Beyond the Vanishing Point

A COMPLETE NOVELETTE

By Ray Cummings

CHAPTER I

_The Fragment of Quartz_

[Sidenote: The tale of a golden atom--an astounding adventure in
size.]

[Illustration: The fly landed with a thud on the center table.]


It was shortly after noon of December 31, 1960, when the series of
weird and startling events began which took me into the tiny world of
an atom of gold, beyond the vanishing point, beyond the range of even
the highest-powered electric-microscope. My name is George Randolph. I
was, that momentous afternoon, assistant chemist for the Ajax
International Dye Company, with main offices in New York City.

It was twelve-twenty when the local exchange call-sorter announced
Alan's connection from Quebec.

"You, George? Look here, we've got to have you up here at once.
Chateau Frontenac, Quebec. Will you come?"

I could see his face imaged in the little mirror on my desk; the
anxiety, tenseness in his voice, was duplicated in his expression.

"Well--" I began.

"You must, George. Babs and I need you. See here--"

He tried at first to make it sound like an invitation for a New Year's
Eve holiday. But I knew it was not that. Alan and Barbara Kent were my
best friends. They were twins, eighteen years old. I felt that Alan
would always be my best friend; but for Babs my hopes, longings, went
far deeper, though as yet I had never brought myself to the point of
telling her so.

"I'd like to come, Alan. But--"

"You must! George, I can't tell you over the public air. It's--I've
seen _him_! He's diabolical! I know it now!"

_Him!_ It could only mean, of all the world, one person!

"He's here!" he went on. "Near here. We've seen him to-day! I didn't
want to tell you, but that's why we came. It seemed a long chance, but
it's he, I'm positive!"

I was staring at the image of Alan's eyes; it seemed that there was
horror in them. And in his voice. "God, George, it's weird! Weird, I
tell you. His looks--he--oh I can't tell you now! Only, come!"

* * * * *

I was busy at the office in spite of the holiday season, but I dropped
everything and went. By one o'clock that afternoon I was wheeling my
little sport midge from its cage on the roof of the Metropole
building, and went into the air.

It was a cold gray afternoon with the feel of coming snow. I made a
good two hundred and fifty miles at first, taking the northbound
through-traffic lane which to-day the meteorological conditions had
placed at 6,200 feet altitude.

Flying is largely automatic. There was not enough traffic to bother
me. The details of leaving the office so hastily had been too
engrossing for thought of Alan and Babs. But now, in my little pit at
the controls, my mind flung ahead. They had located him. That meant
Franz Polter, for whom we had been searching nearly four years. And my
memory went back into the past with vivid vision....

The Kents, four years ago, were living on Long Island. Alan and Babs
were fourteen years old, and I was seventeen. Even then Babs
represented to me all that was desirable in girlhood. I lived in a
neighboring house that summer and saw them every day.

To my adolescent mind a thrilling mystery hung upon the Kent family.
The mother was dead. Dr. Kent, father of Alan and Babs, maintained a
luxurious home, with only a housekeeper and and no other servant. Dr.
Kent was a retired chemist. He had, in his home, a chemical laboratory
in which he was working upon some mysterious problem. His children did
not know what it was, nor, of course, did I. And none of us had ever
been in the laboratory, except that when occasion offered we stole
surreptitious peeps.

I recall Dr. Kent as a kindly, iron-gray haired gentleman. He was
stern with the discipline of his children; but he loved them, and was
indulgent in a thousand ways. They loved him; and I, an orphan, began
looking upon him almost as a father. I was interested in chemistry. He
knew it, and did his best to help and encourage me in my studies.

* * * * *

There came an afternoon in the summer of 1956, when arriving at the
Kent house, I ran upon a startling scene. The only other member of the
household was a young fellow of twenty-five, named Franz Polter. He
was a foreigner, born, I understood, in one of the Balkan
Protectorates; and he was here, employed by Dr. Kent as laboratory
assistant. He had been with the Kents, at this time, two years. Alan
and Babs did not like him, nor did I. He must have been a clever,
skilful chemist. No doubt he was. But in aspect he was, to us,
repulsive. A hunchback, with a short thick body; dangling arms that
suggested a gorilla; barrel chest; a lump set askew on his left
shoulder, and his massive head planted down with almost no neck. His
face was rugged in feature; a wide mouth, a high-bridged heavy nose;
and above the face a great shock of wavy black hair. It was an
intelligent face; in itself, not repulsive.

But I think we all three feared Franz Polter. There was always
something sinister about him, quite apart from his deformity.

I came, that afternoon, upon Babs and Polter under a tree on the Kent
lawn. Babs, at fourteen with her long black braids down her back,
bare-legged and short-skirted in a summer sport costume, was standing
against the tree with Polter facing her. They were about of a height.
To my youthful imaginative mind rose the fleeting picture of a young
girl in a forest menaced by a gorilla.

I came upon them suddenly. I heard Polter say:

"But I lof you, And you are almos' a woman. Some day you lof me."

He put out his thick hand and gripped her shoulder. She tried to twist
away. She was frightened, but she laughed.

"You--you're crazy!"

He was suddenly holding her in his arms, and she was fighting him. I
dashed forward. Babs was always a spunky sort of girl. In spite of her
fear now, she kept on laughing, and she shouted:

"You--let me go, you--hunchback!"

He did let her go; but in a frenzy of rage he hauled back his hand and
struck her in the face. I was upon him the next second. I had him down
on the lawn, punching him; but though at seventeen I was a reasonably
husky lad, the hunchback with his thick, hairy gorilla arms proved
much stronger. He heaved me off. And then the commotion brought Alan.
Without waiting to find out what the trouble was, he jumped on Polter.
Between us, I think we would have beaten him pretty badly. But the
housekeeper summoned Dr. Kent and the fight was over.

* * * * *

Polter left for good within an hour. He did not speak to any of us.
But I saw him as he put his luggage into the taxi which Dr. Kent had
summoned. I was standing silently nearby with Babs and Alan. The look
he flung us as he drove away carried an unmistakable menace--the
promise of vengeance. And I think now that in his warped and twisted
mind he was telling himself that he would some day make Babs regret
that she had laughed at his love.

What happened that night none of us ever knew. Dr. Kent worked late in
his laboratory; he was there when Alan and Babs and the housekeeper
went to bed. He had written a note to Alan; it was found on his desk
in a corner of the laboratory next morning, addressed in care of the
family lawyer to be given Alan in the event his father died. It said
very little. Described a tiny fragment of gold quartz rock the size
of a walnut which would be found under the giant microscope in the
laboratory; and told Alan to give it to the American Scientific
Society to be guarded and watched very carefully.

This note was found, but Dr. Kent had vanished! There had been a
midnight marauder. The laboratory was on the lower floor of the house.
Through one of its open windows, so the police said, an intruder had
entered. There was evidence of a struggle, but it must have been
short, and neither Babs, Alan, the housekeeper nor any of the
neighbors heard anything amiss. And the fragment of golden quartz was
gone!

The police investigation came to nothing. Polter was found in New
York. He withstood the police questions. There was nothing except
suspicion upon which he could be held, and he was finally released.
Immediately, he disappeared.

Neither Alan, Babs nor I saw Polter again. Dr. Kent had never been
heard from to this day, four years later when I flew to join the twins
in Quebec. And now Alan had told me that Polter was up there! We had
never ceased to believe that Dr. Kent was alive, and that Polter was
the midnight marauder. And as we grew older, we began to search for
Polter. It seemed to us that now we were older, if we could once get
our hands on him, we could drag from him the truth in which the police
had failed.

* * * * *

The call of a traffic director in mid-Vermont brought me back from
these vivid thoughts. My buzzer was clanging; a peremptory
halting-signal day-beam came darting up at me from below. It caught me
and clung: I shouted down at it.

"What's the matter?" I gave my name and number and all the details in
a breath. Above everything I had no wish to be halted now. "What's the
matter? I haven't done anything wrong."

"The hell you haven't," the director roared. "Come down to three
thousand. That lane's barred."

I dove obediently and his beam followed me. "Once more like that,
young fellow--" But he went busy with somebody else and I didn't hear
the end of his threat.

I crossed into Maine in mid-afternoon. Twilight was upon me. The sky
was solid lead. The landscape all up through here was gray-white with
snow in the gathering darkness. I passed the city of Jackman, crossing
full over it to take no chances of annoying the border officials; and
a few miles further, I dropped to the glaring lights of the
International Inspection Field. The formalities were soon finished. I
was ready to take-away when Alan rushed at me.

"George! I thought I could connect here." He gripped me. He was
wild-eyed, incoherent. He waved his taxiplane away. "I'm going back
with my friend. George. I can't--I don't know what's happened to her.
_She's_ gone, now!"

"Who's gone? Babs?"

"Yes." He pushed me into my plane and climbed in after me. "Don't
talk. Get us up! I'll tell you then. I shouldn't have left."

When we were up in the air, I swung on him. "What are you talking
about? Babs gone?"

I could feel myself shuddering with a nameless horror.

"I don't know what I'm talking about, George. I'm about crazy. The
Quebec police think I am, anyway. I been raising hell with them for an
hour. Babs is gone. I can't find her. I don't know where she is."

* * * * *

He finally calmed down enough to tell me. Shortly after his radiophone
to me in New York, he had missed Babs. They had had lunch in the huge
hotel and then walked on the Dufferin Terrace--the famous promenade
outside looking down over the lower city, the great sweep of the St.
Lawrence River and the gray-white distant Laurentian mountains.

"I was to meet her inside. I went in ahead of her. But she didn't
come. I went back to the terrace and she was gone. Wasn't in our
rooms. Nor the lobby--nor anywhere."

But it was early afternoon, in the public place of a civilized city.
In the daylight of the Dufferin Terrace, beside the long ice toboggan
slide, under the gaze of skaters on the ice-rink and several hundred
holiday merrymakers, a young girl could hardly be murdered, or
forcibly abducted, without attracting some attention! The Quebec
police thought the young American unduly excited over his sister, who
was missing only an hour. They would do what they could, if by dark
she had not rejoined him. They suggested that doubtless the young lady
had gone shopping.

"Maybe she did," I agreed. But in my heart, I felt differently.
"She'll be waiting for us in the hotel when we get there, Alan."

"But I'm telling you we saw Polter this morning. He lives here--not
thirty miles from Quebec. We saw him on the terrace after breakfast.
Recognized him at once."

"Did he see you?"

"I don't know. He was lost in the crowd in a minute. But I asked a
young French fellow who it was. He knew him. Told me, Frank Raskor.
That's the name he wears now. He's a famous man up here--well known,
immensely rich. I don't know if he saw us or not. What a fool I was to
leave Babs alone, even for a minute!"

We were speeding over a white-clad valley with a little frozen river
winding down its middle. Almost full night had come. The leaden sky
was low above us. It began snowing. The lights of the small villages
along the river were barely visible.

"Can you land us, Alan?"

"Yes, surely. Municipal field just beyond the Citadel. We can get to
the hotel in five minutes. Good landing lights."

* * * * *

It was a flight of only half an hour. During it, Alan told me about
Polter. The hunchback, known now as Frank Rascor, owned a mine in the
Laurentides, some thirty miles from Quebec City--a fabulously
productive mine of gold. It was an anomaly that gold should be
produced in this region. No vein oL gold-bearing rock had been found,
except the one on Polter's property. Alan had seen a newspaper account
of the strangeness of it; and just upon the chance had come to Quebec,
seen Frank Rascor on the Dufferin Terrace, and recognized him as
Polter.

Again my thoughts went back into the past. Had Polter stolen that
missing fragment of golden quartz the size of a walnut which had been
beneath Dr. Kent's microscope? We always thought so. Dr. Kent had some
secret, some great problem upon which he was working. Polter, his
assistant, had evidently known, or partially known, its details. And
now, four years later, Polter was immensely rich, with a "gold mine"
in mountains where there was no other such evidence of gold!

I seemed to see some connection. Alan, I knew, was groping with a dim
idea, so strange he hardly dared voice it.

"I tell you, it's weird, George. The sight of him. Polter--heavens,
one couldn't mistake that hunchback--and his face, his features, just
the same as when we knew him."

"Then what's weird?? I demanded.

"His age." There was a queer solemn hush in Alan's voice. "George,
when we knew Polter, he was about twenty-five, wasn't he? Well, that
was four years ago. But he isn't twenty-nine now! I swear it's the
same man--but he isn't around thirty. Don't ask me what I'm talking
about. I don't know. But he isn't thirty. He's nearer fifty!
Unnatural! Weird! I felt it, and so did Babs, just that brief look we
had at him."

I did not answer. My attention was on managing the plane. The lights
of Sevis were under us. Beyond the city cliffs the St. Lawrence lay
in its deep valley; and the Quebec lights, the light-dotted ramparts
with the terrace and the great fortress-like hotel showed across the
river.

"Better take the stick, Alan. I don't know where the field is. And
don't you worry about Babs. She'll be back by now."

* * * * *

But she was not. We went to the two connecting rooms in the tower of
the hotel which Alan and Babs had engaged. We inquired with half a
dozen phone-calls. No one had seen or heard from her. The Quebec
police were sending a man up to talk to Alan.

"Well, we won't be here," Alan called to me. He was standing by the
window in Bab's room; he was trembling too much to use the phone. I
hung up the receiver and went through the connecting door to join him.

Bab's room! It sent a pang through me. A few of her garments were
lying around. A negligee was laid out on the dainty little bed. A
velvet boudoir doll--she had always loved them--stood on the dresser.
Upon this hotel room, in a day, she had impressed her personality. Her
perfume was in the air. And now she was gone.

"We won't be here," Alan was repeating. He gripped me at the window.
"Look!" In his hand was an ugly-looking, smokeless, soundless
automatic of the Essen type. "And I've got another, for you. Brought
them up with me."

His face was white and drawn, but his hands abruptly were steady. The
tremble was gone out of his voice.

"I'm going after him. George! Now! Understand that? Now! His place is
only thirty miles from here, out there in the mountains. You can see
it in the daylight--a wall around his property and a stone castle
which he built in the middle of it. A gold mine? Hell!"

There was nothing to be seen now out of the window but the
snow-filled darkness, the blurred lights of lower Quebec and the line
of dock-lights five hundred feet under us.

"Will you fly me, George?"

"Of course."

I was the one trembling now; the cool feel of the automatic which Alan
thrust into my hand seemed suddenly to crystallize Bab's danger. I was
here in her room, with the scent of her perfume around it, and this
deadly weapon was needed! But the trembling was gone in a moment.

"Yes. Of course, Alan. No use talking to the police. You can't get a
search warrant to ransack the castle of a rich man just because you
can't find your sister. Come on. You can tell me what his place is
like as we go."

* * * * *

Bundled in our flying suits we hurried from the hotel, climbed the
Citadel slope of the landing field, and in ten minutes were again in
the air. The wind sucked at us. The snow now was falling with thick
huge flakes. Directed by Alan, I headed out over the ice-filled St.
Lawrence, past the frozen Isle d'Orleans, toward Polter's mysterious
mountain castle.

Suddenly Alan burst out, "I know what father's secret was, George! I
can piece it together now, from little things that were meaningless
when I was a kid. He invented the electro-microscope. You know that.
The infinitely small fascinated him. I remember he once said that if
we could see far enough down into smallness, we would come upon human
life!"

Alan's low tense voice was more vehement than I had ever heard it
before. "It's clear to me now, George. That little fragment of golden
quartz which he wanted me to be so careful of contained a world with
human inhabitants! Father knew it, or suspected it. And I think the
chemical problem on which he was working aimed for some drug. I know
it was a drug they were compounding. Polter said so once, a
radio-active drug; I remember listening at the door. A drug, George,
capable of making a human being infinitely small!"

I did not answer when momentarily Alan paused. So strange a thing! My
mind whirled with it; struggled to encompass it. And like the
meaningless pieces of a puzzle, dropping so easily into place when the
key-piece is fitted. I saw Polter stealing that fragment of gold;
abducting Dr. Kent--perhaps because Polter himself was not fully
acquainted with the secret. And now, Polter, up here with a fabulously
rich "gold mine." And Babs, abducted by him, to be taken--where?

It set me shuddering.

"Alan!"

"That's what it was!" Alan reiterated. "And Polter, here now with what
he calls a 'mine.' It isn't a mine, it's a laboratory! He's got
father, too, hidden God knows where! And now Babs. We've got to get
them. George! The police can't help us! It's just you and me, to fight
this thing. And it's diabolical!"


CHAPTER II

_The Girl an Inch Tall_

We soared over the divided channel of the St. Lawrence, between
Orleans and the mainland. Montmorency Falls in a moment showed dimly
white through the murk to our left, a great hanging veil of ice higher
than Niagara. Further ahead, the lights of the little village of St.
Anne de Beaupre were visible with the gray-black, towering hills
behind them. Historic region! But Alan and I had no thoughts for it.

"Swing left, George. Over the mainland. That's St. Anne; we pass this
side of it. Put the mufflers on. This damn thing roars like a tower
siren."

