_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!