality of life was about to downgrade.

Stan slammed down the phone. 'Car wreck. Dr. Froendlich.'

'Al? How bad was it? Is he..'

'The jerk's in intensive care, UNCONSCIOUS in intensive care.'  Stan cut her off savagely.  'He couldn't have had a wreck a month ago, so I could change the visit, he couldn't wait until next week, when it would be over, no, he had to pick today to get hit by a truck.  Today, why today?'

'Al didn't plan to get in a wreck, my God, he's in the hospital, what can we do?'  Stan's harshness had astonished Claire before but never like this.  'There  must be something we can do for him.  And we have to postpone this visit.'

'No way.  I'll send Al some flowers.  Maybe they'll cheer him up when he regains consciousness.  There's nothing anybody but the doctors can do for him that'll make the slightest difference.  What makes a difference to us is that Doug Wintersí flight is due in three hours, that I'm meeting him at the airport,  and that tomorrow morning I'm bringing him here and he's gonna want to see some results for all the funding he's thrown our way.  We're not going to snivel about Dr. Froendlich's unfortunate mishap and we've got to to show him some results.'

 'We can't run the demo Al had in mind.  I don't even know exactly what the demo was that Al had in mind.'

'Well neither do I and we sure can't ask Al.  We'll just have to wing it.  Is the capacitor charged up yet?'

'Decapacitor.' Claire corrected him.  'The decapacitor is at, lemme see, 64% inverse charge saturation.  It should reach 90%  by morning.  But I can't do the run without Al.  You know that the LanthPal cells will burn out when they uncharge  so we can only do one run.   I've never even run the controls.'

'Details, details.  Look, the cells are going to decompose even if  you don't do the run. You've helped Dr. Froendlich with the bench unit he fried last week.  The controls are the same.  So do the run.'  Stan was calming down but he was still intense.

'On what? I don't even know what object he was going to use for this run.'

'Well, think of something.  Something more exciting than that piece of wood he used last week.  Something interesting.  Maybe a live animal.'

Claire was aghast.  'We're not ready to test this on a live animal.  Anyway, we don't have any animals.'

Scowling was something Stan Montour was extremely good at.  So was sarcasm.  'Let me drill you on some simple concepts for you, Ms. Lawson. Doug Winters has given me four hundred thousand dollars.  He's got a lot more money than that  and I want some.  We want some.  He'll give us more money if only you can show him a good demonstration of this, what, decapacitor.  Turning a two by four into a stick wouldn't  be very impressive.  Turning  a nice big dog into a nice little dog, now, that would be highly impressive.  So get a nice dog, or something, and shrink it.'
 
 

Claire slept neither much nor well that night.  She didn't know whether to call poor Al's ex-wife or his sister, since the hospital would only release information to family members.  Late in the evening, she finally got hold of his sister, who actually had some comparatively good news.  'It looks like he broke both legs and a bunch of ribs but no internal damage or anything.  He's out of ICU already but they've got him real doped up for the pain.  It'll be the day after tomorrow before anybody can see him. .. Sure, I'll tell him you called...Yeah, give me a call tomorrow night and I'll let you know.'

And then in the morning, she just couldn't buy a sacrificial lamb, er, dog, at the pet shop.  They had a really nice almost full grown collie that could've worked - but, no, she couldn't do that.  Stan and this Doug Winters would have to settle for something else.  Al had calculated that the process would work poorly on objects containing much metal and best on organic materials.  Claire thought a chair would do nicely, like that expensive oak and leather one behind Stan's desk.  She would actually have liked to use his desk, but it was too heavy.  Not even Al  knew precisely how much mass the floor scale decapacitor could affect  but it definitely had a limit.  The chair would be fine.  Let Stan use a steel folding chair like the rest of them for a while.

When she got to the lab, it was after 10 and the decapacitor was at 91% saturation,  climbing slowly.  A nervous ache appeared in her stomach as she inspected the control board and she had to keep telling herself there was nothing to it.  There really wasn't much to it, either.  The POWER had been on all week, of course, and the unit surrounded the six foot target cube.  Al had spent almost three days aligning and calibrating the resonance paths and the interference meter showed they were still valid.  All she needed to do, really, was put the chair in the cube and divert the charge from STORE to FLUX.  She rolled the chair into the cube and nervously, very nervously, waited.

It was nearly 11 when Al showed up with the visitors.  Claire hadn't expected two but there they were, a dark haired, nerdy chap of slightly above average height and a very attractive red haired woman.  Claire had a nice trim body and a good figure but she was nothing compared to this woman.

'Claire Lawson, I'd like you to meet Douglas Winters and Theresa Steiner.'  Stan said briskly.  'I've told them about Dr. Froendlich's unfortunate accident and how  you'll have to conduct the demonstration they've come so far to watch.'

'Call me Doug,'  Winters said, holding her hand just a little longer than she felt comfortable with.  'It's terrible about Dr. Froendlich not being able to be here but Stan tells us you're more than able to perform this experiment  by yourself.'

'And I'm Teri.  I'm Mr. Winter's financial assistant.  I've been wondering where all this venture money was going so I thought I'd tag along.  So Claire, may I call you Claire?  Tell me Claire, what exactly is it you do around here?  I'd expected a somewhat  more elaborate facility.'

Stan leaped in before Claire could say a word.  'I take it Doug hasn't told you of the nature of our work here.'