I cut in the mufflers, and switched off our wing-lights. It was
illegal, but we were past all thought of that. We were both desperate;
the slow prudent process of acting within the law had nothing to do
with this affair. We both knew it.

Our little plane was dark, and amid the sounds of this night blizzard
our muffled engine could not be heard.

Alan touched me. "There are his lights; see them?"

We had passed St. Anne. The hills lay ahead--wild mountainous country
stretching northward to the foot of Hudson Bay. The blizzard was
roaring out of the north and we were heading into it. I saw, on what
seemed a dome-like hill perhaps a thousand feet above the river level,
a small cluster of lights which marked Polter's property.

"Fly over it once, George. Low--we can chance it. And find a place to
land outside the walls."

We presently had it under us. I held us at five hundred feet, and cut
our speed to the minimum of twenty miles an hour facing the gale,
though it was sixty or seventy when we turned. There were a score or
two of hooded ground lights. But there was little reflection aloft,
and in the murk of the snowfall I felt we would escape notice.

We crossed, turned and went back in an arc following Polter's outer
curved wall. We had a good view of it. A weird enough looking place,
here on its lonely hilltop. No wonder the wealthy "Frank Rascor" had
attained local prominence!

* * * * *

The whole property was irregularly circular, perhaps a mile in
diameter covering the almost flat dome of the hilltop. Around it,
completely enclosing it, Polter had built a stone and brick wall. A
miniature wall of China! We could see that it was fully thirty feet
high with what evidently were naked high-voltage wires protecting its
top. There were half a dozen little gates, securely barred, with
doubtless a guard at each of them.

Within the wall there were several buildings: a few small stone houses
suggesting workmen's dwellings; an oblong stone structure with smoke
funnels which seemed perhaps a smelter; a huge, dome-like spread of
translucent glass over what might have been the top of a mine-shaft.
It looked more like the dome of an observatory--an inverted bowl fully
a hundred feet wide and equally as high, set upon the ground. What did
it cover?

And, there was Polter's residence--a castle-like brick and stone
building with a central tower not unlike a miniature of the Chateau
Frontenac. We saw a stone corridor on the ground connecting the lower
floor of the castle with the dome, which lay about a hundred feet to
one side.

Could we chance landing inside the wall? There was a dark, level
expanse of snow where we could have done it, but our descending plane
would doubtless have been discovered. But the mile-wide inner area was
dark in many places. Spots of light were at the little wall-gates.
There was a glow all along the top of the wall. Lights were in
Polter's house; they slanted out in yellow shafts to the nearby white
ground. But for the rest, the whole place was dark, save a dim glow
from under the dome.

I shook my head at Alan's suggestion. "We couldn't land inside." We
had circled back and were a mile or so off toward the river. "You saw
guards down there. But that low stretch outside the gate on this
side--"

A plan was coming to me. Heaven knows it was desperate enough, but we
had no alternative. We would land and accost one of the gate guards.
Force our way in. Once inside the wall, on foot in the darkness of
this blizzard, we could hide; creep up to that dome. Beyond that my
imagination could not go.

* * * * *

We landed in the snow a quarter of a mile from one of the gates. We
left the plane and plunged into the darkness. It was a steady upward
slope. A packed snowfield was under foot, firm enough to hold our
shoes, with a foot or so of loose soft snow on its top. The falling
flakes whirled around us. The darkness was solid, Our helmeted
leather-furred flying suits were soon shapeless with a gathering white
shroud. We carried our Essens in our gloved hands. The night was cold,
around zero I imagine, though with that biting wind it felt far
colder.

From the gloom a tiny spot of light loomed up.

"There it is, Alan. Easy now! Let me go first." The wind tore away my
words. We could see the narrow rectangle of bars at the gate, with a
glow of light behind them.

"Hide your gun, Alan." I gripped him. "Hear me?"

"Yes."

"Let me go first. I'll do the talking. When he opens the gate, let me
handle him. You--if there are two of them--you take the other."

We emerged from the darkness, into the glow of light by the gate. I
had the horrible feeling that a shot would greet us. A challenge came,
at first in French, then in English.

"Stop! What do you want?"

"To see Mr. Rascor."

We were up to the bars now, shapeless hooded bundles of snow and
frost. A man stood in the doorway of a lighted little cubby behind the
bars. A black muzzle in his hand was leveled at us.

"He sees no one. Who are you?"

Alan was pressing at me from behind. I shoved back, and took a step
forward. I touched the bars.

"My name is Fred Davis. Newspaper man from Montreal. I must see Mr.
Rascor."

"You cannot. You may send in your call. The mouthpiece is there--out
there to the left. Bare your face; he talks to no one without the face
image."

* * * * *

The guard had drawn back into his cubby; there was only this extended
hand and the muzzle of his weapon left visible.

I took a step forward. "I don't want to talk by phone. Won't you open
the gate? It's cold out here. We have important business. We'll wait
with you."

Abruptly the gate lattice slid aside. Beyond the cubby doorway was the
open darkness within the wall. A scuffed path leading inward from the
gate showed for a few feet.

I walked over the threshold, with Alan crowding me. The Essen in my
coat pocket was leveled. But from the cubby doorway, I saw that the
guard was gone! Then I saw him crouching back of a metal shield. His
voice rang out.

"Stand!"

A light struck my face--a little beam from a television sender beside
me. It all happened in an instant, so quickly Alan and I had barely
time to make a move. I realized my image was now doubtless being
presented to Polter. He would recognize me!

I ducked my head, yelling: "Don't do that! You frighten me!"

It was too late! The guard had received a signal. I was aware of its
buzz.

From the shield a tiny jet of fluid leaped at me. It struck my hood.
There was a heavy, sickening-sweet smell. It seemed like chloroform. I
felt my senses going. The cubby room was turning dark; was roaring.

I think I fired at the shield. And Alan leapt aside. I heard the faint
hiss of his Essen. And his choked, horrified voice:

"George--come back! Run! Don't fall! Don't!"

I crumpled; slid into blackness. And it seemed, as I went down, that
Alan's inert body was falling on top of me....

* * * * *

I recovered consciousness after a nameless interval, a phantasmagoria
of wild, drugged dreams. My senses came slowly. At first, there were
dim muffled voices and the tread of footsteps. Then I knew that I was
lying on the ground, and that I was indoors. It was warm. My overcoat
was off. Then I realized that I was bound and gagged.

I opened my eyes. Alan was lying inert beside me, roped and with a
black gag around his face and in his mouth. We were in a huge dim open
space. Presently, as my vision cleared, I saw that the dome was
overhead. This was a circular, hundred-foot-wide room. It was dimly
lighted. The figures of men were moving about, their great misshapen
shadows shifting with them. Twenty feet from me there was a pile of
golden rock--chunks of gold the size of a man's fist, or his head, and
larger, heaped loosely into a mound ten feet high.

Beyond this pile of ore, near the center of the room, twenty feet
above the concrete floor, there was a large hanging electrolier. It
cast a circular glow downward. Under it I saw a low platform raised a
foot or two above the ground. A giant electro-microscope was hung with
its twenty-foot cylinder above the platform. Its intensification tubes
were glowing in a dim phosphorescent row on a nearby bracket. A man
sat in a chair on the platform at the microscope's eyepiece.

I saw all this with a brief glance, then my attention went to a white
stone slab under the giant lense. It rested on the platform floor, a
two-foot-square surface of smooth white stone like marble. A little
roped railing a few inches high fenced it. And in its center lay a
fragment of golden quartz the size of a walnut!

There was a movement across my line of vision. Two figures advanced. I
recognized both of them. And I strained at my bonds; mouthed the gag
with futile, horrified effort. I could no more than writhe; and I
could not make a sound. I lay, after a moment exhausted, and stared
with horror.

The familiar hunched figure of Polter advanced toward the microscope.
And with him, his huge hand holding her wrists, was Babs. They were
nearly fifty feet from me, but with the light over them I could see
them clearly. Bab's slim figure was clad in a long skirted dress--pale
blue, now, with the light on it. Her long black hair had fallen
disheveled to her shoulders. I could not see her face. She did not cry
out. Polter was half dragging her as she resisted him; and then
abruptly she ceased struggling.

I heard his gutteral voice. "That iss better."

* * * * *

They mounted to the platform. It seemed to me that they must have been
far away; they were very small. Abnormally small. I blinked. Horror
surged over me. Their figures were dwindling as they stood there!
Polter was saying something to the man at the microscope. Other men
were nearby, watching. All normal, save Polter and Babs. A moment
passed. Polter was standing by the chair in which the man at the
microscope was sitting. And Polter's head barely reached its seat!
Babs was clinging to him, now. Another moment. They were both little
figures down by the chair-leg. Then they began walking with swaying
steps toward the tiny railing of the white slab. The white reflection
from the slab plainly illumined then. Polter's arm was around Babs. I
had not realized how small they were until I saw Polter lift the rope
of the four-inch little fence, and he and Babs stooped and walked
under it. The fragment of quartz lay a foot from them in the center of
the white surface. They walked unsteadily toward it. But soon they
were running.

My horrified senses whirled. Then abruptly I felt something touch my
face! Alan and I were lying in shadow. No one had noticed my writhing
movements, and Alan was still in drugged unconsciousness. Something
tiny and light and soundless as a butterfly wing brushed my face! I
jerked my head aside. On the floor, within six inches of my eyes, I
saw the tiny figure of a girl an inch high! She stood, with a warning
gesture to her lips--a human girl in a filmy flowing drapery. Long
pale golden tresses lay on her white shoulders; her face, small as my
little fingernail, colorful as a miniature painted upon ivory, was so
close to my eyes that I could see her expression--warning me not to
move.

There was a faint glow of light on the floor where she stood, but in a
moment she moved out of it. Then I felt her brush against the back of
my head. My ear was near the ground. A tiny warm hand touched my
ear-lobe; clung to it. A tiny voice sounded in my ear.

"Please do not move your head! You might kill me!"

There was a pause. I held myself rigid. Then the tiny voice came
again.

"I am Glora, a friend. I have the drug! I will help you!"


CHAPTER III

_The Fight in the Shrinking Dome Room_

It seemed that Alan was stirring. I felt the tiny hand leave my ear. I
thought that I could hear faint little footfalls as the girl scampered
away, fearful that a sudden movement from Alan would crush her. I
turned cautiously after a moment and saw Alan's eyes upon me. He too
had seen, with a blurred returning consciousness, the dwindling
figures of Babs and Polter. I followed his gaze. The white slab with
the golden quartz under the microscope seemed empty of human movement.
The several men in this huge circular dome-room were dispersing to
their affairs: three of them sat whispering by what I now saw was a
pile of gold ingots stacked crosswise. But the fellow at the
microscope held his place, his eye glued to its aperture as he watched
the vanishing figures of Polter and Babs on the rock-fragment.

Alan seemed trying to convey something to me, He could only gaze and
jerk his head. I saw behind his head the figure of the tiny girl on
the floor behind him. She wanted evidently to approach his head but
did not dare. When for an instant he was quiet, she ran forward, but
at once scampered back.

From the group by the ingots, one of the men rose and came toward us.
Alan held still, watching. And the girl, Glora, seized the opportunity
to come nearer. We both heard her tiny voice:

"Do not move! Close your eyes! Make him think you are still
unconscious."

Then she was gone, like a mouse hiding in the shadows near us.

Amazement swept Alan's face; he twisted, mouthed at his gag. But he
saw my eager nod and took his cue from me.

* * * * *

I closed my eyes and lay stiff, breathing slowly. Footsteps
approached. A man bent over Alan and me.

"Are you no conscious yet?" It was the voice of a foreigner, with a
queer, indescribable intonation. A foot prodded us. "Wake up!"

Then the footsteps retreated, and when I dared to look the man was
rejoining his fellows. It was a strange-looking trio. They were
heavy-set men in leather Jackets and short, wide knee-length trousers.
One wore tight, high boots, and the others a sort of white buskin,
with ankle straps. All were bareheaded--round, bullet heads of
close-dipped black hair.

I suddenly had another startling realization. These men were not of
normal size as I had assumed! They were eight or ten feet tall at the
very least! And they and the pile of ingots, instead of being close to
me, were more distant than I had thought.

Alan was trying to signal me. The tiny girl was again at his ear,
whispering to him. And then she came to me.

"I have a knife. See?" She backed away. I caught the pin-point gleam
of what might have been a knife in her hand. "I will get a little
larger. I am too small to cut your ropes. You lie still, even after I
have cut them."

I nodded. The movement frightened her so that she leaped backward; but
she came again, smiling. The three men were talking earnestly by the
ingots. No one else was near us.

Glora's tiny voice was louder, so that we both could hear it at once.

"When I free you, do not move or they may see that you are loose. I
get larger now--a little larger--and return."

* * * * *

She darted away and vanished. Alan and I lay listening to the voices
of the three men. Two were talking in a strange tongue. One called to
the man at the microscope, and he responded. The third man said
suddenly:

"Say, talk English. You know damn well I can't understand that lingo."

"We say, McGuire, the two prisoners soon wake up."

"What we oughta do is kill 'em. Polter's a fool."

"The doctor say, wait for him return. Not long--what you call three,
four hours."

"And have the Quebec police up here lookin' fer 'em? An' that damn
girl he stole off the terrace--What did he call her, Barbara Kent?"

"These two who are drugged, their bodies can be thrown in a gully down
behind St. Anne. That what the doctor plan to do, I think. Then the
police find them--days maybe from now--and their smashed airship with
them."

Gruesome suggestion!

The man at the microscope called, "They are gone. Almost. I can hardly
see them more." He left the platform and joined the others. And I saw
that he was much smaller than they--about my own size possibly.

There seemed six men here altogether. Four now, by the ingots, and two
others far across the room where I saw the dark entrance of the
corridor-tunnel which led to Polter's castle.

Again I felt a warning hand touch my face, and saw the figure of Glora
standing by my head. She was larger now--about a foot tall. She moved
past my eyes; stood by my mouth; bent down over my gag. I felt the
cautious side of a tiny knife-blade inserted under the fabric of the
gag. She hacked, tugged at it, and in a moment ripped it through.

She stood panting from the effort. My heart was pounding with fear
that she would be seen; but the man had turned the central light off
when he left the microscope, and it was far darker here now than
before.

* * * * *

I moistened my dry mouth. My tongue was thick, but I could talk.

"Thank you, Glora."

"Quiet!"

I felt her hacking at the ropes around my wrists. And then at my
ankles. It took her a long time, but at last I was free! I rubbed my
arms and legs; felt the returning strength in them.

And presently Alan was free. "George, what--" he began.

"Wait!" I whispered. "Easy! Let her tell us what to do."

We were unarmed. Two, against these six, three of whom were giants.

Glora whispered, "Do not move! I have the drugs. But I can no give
them to you when I am still so small. I have not enough. I will
hide--there." Her little arm gestured to where, near us, half a dozen
boxes were piled. "When I am large as you, I come back. Be ready,
quickly to act. I may be seen. I give you then the drug."

"But wait," Alan whispered. "We must know--"

"The drug to make you large. In a moment then you can fight these men.
I had planned it for myself, to do that, and then I saw you held
captive. That girl of your world the doctor just now steal, she is
friend of yours?

"Yes! Yes, Glora. But--" A thousand questions were springing in my
mind, but this was no time to ask them. I amended, "Go! Hurry! Give us
the drug when you can."

The little figure moved away from us and disappeared. Alan and I lay
as we had before. But now we could whisper. We tried to anticipate
what would happen; tried to plan, but that was futile. The thing was
too strange, too astoundingly fantastic.

* * * * *

HOW long Glora was gone I do not know. I think, not over three or four
minutes. She came from her hiding place, crouching this time, and
joined us. She was, probably, of normal Earth size--a small,
frail-looking girl something over five feet tall. We saw now that she
was about sixteen years old. We lay staring at her, amazed at her
beauty. Her small oval face was pale, with the flush of pink upon her
cheeks--a face queerly, transcendently beautiful. It was wholly human,
yet somehow unearthly, as though unmarked by even the heritage of our
Earthly strifes.

"Now! I am ready." She was fumbling at her robe. "I will give you each
the same."

Her gestures were rapid. She flung a quick glance at the distant men.
Alan and I were tense. We could easily be discovered now, but we had
to chance it. We were sitting erect. He murmured:

"But what do we do? What happens? What--"

On the palm of her hand were two small pink-white pellets. "Take
these--one for each of you. Quickly!"

Involuntarily we drew back. The thing abruptly was gruesome,
frightening. Horribly frightening.

"Quickly," she urged. "The drug is what you call highly radio-active.
And volatile. Exposed to the air it is gone very soon. You are afraid?
No! No, it will not harm you."

With a muttered curse at his own reluctance, Alan seized the pellet. I
stopped him.

"Wait!"

* * * * *

The men momentarily were engaged in a low-voiced, earnest discussion.
I dared to hesitate a moment longer.

"Glora, where will you be?"

"Here. Right here. I will hide."

"We want to go after Mr. Polter." I gestured. "Into that little piece
of golden rock. Is that where he went? Is that where he took the Earth
girl?"

"Yes. My world is there--within an atom there in that rock."

"Will you take us?"

