Into a different space-sphere bursts Lea,
terrified Princess of the microcosmic Heanas,
searching for an earthling champion. For the
vicious Taroh had thieved the secret of
transcendant growth, and he's marching to
crush the gentle sub-world of Helos.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Spring 1940.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Young George Carter had always particularly liked the little rock
garden which lay on the declivity behind his home. His mother, now
dead, had designed and planted it with loving care. In the spring, and
particularly on hot summer evenings when the moonlight patched the
garden with silver, it was his favorite spot, the place where he liked
to sit alone, smoking and dreaming.
Despite his intention of following in his father's footsteps and
becoming a scientist, there was incongruously much of the dreamer, the
romanticist, in young George Carter. At nineteen now, six feet tall, he
was lean and rangy, with a rugged, handsome face, dark eyes and unruly,
longish black hair. Admiring college girls had sometimes told him that
he was a combination of Abe Lincoln and Lord Byron. That pleased him,
though in his heart he knew it really wasn't very important.
He was finished with his studies now, ready for the world of
achievement. His father, a retired Professor of Ethnology, had arranged
the financing of an exploring expedition. Alice--George's twin sister,
who from birth had been blind--was going to visit distant relatives.
George and his father would go to central Asia. Perhaps they would
find some Neanderthal skeletons, crumbling bones that could be pieced
together thrillingly to throw more light upon the nature of our savage
ancestors of a few million years ago.
It was an exciting prospect to young Carter. All the spirit of
adventurous youth stirred within him at the thought of it. But
nevertheless, this summer more than ever, when the night breeze rustled
the leaves and the moonlight patched his mother's little rock garden,
he found himself liking to lie out there alone, smoking and vaguely
dreaming of things less remote than Asiatic Neanderthal skeletons of a
million years ago.
Undoubtedly--this particular July evening--young Carter drowsed off
into complete unconsciousness, with his long lanky figure sprawled in
the chair. He was awakened by a faint vague sound so abnormal to the
somnolent little garden that at once it snapped him into alertness.
It sounded like a faint cry--a little gasp of human fear. He sat up,
startled, but the sound was gone. There seemed nothing here but the
patches of moonlight and the dim outlines of the garden.... Then Carter
sucked in his breath and tensed, with his hands gripping the sides
of his canvas chair. There was a girl standing off there between the
sundial and the distant hedge--a girl smaller than Alice, with the
moonlight shining on the pale fabric of her dress that hung from her
shoulders to above her knees. A gray-blue cord crossed to divide her
breasts, encircled her slim waist and hung with tassels down one side
to her knees. He saw her face, with hair streaming down to frame it--a
face that stared at him with terror.
"Well," he murmured. "Good Heavens, where did you come from?"
He jumped to his feet. Again she gave the little cry of fear, and like
a faun darted backward until the hedge stopped her. She had come into
a brighter patch of moonlight now, and the sight made him gasp. Her
short tasseled robe was torn and soiled. Her bare legs were scratched
and splotched with blood that had dried. On her feet, buskins tied with
thongs about her ankles were ragged, dirty and bloodstained. Her whole
aspect suggested an arduous, perhaps desperate journey.
Thoughts are instant things. For that moment he stared, transfixed; and
like a trapped little animal she gazed back at him. He saw that she was
young, fifteen or sixteen perhaps. A girl in a fancy dress costume, who
had run a long way and was cowering here in terror. But then he saw her
pale-gold hair, almost silvery in the moonlight; the flesh of her neck
and arms and face, queerly seeming to glow, as though opalescent--saw
her face of exquisite, but very strange beauty. Oriental? He knew it
was not that. And all his sudden thoughts of rationality were stricken
from him with the startled idea that this girl could belong to no race
that had ever been known on Earth. Idiotic thought! But he could not
thrust it away.
He was advancing upon her now. "Who the devil are you?" he demanded.
"How did you get in here? What's happened to you?"
She was trembling as a faun might stand its ground and tremble, so that
now he was beside her, with her face at his shoulder as she stared up
at him. Then she was murmuring something, in a language of soft limpid
syllables. A language of Earth? Certainly it didn't seem so. She was
breathing hard; her whole aspect showed exhaustion.