'No, I've been keeping Teri in the dark about the details of your research, at least until you can show us some results.' Doug offered.  'Please fill her in, and maybe explain a few details to me, too.'

'Well, all right,' Stan paused for dramatic effect,  'Teri, in our research here, we have discovered how to make ordinary physical objects smaller. Miniaturization.'

Teri frowned. 'I don't think you need to spend over $ 400,000 to find out how to make small versions of ordinary things.'

'I didn't say we make small versions of things.  We make the things smaller.  We shrink them.'

Teri did her best not to look incredulous while Doug looked unfazed, or maybe even enthusiastic.  Of course this was not news to him.  'I find the process concept very exciting and I really would like to see it. When can you start?'

Claire checked the saturation.  Over 93%.  'We really ought to do it right away.  I've put  an office chair in the target cube already and checked alignment.'  She switched the POWER switch from on to standby and the STORE switch to hold.  'Once I  turn the FLUX to engage, the chair should start to shrink in about a minute.  It'll take another three minutes to finish.'

Stan jumped in again.  'Hold on, Claire.  I thought we were going to use a, uh, different object.'

'Yeah.' said Doug, 'Stan  told me you would be shrinking a dog, not some piece of furniture.'

Teri spoke up.  'It sure sounds like some sort of parlor trick to me, like something in a stage magic act.  Let me have a look at this ëoffice chairí.  I'll bet there's a trap door or something under it and a little copy chair somewhere in there.'  She stepped into the target cube and examined the floor and then the chair, swiveling it and finally sitting in it.  'Everything looks ordinary enough.'  She seemed diappointed.

A manic grin appeared on Doug's face.  'Well let's give it a try, then.'  He shoved Claire away from the control board and slammed the FLUX switch over.  A faint violet grid appeared on all six surfaces of the target cube and quickly intensified.  As it did, the heavy wooden chair,  and its startled occupant, began to levitate, slowly rising above the floor.

'Stop this, stop this,' cried the now  frightened Teri, 'I don't know what this is but stop it.  Let me out of here.'  She pushed herself out of  the chair but  continued to drift upward.  So did the chair, only now a few inches below her.

Claire staggered away from the control board and watched the scene in horror.  Both Doug and Stan were blocking her from the control board and she knew she couldn't stop the process even if she could get to the board.  The intense violet grid meant that the LanthPal cell had already uncharged to the target cube.  As soon as poor Teri and the chair were in a stable position in the center of the cube, miniaturization would commence.  Nothing in the world could stop that now.

Teri continued to twist and writhe but  the chair, with her in it,  serenely floated up until it was a couple of feet off the floor.  It were also a couple of feet from the ceiling of the target cube and a couple of feet from each of the walls.  Now the grid color  began to change subtly, gradually shading from violet to vivid blue.  As the color shifted, the grid slowly shrank and began to move inward from all the solid surfaces of the target cube.  The glowing grid did not get closer to the frantic girl, however; as the cube of light grew smaller she began to shrink,  maintaining her position in the center of the chamber.

At first, Stan didn't know what to think.  The sudden burst of action, followed by the bizarre turn the demonstration had taken, effectively stunned him until the actual miniaturization had well begun.  He glanced at Claire for a second but immediately returned to the sight of the floating, shrinking woman.   But it was the expression on the face of his hoped for benefactor that drew his gaze from the contacting cube and its victim.  For Doug was enraptured.  The joy on his face made him seem to be the happiest man alive.  Claire saw his expression also and recognized it immediately.  She'd seen that look on a man's face before, but rarely.  She always preferred dim lights in the bedroom.

In the mean time, Teri quit struggling as she shrank.  She continued to thrash about in the chair and she continued to cry out,  but the movements were no longer of attempted escape and the cries were no longer of fear.  They became sighs, and then moans,  of excitement and pleasure mixed and they became more frequent and louder.  At last she gave a long keening scream and finally relaxed.  Claire had heard those sorts of noises before, too, only they sounded different when she was making them

The grid color by now was almost green and the glow was beginning to fade.  The much reduced Teri quietly rode in her chair as it sank toward the floor of the target cube.  Finally the glow died out altogether.  Claire reached past Doug, who remained motionless, and flipped the FLUX switch to disengage.  'Safety first.' she giggled, working very hard not to slip over the edge into hysteria.

'How...how small...' the words trailed from Stan's mouth.

'Dr. Froendlich hardwired the field calibrations in,' came from Claire in a monotone.  'The shrinking actually occurred in two stages.  The first had a linear reduction ratio of 2, to 50% of her original height.  The second stage immediately followed that: it had a ratio of 3.  Between them, she's now one sixth as tall as she used to be.'

'Maybe Al can reverse it, but I don't have any idea how.  It could be she'll always be that way, the size of a Barbie doll.'

She walked into the target cube and retrieved the spent and silent little figure from within.  Meanwhile, Doug began  to come out of his trance but he appeared severely shaken.  He sank into a folding chair and stared at the cube. 'It works.  It really, really works.'

Stan was also coming around.  He left Doug to his reverie and Claire to tend her tiny charge, for he wanted to see how badly the decapacitor had fared.  A quick glance at the control board told him what he wanted to know.  The saturation level had fallen, of course, but not nearly as much as he expected.  It stood, as near as he could make out, at 58%.

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