"Yes! Yes!"

Alan whispered suddenly, "Then let us go now. Get smaller, now."

But she shook her head vehemently. "That is not possible. We would be
seen as we climbed the platform and crossed the white slab."

"No." I protested. "Not if we get very small, hiding here first."

She was smiling, but urgently fearful of this delay. "Should we get
that small, then it would be, from here"--she gestured toward the
microscope--"to there, a journey of very many miles. Don't you
understand?"

This thing so strange!

Alan was plucking at me. "Ready, George?"

"Yes."

I put the pellet on my tongue. It tasted slightly sweet, but seemed
quickly melted and I swallowed it hastily. My head swam. My heart was
pounding, but that was apprehension, not the drug. A thrill of heat
ran through my veins as though my blood were on fire.

Alan was clinging to me as we sat together. Glora again had vanished.
In the background of my whirling consciousness the sudden thought
hovered that she had tricked us; done to us something diabolical. But
the thought was swept away in the confusion of the flood of
impressions upon me.

I turned dizzily. "All right, Alan?"

"Yes, I--I guess so."

My ears were roaring, the room seemed whirling, but in a moment that
passed. I felt a sudden, growing sense of lightness. A humming was
within me--a soundless tingle. To every tiny microscopic cell in my
body the drug had gone. The myriad pores of my skin seemed thrilling
with activity. I know now it was the exuding volatile gas of this
disintegrating drug. Like an aura it enveloped me, acted upon my
garments.

* * * * *

I learned later much of the principles of this and its companion drug.
I had no thought for such things now. The huge dimly illumined room
under the dome was swaying. Then abruptly it steadied. The strange
sensations within me were lessening, or I forgot them. And I became
aware of externals.

The room was shrinking! As I stared, not with horror now, but with
amazement and a coming triumph, I saw everywhere a slow, steady,
crawling movement. The whole place was dwindling. The platform, the
microscope, were nearer than before, and smaller. The pile of ingots,
with the men off there, was shifting toward me.

"George! My God--weird!"

I saw Alan's white face as I turned to him. He was growing at the same
rate as myself evidently, for of all the scene he only was unchanged.

We could feel the movement. The floor under us was shifting, crawling
slowly. From all directions it came, contracting as though it were
being squeezed beneath us. In reality our expanding bodies were
pushing outward.

The pile of boxes which had been a few feet away, were thrusting
themselves at me I moved incautiously and knocked them over. They
seemed small now, perhaps half their former size. Glora was standing
behind them. I was sitting and she was standing, but across the
litter, our faces were level.

"Stand up!" she murmured. "You all right now. I hide!"

I struggled to my feet, drawing Alan up with me. Now! The time for
action was upon us! We had already been discovered. The men were
shouting, clambering to their feet. Alan and I stood swaying. The
dome-room had contracted to half its former size. Near us was a little
platform, chair and microscope. Small figures of men were rushing at
us.

I shouted, "Alan! Watch yourself!"

* * * * *

We were unarmed. These men might have automatics. But evidently they
did not. Knives were in their hands. The whole place was ringing with
shouts. And then a shrill siren alarm from outside was clanging.

The first of the men--a few moments before he had seemed a
giant--flung himself upon me. His head was lower than my shoulders. I
met him with a blow of my fist in his face. He toppled backward; but
from one side, another figure came at me. A knife-blade bit into the
flesh of my thigh.

The pain seemed to fire my brain. A madness descended upon me. It was
the madness of abnormality. I saw Alan with two dwarfed figures
clinging to him. But he threw them off, and they turned and ran.

The man at my thigh stabbed again, but I caught his wrist and, as
though he were a child, whirled him around me and flung him away. He
landed with a crash against the shrunken pile of gold nuggets and lay
still.

The place was in a turmoil. Other men were appearing from outside. But
they stood now well away from us. Alan backed against me. His laugh
rang out, half hysterical with the madness upon him as it was upon me.

"God! George, look at them! So small!"

They were now hardly the height of our knees. This was now a small,
circular room, under a lowering concave dome. A shot came from the
group of pigmy figures. I saw the small stab of flame, heard the sing
of the bullet.

We rushed, with the full frenzy of madness upon us, enraged giants.
What actually happened I can not recount. I recall scattering the
little figures; seizing them; flinging them headlong. A bullet, tiny
now, stung the calf of my leg. Little chairs and tables under my feet
were crashing. Alan was lunging back and forth; stamping; flinging his
tiny adversaries away. There were twenty or thirty of the figures
here now. Then I saw some of them escaping.

The room was littered with wreckage. I saw that by some miracle of
chance the microscope was still standing, and I had a moment of
sanity.

"Alan, watch out! The microscope! The platform--don't smash it! And
Glora! Look out for her!"

* * * * *

I suddenly became aware that my head and a shoulder had struck the
dome roof. Why, this was a tiny room! Alan and I found ourselves
backed together, panting in the small confines of a circular cubby
with an arching dome close over us. At our feet the platform with the
microscope over it hardly reached our boot-tops. There was a sudden
silence, broken only by our heavy breathing. The tiny forms of humans
strewn around us were all motionless. The others had fled.

Then we heard a small voice. "Here! Take this! Quickly! You are too
large! Quickly!"

Alan took a step. And then a sudden panic was on us both. Glora was
here at our feet. We did not dare turn; hardly dared move. To stoop
might have crushed her. My leg hit the top of the microscope cylinder.
It rocked but did not fall.

Where was Glora? In the gloom we could not see her. We were in a
panic.

Alan began, "George, I say--"

The contracting inner curve of the dome bumped gently against my head.
The panic of confusion which was upon us turned to fear. The room was
closing in to crush us.

I muttered. "Alan! I'm going out!" I braced myself and heaved against
the side and top curve of the dome. Its metal ribs and heavy
translucent, reinforced glass plates resisted me. There was an instant
when Alan and I were desperately frightened. We were trapped, to be
crushed in here by our own horrible growth. Then the dome yielded
under our smashing blows. The ribs bent; the plates cracked.

We straightened, pushed upward and emerged through the broken dome,
with head and shoulders towering into the outside darkness and the
wind and snow of the blizzard howling around us!


CHAPTER IV

_The Journey Into Smallness_

"Glora, that--that was horrible."

We stood, again in normal size, with the wrecked dome-laboratory
around us. The dome had a great jagged hole halfway up one of its
sides, through which the snow was falling. The broken bodies strewn
around were gruesome.

Alan repeated, "Horrible, Glora. This drug, the power of it, is
diabolical."

Glora had grown large after us; had given us the companion drug. I
need not detail the strange sensations of our dwindling. We were so
soon to experience them again!

We had searched, when still large, all of Polter's grounds. Some of
his men undoubtedly escaped, made off into the blizzard. How many, we
never knew. None of them ever made themselves known again.

We were ready to start into the atom. The fragment of golden quartz
still lay under the microscope on the white square of stone slab. We
had hurried with our last preparations. The room was chilling. We were
all inadequately dressed for such cold.

I left a note scribbled on a square of paper by the microscope. With
daylight, Polter's wrecked place would be discovered. The police would
come.

"Guard this piece of golden quartz. Take it at once, very carefully,
to the Royal Canadian Scientific Society. Have it watched day and
night. We will return."

I signed it George Randolph. And as I did so, the extraordinary aspect
of these events swept me anew. Here in Polter's weird place I had
seemed living in some strange fantastic realm. But this was the
Province of Quebec, in civilized Canada. These were the Quebec
authorities I was addressing.

I flung the thoughts away. "Ready, Glora?"

"Yes."

* * * * *

Then doubts assailed me. None of Polter's men had gotten large to
fight us. Evidently he did not trust them with the drug. We could well
believe that, for the thing, misused, was diabolical beyond human
conception. A single giant, a criminal, a madman, by the power of
giant size alone, could devastate the earth! The drug, lost, or
carelessly handled, could get loose. Animals, insects, eating it,
could roam the earth, gigantic monsters! Vegetation, nourished with
it, might in a day overrun a great city, burying it with a jungle
growth!

How terrible a thing, if the realm of smallness were suddenly to
emerge! Monsters of the sea, marine organisms, could expand until even
the ocean was too small for them. Microbes of disease, feeding upon
this drug--

Alan was gripping me. "We're ready, George."

"Yes. Yes, I'm ready."

This was not largeness we were facing now, but smallness. I thought of
Babs, down there with Polter, beyond the vanishing point in the realm
of the infinitely small. They had been gone an hour at least. Every
moment lost now was adding to Bab's danger.

"Yes. I'm ready, Alan."

Glora sat with us on the platform. Strange little creature! She was
wholly calm now; methodical with her last directions. There had been
no time for her to tell us anything about herself. Alan had asked her
why she had come here and how she had gotten the drugs. She waved him
away:

"On the journey down. Plenty of time, then."

"How long?" Alan demanded.

"Not too long. If we are careful with managing the trip, what you
might call ten hours."

* * * * *

And now as we were ready to start, she told us calmly:

"I will give you each your share of the drugs, but them you take only
as I tell you."

She produced from her robe several small vials a few inches long. They
were tightly stoppered. The feel of them was cool and sleek; they
seemed of some strange, polished metal. Some of them were tinted black
while the others glowed opalescent. She gave each of us one vial of
each kind.

"The light ones are for diminishing," she said. "We take them very
carefully, one small pellet only at first."

Alan was opening one of his, but she checked him.

"Wait! The drug evaporates very quickly. I have more to say, first. We
sit here together. Then you follow me to the white slab. We climb upon
the little rock."

She laid her hands on our arms. Her blue eyes regarded us earnestly.
Her manner was naive; childlike. But I could not mistake her
intelligence; the force of character stamped on her face for all its
dainty, ethereal beauty.

"Alan--" She smiled at him, and tossed back a straying lock of her
hair which was annoying her. "You pay attention, Alan. You are very
young, reckless. You listen. We must not be separated. You understand
that, both of you? We will be always in that little piece of rock. But
there will be miles of distance. And to be lost in size--"

Strange journey upon which now we were starting! Lost in size?

"You understand me? Lost in size. If that happens, we might never find
each other. And if we come upon the Doctor Polter and the girl he
holds captive--if we can overtake them--"

"We must!" I exclaimed. "And we must start, Glora!"

"Yes. Now!"

* * * * *

She showed us which pellet to select. They were of several sizes, I
found. And as she afterward told us, the larger ones were not only
larger but of an intensified strength. We took the smallest. It was
barely a thousandth part of the strength of the largest. In unison we
placed the pellets on our tongues, and hastily swallowed.

The first sensations were as before. And, familiar now, they caused no
more than a fleeting discomfort. But I think I could never get used to
the outward strangeness!

The room in a moment was expanding. I could feel the platform floor
crawling outward beneath me, so that I had to hitch and change my
position as it pulled. We were seated together, Alan and I on each
side of Glora. My fingers were on her arm. It did not change size, but
it slowly drew away with a space opening between us. Overhead, the
dome-roof, the great jagged hole there, was receding, lifting, moving
upward and away.

Glora pulled us to our feet. "We had better start now. The distance is
so far, so quickly."

We had been sitting within five feet of the stone slab with its little
four-inch-high railing around it. A chair was by the microscope
eyepiece. As we stood swaying I saw that the chair was huge, and its
seat level with my head. The great barrel-cylinder of the microscope
slanted sixty feet upward. The dome-roof was a distant spread three
hundred feet up in the dimness. This gigantic room! It was a vast
arena now.

Alan and I must have hesitated, confused by the expanding scene--a
slow steady movement everywhere. Everything was drawing away from us.
Even as we stood together, the creeping platform floor was separating
us.

A moment passed. Glora was urging vehemently:

"Come! You must not stand!"

We started walking. The railing around the slab was knee-high. The
slab itself was a broad square surface. The fragment of golden quartz
lay in its center. It was now a jagged lump nearly a foot in
diameter!

* * * * *

The platform seemed shifting as we walked; the railing hardly came
closer as we advanced toward it. Then suddenly I realized it was
receding. Thirty feet away? No, now it was more than that--a great,
thick rope, waist-high, with a huge spread of white surface behind it.

"Faster!" urged Glora. We ran, and reached the railing. It was higher
than our heads. We ran under it, and out upon the white slab--a level
surface, larger now than the whole dome-room had been.

Glora, like a fawn ran in advance of us, her draperies flying in the
wind. She turned to look back.

"Faster! Faster--or it will be too hard a climb!"

Ahead lay a golden mound of rock. It was widening; raising its top
steadily higher. Beyond it and over it was a vast dim distance. We
reached the rock, breathless, winded. It was a jagged mound like a
great fifty-foot butte. We plunged upon it, began climbing.

The ascent was steep; precipitous in places. There were little
gullies, which expanded as we climbed up them. It seemed that we
should never reach the top, but at last we were there. I was aware
that the drug had ceased its action. The yellow rocky ground was no
longer expanding.

We came to the summit and stood to get back our breath. And Alan and I
gazed with awe upon the top of a rocky hill. Little buttes and strewn
boulders lay everywhere. It was all naked rock, ridged and pitted, and
everywhere yellow-tinged.

Overhead was distance. I could not call it a sky. A blur was
there--something almost but not quite distinguishable. Then I thought
that I could make out a more solid blur which might be the lower lens
of the microscope above us. And there were blurred, very distant spots
of light, like huge suns masked by a haze, and I knew that they were
the hooded lights of the laboratory room.

* * * * *

Before us, over the brink of a five hundred-foot cliff, a great
glistening white plain stretched into the distance. I seemed to see
where it ended in a murky blur. And far higher than our own hilltop
level a horizontal streak marked the rope railing of the slab.

"Well," said Alan, "we're here." He gazed behind us, back across the
rocky summit which seemed several hundred feet across to its opposite
brink. He was smiling, but the smile faded. "Now what, Glora? Another
pellet?"

"No. Not yet. There is a place where we go down. It is marked in my
mind."

I had a sudden ominous sense that we three were not alone up here.
Glora led us back from the cliff. As we picked our way among the naked
crags, it seemed behind each of them an enemy might be lurking.

"Glora, do you know if any of Dr. Polter's men have the drug? I mean,
do they come in and out here?"

She shook her head. "I think not. He lets no one have the drug. He
trusts not any one. I stole it; I will tell you later. Much I have to
tell you before we arrive."

Alan made a sudden sidewise leap, and dashed around a rock. He came
back to us, smiling ruefully.

"Gets on your nerves, all this. I had the same idea you did, George.
Might be someone around here. But I guess not." He took Glora's hand
and they walked in advance of me. "We haven't thanked you yet, Glora."

"Not needed. I came for help from your world. I could not get back to
my own, and I followed the Doctor Polter when he came outward. He has
made my world, my people, his slaves. I came for help. And because I
have helped you needs no thanks."

"But we do thank you, Glora." Alan turned his flushed, earnest face
back to me. I thought I had never seen him so handsome, with his
boyish, rugged features, and shock of tousled brown hair. The grimness
of adventure was upon him, but in his eyes there was something else.
It was not for me to see it. That was for Glora; and I think that even
then its presence and its meaning did not escape her.

"Stay close, George."

"Yes."

* * * * *

We reached a little gully near the center of the hilltop. It was some
twenty feet deep. Glora paused.

"We descend here."

The gully was an unmistakable landmark--open at one end, forty feet
long, with the other end terminating in a blind wall, smoothly
precipitous. We retraced our steps, entered the gully at its open end,
and walked its length. Glora paused by the wall which now loomed above
us.

"A pit is here--a hole. I cannot tell just how large it will look when
we are in this size."

We found and stood over it--a foot-wide circular hole extending
downward. Alan abruptly knelt and shoved his hand and arm into it, but
Glora sprang at him.

"Don't do that!"

"Why not? Is this it? How deep is it?"

She retorted sharply, "The Doctor Polter is ahead of us. How far away
in size, who knows? Do you want to crush him, and crush that young
girl with him?"

Alan's jaw dropped. "Good Lord!"

We stood with the little pit before us, and another of the pellets
ready.

"Now!" said Glora.

Again we took the drug, a somewhat larger pellet this time. The
familiar sensations began. Everywhere the rocks were creeping with a
slow inexorable movement, the landscape expanding around us. The gully
walls drew back and upward. In a moment they were precipice
cliff-walls and we were in a broad valley.

We had been standing close together. We had not moved except to shift
our feet as the expanding ground drew them apart. I became aware that
Alan and Glora were a distance from me. Glora called:

"Come, George! We go down, quickly now."

* * * * *

We ran to the pit. It had expanded to a great round hole some six feet
wide and equally as deep. Glora let herself down, peered anxiously
beneath her, and dropped. Alan and I followed. We jammed the pit; but
as we stood there, the walls were receding and lifting.

I had remarked Glora's downward glance, and shuddered. Suppose, in
some slightly smaller size, Babs had been here among these rocks!

The pit widened steadily. The movement was far swifter now. We stood
presently in a great circular valley. It seemed fully a mile in
diameter, with huge encircling walls like a crater rim towering
thousands of feet into the air. We ran along the base of one expanding
wall, following Glora.

