_Tiny Fragment of Rock_
A year passed. Father and I lived permanently now at King's Cove. In
a special room, with three trusted guards, the fragment of rock lay
carefully watched. Nothing--no one, friend or enemy--appeared during
that year; and we began to think that perhaps no one ever would.
Father's health was not good. The shock of losing Drake was very great.
He said it was not that. He said always--and so wistfully--that Drake
would come back to us. And Dianne.
The world, for months, talked of those days of the giants. But the
world soon forgets. The giants were an enigma--a menace--but our war
planes and the battleship soon overcame it. No one, after a year,
seemed afraid of giants; in a few years more they would be history,
forgotten completely.
No drugs were found on the bodies of the giants. They wore, the reports
said, a belt with many empty compartments. To whom could that possibly
be significant, save father and me?
I sat often alone at night in the barred room, by the light which
shone on the rock fragment as it rested on its smooth slab of stone. A
microscope stood in a bracket which in an instant could be swung into
position. Nothing could appear there without our seeing it at once. If
the menace came, we were ready always to deal with it.
Tiny fragment of rock lying there, with its billions of atoms--each a
universe. One--the universe that held Dianne.
I wondered, so often, what she and Drake and Ahlma might be doing down
there in the Infinitely Small. Trying, perhaps, to protect us from the
menace? It seemed so.
Often I cursed my helplessness. I could put my finger down and touch
the fragment of rock. An eighth of an inch of space--no more than that,
perhaps--separated me from Dianne. Yet it was an infinite, hopeless
void of distance.
And then one night in May, as I sat alone, staring at the rock
fragment, hope which I had thought dead leaped within me.
Something had come from the atom! Under the glare of light,
where all these hopeless days and nights nothing living had ever
appeared--something moved.
A speck, appearing from invisible smallness.
It grew.
A tiny human figure, small as a pinhead, was upon the jagged piece of
rock. I swung the microscope over it.
And I saw a man in tattered, blood-stained garments, clinging to the
rock, waving a white flag frantically at me!