CHAPTER XI

_Giant in Ambush_

Within an hour I was ready. An hour of hurried, feverish preparation. Yet after all, there was not much to do. I wore a bathing suit, with a belt of the drugs strapped about my waist. And the stoutest shoes I owned.

Foley's eyes were never for a moment off this fellow Alt. He appeared inoffensive enough. He was not badly injured. Exhausted--he seemed only to desire a rest; he lay quiet while we bathed and dressed his wounds. They were bruises and superficial cuts where he had fallen on the sharp rocks of his outward journey. His feet were the worst. He had started with a pair of buskins, made of animal skin. The rocks had torn them to shreds; his feet were bleeding and swollen.

"Couldn't Drake get you shoes?" I demanded. "Something to protect your feet better than that?"

He smiled. A friendly, ingenuous sort of smile. I was alternating between liking him and being suspicious of him.

"No," he said. "We do not have what you call shoes. Drake did not know the journey would be so bad for me. It should not--I was not clever--I did it wrong."

"What do you mean by that? You got lost?"

"No. Not lost--I will show you what I mean, when we start in."

He had brought no food or water, and needed both badly. He drank the water we supplied him, and ate the bread avidly. The meat he discarded; he did not know what it was. He shuddered when we told him--as though to eat it would be cannibalistic.

I rigged a holster around my chest over one shoulder; and another about my waist, above the drug belt, so that I could carry four automatics and two or three knives. And with a cartridge belt, I was awkwardly equipped; I felt like a walking arsenal.

"I can carry some of them," Alt offered.

"No, thank you," I retorted.

He smiled, but made no further comment.

The trip in to Drake, he said, should only take a few hours. We would find water partway in; we needed little food. Alt suggested one small bit of bread.

A very casual fellow this! Certainly he hardly believed in preparedness. Suppose we got lost!

Strange journey! A trip, not of distance, but only of changing size. There were so many factors to it that I had yet to learn! Alt said quietly:

"Coming out, I used up my food at once. But going in that is not necessary." He saw my puzzled expression, and added. "If we put that piece of bread on a rock beside us, then in a moment there is a mountain of bread that could feed a thousand."

We were ready at last. Alt needed rest. But he seemed anxious to start at once.

"Drake bade me hurry."

We had bound his feet; and I found a large pair of shoes for him to wear over the bandages.

"Can you walk?"

"Yes."

"Try it."

He hobbled along the side of the room, with Foley eying him. His feet must have been painful; but in a moment he was walking with hardly a limp.

A likable fellow, this. He said, "I can do it. Besides, I shall be more clever going in--you will see. Our trip will be easy."

I said good-by to father.

"Remember, dad, keep watch here. Closer than ever. And when we come back--look for our signal."

A flag of striped black and white which we would wave.

Alt explained the drugs. I would not let him touch them. The belt had eight compartments on each side. Two drugs, of opposite action. Eight intensities of each. Small, metallic vials held the tiny pellets.

"Have we enough?" I demanded.

"Oh yes, I think so. Or if we had not, it would be easy to set some aside, and pick them up again when we were smaller."

We stood in the center of the room on the floor beside the granite slab. Father sat in a chair. Foley stood regarding us as though we were ghosts and expecting us to dissolve into nothingness.

I handed Alt a pellet. "This right?"

"Yes."

It was the diminishing drug of the weakest intensity, like the one Dianne had given us, when in the bedroom we had pursued Togaro that brief distance into smallness.

"Yes," Alt repeated. "We each take one at the same instant." He touched me. "There is the great danger that we may become separated from each other. You understand? Lost in size. You will take none that you do not give me the same?"

"No," I agreed. Friend or enemy, I could not blame him for being apprehensive. I had the drugs; he had none. Lost in size--stranded.

We took the pellets. The familiar lurching sensation came as before. But this time I was prepared for it. I stood quiet, with the swimming room around me. I was facing the granite slab. It was waist high, with the rock fragment in its center. The slab seemed lifting; expanding--and receding. I was presently below it, looking up at its bottom resting upon the wooden supports.

Alt was unchanged beside me. He said in a moment,

"Your father will lift us up?"

"Yes."

My thoughts went winging off. I was not frightened this time. My heart was beating normally. A sense of eager exhilaration was on me. Soon we would reach Drake and Dianne.

I was abruptly aware of Alt plucking at me.

"Your father, he must lift us up!"

The slab was far overhead. At a distance, the wooden pedestal legs rose like great round columns of some strange, crudely-fashioned temple. I recall that just at that instant, I had the impression of a tug at my shoelace. A tiny twitch. But it was driven from my mind. I had no time to look down. Something gigantic came swooping at me from overhead. Something monstrous, pink-white, wrapped itself around me.

I was lifted. Squeezed breathless; and snatched up with a dizzy swoop. Up--a hundred feet it seemed, through the rushing air. Into a glare of light. And then released.