I noticed now that overhead the turgid murk had turned into the blue
of distance. A sky. It was faintly sky-blue, and there seemed a haze
in it, almost as though clouds were forming. It had been cold when we
started. The exertion had kept us fairly comfortable; but now I
realized that the air was far warmer. It was a different air, more
humid, and I thought the smell of moist earth was in it. Rocks and
boulders were strewn here on the floor of this giant valley, and I saw
occasional pools of water. There had been rain recently!

The realization came with a shock of surprise. This was a new world! A
faint, luminous twilight was around us. And then I noticed that the
light was not altogether coming from overhead. It seemed inherent to
the rocks themselves. They glowed very faintly luminous, as though
phosphorescent.

We were now well embarked upon this strange journey. We spoke seldom.
Glora was intent upon guiding us. She was trying to make the best
possible speed. I realized that it was a case of judgment, as well as
physical haste. We had dropped into that six-foot pit. Had we waited a
few moments longer, the depth would have been a hundred feet, two
hundred, a thousand! It would have involved hours of arduous
descent--if we had lingered until we were a trifle smaller!

* * * * *

We took other pellets. We traveled perhaps an hour more. There were
many instances of Glora's skill. We squeezed into a gully and waited
until it widened; we leaped little expanding caverns; we slid down a
smooth yellowish slide of rock like a child's toboggan, and saw it
behind and over us, rising to become a great spreading ramp extending
upward into the blue of the sky. Now, up there, little sailing white
clouds were visible. And down where we stood it was deep twilight,
queerly silvery with the phosphorescence from the luminous rocks as
though some hidden moon were shining.

Strange, new world! I suddenly envisaged the full strangeness of it.
Around me were spreading miles of barren, naked landscape. I gazed off
to where, across the rugged plateau we were traversing, there was a
range of hills. Behind and above them were mountains; serrated tiers,
higher and more distant. An infinite spread of landscape! And, as we
dwindled, still other vast reaches opened before us. I gazed overhead.
Was it--compared to my stature now--a thousand miles, perhaps even a
million miles up to where we had been two or three hours ago? I think
so.

Then suddenly I caught the other viewpoint. This was all only an inch
of golden quartz--if one were large enough to see it that way!

Alan had been trying to memorize the main topographical features of
our route. It was not as difficult as it seemed at first. We were
always far larger than normal to our environment. The main
distinguishing characteristics of the landscape were obvious--the
blind gully, with the round pit, for instance, or the ramp-slide.

We had been traveling some three or four hours when Glora suggested a
rest. We were at the side-wall of a broad canyon. The wall towered
several hundred feet above us; but a few moments before we had jumped
down it with a single leap!

* * * * *

The drug we had last taken had ceased its action. We sat down to rest.
It was a wild, mountainous scene around us, deep with luminous gloom.
We could barely see across the canyon to its distant cliff-wall. The
wall beside us had been smooth, but now it was broken and ridged.
There were ravines in it, and dark holes like cave-mouths. One was
near us. Alan gazed at it apprehensively.

"I say, Glora. I don't like sitting here."

I had been telling her all we knew of Polter. She listened quietly,
seldom interrupting me. Then she said:

"I understand. I tell you now about Polter as I have seen him."

She talked for five or ten minutes. I listened amazed, awed by what
she told.

But Alan suddenly interrupted her. "I say, let's move away from here.
That tunnel-mouth, or cave, whatever it is--"

"But we go in there," she protested. "A little tunnel. That is our way
to travel. We are not far from my city now."

Perhaps Alan felt what a generation ago they called a hunch, a
premonition, the presage of evil which I think comes strangely to us
more often than we realize. Whatever it was, we had no time to act
upon it. The tunnel-mouth which had caused Alan's apprehension was
about a hundred feet away. It was a ten-foot, black yawning hole in
the cliff. Perhaps Alan sensed a movement off there. As I turned to
gaze, from the opening came a great hairy human arm! Then a shoulder!
A head!

The giant figure of a man came squeezing through the hole on his
hands and knees! He gathered himself, and as he stood erect, I saw
that he was growing in size! Already he was twenty feet tall compared
to us--a thick-set fellow, dressed in leather garments, his legs and
bare arms heavily matted with black hair. He stood swaying, gazing
around him. I stared up at his round bullet head, his villainous face.

He saw us! Stupid amazement struck him, then comprehension.

He let out a roar and came at us!


CHAPTER V

_The Message from Polter_

Glora shouted, "Into the tunnel! This way!" She held her wits and
darted to one side, with Alan and me after her. We ran through a
narrow passage between two fifty-foot boulders which lay close
together. Momentarily the giant was out of sight, but we could hear
his heavy tread and his panting breath. We emerged; had passed him. He
was taller now. He seemed confused at our sudden scampering activity.
He checked his forward rush, and ran around the twin boulders. But we
had squeezed into a narrow ravine. He could not follow. He threw a
rock: to us it was a boulder. It crashed behind us. To him, we were
like scampering insects; he could not tell which way we were about to
dart.

Alan panted, "Glora, this--does this lead out?"

The little ravine seemed to open fifty feet ahead of us. Alan stopped,
seized a chunk of rock, flung it up. I saw the giant's face above us.
He was kneeling, trying to reach in. The rock hit him in the
forehead--a pebble, but it stung him. His face rose away.

Again we emerged. The tunnel-mouth was near us. We reached it and
flung ourselves into its ten-foot width just as the giant came lunging
up. He was far larger than before. Looking back, I could see only the
lower part of his legs blocked against the outer light.

"Glora! Alan, where are you?"

For a moment I did not see them. It was darker in this tunnel; broken
rocky walls, a jagged arching roof ten feet high. Then I heard Alan's
voice.

"George! Here!"

They came running to me. For a moment we stood, undecided what to do.
My eyes were growing accustomed to the darkness; it was illumined by a
dim phosphorescence from the rocks. I saw Alan fumbling for his vials,
but Glora stopped him.

"No! We are the right size."

* * * * *

We were a hundred feet back from the opening. The giant's legs
disappeared. But in a moment the round light hole of the exit was
obscured again. His head and shoulders! He was lying prone. His great
arms came in. He hitched forward. The width of his expanding shoulders
wedged.

I think that he expected to reach us with a single snatch of his
tremendous arms. Or perhaps he was confused, and forgot his growth. He
did not reach us. His shoulders stuck. Then suddenly he was trying to
back out, but could not!

It was only a moment. We stood in the radiant gloom of the tunnel,
clinging to each other, ourselves stricken by confusion. The giant's
voice roared, reverberating around us. Anger. A note of fear. Finally
stark terror. He heaved, but the rocks of the opening held solid. Then
there was a crack, a gruesome rattling, splintering--his shoulder
bones breaking. His whole gigantic body gave a last convulsive lunge,
and he emitted a deafening shrill scream of agony.

I was aware of the tunnel-mouth breaking upward. Falling rocks--an
avalanche, a cataclysm around us. Then light overhead.

The giant's crushed body lay motionless. A pile of boulders, rocks and
loose metallic earth was strewn upon his head and torso, illumined by
the outer light through a jagged rent where the cliff-face had fallen
down.

We were unhurt, crouching back from the avalanche. The giant's mangled
body was still expanding; shoving at the litter of loose rocks. In a
moment it would again be too large for the broken cliff opening.

I found my wits. "Alan! Out of here--God! Don't you see--"

* * * * *

But Glora held us. The drug the giant had taken was about at its end,
and Glora recognized it. The growth presently stopped. That huge,
noisome mass of pulp which once had been human shoulders--

I shoved Glora away. "Don't look!" I was shaking; my head was reeling.
Alan's face, painted by the phosphorescence, was ghastly.

Glora pulled at us. "This way! The tunnel is not too long. We go."

But the giant had drugs. And perhaps weapons. "Wait!" I urged. "You
two wait here. I'll climb over him."

I told them why, and ran. I can only leave to the imagination that
brief exploratory climb. The broken body seemed at least a hundred
feet long; the mangled shoulders and chest filled the great torn hole
in the cliff. I climbed over the litter. Indescribable, horrible
scene! A river of warm blood was flowing down the declivity
outside....

I came back to Glora and Alan. Under my arm was a huge cylinder vial.
It was black--the enlarging drug. I set it down. They stared at me in
my blood-stained garments.

"George! You're--"

"His blood, not mine, Alan." I tried to smile. "There's the drug he
carried. Evidently Polter was only sending him out. Just the one
drug."

"What'll we do with it?" Alan demanded. "Look at the size of it!"

"Destroy it," said Glora. "See, that is not difficult." She tugged at
the huge stopper, and exposed a few of the pellets--to us as large as
apples. "The air will soon spoil it."

We left it in the tunnel. I had brought a great roll of paper; had
found it folded in the giant's belt, with the drug cylinder. We
unrolled it, and hauled its folds to a spread some ten feet long. It
was covered with a scrawled handwriting in pencil, but its giant
characters seemed thick blurred strokes of charcoal. We could not read
it; we were too close. Alan and Glora held it up against the tunnel
wall. From a distance I could make it out. It was a note written in
English, signed "Polter," evidently to one of his men.

I read it:

"The two men prisoners, kill them at once. That is better. It will be
too dangerous to wait for my return. Put their bodies with their
airplane. Crash it a mile or more from our gate."

Full directions for our death followed. And Polter said he would
return by dawn or soon after.

* * * * *

It gave me a start. By dawn! We had been traveling four or five hours.
The dawn was up there now!

"No," said Glora. She and Alan cast away the paper. "No, the time in
here is different. A different time-rate. I do not know how much
difference. My world speeds faster; yours is very slow. It is not the
dawn up there quite yet."

Again my mind strove to encompass these things so strange. A faster
time-rate prevailed in here? Then our lives were passing more quickly.
We were living, experiencing things, compressed into a shorter
interval. It was not apparent; there was nothing to which comparison
could be made. I recalled Alan's description of Polter--not thirty
years old as he should have been, but nearer fifty. I could understand
that, now. A day in here--while our gigantic world outside might only
have progressed a few hours.

We walked the length of the tunnel. I suppose it was a quarter of a
mile, to us in this size. It wound through the cliff with a steady
downward slope. And suddenly I realized that we had turned downward
nearly half the diameter of a circle! We had turned over--or at least
it seemed so. But the gravity was the same. I had noticed from the
beginning very little change.

The realization of this turning brought a mental confusion. I lost all
sense of direction. The outer world of Earth was under my feet,
instead of overhead. Then we went level. I forgot the confusion; this
was normality here. We turned upward a little. Cross tunnels
intersected ours at intervals. I saw caverns, open, widened tunnels,
as though this mountain were honeycombed.

"Look!" said Glora. "There is the way out. All these passages lead the
same way."

* * * * *

There was a glow of light ahead. I recall that I was at that moment
fumbling at my belt in two small compartments of which I was carrying
the two vials of the drugs which Glora had given me. Alan wore the
same sort of belt. We had found them in the wrecked dome-room. I heard
a click on the ground at my feet. I was about to stoop to see what I
had kicked--only a loose stone, perhaps--but Glora's words distracted
me. I did not stoop. If only I had, how different events might have
been!

The glow of light ahead of us widened as we approached, and presently
we stood at the end of the tunnel. A spread of open distance was
outside. We were on a ledge of a rocky, precipitous wall some fifty
feet above a wide level landscape. Vegetation! I saw trees--a forest
off to the left. A range of naked hills lay behind it. A mile away, in
front and to the right, a little town nestled on the shore of shining
water. There was starlight on the water! And over it a vast
blue-purple sky was studded with stars!

I gazed, with that first sudden shock of emotion, into illimitable
depths of interplanetary space! Light years of distance. Gigantic
worlds, blazing suns off there shrunken by distance now to little
points of light. A universe was here!

But this was an inch of golden quartz!

Above my head were stars which, compared to my bodily size now, were
vast worlds ten thousand light-years away! Yet, from the other
viewpoint, I had only descended perhaps an eighth or a quarter of an
inch beneath the broken pitted surface of a little fragment of golden
quartz the size of a walnut--into just one of its myriads of golden
atoms!


CHAPTER VI

_The Girl in the Golden Cage_

"My world," Glora was saying. "You like it? See the starlight on the
lake? I have heard that your world looks like this at night, in
summer. Ours is always like this. No day, no night. Just like
this--starlight." Her hand went to Alan's shoulder. "You like it? My
world?"

"Yes. Yes, Glora, It's beautiful."

There seemed a sheen on everything, a soft, glowing sheen of
phosphorescence from the rocks rising to meet the pale wan starlight.
The night air was soft, with a gentle breeze that rippled the distant
lake into a great spread of gold and silver light.

The city was called Orena. I saw at once that we were about normal
size to its houses and people. There were fields beneath our ledge,
with farm implements lying in them; no workers, for this was the time
for sleep. Ribbons of roads wound over the country, pale streamers in
the starlight.

Glora gestured. "The giants are on their island. Everyone sleeps now.
You see the island off there?"

Beyond the city, over the low stone roofs of its flat-topped
dwellings, the silver spread of lake showed a green-clad island some
three miles off shore. The distance made its white stone houses seem
small. But as I gazed, I realized that they were large to their
environment, all far larger than those of the little town. The island
was perhaps a mile in length. Between it and the mainland a boat was
coming toward us. It was a dark blob of hull on the shining water, and
above it a queerly shaped circular sail was puffed out like a
balloon-parachute by the wind.

* * * * *

"The giants live, there?" said Alan.

"You mean Polter's men?"

"And women. Yes."

"Are there many giants?"

"No."

"How many?" I put in. "How large are they? In relation to us now, I
mean. And to your normal size?"

I turned to Alan. "Polter and Babs must be down there now! They must
have arrived only recently. But we must determine what size to be
before we go any further. We can't be gigantic If he sees us--if we
assailed him--well, he'd kill Babs. We're got to plan. Glora tell
us--"

"You ask so many questions so fast, George. There are two hundred or
more of the giants. And there are more than that many thousands of our
people here. Slaves, because the giants are four times as large. This
little city, these fields, these hills of stone and metal, all this
was ours to have in peace and happiness--until your Polter came. And
that starlight on the water--"

She gestured. "Everywhere is a great reach of desert and forests.
Insects, but there are no wild beasts--nothing to harm us. Nature is
kind here. The weather is always like this. We were happy--until
Polter came."

"And only a few thousand people," Alan said. "No other cities?"

"What lies off in the great distance we do not know. Our nation is ten
times what is here. A few other cities, though some of our people live
in the forests--"

She broke off. "That boat is coming for Polter. He is in the city, no
doubt of that. The boat will take him and that girl you call Babs to
the giant's island. His castle is there."

* * * * *

If we could get on that boat and go with him to the island--! But in
what size? Very small? But then, if we were very small it would take
us hours to get from here to the boat. Glora pointed out where it
would land--just beyond the village where the houses were set in a
sparse fringe. It would be there, apparently, in ten or fifteen
minutes. Polter was probably there now with Babs, waiting for it.

In our present size we could not get there in time. It was two or
three miles at least. But a trifle larger--the size of one of Polter's
giants--would enable us to make it. We would be seen, but in the pale
starlight, keeping away from the city as much as possible, we might
only be mistaken for Polter's people. And when we got closer we would
diminish our size, creep into the boat, get near Babs and Polter and
then plan what to do.

Futile plans! All of life is so futile, so wind-swept upon the tossing
sea of chance!

We climbed down from the ledge and stood at the base of the towering
cliff which reared its jagged wall against the stars. A field and a
road were near us. The road seemed of normal size. A man was across
the field. He did not seem to notice us. He was apparently about my
height. He presently discarded his work, went away from us and
vanished.

"Hurry, Glora." Alan and I stood beside her while she took pellets
from her vials. It needed a careful adjustment. We wanted our stature
now to be four times what it was. Glora gave us pellets of both drugs,
one of which was slightly more intense than the other.

"Polter made them this way," she said. "The two at once gives just the
growth to take us from this normal size to the stature of the giants."

Alan and I did not touch our own vials. We had used none of our
enlarging drug upon the journey; the supply she had given us of the
other was nearly gone.

* * * * *

As I took these pellets which Glora now gave us, standing there by the
side of that road, I recall that I was struck with the realization
that never once upon this journey had I conceived myself to be other
than normal stature. I am normally about six feet tall. I still
felt--there in that golden atom--the same height. This landscape
seemed of normal size. There were trees nearby--spreading, fantastic
looking growths with great strings of pods hanging from them. But
still, as I looked up to see one arching over me with its blue-brown
leaves and an air-vine carrying vivid yellow blossoms--whatever the
size of the tree, my consciousness could only conceive myself as of a
normal six-foot stature standing beneath it. The human ego always is
supreme! Around each man's consciousness of himself the entire
universe revolves!

We crouched on the ground when this growth now began; it would not do
to be observed changing size. Polter's giants never did that. Years
before, he had made them large--his few hundred men and women. They
were, Glora said, people both of this realm and from our great world
above--dissolute, criminal characters who now had set themselves up
here as the nucleus of a ruling race.