"You're all in," he murmured. "Good Heavens, you look as though you'd
walked from California and climbed half a dozen mountains."
Idiotic words, especially as obviously she couldn't understand them.
His hand went to her shoulder. Perhaps she was badly hurt.... He must
get her into the house....
But at his touch she twitched loose. She was staring past him now
to where the moonlight glistened on the rippling little lily pool.
Then she darted away; and at the pool knelt down, plunging her face,
drinking deeply, greedily as one drinks who has been much loo long
without water....
* * * * *
It was several weeks before Professor Carter, Alice and George had any
clear idea of who the strange, weirdly beautiful young girl might be,
or where she had come from. Her name, which almost at once she was
able to indicate to them, sounded as though it might be Lea--a limpid
syllable as near that as they could determine. Professor Carter had
told no one in the quiet little New England village about her. For the
first few days, vaguely it had seemed that from some distant place a
hue and cry would be raised for her; news that such a girl had escaped
from some asylum, circus or Heaven knows what.
But nothing developed. No such girl seemed missing. It confirmed George
and his father's own conviction; incredibly this timid, new little
inmate of the prosaic Carter household was of a race so far unknown.
"Why, look at her, George," Professor Carter had exclaimed that first
evening. "That complexion, creamy, ivory-tinted--perfect for an
earth-girl. But don't you see that glow of opalescence in it? God,
that's weird, unnatural, unexplainable. And look at the shape of her
skull--not our shape. Not Neanderthal. I'd call it perhaps more in
the line of Cro-Magnon. Yet hardly that either. My guess is that the
skeleton formation, particularly the skull, certainly in many ways
represents a development different from ours."
Professor Carter was scientifically enthusiastic, amazed and thrilled
by this mysterious specimen of living young female so miraculously here
for him to study. George's father was a stocky, thick-set man of nearly
sixty, square-rigged like a brig. His face was solid, heavily lined
from almost a constant habit of grimness. He had a sunburned baldspot
with a fringe of iron-gray hair. There was nothing of the dreamer,
the romanticist in the practical scientific nature of Professor
Carter--save that to him, everything scientific was the essence of
romance. His deep-set gray eyes were sparkling with earnestness as he
regarded the queerly beautiful little Lea.
"A primitive race, George. And yet, look at her expression. Those
delicately chiseled features. She has artistic feeling--a mentality
different from ours, but perhaps in some ways even more advanced."
To young Carter, the classification was repugnant, as though this
frightened, wild little creature were a bug under a microscope. And
Alice evidently felt the same.
"Father, stop it!" she exclaimed. "Don't boom at her like that. She's
still too frightened."
George's blind sister was slender, brown-haired. Her face had a gentle,
wistful beauty, enhanced into pathos by the blankness of her pale-brown
eyes. Here in her own home where she had lived all her sightless life,
she could move with almost normal freedom. It was she who took care
of Lea at first. But as the days passed into weeks the strange little
visitor, alert of mentality, always with a whimsical smile, began
taking care of the blind girl. Lea's language of soft, weird syllables
defied Professor Carter's classification. He and George could do
nothing with it. But from the first, with extraordinary concentration
and abnormal aptitude, at once Lea began learning English. That her
mentality was different, and in this respect certainly far superior
to their own, immediately became apparent. With amazing rapidity she
memorized and understood the words and phrases with which patiently
they drilled her. With Alice as her constant companion, she made an
immediate effort to fit into what was for her, the strangeness of their
household. Often she would laugh with what obviously was a keen sense
of whimsical humor--a little rippling rill of girlish laughter....
The knowledge of who she was and where she had come from, of necessity
was imparted gradually to the still incredulous Carters. Obviously
now she was struggling with their language with the desire to tell
them. There was still another mystery about her which that very first
evening, Alice had discovered. Beneath one of her armpits, held by a
strap around her body, there was a small vial, seemingly of some tough
vegetable fiber. She had wildly, vehemently resisted everyone's effort
to touch it; she would never let it leave her person.
Then at last came her ability to make them really understand that she
had come from a strange world of infinite smallness. A world so tiny
that it was vastly beyond the reach of any microscope. A world in an
atom.
