Ray Cummings

“ The luminous radiation from the rocks showed it more plainly now—long bulging body with six crooked legs; body pinched in the middle grotesquely like a spindly waist so small that it seemed as though the twenty-foot body might break in half.
"It doesn't see us, George—"
"Quiet!"
They crouched among the rocks. There seemed no place else they could hide. Could they out-distance the horrible thing in a straightaway run? Carter did not think so; certainly he did not dare try it. He was fumbling with the drug-vial now. And then the monstrous insect saw them! It whirled; dropped to its six legs. ”

“ Around them now was a great void of luminous darkness with an undulating landscape of naked rocks dimly visible. In a moment it seemed to Carter that his eyes were becoming accustomed to the darkness. He could see, far away in the distance where the ground rose up seemingly to meet the sky.
"Shall we take another pellet now, Lea?" he suggested at last.
"All right," she agreed.
Again they took the drug; and gazed appraisingly about them as the luminous, naked landscape crawled and shifted with its outward, upward motion. Tremendous journey downward into smallness! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Professor Carter said finally. "Good Lord, George—a trip like that, you could have been killed a hundred times. You accomplished your purpose—I'm glad of that. Taroh is dead. No use trying to connect that world with this one any further. It's against nature. And those drugs—the most diabolic things that exist in the world today. I'll demonstrate them to our scientists—then we'll have them destroyed."
Did the blind little Alice perhaps feel differently? Her sensitive fingers caressed the stubble of beard on George's blood-smeared face. "In the morning you'll tell me all about Lea?" ”

“ 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. ”

“ For a second Taroh seemed to stand balanced, with buckling knees. A dead man on his feet. Then he fell, lay sprawled on his back with the inch-high forest trees crushed beneath him.
And one of his outstretched dead arms struck across a rill of shimmering water—a river that backed up against the Titan arm, then turned aside and went roaring off through the mangled forest!...
At the city gates the running Lea had paused. She could hear that the city was in a wild turmoil of terror; shouting, running guards; people awakening in the middle of the time of sleep; appearing in windows or on rooftops ”

“ They are thousands, millions, trillions of light-years away—distances beyond conception of the human mind. Then go in and stand by the sundial in the Carters' little living room. You'll see, quite plainly, the tiny abrasion on the narrow top edge of the triangular sundial pointer. Lea's world, infinitely distant, beyond the reach of any microscope, is there—her world with its own remote heavens, and its own myriad tiny atoms—and each of them holding still other infinitudes of smallness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He saw himself as he actually was, a monstrous Titan, standing here with his head reared thousands of feet into the sky and Lea's world shimmering peacefully in the starlight almost at his feet!
The ground under them was still expanding from the last small dose of the drug. The shining lake and the little city were growing larger, seeming to rise up; but they were also visually receding.
"We sure better start walking forward," Carter suggested. "It'll be an awfully long walk if we don't make speed before we get much smaller." ”

“ 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."
She steadied him. "It will seem not so bad in a moment."
One may almost get used to anything. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Quietly he left the house, went down to the little rock garden where the moonlight gleamed on the old sundial and its metal pointer. And he did not come back....
That was more than a year ago. They found his scrawled little note: "Don't worry over me—I'll return shortly."
But so far, he has not. The sundial is in the Carter living room now; the room is closed off and never used. If you go to the small New England village, perhaps Professor Carter would let you see the sundial. A microscope has been erected over it. A light always shines on the old metal pointer. ”

“ Then an expanding cluster of nearby rocks intervened and they could no longer see it.
"We've got to be careful, Lea. Do things quickly or we'll get lost in size." With the attacking monster gone, Carter's wits came back to make him aware of a new danger. They had not intended to take this double dose of the diminishing drug. Gripping the girl, Carter stood unsteadily, peering around at the swaying scene. The apparent enlarging of the landscape was greatly accelerated, so swift that it was dizzying. ”

“ 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. ”