In a moment now, we were the size of these giants. Twenty to
twenty-five feet tall, in relation to this environment. But I did not
feel so. As I stood up--still myself in normal stature--I saw around
me a shrunken little landscape. The trees, as though in a Japanese
garden, were about my own height; the road was a smooth level path:
the little field near us a toy fence around it. In another road across
it, the man was walking. In height he would barely have reached my
knees. He saw us rise beside the trees. He darted off his road in
alarm, and disappeared.

* * * * *

I have taken longer to tell all this than the actual time which
passed. We could see the boat coming from the island, and it was still
a fair distance off shore. We ran along the road, skirting the edge of
the little town. Its houses were none of them taller than ourselves.
The windows and doorways were ovals into which we could only have
inserted a head or an arm. They were most of them dark. Little people
occasionally stared out, saw us run past, and ducked back, thankful
that we did not stop to harass them.

"This way," said Glora. She ran like a fawn, hardly winded, with Alan
and me heavily panting behind her. "There are trees--thick
trees--quite near where the boat lands. We can get in them and hide
and change our size to smallness. But hurry, for we will need so much
time when we are small!"

The little spread of town and the shining lake remained always to our
right. In five minutes we were past most of the houses. A patch of
woods, with thick interlacing treetops about our own height, lay
ahead. It extended a few hundred feet over to the lake shore. The
sailboat was heading in close. There was a broad, starlit roadway at
the edge of the lake, and a dock there at which the boat was preparing
to land.

Would we be in time? I suddenly feared not. To get small now, with
distance lengthening between us and the boat, would be disastrous. And
where was Polter?

Abruptly we saw him. There had been only little people visible to us;
none of our own height. The lake roadway by the dock was brightly
starlit. As we approached the intervening patch of woods it seemed
that a crowd of little people were near the dock. Polter must have
been sitting. But now he rose up. We could not mistake his hunched
thick figure, the lump on his shoulders clear in the starlight with
the gleaming lake as a background. The crowd of little figures were
milling around his knees. In the silence of the night the murmur of
their voices floated over to us.

"There he is!" Alan gasped. We all three checked our running; we were
at the edge of the patch of woods. "By God, there he is! Let's get
larger! Rush him! Why that's only a few hundred feet over there!"

But Babs? Where was Babs?

"Alan! Down!" I crouched, pulling Alan and Glora with me. "Don't let
him see us! He'd know at once--and where is Babs? Can't rush him,
Alan. He'd see us coming--kill her--"

* * * * *

Of all the strange events which had been flung at us, I think this
sudden crisis now most confused Alan and me. To get larger, or
smaller? Which? Yet something must be done at once.

Glora said, "We can get through the woods best in this size. And not
be seen--get closer to the landing."

We crouched so that the little treetops were always well over us. The
patch of woods was dark. A soil of black loam was under us, a thick
soft underbrush reached our knees, and lacy, flexible leaves and
branches were at our shoulder height. We pushed them aside, forcing
our way softly forward. It was not far. The little murmuring voices of
the crowd grew louder.

Presently we were crouching at the other edge of the woods. I softly
shoved the tree branches aside until we could all three get a clear
view of the strange scene now directly before us.

And I saw a toy dock, at which a twenty-foot, barge-like open sailboat
was landing; a narrow starlit roadway, crowded with a milling throng
of people all no more than a foot and a half in height. The crowd
milled almost to where we were crouching, unseen in the shrubbery.

Across the road by the dock. Polter stood with the crowd down around
his knees. In height he seemed the old familiar Polter. Bareheaded,
with his shaggy black hair shot with white. He was dressed in Earth
fashion: narrow black evening trousers and a white shirt and collar
with flowing black tie. I saw at once what Alan had noticed--the
change in him. An abnormality of age. I would have called him now
forty, or older. Beyond even that there was an abnormality. A man old
before his time; or younger than he should have been for the years he
had lived. An indescribable mingling of something. The mingling, of
the two worlds, perhaps. It marked him with a look at once unnatural
and sinister.

These were instant impressions. Glora was plucking at me. "On the
white chest of his shirt, something is there."

* * * * *

Polter was coatless, with snowy white shirt and cuffs to his thick
wrists. He was no more than fifty feet from us. On his shirt bosom
something golden in color was hanging like a large bauble, an
ornament, an insignia. It was strapped tightly there with a band about
his chest, a cord like a necklace chain up to his thick hunched neck,
and other chains down to his belt.

I stared at it. An ornament, like a cube held flat against his
shirt-front--a little golden cube, ornate with tiny bars.

I heard Alan murmuring, "A cage! Why George, it's--"

And then, simultaneously, realization struck me. It was a golden cage
strapped there. And I seemed to see that there was something in it. A
tiny figure? Babs!

"I think he has her there," Glora murmured. "You see the little box
with bars? The girl Babs, a prisoner in there." She spoke swiftly,
vehemently. "He will take the boat to the island."

She suddenly gripped us. "You think really it best to go? I do what
you say. I had the wish to get to my father with these drugs."

"No!" exclaimed Alan. "We must keep close to Polter!"

We were ready with our pellets. But a sudden activity in the road made
us pause. The crowd of little people were hostile to Polter. A sullen
hostility. They milled about him as he stood there, gazing down at
then sardonically.

And abruptly he shouted at them in English. "You speak my language,
some of you. Then listen."

The crowd fell silent.

"Listen. This iss your future Queen. Can you see her? She iss small
now. But she has the magic power. Soon, she will be large. Like me."

The crowd was shouting again. It surged forward, but it lacked a
leader, and those in advance shoved backward in fear.

Polter spoke again. "This girl from my world, you will like her. She
iss kind and very beautiful. When she iss large, you will see how
beautiful."

A little stone suddenly came up from the throng of little people and
struck Polter on the shoulder. Then another. The crowd, emboldened,
made a rush; surged against his legs.

He shouted, "You do that? Why how dare you? I show to you what giants
do when you make dem angry!"

From down by his knees he plucked the small figure of a man. The crowd
scattered with shouts of terror. Polter had the struggling
eighteen-inch figure by the wrist. He whirled it around his head like
a nine-pin and flung it over the canopy of the dock far out into the
shimmering lake!


CHAPTER VII

_Within the Golden Cage_

The trees around us expanded to towering forest giants. The underbrush
rose up over our heads. We had taken only a taste of the diminishing
drug; Glora showed us how to touch it to our tongue several times, to
adjust our size as we became smaller. It was no more than a minute of
diminishing. We could hear the roar of the crowd, and Polter's voice
shouting. We ran forward through the great forest. It was a fair
distance out to the starlit road. We saw it as a wide shining
esplanade. The people now were giants twice our height! Polter,
himself towering with a seeming fifty foot stature, was standing by
the gigantic canopy of the dock. He had dispersed the crowd. There was
an open space on the esplanade--a run for us of about a hundred feet.

"We've got to chance it!" I murmured. "Make a run of it--now."

We darted across. In the confusion, with all eyes centered on Polter,
we escaped discovery. It was dim under the dock canopy. Polter had
backed from the road and was walking to the barge. It lay like the
length of an ocean liner, its sail looming an enormous spread above
it. The gunwale was level with the dock-floor. A dozen or more
fifty-foot men were greeting Polter. They were amidships.

I realize now that in those moments as we scurried aboard like wharf
rats, we took wild chances. We made for the stern which momentarily
was unoccupied. To Polter and his men we were eight or nine inches
tall. We dropped over the gunwale, slid down the convex thirty or
forty-foot incline of the interior and landed on the bottom of the
boat.

There were many places where we could safely hide. A litter of
gigantic rope-strands was around us. We could see the bottom of a
cross-bench looming overhead, and the great curving sides of the
vessel with the gunwales outlined against the starlight.

* * * * *

The boat left the dock in a moment; the sail bellied out enormous over
us. Ten feet forward from us the towering figure of a man sat on a
bench with the steering mechanism before him. Further on, the other
men were dispersed, with one or two in the distant bow. Polter
reclined on a cushioned couch amidships. Looking along the dark widely
level bottom of the boat there were only the feet and legs of the men
visible.

Alan whispered, "Let's get closer."

We were insects soundlessly scuttling unnoticed in the dimness. And it
was noisy down here--the clank of the steering mechanism; the swish,
and surge of the water against the hull; the voices of the men.

We passed the boots of the seated helmsmen, and found another hiding
place nearer Polter. We could see his giant length plainly. None of
the other men were near him. He was reclining on an elbow, stretched
at ease on the cushion. And at the moment, he was fumbling with the
chains that fastened the little golden cage to his chest. The cage was
double its former size to us now. A shaft of pale light came down,
reflected from the great sail surface overhead. It struck the bars of
the cage. We could see a small figure in there.

Babs!

Then we heard Polter's voice. "I will let you out, Babs. You come out,
sit on my hand and talk with me. That will be nice? We haf a little
time."

He unfastened the cage and put it on the cushion beside him. He was
still propped up on one elbow.

"I let you out, now. Be careful, Babs."

My heart was almost smothering me. "Alan! We've got to get still
closer! Try something! Get large, shall we?"

Alan whispered tensely, "I don't know! Oh, I don't know what to do!
This thing--"

This thing so strange.

"We can get closer," Glora whispered. "But never larger--not here.
They would discover us too soon."

* * * * *

We crept forward. We reached the edge of the cushion. Its top surface
was a trifle lower than our heads--a billowing, wrinkled mass of
fabric. But I saw that the folds of it were rough enough to afford a
foothold. I thought that I could climb it. We stood erect. There was a
deep shadow along here, but it was brighter on the cushion top. We
could see over its edge; an undulating spread of surface with the
giant length of Polter stretched there. The cage was nearer to us.
Polter's great fingers fumbled with it; a door in the lattice bars
flipped open.

"Careful, my Babs!" His voice was a throaty, rumbling roar from above
us. "Careful! I do not want you to be hurt."

From the little doorway came the figure of Babs! The starlight glowed
on her long blue dress; her black hair was tumbling over her
shoulders; her face was pale, but she was unhurt.

Babs! I think that I had never loved her so much as at that moment.
Nor ever seen her so beautiful as in that miniature, standing at the
door of her golden cage, bravely facing the monstrous misshapen figure
of her captor.

We heard her small voice.

"What do you want me to do?"

"Stand quiet. Now I put my hand for you."

His monstrous hand bristled with a thatch of heavy black hair. He
brought it carefully sliding along the cushion. Babs was barely the
length of one of its finger joints. She climbed upon its palm.

"That iss right, Babs. Now I bring you--hold tight to my finger. Here,
I crook the little one. Fling your arms around it."

With a swoop his hand took her aloft and away. Then we saw her, twenty
feet or so in the air, still on his hand as he held it near his face.

"Now we haf a little talk, Babs. When we get to the island, I put you
back in your cage."

* * * * *

I had a sudden flash of realization. Something I could do. I did not
plan it. I know now my judgment was bad. I recall it struck me that
Alan would want to do it also. And, perhaps, even Glora. That would
not work. My chances, however desperate, were better alone. And Glora
and Alan--in our present size-could doubtless disembark safely. Glora
knew the lay-out of the island. She could follow Polter.

Alan and Glora were standing beside me, peering over that billowing
cushion spread toward the distant giant palm with Babs standing upon
it. I gripped Alan's shoulder.

"See here, Alan," I whispered vehemently, "whatever happens, we must
follow Polter. Glora knows the way. Some chance will come. What we
want is an opportunity to get large without discovery. Then rush
Polter!"

Alan's white face turned to me. "Yes, that's what we're planning. But
George, here on this boat--"

"Of course. Can't do it here. Tell Glora, be sure and follow Polter.
Whatever happens, you think of nothing else: you won't, will you?"

"George, what--"

"We've got to make some opportunity." I was trembling inside, fearful
that Alan would be suspicious of me. Yet I had to make sure that he
and Glora would stay as close to Polter as possible.

"Yes," Alan agreed. "Listen to them."

Polter was talking to Babs. But I did not hear the words. I moved a
trifle away. Rash decision! I hardly decided anything. There was only
the vision of Babs before me; my love for her. And my desperate need
of doing something; getting to her; seeing her, being with her; having
her near my own size again as though the blessed normality of that
would rationalize and lessen her danger. If only I had been less rash!
If only back there in that tunnel I had stopped to see what it was my
foot kicked against!

* * * * *

I slid away. Alan and Glora did not notice it; they were whispering
together and gazing over the cushion at Babs. In the floor shadow I
moved some ten feet. On the undulating top of the cushion the little
golden cage stood with its lattice door open! It was only a few feet
from my face.

I fumbled at my belt for the diminishing vial. I found one pellet
left. Well, that would be enough. I was hurried. Alan might discover
me. Polter might move; put Babs back in the cage and close its door.
We might be near the island already, and the confusion, the activity
of disembarking would defeat me. A thousand things might happen.

I touched the pellet to my tongue. In a few seconds the drug action
had come and passed. The cushion top loomed well over my head. The
side was a ridged, indescribably unnatural vista of cliff-wall. The
fabric was coarse with hairy strands, dented into little ravines and
crevices. I climbed. I came panting to the pillow surface. The golden
cage was six or eight feet away and was now two feet high.

Again I touched the drug to my tongue; held it an instant. The cage
drew away; grew to a normal six-foot height; then larger, until in a
moment it stopped. I stood peering at it, trying to gauge its size in
relation to me. I wanted so intensely now to be normal to Babs. The
cage seemed about ten feet high. A little less, possibly. I barely
tasted the pellet, and replaced it carefully in the vial. I could only
hope its efficacy would be preserved.

I had to chance that I would not be seen now crossing this billowy
expanse. I ran. The rope strands of the fabric now had spaces between
their curving surfaces. The cage was a shining golden house, set on
this wide rolling area. Far in the distance there was a blur--Polter's
reclining body.

I reached the cage. It was a room about ten feet square and equally as
high. Walled solid, top and bottom, and on three sides. The front was
a lattice of bars, with a narrow six-foot-high doorway, standing open
now.

I dashed in. The interior was not wholly bare. There was a
metal-wrought couch fastened to the wall, with a railing around it and
handles. It suggested a ship's bunk. There was a railing at convenient
height all around the wall.

I sought a hiding place. I saw just one--under the couch. It was
secluded enough. There was a grille-like lattice extending down from
the seat to the floor. I squeezed under one end, and lay wedged behind
the grille.

* * * * *

How much time passed I do not know. My thoughts were racing. Babs
would be coming.

I heard the distant approaching rumble of Polter's voice. Through the
grille I could see across the floor of the ten-foot cage to the front
lattice bars. Outside, there appeared a huge, pink-white, mottled
blob--Polter's hand, a ridged and pitted surface with great bristling
black stalks of hair.

The figure of Babs came through the cage doorway. Blessed normality!
The same slim little Babs who always stood, since we were both
matured, with her head about level with my shoulders.

The latticed door swung shut with a reverberating metallic clank. Babs
stood tense, clinging to the wall railing. I heard the blurred rumble
of Polter's voice.

"Hold tightly, my little Babs!"

The room lurched; went upward and sidewise with a wild dizzying swoop.
Babs clung; and I was wedged prone under the couch. Then the movement
stopped; there was a jolting, rocking, and outside I heard the clank
of metal. Polter was fastening the chains of the cage to his chest.

A white reflected glow now came through the bars. It was starlight
reflected from Polter's shirt bosom. An abyss of distance was outside.
I could see nothing but the white glow.

Momentarily there was very little movement to the room. Only the
rhythmic sway of Polter's breathing and an occasional jolt as he
shifted his position. The floor was tilted at a sharp angle. Babs came
toward the couch, pulling herself along the wall railing.

I called softly, "Babs! Babs, dear!"

She stopped. I called again, "Babs! Don't cry out! It's George!
Here--stand still!"

She gave a little cry. "George--where are you? I don't--"

I slid out from my concealment and stood up, holding to the railing.

"Babs, dear."

Blessed normality of size! She cried again, "George! You! George,
dear--"

She edged along the railing, a step or two down the tilting floor,
then released her hold and flung herself into my waiting arms.

* * * * *

"I think we are landing. Hold the railing, George. When the room moves
it goes with a rush."

Babs laughed softly. It must have seemed to her, after being alone in
here, that now our plight was far less desperate. She had told me how
she was captured. A man accosted her on the terrace, saying he wanted
to speak to her about Alan. Then a weapon threatened her. Amid all
those people she was held up in old fashioned style, hurried to a
taxicar and whirled away.

She was saying now, "When Polter moves, it is dizzying. You'll see."

"I have already, Babs. Heavens, that swoop!"

The room was more level now. We carefully drew ourselves to the front
lattice. Polter was standing, and we had the white sheen from his
shirt-front. A sheer drop was outside the bars, but looking down I
could see the outlines of his body with the huge spread of the boat
interior underneath us.

A confusion of rumbling voices sounded. Blurred giant shapes were
outside. The room jolted and swayed as the boat landed and Polter
disembarked.

Babs stood clinging to me. Blessed normality of size! We, at least,
were normal--this metal barred room, Babs and I. But outside was the
abnormality of largeness. I think that in relation to us, the men were
of over two hundred foot stature, and the hunched Polter a trifle
less. It seemed as he walked that we were lurching at least a hundred
and fifty feet above the ground.

