One may almost get used to anything. His senses presently were
steady. And he knew that all the motion he was seeing was only an
optical effect. Nothing was changing save himself and Lea as they
dwindled. Amazing scene! The motion of the landscape had accelerated
now--soundless expansion of everything within his vision. Only Lea
beside him remained seemingly unchanged. To each of us, himself is the
center of the Universe. Always throughout all the weird journey, Carter
conceived himself his normal six foot height--and all the world around
him seemed getting larger.
He had taken a step away from Lea on the unsteady ground. Awed, he
stood gazing at the crawling movement of the expanding garden. The
trees near at hand already had drawn back; their interlocking branches
were strangely high over his head. Beyond a line of huge mossy rocks,
forty feet away now when it should have been twenty, he could see the
moonlit line of giant hedge. To the left, the moonlight glinted on a
great pool of rippling water, with tremendous lily pads and a great
line of mossy boulders along the bank--a line which was shifting
backward and expanding upward, steadily, as he stared.
Gigantic garden. Why, he could hardly see across it now. A forest of
giant trees towered into the sky near its distant lower end.
"George! The sundial!" He felt Lea tugging at him. "We must go--"
"Good Heavens, we've got to climb up there," he gasped. He seized her
hand; ran with her. The rocky garden path was broad as a road. The
flaring top of the sundial was seven or eight feet above the ground
when they got there. Frantically he lifted her up and leaped after her.
She pulled at him; tumbled him over the brink. Panting, they lay on the
great circular spread of uneven concrete, with the brink down to the
moonlit ground beyond its curving edge, close beside them. Beneath him
he could feel the concrete turning rougher and shifting outward in all
directions. There were sharp jagged points on it now. Then he stared
down over the edge. It was an astonishing abyss, sixty feet at least,
down to a spread of moonlit rippled lake, which was the lily pool!
He had helped Lea to her feet when abruptly they thought of the sundial
pointer. In the center of the circular moonlit spread of concrete the
metal pointer stood gleaming, fifty feet away. It was a triangle of
metal standing on edge, with its top sloping steeply upward--a slope
perhaps thirty feet long now, up to an apex ten feet high. Swiftly they
walked toward it. Within a moment, around them was a huge porous plain
of jagged rocks gleaming with moonlight. The circular lip of the abyss
everywhere was receding. There was only a silvery sheen of darkness
beyond it now. Overhead, far up, a single gigantic tree branch still
was visible, blurred in the moonlight.
* * * * *
Then they reached the sundial pointer. Its apex towered twenty feet
high now; the lower end of its upper sloping edge already was a foot
or two above the ragged, porous ground. Carter, standing at the end of
the pointer which in another moment was waist high, gazed up a six-foot
wide slope of metal which rose steeply into the moonlight. Ten feet or
so up the slope there was a depression like a little gully gouged out
of the metallic rock.
"That is the place," Lea said.
"All right. We'd better get up there at once."
He lifted her up to the bottom of the slope. Together, up a great
jagged expanding ramp which presently was twenty feet wide, arduously
they climbed upward. Inexorable expansion! New spaces every moment were
opening up beneath their feet. A tiny rift in the jagged metal ground,
in a moment was a little gully. Metal stones were apparent now, and
tiny pits into which one might thrust a finger. The edge of the slope
chanced to be beside Carter; and he gazed down from here on the top of
the pointer--down to the concrete circular top of the sundial. Hundreds
of feet down there, a vast, shining moonlit surface spread out now to
the blurred horizon! Huge pits, gullies, ravines were inky black.
On the jagged spires and little butte-tops the moonlight was molten
silver. It was a weird, naked scene of gray and yellow-white rocks,
fantastic as a Lunar landscape!
Then just for a moment, with mental viewpoint changed, Carter envisaged
the actuality. How big, compared to his original six-foot stature, was
he now? A sixteenth of an inch perhaps? If his father were here in the
garden, bending close over the sundial pointer with a light, he might
still be able to see him and the girl as they struggled up the sloping
narrow top edge of the sundial pointer!
Amazing how nothing is absolute, but wholly comparative to something
else! He had told Lea that they were not going very far! Only from the
house to the sundial in the garden. But, based on his present size, his
father and Alice off there in the house now, were at least sixty or
seventy miles away!
"This is the valley," Lea panted. "I can recognize now. It almost
closed upon me as I grew large. I can remember climbing up to here."
The edges of the giant upward slope had drawn away, so that with
tumbled boulders intervening, Carter could no longer see them. He and
Lea were in a depression, like a huge cauldron with its scooped-out
bottom almost level--a place a hundred feet in diameter. Steadily the
crawling expansion of all the scene continued. It seemed a uniform rate
of expansion now.
"That pellet lasts a long time, Lea." He tried to grin at her. "Don't
you suppose its effect is about over?"
"Oh, no! There is a great distance yet."
Distance; size! Meaningless terms. He and Lea--as his father would
view it--were not going very far in terms of distance! Just two
tiny creatures, almost too small to be seen, struggling on the
one-eighth-inch-thick top of the sundial pointer!
"You say we go into a valley?" he suddenly demanded. "I don't see any
valley."
"This one," the girl said.
A few feet from them there was a rift, like a little crescent slash.
A foot wide and twice as deep, it began here and curved off into the
distance. But presently it was a gully--a ragged, curving little
canyon fifty feet wide with broken walls that towered above them as
they went into it.
"I climbed out from here," Lea said. "I am sure it was just about here
where nearly I was crushed. But it looks so very different now." She
was puzzled as she gazed about them--gazed at what now was a broad,
curving valley with great mountainous sides towering up into the
luminous darkness overhead.
"Look here," he said, "I'm getting the hang of this. The secret is not
to wait until you're too small before going anywhere. Which way next?"
She was still puzzled. And then she brightened. "Why, it is right here.
I see it now."
It was a steeply descending little chasm. It had been a mere crack a
moment ago so that she had not recognized it. Now it was a ten-foot
rift, with a bottom smooth as black marble--a slide steeply descending
into darkness.