"I watch--very careful as I grow large," she said. "I can show you
now from where I come." Then she led them, amazed and, of course,
still incredulous, out into the garden. At the broken old sundial she
indicated to them its metal pointer, near the end of which there was a
tiny abrasion.
"From there," she insisted. "I notice it well when I come. You wait--I
tell to you soon--when the English for me get better."
To young Carter who watched her always with a mixture of struggling
emotions which he could not himself understand, it seemed that a
shadow crossed her expressive little face as she showed them the spot
on the green-bronzed aged pointer of the old sundial. A single atom,
down there in the metal, housed her world. She was worried about her
people....
Amazing infinity of smallness! As a scientist, young Carter had been
reared upon the contemplation of how little one can really know of the
multiplicity of things which exist in the Universe. The remoteness of
inter-stellar space to him had always been awesome. And here was an
opposite remoteness. An infinity of smallness....
Lea's English was sometimes quaint, but adequate to her task, that
evening when in detail she told them....
* * * * *
My people--Lea said--live in the mountains and in the forests around
the big lake. The main city, it is called Helos. We are the Heanas,
most civilized people in our world....
It was a strange picture which the girl evoked of her world within
an atom of the sundial pointer. From a shimmering, luminescent lake
in a region of soft-glowing twilight, hills of a strange blue-gray
vegetation rose in great undulating terraces toward the distant
mountains. The Heanas were a peaceful people. Nature had always been
kind; food was readily grown; the people's few wants always had been
easily supplied. Crime among them had always been very little. But
there was some, of course--crimes of fundamental motive; love, hate,
jealousy, cupidity, revenge. Wherever humans exist, such crimes are
inevitable.
It happened that when Lea was just emerging from childhood--perhaps a
thousand times of sleep ago--there was a man in Helos named Taroh. He
had been what might be called a chemist--his work created substances
which kept the fields fertile so that foods might easily and swiftly
be grown. Neither Lea nor her father--who was ruler of the city of
Helos--liked this Taroh. And shortly after that, the fellow was caught
and convicted of killing another man. For punishment he was banished
from the land of the Heanas--sent to live forever in the region of
darkness beyond the mountains, in the country of the Malobs, as it was
called.
For a thousand times of sleep, little was heard in Helos of this
Taroh. But it was known that he had risen to be a ruler of the colony
of banished criminals like himself; that he had organized them, and
organized the savage tribe of Malobs--men who lived in caves or roamed
the black distant forests and killed the lurking animals for food.
"Like our Neanderthals," Professor Carter interjected, when Lea had
further described to them the savage, primitive Malobs.
* * * * *
In Helos they were beginning to fear that Taroh might have become a
menace. Occasional visitors to banished relatives in the Malob colony
brought darkling hints back to Helos that Taroh was promising to have
his revenge; that some day there would be a war like the ancient wars;
the exiles and the Malobs would be victorious and they would rule and
enjoy the better lands and better climates which the Heanas now were
ruling. It had frightened Lea's father and his counselors. Secretly
they had selected a young Heana named Artone, who volunteered to
pretend that he was convicted of a crime and banished; and thus go
and as a spy join Taroh to find out what was going on. This was known
to Lea. She liked Artone--he was young, handsome and courageous. She
feared for him; his mission was dangerous.
Then, during one of the times of sleep, Artone had returned to Helos,
riding one of the swift iguaras. Lea had met him, before he met anyone
else in Helos. And his news was terrifying. Even before Taroh had
been banished--Artone had learned--he had been experimenting with a
diabolical, dangerous drug. It was finished now. A drug which effected
the growth of living cell-organisms. Young Artone had been clever. He
had gained Taroh's confidence, so that one night the drunken Taroh
and an evil woman who called herself Tara after him, gloatingly told
Artone all about it.
Lea had only partially understood the depth of scientific principles
involved. To enlarge the bodily size of a living human, for instance,
Taroh had said, engaged no deeper problem than does a slight expansion
of tissue--or the rapid growth of a single cell--except that it must be
carried farther. The problem was to find a combination of chemicals,
sufficiently unharmful to life, that would so act upon the cells as to
cause an increase of their bulk without changing their shape--a uniform
proportionate rate of growth of each cell, so that the body shape would
not be altered.