"You had better hide," Babs urged. "He might stop and speak to
someone. If anyone peered in here you would be seen: no chance then,
even to get across the room."

* * * * *

It was true. But for a few moments I lingered, though I could
distinguish vegetation on their flat roof-tops, as though
flower-gardens were laid there.

We passed a house with its hundred-foot oval windows all aglow with
light. Music floated out--a distant blare of musical sounds, and the
ribald laughter of giant voices. I had seen no women among these
giants of the islands. But now a huge face was at one of the ovals. A
dissolute, painted woman of Earth, staring out at Polter as he passed.
It was like the enormous close-up image on a large motion picture
screen. She shouted a ribald jest as he went by.

"George, please go back. Suppose she had seen you?"

We were ascending a hill. A distance ahead a great oblong building
loomed like a giant's palace, which indeed it was. We headed for it,
passed through a vast arching doorway into the greater dimness of an
echoing interior. I scurried back across the lurching room and again
wedged myself under the couch. Babs stood at the lattice ten feet
away. We dared to talk in low tones; the rumbling voices and footsteps
outside would make our tiny voices inaudible to Polter.

I was tense with my plans. I had told them to Babs. With the one
partially used remaining pellet of the diminishing drug we could make
ourselves small enough to walk out through the bars. Then my black
vial of the enlarging chemicals, as yet unused, would take us up, out
to our own world. We could not use the drugs now. But the chance might
come when Polter would set the cage on the ground, or somewhere so
that we might climb down from it, with a chance to hide and get large
before we were discovered. I would fight our way upward; all I needed
was a fair start in size.

* * * * *

But I lay now with doubts assailing me. This was the first moment I
had had for calm thoughts, though in truth they were far from calm!
Where were Alan and Glora? Following us now? I could only hope so.
Once out of this, Babs and I would have to rejoin them. But how? A
panic swept me. I should not have left them. Or at least I should have
told them what I was trying, and given Alan a chance to plan.

The panic grew upon me, the premonition of disaster. From my belt I
took the opalescent vial with its one partly used pellet. I dumped the
pellet out. It was spoiling! The former exposure of the air, the
moisture of my tongue, had ruined it! I had no need to guess at the
catastrophe; as I held its crumbling, deliquescing fragments on my
palm it melted into vapor and was gone!

We could not make ourselves smaller! We would have to wait now until
Polter opened the cage. But once outside, the enlarging drug would
give us our chance to fight our way upward. My trembling fingers
sought the black vial in my belt. It was not there! My mind flung
back: in that tunnel, something had dropped and I had kicked it!
Accursed chance! My accursed, heedless stupidity!

I had lost the black vial! We were helpless! Caged! Marooned here in a
size microscopic!


CHAPTER VIII

_From a Drop of Water_

I lay concealed, and Babs stood at the lattice of our cage room. I was
aware that Polter had entered some vast apartment of this giant
palace. A brighter light was outside; I heard voices--Polter's and
another man's. I could see the distant monster shape of one. He was at
first so far away that all his outline was visible. A seated man, in a
huge white room. I thought there were great shelves with enormous
bottles. The spread of table tops passed under our cage as Polter
walked by them. They held a litter of apparatus, and there was the
smell of chemicals in the air. It seemed that this was a laboratory.

The man stood up to greet Polter. I had a glimpse of his head and
shoulders level with us. He wore a white linen coat, open, soft collar
and black tie. He seemed an old man, queerly old, with snow-white
hair....

I had an instant of whirling, confused impressions. Something was
familiar about his face. It was seamed and wrinkled with lines of age
and care. There were gentle blue eyes.

Then all I could see was the vast spread of his white shirt and coat,
a black splotch of his tie outside our bars as Polter faced him.

Babs gave a low cry. "Why--why--dear God--"

And then I knew! And Polter's words were not needed, though I heard
their rumble.

"I am back again, Kent. Are you still rebellious? You haf still
determined to compound no more of our drugs? You would rather I killed
you? Then see what I haf here. This little cage, someone--"

It was Dr. Kent, a prisoner here all these years!

Babs turned her white face toward me. "George, it's father! He's
alive! Here!"

"Quiet, Babs! Don't let them know I'm here. Remember!"

The old man recognized her. "Babs!" It was an agonized cry. The blur
of him was gone as he sank down into his chair.

Polter continued standing. I could envisage his sardonic grin. Babs
was calling:

"Father, dear! Father!"

From over us came Polter's rumble. "She iss glad to see you, Kent. I
haf her here, safe. You always knew I would nefer be satisfied until I
had my little Babs? Well, now I haf her. Can you hear me?"

A sudden desperate calmness fell on Babs. She called evenly, "Yes, I
hear you. Father, do not anger him. Do not rebel; do what he commands.
Dr. Polter, will you let me be with my father? After all these years,
let me be with him, just for a little while. In his size--normal."

"Hah! My Babs iss scheming."

"No! I want to talk to him, after so long. These years when I thought
he was dead."

"Scheming. You think, my little Babs, that he has the drugs? I am not
so much a fool. He makes them. He can do that, and the last secret
reactions only he can perform. He iss stubborn. Never would he tell me
that one reaction. But he makes no drugs complete, only when I am
here."

"No, Dr. Polter! I want only to be with him."

The old man's broken voice floated up to us. "You will not harm her,
Polter?"

"No. Fear nothing. But you no longer rebel?"

"I will do what you tell me." The tones carried hopeless resignation,
years of being beaten down, rebelling--but now this last blow
vanquished him. Then he spoke again, with a sudden strange fire.

"Even for the life of my daughter, I will not make your drugs, Polter,
if you mean to harm our Earth."

The golden cage room swooped as Polter sat down. "Hah! Now we bargain.
What do you care what I do to your world? You never will see it again.
I can lie to you. My plans--"

"I do care."

"Well, I will tell you, Kent. I am good natured now. Why should I not
be, with my dear little Babs? I tell you. I am done with the Earth
world. It iss so much nicer here. My friends, they haf a good time
always. We like this little atom realm. I am going out once more. I
must hide the little piece of golden quartz so no harm will come to
it."

* * * * *

Polter was evidently in a high good humor. His voice fell to an
intimate tone of comradeship; but still I could not mistake the irony
of it.

"You listen to me, Kent. There was a time, years ago, when we were
good friends. You liked your young assistant, the hunchback Polter.
Iss it not so? Then why should we quarrel now? I am gifing up the
Earth world. I wanted of it only the little Babs.... You look at me so
strange! You do not speak."

"There is nothing to say," retorted Dr. Kent wearily.

"Then you listen. I haf much gold above, in Quebec. You know that. So
very simple to take it out of our atom, grow large with it, to what we
call up there the size of a hundred feet. I haf a place, a room,
secluded from prying eyes under a dome-roof. I become very tall,
holding a piece of gold. It is large when I am a hundred feet tall. So
I haf collected much gold. They think I own a mine. I haf a smelter
and my gold quartz I make into ingots, refined to the standard purity.
So simple, and I am a rich man.

"But gold does not bring happiness, my friend Kent." He chuckled
ironically at his use of the platitude. "There is more in life than
the ownership of gold. You ask my plans. I haf Babs, now. I am gifing
up our Earth world. The mysterious man they know as Frank Rascor will
vanish. I will hide our little fragment of quartz. No one up there
will even try to find it. Then I come down here, with Babs, and we
will haf so nice a little government and rule this world. No more of
the drugs then will be needed, Kent. When you die, let the secret die
with you."

Again Polter's voice turned ingratiating, even more so than before.
"We will be friends, Kent. Our little Babs will lof me; why should
she not? You will tell her--advise her--and we will all three be very
happy."

Dr. Kent said abruptly, "Then leave her with me now. That was her
request, a moment ago. If you expect to treat her kindly, then why
not--"

"I do! I do! But not now. I cannot spare her now. I am very busy, but
I must take her with me."

* * * * *

Babs had been silent, clinging to the bars of our cage. She called:

"Why? I ask you to put this cage down."

"Not now, little bird."

"And let me be with my father."

It struck a pang through me. Babs was scheming, but not the way Polter
thought. She wanted the cage put on the floor, herself out, and a
chance for me to escape. I had not yet told her of my miserable
stupidity in losing the vial.

Polter was repeating. "No, little bird. Presently; not now. I may take
you out with me, my last trip out. I want to talk with you in a normal
size when I haf time."

Our room swooped as he stood up. "You think over what I haf said,
Kent. You get ready now to make the fresh drugs I will need to bring
down all my men from the outer world. They will all be glad to come,
or, if not--well, we can easily kill those who refuse. You make the
drugs. I need plenty. Will you?"

"Yes."

"That iss good. I come back soon and gif you the catalyst for that
last reaction. Will you be ready?"

"Yes."

The blur outside our bars swung with a dizzying whirl as Polter turned
and left the room, locking its door after him with a reverberating
clank.

* * * * *

Left alone in his laboratory, Dr. Kent began his preparations for
making a fresh supply of the drugs. This room, with two smaller ones
adjoining, was at once his workshop and his prison. He stood at his
shelves, selecting the basic chemicals. He could not complete the
final compounds. The catalyst which was necessary to the final
reaction would be brought to him by Polter.

How long he worked there with his thoughts in a whirl at seeing Babs,
he did not know. His movements were automatic; he had done all this so
many times before. His mind was confused, and he was trembling from
head to foot, an old, queerly, unnaturally old man now--unnerved. His
shaking fingers could hardly hold the test tubes.

His thoughts were flying. Babs was here, come down from the world
above. It was disaster--the thing he had feared all these years.

He suddenly heard a voice.

"Father!"

And again: "Father!" A tiny voice, down by his shoe-tops. Two small
figures were there on the floor beside him. They were both panting,
winded by running. They were enlarging; they had come from a smaller
size.

It was Alan and Glora, who had followed Polter from the boat,
diminished again, and come running through the tiny crack under the
metal door of the laboratory.

They grew to a foot in size, down by Dr. Kent's legs. He was too
unnerved; he sat in a chair while Alan swiftly told him what had
happened. Babs was in the golden cage. Dr. Kent knew that; but none of
them knew what had happened to me.

"We must make you small, Father. We have the drugs, here with us."

"Yes! Yes, Alan. How much have you? Show me. Oh, my boy, that you are
here--and Babs--"

"Don't you worry, we'll get away from him."

* * * * *

Glora and Alan had almost reached Dr. Kent's size before their excited
fingers could get out the vials. They took some of the diminishing
drug to check their growth. Alan handed his father a black vial.

"Yes, lad--"

"No! Wait, Father! That's the wrong drug. This other--"

Dr. Kent had opened the vial. His trembling hand spilled some of the
pellets, but none of them noticed it.

"Father, dear, this one." Alan held an opalescent vial. "This one."

Glora said abruptly, "Listen! Is that someone coming?"

They thought they heard approaching footsteps. A moment passed, but no
one came into the room.

"Hurry," urged Glora. "It is nothing. We wait too long."

"My boy--Alan, dear, after all these years--"

They were about to take the diminishing drug. From across the room
there came a very queer sound. A scuttling, scratching, and the drone
of wings.

"Father, good God--look!"

Over by the wall, a giant fly was running across the floor. It was
growing larger!

At Dr. Kent's feet the pellets he had dropped were crushed by his
footsteps and strewn on the floor. A fly had eaten of the sweetish
powder.

The enlarging drug was loose!

A few drops of water lay mingled with the drug on the floor. And from
the water nameless hideous things were rising!


CHAPTER IX

_The Doomed Realm_

To Alan the first few moments that followed the escape of the drug
were the most horrible of his life. The discovery struck old Dr. Kent,
Glora and Alan into a numb, blank confusion. They stood transfixed,
staring with cold terror. The fly was scurrying along the floor close
against the wall Already it was as large as Alan's hand. It ran into
the corner, hit the wall in its confused alarm, and turned back. Its
wings were droning with an audible hum. It reared itself on its hairy
legs, lifted and sailed across the room.

As though drawn by a magnet Alan turned to watch it. It landed on the
wall. Alan was aware of Dr. Kent rushing with trembling steps to a
shelf where bottles stood. Glora was stricken into immobility, the
blood draining from her face.

The fly flew again. It passed directly over Alan. Its body, with a
membrane sac of eggs, was now as large as his head; its wide-spread
transparent wings were beating with a reverberating drone.

Alan flung a bottle which was on the table beside him. It missed,
crashed against the ceiling, came down with splintering glass and
spilling liquid. Fumes spread chokingly over the room.

The fly landed again on the floor. Larger now! Expanding with a
horribly rapid growth. Glora flung something--a little wooden rack
with a few empty test-tubes in it. The rack struck the monstrous fly,
but did not hurt it. The fly stood with hairy legs braced under its
bulging body. Its multiple-lensed eyes were staring at the humans. And
with its size must have come a sense of power, for it seemed to Alan
that the monstrous insect had an abnormal alertness as it stood
measuring its adversaries, gathering itself to attack them.

Only a few seconds had passed. Confused thoughts swept Alan. This fly
with its growth would soon fill this room. Burst it; burst upward
through a wrecked palace; soar out, and by the power of its size
alone, devastate this world.

He heard himself shouting. "Father, get back! It's too large! I've got
to kill it!"

* * * * *

Launch himself upon it? Wrestle with it in a hand to hand combat? Alan
edged around the center table. He was bathed in cold sweat. This thing
so horrible! It was too large! Half the length of his own body, now.
In a moment it might be twice that! He was aware of Glora pulling at
him; and his father rushing past him with a bottle of liquid, and
shouting:

"Alan! Run! You and this girl, get out of here! The other room--"

Then Alan saw the things upon the floor! His foot crushed one with a
slippery squash! Nameless, hideous, noisome things grown monstrous,
risen from their lurking invisibility in the drops of water! Sodden,
gray-black and green-slimed monsters of the deep; palpitating masses
of pulp! One lay rocking, already as large as a football with
streamers of ooze hanging upon it, and a black-ink fluid squirting;
others were rods of red jelly-pulp, already as large as lead pencils,
quivering, twitching. Germs of disease, these ghastly things,
enlarging from the invisibility of a drop of water!

The fly landed with a thud on the center table. The fumes of the
shattered bottle of chemicals were choking Alan. He flung himself
toward the monster fly, but Glora held him.

"No! Escape! The other room!"

Dr. Kent was stamping the things upon the floor; pouring acids upon
them. Some eluded him. The air in the room was unbreathable....

They reached the bedroom. The laboratory was a hideous chaos. They
were aware of its outer door opening, disclosing the figure of Polter
who, undoubtedly, had been attracted by the noise. He shouted a
startled oath. Alan heard it above the beating wings of the monster
fly. Things lurched at the opened door; Polter banged it upon them and
rushed away, shouting the alarm through the palace.

Dr. Kent was stammering, "Not the enlarging drug! Glora, child, the
other! Hurry!"

Alan helped Glora with the opalescent vial. Things were lurching
toward this room from the laboratory. Alan with averted face, choked
by the incoming fumes, slammed the door upon the gruesome turmoil.

They took the diminishing drug. The bedroom expanded. The hideous
sounds from the laboratory, and the whole palace now ringing with a
wild alarm, then faded into the blessed remoteness of distance above
them....

* * * * *

"I think it is this way, Alan. Off there--a doorway from my bedroom.
Polter always kept it locked, but it leads into a corridor. We must
get out of here. A crack under the door--is that it, off there?" Dr.
Kent pointed into the gloomy blur of distance. "We are horribly
small--it's so far to run--and I've lost my sense of direction."

The drug had ceased its action. The wooden floor of the room had
expanded to a spread of cellular surface, ridged with broken,
tube-like tunnels; pits and jagged cave-mouths. A knot-hole yawned
like a crater a hundred feet away.

"We are too small," Gloria protested hurriedly. "The door is where you
say, Dr. Kent, but miles away."

With the other drug, the room contracted. The floor-surface shrank and
smoothed a little. The door was distinguishable--a square panel
several hundred feet in width and towering into the upper haze. The
black line of the crack was visible along its bottom.

They ran to it. The top of the crack was ten feet above their heads.
They ran under, across the wide intervening darkness toward a glow of
light. Then they came from under the door into a corridor--and shrank
against a cliff-wall as with a rush of wind and pounding tread the
blurred shapes of a man's huge feet and legs rushed passed. The upper
air was filled with rumbling shouts.

"We must chance it!" exclaimed Dr. Kent. "Too dangerous, so small!
Larger--and if they see us, fight our way out!"

In the turmoil of the doomed palace no one noticed them. They cast
aside all restraint. It was too dangerous to wait. The excessive dose
they took of the drug made the corridor shrink with dizzying speed.
They rushed along its length. Alan hurled a little man aside who was
in their path. Already they were larger than the Polter people.

* * * * *

They squeezed out of a shrinking doorway. The dwindling island was a
turmoil. Little figures were plunging from the palace. At the edge of
the water, Alan, Glora and Dr. Kent stood for an instant looking
behind them. The palace was rocking! Its roof heaved upward then
smashed and fell aside with the clatter of tumbling masonry. The
monstrous fly, its hideous face mashed and oozing, reared itself up
and, with broken, torn wings tried to soar away. But it could not. It
slipped back. The drone and buzz of its fright sounded over the chaos
of noise. Other things came lurching and twitching upward; slithering
out....

