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
panting breath. We emerged having 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, 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 to reach in. The rock hit him on 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 of broken
rocky walls, and jagged arching roof than outside.
Then I heard Alan's voice: "George! Over here!"
They came running to me. For a moment we stood, undecided. My eyes were
becoming accustomed to the gloom. The tunnel 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 about 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, or 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,
confused and frightened. 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 small for the broken cliff opening.
I found my wits. "Alan, we've got to get out of here. God--don't you see
what's happening?"
But Glora restrained us. She realized that the effect of the drug the
giant had taken was about at its end. The growth presently stopped. That
huge noisome mass of pulp which once had been human shoulders no longer
expanded.
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 outward....
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
bloodstained garments.
"George! You're--"
"His blood, not mine." I tried to smile. "Here's the drug he carried.
Evidently Polter was only sending him out because I found 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 also had with me a great roll of paper which
had been 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.
It read:
_The two 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 from my gate._
Full directions for our death followed. And Polter said he would return
by dawn or soon after.
That gave me a start. By dawn! We had been traveling four or five hours.
It was already dawn up there now!
"No," Glora explained, "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 was equal to only a few hours on our gigantic world outside.
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 tunnel 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 in 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 steep rocky 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 the infinite
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!