Taroh, experimenting with simple living organisms, had progressed to
insects, and then to himself. He had found, too, that any object of
animal or vegetable cell structure which is held in close physical
contact with the enlarging body, likewise would be expanded, because
they would be within the natural aura of magnetic field with which
every living thing is surrounded. Thus a man's garments, his weapons
closely held against him--unless they were mineral--would grow large
with him.
"And Taroh planned to take this drug?" George Carter exclaimed. "And
grow large? A man a hundred feet tall perhaps--so that he could come
and devastate your city of Helos? Why of course he could do that!"
It had been Taroh's boasted intention. But Lea, hearing of it from the
breathless Artone, had ridden back at once with Artone on the huge
iguara. It had pleased and flattered the drunken Taroh that the girl,
out of attraction for him, had come to join him, so that Lea had been
able to learn from him where he kept the diabolic drug.
"You did that?" Professor Carter exploded. "Look here, young woman,
you mean to say on a thing of importance like that you didn't tell
your father and his counselors? You dared take the thing into your own
hands?"
Lea's slant eyes beneath her long lashes flung him a sidewise glance;
her lips twisted into a whimsical smile.
"It could be that there are some things," she said demurely, "where a
woman's wit is better than the strength of a man's arms." And she added
slyly, "You are much like my father, Professor Carter."
She had gotten the drug. And with it, upon the verge of being trapped,
she had no recourse but to take the drug herself, and by growing
gigantic, escape from Taroh. The drug at first had blurred her senses.
That, and her terror, had sent her reeling out into the faintly
luminous darkness of the Malob country. Quite evidently she had taken
far more of the drug than she planned. Half conscious, she had been
aware of the dwindling rocky landscape--gullies closing in upon her
so that she had to draw her expanding body upward or its bulk in the
apparently shrinking space would have crushed her.
* * * * *
It had been a weird and ghastly journey to the terrified Lea. Professor
Carter, George and Alice sat tense, amazed as they tried to visualize
what so earnestly she was describing. Then at last the dose of the drug
she had taken wore off. She had desperately climbed from a shrinking
valley into a new vista of barren rocky waste. Exhausted, she had
slept. Then she was cold, hungry and thirsty. For hours and for miles
she had wandered over the gigantic, empty, naked terrain of metallic
rocks. Without food or water, she knew she would die. There was
nothing she could do save to take more of the drug, with the monstrous
landscape again shrinking until at last there was different air,
different light.
She emerged finally, with other, decreasing doses of the drug which now
she had learned to regulate--emerged upon the pointer of the Carter
sundial. And growing still larger, had been able to drop to the surface
of the sundial itself, and then with more growth, to the ground. She
was in the Carter garden, where presently the last tiny taste of the
drug wore off. With size unchanging she stood terrified and amazed
in the strange silver and black world--and then she had seen the
strange-looking man who was George Carter, lying in his chair....
For a moment the Carters were silent as Lea ended her amazing
narrative. It seemed incredible, but they had to believe it; the girl
was so earnest; her words carried such a wealth of corroborating
detail. It made them realize anew what a vast multiplicity of human
life must be hidden away beyond our ken in the Universe!... Later that
evening, George and his father discussed it.
"Naturally the human life within atoms of our own earth has
developed in our own image," Professor Carter was saying. "The
same life-source--same general lines of evolution. A different
environment--that, and a different size. But still fundamentally the
same. Why, I'll be able to lecture on this, George. That girl Lea--she
can appear with me." He slapped George enthusiastically on the back.
"This will be a big thing for us, boy. We'll be world famous, once we
make it known."
"Will we?" Young Carter sat with his gaze focused far through the walls
of the living room--gazing out to the conjured vision of a world of
Heanas, and savage Malobs. The lamplit living room here was silent.
Alice had gone to bed. Lea had retired to her room up there also.
"I was thinking," George said. "That fellow Taroh--Lea stole his drug,
but he can make more. Why not? Maybe by now that's what he's done. To
trample gigantic, upon Lea's people--to wreck that little city--"
It seemed that there was a faint noise at the top of the hall stairs.
George and his father glanced up inquiringly, then decided that it was
nothing.