The expanding body of the fly was pushing the palace walls outward. In
a moment they collapsed and it emerged....

To Alan and his companions the scene was all shrinking into a
miniature chaos of horror at their shoe-tops. A diminuendo of screams
mingled down there. Overhead were the stars, shining peacefully
remote. Nearby lay a rapidly narrowing channel of shining water. A
tiny city was across it. Lights were moving. The panic had spread from
the island to Orena. Beyond the tiny city, a range of mountains
showed; a cliff, gleaming in the starlight; tunnel mouths.

Suddenly against the stars off there, Alan saw the enlarging figure of
Polter, his hunched shape unmistakable. He was facing the other way.
He lunged and scrambled into a yawning black hole in the mountains.
Polter was escaping! None of these people except himself had the
drugs. He was escaping with the golden cage, out of this doomed atomic
world to our Earth above.

Glora murmured, "There is our way out. Your way. And that is Polter
going. I think he did not see us. So much is growing gigantic here."
She clung to Alan. "Dear one--"

Dr. Kent muttered, "We will wait a moment--wade across--or leap over,
and follow him out. Babs with him--dear God I hope so! This doomed
realm!"

* * * * *

Alan held Glora close. And suddenly he was laughing--a madness, half
hysteria. "Why, this, all this--why look, Glora, it's funny! This
little world all excited, an ant-hill, outraged! Look! There's our
giant sailboat!"

Down near their feet the inch-long sailboat stood at its dock. Tiny
human figures were rushing for it; others, floundering in the water,
were trying to climb upon it. Dr. Kent had stepped from the shore a
foot or two, and tiny, lashing white rollers rocked the boat, almost
engulfing it.

Alan's laugh rang out, "God! It's funny, isn't it? All those little
creatures, so excited!"

"Steady, lad!" Dr. Kent touched him. "Don't let yourself laugh! A
moment now, then we'll wade across. Polter won't have much start on
us. We mustn't get too close to him in size, but try and attack him
unawares. We have got to get Babs away from him."

The narrowing passage rose hardly to their knees. They stepped ashore,
well to one side of the toy city. Their growth had almost stopped. But
suddenly Alan realized that Glora was diminishing! She had taken the
other drug.

"Glora!"

"I must go back, Alan. This is my world, doomed perhaps, but I cannot
forsake it now. I must give the enlarging drug to my father. And
others who can rise and fight these monsters."

"Glora!"

Dr. Kent said hurriedly, "She's right, Alan. There is a chance they
can save their city. For her to leave them would be dastardly."

She cried, "You go on up, Alan. You have enough of the drugs. Leave
me, dear one--I am going back!"

"No!" he protested. "You must not! Or if you do, I'll come with you!"

She clung to him. He felt her body diminishing within his encircling
arms. His love for her swept him--this girl who had cajoled Polter, or
tricked him, stolen several of the little vials from him heaven knows
how, and followed him up to the other world. This girl whom Alan now
knew he loved, was leaving him. Forever?

* * * * *

As he stood there, with the miniature landscape at his feet in the wan
starlight, the panic-stricken tiny city, the island with its monsters
rising to overwhelm this microscopic world--it seemed to Alan then
that if he let her go it was the end for him of all life's promised
happiness.

"Alan, lad, come." His father was pulling at him. So horrible a
choice! Alan thought that I was back on that island. But Babs, a
prisoner in the golden cage, was with Polter, plunging upward in size.
And his father was beside him, pleading.

"Alan--come--I can't get out alone. Nor save Babs. And the maddened
Polter, with the power of this drug, can conquer and enslave our Earth
as he has enslaved Orena--just one little city of one tiny golden
atom! Believe me, lad, your duty lies above."

Glora's head was now down at Alan's waist. He stooped and kissed her
white forehead; his fingers, just for an instant, smoothed her glossy
hair.

"Good-by, Glora."

"Dear one, good-by."

She plunged away, and her tread as she dwindled mashed the forest
behind the city. Alan and his father ran for the cliff. They were too
large to squeeze into the little hole. But in a moment they made
themselves smaller. They climbed as they dwindled; checked the drug
action and rushed into the tunnel-mouth.

Alan stopped just for an instant to gaze out over the starlit scene.
It was almost the same viewpoint from which he had his first sight of
Glora's world only an hour or two before. The distant island beyond
the city showed plainly with the shining water around it. The
vegetation there was growing! And there were dark, horribly formless
blobs lurching outward and rising with monstrous bulk against the
background of the stars!

"Alan! Come, lad!"

With a prayer for Glora trembling on his lips, Alan plunged into the
dim phosphorescent gloom of the tunnel.


CHAPTER X

_The Escape_

To Babs and me the ride in the golden cage strapped to Polter's chest
as he made his escape outward into largeness was an experience awesome
and frightening almost beyond conception. We heard the alarm in the
palace on the island. Polter rushed to Dr. Kent's laboratory door,
looked in, and in a moment banged it shut. Babs and I saw very little.
We knew only that something horrible had happened; we could see only a
blur with formless things in the void beneath our bars; and there were
the choking fumes of chemicals surging at us.

Polter rushed through the castle corridor. We heard rumbling distant
shouts.

"The drug is loose! The drug is loose! Monsters! Death for everyone!"

The room swayed with horrible dizzying lurches as Polter ran. We clung
to the lattice bars, our legs and arms entwined. There were moments
when Polter leaped, or suddenly stooped, and our reeling senses all
but faded.

"Babs! Babs, darling, don't let go! Don't lose consciousness!"

If she should be limp, here in this lurching room, her body to be
flung back and forth across its confines--that would be death in a
moment. I feared I could not hold her. I managed to get an arm about
her waist.

"Babs!"

"I'm--all right, George. I can stand it. We're--he is enlarging."

"Yes."

I saw water far beneath us, lashed into a turmoil of foam with
Polter's wading steps. There was a brief swaying vista of a toy city;
starlight overhead; a lurching swaying miniature of landscape as
Polter ran for the towering cliffs. Then he climbed and scrambled into
the tunnel-mouth. Had he turned at that instant doubtless he would
have seen the rising distant figures of Glora, Alan and Dr. Kent. But
he did not see them, evidently. Nor did we.

Polter spoke only very occasionally to Babs. "Hold tightly!" It was a
rumbling voice from above us. He made no move to touch the cage,
except that a few times the great blur of his hand came up to adjust
its angle.

* * * * *

The lurching and jolting was less violent in the tunnel. Polter's
frenzy to escape was subsiding into calmness. He traversed the tunnel
with a methodical swinging stride. We were aware of him climbing over
the noisome litter of the dead giant's body which blocked the tunnel's
further end. We heard his astonished exclamations. But evidently he
did not suspect what had happened, thinking only that the stupid
messenger had miscalculated his growth and been crushed.

We emerged into a less dim area. Polter did not stop at the fallen
giant. Nothing mattered now to him, quite evidently, save his own
rapid exit with Babs from this atomic realm. His movements seemed
calm, yet hurried.

We realized now how different was an outward journey from the trip
coming in. This was all only an inch of golden quartz! The stages
upward were frequently only a matter of growth in size; the distances
in this vast desert realm of golden rock always were shrinking. Polter
many times stood almost motionless until the closing dwindling walls
made him scramble upward into the greater space above.

It may have been an hour, or less. Babs and I, from our smaller
viewpoint, with the landscape so frequently blurred by distance and
Polter's movements, seldom recognized where we were. But I realized
that going out was far easier in every way than coming in. Easier to
determine the route, since usually the diminishing caverns and gullies
made the upward step obvious.... We knew when Polter scrambled up the
incline ramp.

It seemed impossible for us to plan anything. Would Polter make the
entire trip without a stop? It seemed so. We had no drugs. Our cage
was barred beyond possibility of our getting out. But even if we had
had the drugs, or had our door been open, there was no escape. An
abyss of distance was always yawning beyond our lattice--the sheer
precipice of Polter's body from his chest to the ground.

"Babs, we must make him stop. If he sits down to rest, you might get
him to take you out. I must reach his drugs."

"Yes. I'll try it, George."

* * * * *

Polter was momentarily standing motionless as though gazing around
him, judging what to do next. His size seemed stationary. Beyond our
bars we could see the distant circular walls as though this were some
giant crater-pit in which Polter was standing. Then I thought I
recognized it--the round, nearly vertical pit into which Alan had
plunged his hand and arm. Above us then was a gully, blind at one end.
And above that, the outer surface, the summit of the fragment of
golden quartz.

"Babs! I know where we are! If he takes you out, keep his attention.
I'll try and get one of his black vials. Make him hold you near the
ground. If I see you there, in position where you can jump, I'll
startle him. Oh, Babs, dear, it's desperately dangerous but I can't
think of anything else. Jump! Get away from here. I'll keep his
attention on me. Then I'll join you if I can--with the drug."

Polter was moving. We had no time to say more.

"Yes! Yes, I'll try it, George." For just an instant she clung to me
with her soft arms about my neck. Our love was sweeping us in this
desperate moment, and it seemed that above us was a remote Earth world
holding the promise of all our dreams. Or were we star-crossed, doomed
like the realm of the atom? Was this swift embrace now marking the end
of everything for us?

Babs called, "Dr. Polter?"

We could feel his movements stopping.

"Yes? You are all right, Babs?"

She laughed--a ripple of silvery laughter--but there was tragic fear
in her eyes as she held her gaze on me. "Yes, Dr. Polter, but
breathless. Almost dead, but not quite. What happened? I want to come
out and talk to you."

"Not now, little bird."

"But I want to." To me it was a miracle that she could call so lightly
and hold that note of lugubrious laughter in her voice. "I am hungry.
Don't you think of that? And frightened. Take me out."

* * * * *

He was sitting down! "You remind me that I am tired, Babs. And hungry,
also. I haf a little food. You shall come out for just a short time."

"Thank you. Take me carefully."

Our tilted cage was near the ground as he seated himself. But still it
was too far for me to jump.

I murmured, "Babs--"

"Wait, George! I'll fix that. You hide! If he looks in he'll see you,
where you are now!"

I scrambled back to my hiding place. Polter's huge fingers were
fumbling at our bars. The little door sprang open.

"Come, Babs."

He held the cupped bowl of his palm to the doorway. "Come out."

"No!" she called. "It is too far down!"

"Come. That iss foolish."

"No! I'm afraid. Put the cage on the ground."

"Babs!" His finger and thumb came reaching in to seize her, but she
avoided them.

"Dr. Polter! Don't! You'll crush me!"

"Then come out on my hand."

He seemed annoyed. I had scrambled back to the doorway; I knew he
could not see me so long as the cage remained strapped to his shirt
front.

I whispered, "I can make it, Babs!"

Polter was apparently on one elbow, half turned on his side. From our
cage, the sloping gleaming white surface of his stiff glossy
shirt-bosom went down a steep incline. His belt was down there, and
the outward bulging curve of his lap--a spreading surface where I
could land like a scuttling insect, unobserved, if only Babs could
hold his attention.

I whispered vehemently. "Try it! Go out! Leave me! Keep talking to
him!"

She called instantly, "Very well, then. Bring your hand! Closer!
Carefully! It seems so high up here!"

* * * * *

She swung herself to his palm, and flung her arms about the great
pillar of his upcrooked finger. The bowl of his hand moved slowly
away. I heard her calling voice, and his overhead rumble.

I chanced it! I could not determine the exact position, or which way
he was looking.

Again I heard Bab's voice. "Careful, Dr. Polter. Don't let me fall!"

"Yes, little bird."

I let myself down from the tilted doorway, hung by my hands and
dropped. I struck the ramp-like yielding surface of his shirt-bosom. I
slid, tumbling, scrambling, and landed softly in the huge folds of his
trouser fabric. I was unhurt. The width of his belt, high as my body,
was near me. I shrank against it; I found I could cling to its upper
edge.

My hold came just in time. He shifted, and sat up. I was lifted with a
swoop of movement. When it steadied I saw above me the top of his
knee. His left leg was crooked, the foot drawn close to him. Babs was
perched up there on the knee summit. His right leg was outstretched. I
was at the right side of his belt. I could dart off along that curving
expanse of his leg and leap to the ground. If he would hold this
position! One of the pouches of his belt was near me. The vial in it
was black. The enlarging drug! I moved toward it.

But Babs was too high to jump from that summit of his crooked knee! I
think she saw me at his belt. I heard her voice.

"I cannot eat up here. It is too high. Oh, please be careful how you
move! I am so dizzy, so frightened! You move with such great jerks!"

He had what seemed a huge surface of bread and meat. He was breaking
oLf crumbs to put before her. I reached the pouch of his belt. The
vial was as long as my body. I tugged to try and lift it out.

* * * * *

All the giant contours of Polter's body shifted as he cautiously
moved. I clung. I saw that Babs was being held gently between his
thumb and forefinger. He lowered her to the ground, and she stood
beside the bread and meat he had placed there.

And she had the courage to laugh! "Why this--this is an enormous
sandwich! You will have to break it."

He was leaning over her, half turned on his left side. The vial came
free. I shoved it; but I could not control its weight. I pushed
desperately. It slid over the round brink of his right hip, and fell
behind him. I heard the tinkling thud of it down on the rocks.

There was no alarm. I could not chance leaping from his hip. I
scurried along the convex top of his outstretched leg, and beyond his
knee I jumped.

I landed safely. I could see the black vial back across the broken
rock surface, with the bulge of Polter's hip above it. I ran back and
reached the vial; tugged at its huge stopper. The cork began to yield
under my panting, desperate efforts. In a moment I would have a pellet
of the enlarging drug; make away with it; startle Polter so that Babs
might dart off and escape.

The huge stopper of the vial was larger than my head. It came suddenly
out. I flung it away, plunged in my hand, and seized an enormous round
pellet.

Then abruptly the alarm came, and I had not caused it! Polter ripped
out a startled, rumbling curse and sat upright. Under the curve of his
leg, I saw that Babs had been momentarily neglected. She was running.

Across the boulder-strewn plain, two tiny men had appeared. Polter had
seen them.

They were the enlarging figures of Dr. Kent and Alan!


CHAPTER XI

_The Combat of Size_

The astounded Polter was taken wholly by surprise. He could have had
no idea that anyone was following him. He thought he was alone with
the tiny Babs in this rock-strewn metal desert. What he saw as he
scrambled to his feet were four insect-size humans, two of them at a
distance, and two within reach of him, and all of them scampering in
different directions. The ground was littered with crags and boulders;
was ridged and pitted, pock-marked, with tiny crater-holes and caves.
The four scuttling figures almost instantly had disappeared from his
sight.

I did not see where Babs went. I turned from the black vial of
Polter's enlarging drug, and with the huge pellet under my arm I ran
leaping over the rough ground and flung myself into a gully. I lay
prone, flattened against a rock. In the murky distance of a pseudo-sky
overhead, the monstrous head and shoulders of Polter were visible. I
could see down to just below his waist. The empty cage with its door
flapping open hung against his shirt-front. He had stooped to try and
recover Babs. And instinctively his hands went to his belt to seize
his enlarging drug.

They were fumbling there now. He hauled out an opalescent vial of the
diminishing element. But his black vial was gone. His frown spread
into fear as he searched for it in the other compartments of his belt.
I had thought that he had more than one black vial, but now it seemed
not. His huge face was swept with the panic of terror. He flung a wild
glance around him.

Through the open end of my gully I saw in the distance, miles away,
the enlarging figure of Alan rising up. Then it ducked back of a
distant rocky peak. Polter undoubtedly saw it. He was fumbling with
his opalescent vial, and with confused panic upon him he made the
mistake of taking the diminishing drug. And instantly seemed to regret
it. His curse rumbled above me. His glance went down to the rocks at
his feet, and there he saw lying his black vial with its stopper out.
His body already was beginning to dwindle. He stooped, seized the
vial, and took the enlarging drug. The shock of it made him stagger;
momentarily he disappeared from my line of vision but I could hear his
panting breath and the unsteady pound of his footsteps.

* * * * *

I still held that huge round ball of the drug. I seized a loose stone
and frantically knocked off a chunk--heaven knows how much, I do not.
I shoved it into my mouth, chewed and hastily swallowed it. And with
the lurching, swaying, shrinking gully closing in upon me, I ran to
get out of its distant open end.

I was heading toward where Alan and his father were lurking. I came
from the gully into the open, just as the walls closed behind me. The
whole scene was a dizzying blurred sway of contracting movement. I saw
that I was in a circular valley now some five miles in diameter, with
its jagged enclosing walls rising sheerly perpendicular out of sight
in the haze overhead.

Polter had staggered backward. I saw him a mile or so away. His back
at that instant was turned to me. He was now no more than three or
four times my own height. He scrambled against the valley cliff-wall
as though trying to find a foothold to climb up it. He went a little
way, but fell back.

Near me, Alan and old Dr. Kent suddenly appeared. I was larger. They
flung themselves at my knees. Alan gasped:

"You, George! You got Babs?"

