ANTALOGIA, Walt Richmond and Leigh Richmond

The Incredible Being, one of the crew of the spaceship, lay stretched full-length on the biosynthetic carpet, exposing itself to the only slightly shielded radiation from the great hydrogen reactor which supplied the ship's power.

There was no tremor in the deck beneath the Being, although he could hear the nearby pounding of the ship's major hydraulic life-support system, kept constantly in motion by the aerodynamic coupling of its gravito/dynamic pumping system to the higher energies of its gaseous heat energy conversion system.

This was the second largest of the four major interdependent and interacting life-support systems that maintained the ship in a complex that had long since been refined into the dynamic stability of a self-repairing configuration, leaving the crew unhampered by necessity for attention to any but the most superficial detail, their intelligence free to direct the goals of the voyage.

The carpet beneath the Being, designed for pleasure as well as comfort, and a small part of the third largest life-support system, gave off a pleasing odor as it renewed itself in a feedback between the radiation of the hydrogen reactor, and the fluids in the tiny hydraulic network of tubes interlacing its nap; while at the same time it absorbed excessive quantities of gases escaping other units, refining the molecular content of the gases into a structure that would tend to rebalance the pneumatic system, largest of the four.

The crew member's attention was focused on one unit of the millions of one form of tiny biorobots that were busily cleaning the deck of the specific type of scraps and crumbs for which they were programmed. It was the robot's size that was so fascinating. Its entire body length was less than 1/400th of that of the crew member observing it, yet it seemed incredibly strong, manipulating a mass several times its own volume and slowly dragging it across the deck toward its particular disposal chute. Once in the chute, the Being knew, the mass would be tackled by a number of similar robots, dissected, and put through a complicated process from which it would emerge in a different chemical form, ready to resume its place in the manufacturing of other structures.

Though he observed but one unit of one form of the ship's micro-servicing units, the Being was easily aware of the millions of different robot types of varying size and complexity, from microscopic to macroscopic, that performed the ship's many automated servicing functions. He was too new a crew member to understand the actual complexity of the self-maintaining and self-servicing ship he was aboard, or of the vast regulatory equipment that kept it in a dynamic stability. Since the technology of the ship itself had long since been established, it was doubtful if any of the full technicians who acted as the supervisors of the crew actually understood the full detail of its functioning or were even completely aware of the intricacy of the configuration they had come to take for granted.

But the microrobot the Being was watching was a subject, he decided, that he would go into in more detail. Occasionally the balance between usefulness and numbers in this particular robot got out of kilter, and although the feedback systems normally operated almost at once to restore the balance, his immediate superior had remarked that morning that this particular robot was in oversupply in their area, and measures would need to be taken to cut back the supply-to-demand proportion.

The measures proposed for the cutback seemed to the Being to be excessive, but that problem was outside of his competence and he confined his attention to a need to know more about the delicacies of the minute creature whose quick and graceful motions seemed so efficient; whose feelers appeared to give it so complete a concept of the microproblem it was engaged in; and whose tensil strength must be great if one compared the lift and motive power in moving the mass to the size of the manipulating waldos.

These robots were not among the subjects the crew member had been instructed to study in detail; they had simply caught his interest in a period of relaxation.

Suddenly the Incredible Being was jerked from his reverie of associative thinking as he became aware of a communication from his immediate superior.

"Andy, get away from that anthill and come on over here to the beach where I can keep an eye on you."

The young boy rose from his stretched, full-length position on the carpet of grass and ran toward the beach where the Moon-pulled tide was coming in and the windblown waves pounded the sand, working over the Earth's content of recyclable life materials.