"We must get the rest of that enlarging drug away from her,"
Professor Carter said. "I didn't want to tackle her tonight--she's
been so unreasonable about that package under her arm. We'll get it,
George, I'll demonstrate it to the scientific societies to prove
our statements, and then, good God, it must be destroyed. Too damn
dangerous. Why, if a thing like that fell into the wrong hands here, it
could devastate the world!"
But George was thinking only of poor little Lea. Marooned here. She
was worried about her people, of course.... After Professor Carter had
gone to bed that night, for a long time George sat alone in the sitting
room, pondering. To his father the fate of that tiny world was only an
interesting scientific thesis. He realized that a billion billion other
atomic worlds might be struggling, unseen, inaccessible to us....
Upon impulse, young Carter suddenly left the sitting room and went
quietly upstairs. Very gently he knocked on Lea's door.
"Lea? You asleep?"
"Oh--that is you, George? Come in."
Clad in a pair of Alice's blue pajamas, Lea was sitting on the
bed--slim little figure with the lamplight softly painting her,
glinting in her pale-gold hair with tints of burnished silver. Her hair
was streaming down over her shoulders; it framed her face on which now
a shadow of terror had gathered.
"You heard what I mentioned to father," George said. "About Taroh maybe
making more of the drug?"
"Yes. That I did. Oh, George--I thought what I did for my world was the
best."
Contrition was upon her. "It was," he said hastily. He had closed the
door behind him; he lowered his voice. "Lea, father wants to get that
drug away from you and destroy it. But I was thinking--chemists here,
analyzing it, might be able to create its reverse."
She stared. "I mean," he added earnestly, "I don't want to abandon your
world, Lea. Not by a jugful I don't. If a drug can be made to increase
bodily growth, why couldn't one be made to diminish it? I don't care
what father says, I'm going to get the best chemists in the country to
try and analyze it--try and create its opposite."
"Your father--and the big men of science--they would never allow that,"
she said. "I heard your father say that this enlarging drug, it could
devastate your world. He is right. And so could one that made people
smaller, so that they would vanish forever into smallness. Is that not
so, George?"
"I don't care," he asserted. "I'll take a chance. I'll be careful what
chemists I give it to. And father needn't know what I'm going to do
anyway. Let's see the drug."
She opened the neck of her pajama top; and produced a flat brown box,
of a strange hard fiber which undoubtedly was vegetable. Within it were
two small vials of the same material.
"This one I used," she said. "There is some of the drug here left."
Opening it, she showed him a number of tiny white pellets. A luminous
phosphorescence seemed to stream up from them when they were held
in shadow. "The dose I first took was three," she added. "But at the
journey end, no more than did I touch one to the tip of my tongue."
* * * * *
The other vial, identical in size, shape and color, was sealed with a
wax-like gum. George opened it. They stared; Lea faintly gasped as he
poured the tiny pellets out into his palm. They were not white like the
others, but a deep violet, with the same luminescence seeming to stream
up from them.
"Why, what is that?" Lea murmured. "I thought that all the drug was the
same."
"But Taroh maybe figured he wouldn't want to stay gigantic," George
exclaimed with rising excitement. "Why not? Maybe our work is all done
for us, Lea."
Were these luminescent violet pellets a diminishing drug?... A fly was
walking on the white counterpane of Lea's bed. Carter watched it as it
flew and landed on the tabletop under the lamp.
"Don't move, Lea," he murmured. "I'll see if I can get that fly to eat
some." He laid one of the violet pellets in the circle of lamplight.
Breathlessly he and the girl watched. Perhaps the violet luminescence
carried an alluring smell, for presently the fly crawled to the pellet.
"It did! It ate some, Lea! Watch it now!"
The fly was standing motionless. For a breathless instant fear stabbed
into Carter. Suppose this were the enlarging drug, the same as the
other save a different color. That fly, getting large, might dart
away. In a moment it might be too large to kill. Still growing, it
would burst the room, wreck the house.... With the flash of terrified
thoughts, Carter raised his hand to try and kill the motionless insect.
But he stopped.
"Look! It is smaller!" Lea murmured.