"Yes--Babs is around somewhere! Stay down here! Don't lose her in
size! Stay small! Search and--"

"But George--"

"I'll tackle Polter. I've taken--God, I don't know how much I've taken
of the drug!"

They were shrinking down by my boot-tops. Alan shouted suddenly,
"There's Babs! Thank God, there's Babs!"

She was too small; I could not see her, nor even hear her, though she
must have been calling to them. Alan again screamed up at me with his
little voice:

"She's here, George! You--go on and get Polter! I can't overtake you
you--haven't enough of the drug!" His tiny voice was fading away. "Go
on and get him, George! This time--get him--"

* * * * *

I swung with a staggering step around to face the open valley. It was
shrunken now to barely half a mile of width. Its smooth walls rose
some two or three thousand feet to an upper circular horizon with
murky distance overhead. Polter stood across from me. He had tried to
climb out but could not. He saw me and came lurching. We were a
quarter of a mile from each other. I ran forward through a shifting
scene of shrinking rock walls and crawling, contracting ground.
Quarter of a mile? It seemed hardly more than a score of running
strides before Polter loomed close ahead of me. He was still nearly
twice my size. I stooped, seized a loose boulder, and flung it. I
missed his face, but, as his hand went up carrying a bared
knife-blade, by fortunate chance the stone struck his wrist. The knife
dropped to the rocks. He stooped to recover it, but I was upon him. As
I felt his huge arms go around me, half lifting me, my foot struck the
knife. But in an instant it was swept down into smallness beneath us
as we expanded above it.

Both of us were unarmed in this combat of size. I was a half-grown
youth in Polter's first grip upon me. I heard his panting words,
grimly triumphant:

"This--George Randolph, I haf been--waiting for so many many years!
The hunchback--takes his revenge--now--"

He lifted me. His great arms were horribly powerful, but I could feel
them dwindling. I was enlarging faster. Just a few moments--if I could
last a few moments!... My feet were off the ground, my chest close
pressed against the little golden cage between us. He had a hand
shoving back my head; his fingers sought my throat. I wound my legs
around him, and then he tried to throw me down and fall upon me. But
we had twisted and my back was to the cliff. The rocks were shoving at
us, insistently pushing with almost a living movement. Polter
staggered with me. His grip on my throat tightened, shutting off my
breath. My senses whirled. His grim sardonic face over me was blurred
to my sight. I tore futilely at my throat to break his choking grip.
All the world was a roaring chaos to my fading senses. Then in the
blur I saw horror sweep his expression. His fingers involuntarily
loosened. I got a breath of blessed air, gasping, and my sight
cleared.

Walls were closing around us! We were in a pit barely ten feet wide,
with the top a few feet above Polter's head. The nearer wall shoved us
again. Our bodies almost filled the shrinking pit! Polter lurched and
cast me off. I half fell, striking my shoulder against the opposite
wall, and I saw Polter leap at the dwindling brink and scramble out.

I was nearly wedged. As I rose, the top of the pit only reached my
waist. Polter had fallen on the upper ground, and was on hands and
knees. Instead of standing up, he lurched at me; tried to shove me
back. But I was out. I clutched at him. We were almost of a size now.
We rolled on the ground, locked together; rolled to the brink of the
pit and over it, as it shrank to a little round hole unnoticed beneath
our threshing bodies!

* * * * *

At the side of the circular valley Alan and Dr. Kent crouched with the
smaller figure of Babs between them. They saw Polter and me as two
swaying gigantic forms locked in a death struggle, towering against
the sky. Tremendous expanded bodies! They saw us come to grips; saw
the great hunched Polter bend me backward, choking me.

Our bodies lurched. Our huge legs with a single step brought us to the
center of the valley. It was a shrinking valley to Alan, Babs and Dr.
Kent, for they too, were enlarging. But the fighting giant figures
were growing faster. In only a moment their shoulders were up there in
the sky, pressing against the narrowing cliff-walls.

Alan gasped. "But George will be crushed! Look at him!"

Horror swept them as they crouched watching. The enormous pillars of
Polter's legs towered straight up from near at hand. Alan was aware of
himself screaming:

"George--out! You're too large! Too large for in here!"

As though his microscopic voice could reach me--my head hundred of
feet above him. But he screamed it again. This was all in a few
horrible moments, though it seemed to the three watchers an eternity.
Alan was helpless to aid me; they had taken all of the enlarging drug
they had.

Then they saw Polter cast me off. I lurched and struck, with my
shoulders wedged against the cliff directly over where they crouched.
The overhead sky was darkened as Polter scrambled upward.

Alan was still screaming futilely, "George--up! Get out!"

Babs huddled with white, horrified face, staring. Then I went out
after Polter. My disappearing legs were great dark blurs in the sky.
Alan saw the valley now contracted to a thousand feet of width, with
its cliffs equally as high. Then everything was smaller.... The sky
overhead went dark again; from cliff to cliff a segment of our rolling
bodies momentarily spanned the opening.

* * * * *

And presently Alan realized that the valley had narrowed to a pit. He
stood up. "Hurry! Now we can get out after them. Up there!"

The opening above was empty. Polter and I were fighting some distance
away....

Dr. Kent was soon large enough to scramble out of the pit. Alan handed
the little Babs up to him and followed. Alan saw that they were now in
a long gully, blind at one end with a five hundred-foot perpendicular
cliff. Against the wall, the titanic form of Polter stood at bay. And
I was fronting him. The summit of the cliff was lower than our waists.
Triumph swept Alan; he saw that I was the larger! As Polter bored into
me my backward step crossed the full width of the gully. Alan shouted:

"Down! Babs--Father!"

They had barely time to flatten themselves in a narrow crevice between
upstanding rocks before my foot crashed down. For an instant the sole
of my boot formed a flat black ceiling as it trod and spanned the
rocks. Then it lifted; was gone with a blurred swoop. They saw the
white blur of my hand come down and snatch a tremendous boulder,
raising it with a great sweep of movement into the sky. They saw me
crash it against Polter; but it only struck his shoulder. He roared
with anger. The whole sky was roaring and rumbling with our shouts and
our panting breathing, and the ground was clattering, pounding with
our giant tread. Huge loose boulders were tumbled in an avalanche
everywhere.

Again it seemed to Alan that our lurching, heedlessly surging bodies
must be crushed within these contracting walls. Only our locked,
intertwined legs were visible; our bodies were lost in the sky. Then
it seemed to Alan that I had heaved Polter upward. And followed him.
We disappeared. There was a distant overhead rumble, and the murky
sky, with vague patches of far-distant illumination in it, became
empty of movement....

The walls presently were again closing upon Alan and his companions.
They ran out of the open end of the shrinking little gully and came to
a new upward vista....

* * * * *

I found myself a full head and shoulders taller than Polter. And he
was tiring, panting heavily. His face was cut and bleeding from the
blows of my fists. The rock I heaved struck his shoulder. He roared,
head down, and bored into me. He was heavier than I. His weight flung
me back. My foot slid on the loose stones of the gully floor. I did
not know that Babs, Alan and their father were huddled under those
stones!

My back struck the opposite wall. Polter's upflung knee caught me in
the stomach, all but knocking the breath from me. He was desperate,
oblivious to the closing walls. And as he flung his arms with a grip
about my neck, hanging, trying to bear me down, I saw in his blazing
dark eyes what seemed the light of suicide. I think that then, with a
sudden frenzied madness he realized that he was beaten. And tried to
pull us to the ground and let the walls crush us.

I summoned all my remaining strength and heaved us forward. I broke
his hold. His body was jammed back against a lowering wall. Its top
seemed almost at our knees. I shoved frantically. He fell backward and
I jumped after him.

We were on a great rocky plateau. But it was shrinking, crawling into
itself. Spots of light were in the murk overhead; there seemed a
distant circular horizon of emptiness around us.

Polter was lying in a heap. But it was trickery, for as I incautiously
bent over him his hand crashed a rock against my head. I reeled, with
all the world turning black, but did not fall. There was a horrible
instant when my senses were going, but I fought to hold them. Blood
from a wound on my forehead was streaming in my eyes. I was
staggering. Then I realized I was grimly tossing my head, shaking the
blood away; and little by little my sight came back.

Polter was on his feet, rushing me. His fist came with an upward swing
at my chin, but I ducked my head aside at the last moment.

And suddenly, fighting up there in the open, my mind envisaged how
gigantic we were! This was a great upland plateau, rounded with miles
of distance and a shadowy, dimly radiant abyss beyond its circular
horizon. And I was a thousand feet or more tall! A titan, looming here
in the sky!...

* * * * *

My fist quite unexpectedly caught Polter's jaw. His simultaneous swing
went wild, though I leaped backward from it. He staggered, and his
arms dropped to his sides. I was crouched forward, guarded, watching
him while I gasped for breath. There was the briefest of instants when
an expression of vague surprise swept his face. But I had not knocked
him out.

It was death overtaking him. His heart was yielding, overtaxed from
this strain; and I think there at the last, he realized it. The blood
drained suddenly from his face and lips, leaving them livid. I saw
fear, then a wild horror in his eyes. He stood swaying. Then his knees
gave way and he toppled. He fell from his height in the air where I
stood gazing at him--fell forward on his face, his titanic length
spread all across the top of this rocky landscape!

For a moment I did not move. My head was reeling, my ears roaring.
Blood streamed into my eyes. I wiped it away with a torn sleeve and
stood panting, gazing at the glowing distance around me.

I was a titan, standing there. The body of Polter was shrinking at my
feet. The circular abyss of emptiness came nearer as this rocky
eminence contracted.

Suddenly my attention went to the sky overhead. Vague distant lights
were there. Then a broad flat blur seemed spread over me. Light
everywhere was growing. Beyond the nearby brink of the abyss was a
white reflected radiance from beneath. Abruptly I realized there was a
level, flat white plain running far off there in the distance.

Overhead a radiance contracted into a spot of light. A shape in the
sky moved! I heard a far-away rumble--a human voice!

The body of Polter lay at my feet. It was hardly the length of my
forearm I stood, a titan.

And then, with a shock of realization, I saw how tiny I was! This was
the broken top of that fragment of golden quartz the size of a walnut!
I was standing there, under the lens of the giant microscope in
Polter's dome-room laboratory, with half a dozen astounded Quebec
police officials peering down at me!


CHAPTER XII

_Mysterious Little Golden Rock_

I need not detail the aftermath of our emergence from the atom. Dr.
Kent and Babs followed me out within a few moments. But Alan was not
with them! He had seen Polter fall. His father and Babs were safe. The
sacrifice he had made in leaving Glora was no longer needed.

Down there on the rocky plateau, Dr. Kent suddenly realized that Alan
was dwindling.

"Father, I must! Don't you understand? Glora's world is menaced. I
can't leave her like this. My duty to you and Babs is ended. I did my
best, Dad--you two are safe now."

"Alan! My boy!"

He was already down at Dr. Kent's waist, Bab's size. He held up his
hand. "Dad, good-by." His rugged, youthful face was flushed, his voice
choked. "You--you've been a mighty good father to me. Always."

Babs flung her arms about him. "Alan, don't!"

"But I must." He smiled whimsically as he kissed her. "You wouldn't
want to leave George, would you? Never see him again? I'm not asking
you to do that, am I?"

"But, Alan--"

"You've been a great little pal, Babs. I'll never forget it."

"Alan! You talk as though you were never coming back!"

"Do I? But of course I'm coming back!" He cast her off. "Babs, listen.
Father's upset. That's natural. You tell him not to worry. I'll be
careful, and do what I can to save that little city. I must find Glora
and--"

Babs was suddenly trembling with eagerness for him. "Yes! Of course
you must, Alan!"

"Find her and bring her out here! I'll do it! Don't you worry." He was
dwindling fast. Dr. Kent had collapsed to a rock, staring down with
horror-stricken eyes. Alan called up to Babs:

"Listen! Have George watch the chunk of gold-quartz. Have it guarded
and watched day and night. Handle it carefully, Babs!"

"Yes! Yes! How long will you be gone, Alan?"

"Heavens--how do I know? But I'll come back, don't you worry. Maybe in
only a day or two of your time."

"Right! Good-by, Alan!"

"Good-by," his tiny voice echoed up. "Good-by, Babs--Father!"

Babs could see his miniature face smiling up at her. She smiled back
and waved her arm as he vanished into the pebbles at her feet.

The eyes of youth! They look ahead; they see all things so easily
possible! But old Dr. Kent was sobbing.

* * * * *

It has broken Dr. Kent. A month now has passed. He seldom mentions
Alan to Babs and me. But when he does, he tries to smile and say that
Alan soon will return. He has been very ill this last week, though he
is better now. He did not tell us that he was working to compound
another supply of the drugs, but we knew it very well.

And his emotion, the strain of it, made him break. He was in bed a
week. We are living in New York, quite near the Museum of the American
Society for Scientific Research. In a room of the biological
department there, the precious fragment of golden quartz lies guarded.
A microscope is over it, and there is never a moment of the day or
night without an alert, keen-eyed watcher peering down.

But nothing has appeared. Neither friend nor foe--nothing. I cannot
say so to Babs, but often I fear that Dr. Kent will suddenly die, and
the secret of his drugs die with him. I hinted once that I would make
a trip into the atom if he would let me, but it excited him so greatly
I had to laugh it off with the assurance that of course Alan will soon
return safely to us. Dr. Kent is an old man now, unnaturally old,
with, it seems, the full weight of eighty years pressing upon him. He
cannot stand this emotion. I think he is despairingly summoning
strength to work upon his drugs, fearful that he will not be equal to
it. Yet more fearful to disclose the secret and unloose so diabolical
a power.

There are nights when with Dr. Kent asleep, Babs and I slip away and
go to the Museum. We dismiss the guard for a time, and in that private
room we sit hand in hand by the microscope to watch. The fragment of
golden quartz lies on its clean white slab with a brilliant light upon
it.

Mysterious little golden rock! What secrets are there, down beyond the
vanishing point in the realm of the infinitely small! Our human
longings go to Alan and to Glora.

But sometimes we are swept by the greater viewpoint. Awed by the
mysteries of nature, we realize how very small and unimportant we are
in the vast scheme of things. We envisage the infinite reaches of
astronomical space overhead. Realms of largeness unfathomable. And at
our feet, everywhere, are myriad entrances into the infinitely small.
With ourselves in between--with our fatuous human consciousness that
we are of some importance to it all!

Truly there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in
our philosophy!


INVISIBLE EYES

An invisible eye that can see in the dark and detect the light of a
ship two miles away on a black foggy night was introduced to newspaper
men recently by its inventor, John Baird of television fame. He calls
the invention "Noctovisor."

It looks like a large camera and can be mounted on a ship or airplane.
It was announced that it would soon be tried on trans-Atlantic liners.
For the demonstration it was mounted in the garden of Baird's cottage,
overlooking the twinkling lights of Dorking. In the dark beyond those
lights an automobile headlight three miles away pointed toward the
cottage.

At a signal from the inventor a sheet of ebonite, as a substitute for
a supposed fog, two miles thick, was placed in front of the headlight.
Not a glimmer was then visible to the human eye, but it appeared on
the noctovisor screen as a bright red disc. It was supposed to have
particular value in permitting a navigator in a fog to tell the exact
direction of a beacon and to estimate roughly its distance.

The device is a combination of camera lens, television transmitter and
television receiver. The lens throws a distant image on the exploring
disc of the transmitter, through which it acts on a photo-electric
cell sensitive to invisible infra-red rays. The receiver amplifies it
for the observer.


MOON ROCKETS

Seventeen years of experimenting on a rocket designed by Prof. Albert
H. Goddard of Clark University, to shriek its way from the earth to
the moon, came to a glorious climax recently in an isolated and
closely guarded section of Worcester when the rocket tore its flaming
way through the air for a quarter-mile with a roar heard for a
distance of two miles.

Prof. Goddard said the rocket was shot out of its cradle, careened
through the air a mass of flame, and landed about where it was
directed to land, beyond the Auburn town line. Test of a new
propellant was the object of his demonstration, Prof. Goddard said.

Two or three times a week a small rocket goes up into the air a short
distance, not enough to attract great attention. But the latest was a
nine-foot rocket, shot out of a forty-foot tower. Near the tower is a
safety post built of stone, with slits for peepholes. The experimental
party stepped into the safety zone when the rocket was started.

The forty-foot tower is built much like an oil well derrick. Inside it
are two steel rails to fill grooves in the rocket. These guide the
rocket much as rifling in a gun barrel guides a bullet. Prof. Goddard,
when teaching at Princeton in 1912, evolved the idea of shooting a
rocket to the moon by means of successive charges of explosive much as
the new German rocket motor racers are powered. In this most recent
experiment he used a new powder mixture.

Prof. Goddard issued a statement after the demonstration, which said:

"My test was one of a series of experiments with rockets using an
entirely new propellant. There was no attempt to reach the moon or
anything of such a spectacular nature. The rocket is normally noisy,
possibly enough to attract considerable attention. The test was
thoroughly satisfactory, nothing exploded in the air, and there was no
damage except possibly that incidental to landing."