I saw the great pink-white hairy thing leaving me. It was father's hand. I staggered dizzily and fell upon a rough expanse of stone.

There are things which one sometimes can remember as being vague, unimportant impressions. Later, in the light of after events, they assume importance and one may wonder how they were overlooked at the time. The tug at my shoelace was such a one. And now, as I fell dizzily upon the stone slab, there came another. The feeling of something crawling upon me. As though an insect brushed my bare shoulder. I thought nothing of it at the time, but later I was to recall it clearly.

I heard a booming voice; father's voice.

"Oh Frank--have I hurt you?"

He had not. But I saw his gigantic hand and arm coming up more slowly with Alt.

I got to my feet, and looked up. Father's chest and head towered above me.

I shouted, "No, you did not hurt me. We're all right."

Again Alt plucked at me. "He waited too long! hurry--run!"

We were on a naked expanse of uneven gray rock. It was flooded with yellow-white light. I saw, a few hundred feet away, a jagged mound of rock, large as a house. It was expanding, and drawing away from us.

Alt was running, and I ran after him. The expanding ground swayed beneath me. Alt called back:

"We've got to climb it--and it is getting so large--"

And so far away! I thought that we could not get there over the shifting, expanding ground. But we made it. The rock was a jagged, volcanic-looking mound when we reached it. Fifty feet high, at least. I followed Alt as he climbed up its precipitous slope. I was close under him; and suddenly I felt that if he were tricking me he had a perfect opportunity to turn and fling me backward.

"Wait a moment, Alt--let me get past you."

He stopped, and I led him to the summit. It was a long climb. We stood at last upon a rocky peak--in a yellow sunlight glare. Far down--it seemed five hundred feet now, at least--a great gray plain spread off into the distance. I could see a void off there--the edge of the granite slab. And vague towering shadows of form--father and Foley perhaps.

The rocks about us were still expanding with their crawling movement. A summit here, of tumbled naked crags. Fairly near at hand I saw a black hole--a pit. Alt led me to it. It was, by the time we got there, an orifice a hundred feet across. A pit of dense blackness, with perfectly smooth, almost vertical sides.

"We descend into that," said Alt.

My mind flung back. Dianne had used those same words, that night on Bird's Nest Island. This then, was the pin-point hole at the top of the rock fragment.

I stood with Alt, waiting. I was winded from the run, and the climb. My belts--the drugs--and the weapons--were awkward carrying.

Alt said, "If we had started just a little sooner, that climb would have been easy. We were too small. You see what I mean, using judgment in the trip?"

I did indeed. We were waiting now for this pit to expand further. The sides were too steep, too smooth now for descent. But the pit was widening; the walls were every moment becoming rougher. We had been quite near, but the expanding ground moved us away. I walked over to the lip again.

"The idea is to get down as soon as we can," I said.

"Yes," he agreed. "Shall we try it now?"

It seemed that there were places rough enough now to climb down. I had seen the bottom; it had not been very deep, though dark with shadow. But it was several hundred feet down now.

We picked our way, sliding perilously at times. We came at last to the bottom--a level, rocky floor, strewn with bowlders. The place seemed now a great circular valley, with towering mountainous sides. A haze of blue distance was overhead for a sky. A pseudo-sunlight was up there; but here on the valley floor shadows made a queer, unnatural twilight. I noticed too, a different quality of air. It was dryer, with a vague metallic sharpness.

"Which way?" I demanded.

The drug we had taken had reached the limit of its effect while we were descending to the valley pit. The landscape was no longer changing.

A new world already. A barren desolation of rock. I added:

"Do we take more of the drug now?"

Alt stood a moment considering. "There is another descent which I think we can almost make in a leap. This way--it is not far."

We walked along the valley floor. The heights from which we had come were beside us. A wildly tumbled volcanic region. There were narrow rifts, cracks in the bowlder-strewn floor; pits, and tiny craters, some with upstanding rims, as though lava had welled up and congealed. Corrugations; ridges; little buttes, and peaks like spires of needle-point sharpness.

I got the sudden impression that I was very large, and that this was a landscape all in miniature.

I was walking beside Alt. "How do you know where we should go?"

"Not far from here there is a place like a crescent. It should be--for our size now--quite small and not very deep. You understand? Easier for us to jump down into it now, than to make a long climb when we are smaller."

We rounded the corner of a fallen mass of bowlders, as though here an avalanche had come tumbling down the valley wall.

"Over there," said Alt. I saw, down a short slope, a small, crescent-shaped pit, with a span of a few feet. We were some two or three hundred yards from it.

I was suddenly stricken motionless. I stood gasping, with the shock of surprise and fear. From the pit, the head and shoulders of a man rose up. A giant face, malevolently staring. His body filled the pit. His hands appeared, caught at the rim, and he scrambled out.

And, with a shout, Alt turned and ran at me!