With wings still folded it was crawling in a wavering little circle
near the pellet. And visibly it was diminishing in size. Already the
tiny pellet seemed gigantic beside it. Silently Lea and Carter stared.
The fly was a tiny black midge now, swiftly crawling, but moving so
slowly on the polished tabletop.
"Can you still see it, Lea?" Carter blinked; bent down. It seemed that
the insect already was beyond his sight.
"Yes. I see it."
And then it had vanished. Not gone. They knew it was still there;
dwindling; soon it would be beyond the reach of any microscope....
For a moment, in the silent little bedroom, Carter and the girl stared
at each other, overwhelmed by the momentousness of their discovery.
"You want to go back to your own world, Lea?" he murmured at last. "You
can do it now--with this."
"Yes--yes! That is what I shall do." Her eyes were shining. Her whole
little figure was trembling. Swiftly she gathered up the pellets,
replaced them in the vial. "Your father shall have no chance to destroy
them," she declared defiantly. "They are mine, not his."
"If you go, I'm going with you," Carter exclaimed suddenly. His heart
was pounding; a band seemed binding his chest. There is no one who can
face the Unknown without a thrill of excitement, and fear.
"And leave this your world?" she murmured. "Your father and
sister--they who love you just as my people love me--"
"I can come back to them. The journey--"
"The journey, it can be very long and very dangerous--"
"Not so dangerous for me as for you, Lea." He seized her by her slender
shoulders and stared earnestly down into her eyes. "Look here, do you
want me to come?" he demanded. "Not because I can help you--I don't
mean only that. Do you want me to come?"
For an instant it seemed that in the limpid depths of her eyes a mist
was gathering. Then her face turned whimsical; her mouth twisted into
a little smile as she cocked her head and gazed at him slantwise from
behind lowered lashes.
"That is for you to think for yourself," she murmured. "I could not
stop you coming if I would. Is that not so?"
"It damn sure is," he agreed. Again he lowered his voice, with a swift
glance at the bedroom door. "I don't think I'll say anything about this
to father and Alice," he added softly. "Just leave them a message that
I'll be right back. No use starting anything, you know."
"And you will come back soon to them? You will thank them for that
they have both been so very kind to me here?"
"Sure I will. Why, Lea, we're not going far. Only into the garden, to
the sundial's pointer. Why, if you look at it like that, we're not
going maybe even an eighth of an inch beneath the surface of that metal
pointer!"
He met Lea, a short time later, out in the moonlit garden. They had
come furtively down through the silent house. He was wearing his
bathing suit, with rubber-soled sneakers on his feet from which he had
removed the metal eyelets. Lea was dressed as he had first seen her,
in her short gray-blue ragged little garment. The same wild, strange
little girl of another world--and now he stared with his heart racing,
and he put his hands on her shoulders.
"I'm glad you're not getting away from me," he said unsteadily.
"We should stand by the sundial," she murmured. "We take the drug now?"
"All right," he agreed. They had divided the two drugs, so that each
of them carried a vial of both violet and white pellets. "Now listen
carefully, Lea," he directed. "Above everything we must keep together.
Not only in space--keep close beside each other, I mean--but we must
be sure and keep together in size also. We must always take identical
amounts of the drug. And take them at identical times."
"That I understand." She had made this trip before; outwardly at least,
she was far less excited than himself. "One pellet first, you think?"
"Yes. Until--until we see what happens." He took one of the luminous
violet pellets in his palm. A pungent aromatic odor wafted up from it.
"Ready, Lea?"
He put the pellet into his mouth and hastily swallowed it. He was
conscious of a sickish sweet taste; a burning constriction of his mouth
and throat. Then his senses reeled with a dizzying swoop.
* * * * *
He and Lea were clinging together; he felt himself staggering a
little. He opened his eyes. The patched black and silver scene of the
rock garden was blurred; swaying. Then his sight clarified. The scene
steadied. But then he realized that everything was moving--the dim
trees, the garden hedge, the little paths and rocks, all very slowly
expanding, heightening, widening. And he felt the movement under his
feet. With a soft, crawling, shifting, the ground was moving outward,
expanding under the soles of his shoes. It drew his feet slowly apart,
so that he had to take a staggering step to readjust them.
"Heavens, Lea--it's weird."