CHAPTER XII

_The Meeting_

For that instant, I was convinced that I was trapped, lured here by Alt to this giant lying in ambush. But Alt shouted:

"Run--that is a Togaro man!"

As Alt went past me, I saw his fear-stricken face. The giant--three or four times my own height--was climbing to his feet. Alt was heading for the broken cliff wall. I ran after him.

Behind us the giant came with a bound. The cliff was fifty feet away. Alt shouted back a warning--something about hiding in a small cave-mouth. There were many small openings; we must get into one too small for the giant to follow.

There was no time for us to take the drug. No time to do anything but run. But in a moment I knew we could never make it. I could hear the thud of the giant's running footsteps, rattling the loose rocks. In a moment more he would have us.

I shouted: "I can't get there, Alt!"

Alt stopped abruptly. He bent and seized a chunk of rock. Futile stand! A hundred feet away the giant came leaping. He was larger now.

Then I thought of my automatics. In the shock of this sudden encounter I had completely forgotten I was armed. I whipped one out, and stood like a hunter facing a charging elephant. But mine was the trembling courage of desperation.

The fast-growing giant was forty or fifty feet tall now. My automatic felt like a toy as I leveled it. I fired; blindly perhaps at the last. The giant let out a bellow of rage and pain--and astonishment. He leaped sidewise; he stood fumbling, clutching at his shoulder where my little bullet had stung him.

Alt shoved me. "This way--run!"

We reached the cliff bottom and found a narrow cleft running back in the rock wall. It was only a few feet wide, but we wedged into it and forced our way back a yard or two.

The giant was silent now. In a moment he was outside the crevice, but he was far too large to get in. We heard him poking about; mumbling to himself. Then he seemed to be digging, rattling the rocks. His hand and arm came into the passage probing for us, and I fired again. The report was deafening in this confined space. Powder fumes choked us.

The giant let out another roar, and his arm, wounded no doubt, was withdrawn. He vanished. In the silence, we heard the scuffle of his heavy, retreating footsteps.

We were all but choked; yet we did not dare go out. We crouched, gasping, and presently the air cleared. There was silence. "Shall we chance it, Alt? Or get smaller in here?"

"Try outside," he whispered. "I think he is gone--getting large, on his way up."

We crept from the rift. The valley outside seemed empty. The giant had vanished. Or was he around here somewhere?

I whispered: "We'd better not move--it might attract his attention."

"No. Wait for a time."

We crouched in the deep shadow of a bowlder. No question of Alt's loyalty now, and my instinctive liking for him sprang anew.

"That was a close call, Alt."

"Yes."

I added, "You want one of these guns?"

In the gloom I could see his pleased expression. I showed him how to aim and fire the automatic. He wore a belt to which was strapped a package of sandwiches and a vacuum of water; I threaded the holster on it.

We waited, perhaps five or ten minutes, crouching by the rock with the silent, shadowy valley around us. There was still no sign of the giant. There were cañons here, into any one of which he might have plunged. The silence was heavy, oppressive, eerie. A haunted silence, as though here were things not to be seen or heard, yet nevertheless making their presence felt.

I whispered at last, "Shall we start?"

"Yes."

I had been lying on my side, raised on one elbow. There came a movement at my belt; I sensed a tiny indefinable creeping movement upon me. My hand went down with a swift, instinctive gesture--as one moves with a startled hand to knock off an insect. And Alt gave a low, sharp cry.

We both saw it at once. As I sat erect, a small human figure which had been clinging to my belt at the side, scuttled down my leg and leaped off me to the ground. It vanished in the shadows. We made a hurried, startled search, but it was gone. We had briefly seen it--a man the length of my thumbnail.

"Gone, Alt!"

We searched no further. Impossible task to find such a figure here on these dark rocks.

The thing gave us a shock. We crouched again, waiting, silently listening. This strangely fearsome journey! Nothing alive save ourselves, here in this brooding place of rocks. Nothing to see, or to hear. Yet it seemed as though there might be living multitudes around us. Humans, not moving in space very far, yet journeying. The giant was gone. He had passed us, moving on into largeness. This tiny figure which had been clinging to me was rushing ahead of us perhaps into smallness.

Alt's voice checked my reverie.

"I think it is safe to go on."

We started off again. The crescent pit we found to be some twenty feet deep. There was no trouble descending its broken sides.

Alt said: "Coming out, I could have climbed in this size very easily. But I was smaller. I climbed up here--it seemed a thousand feet."

The giant had evidently been in here, growing, and had waited until the last moment to scramble out. He had been as surprised as ourselves, no doubt, at the sudden encounter.

"There must be many of Togaro's men traveling," said Alt. "They are in every size, traveling, exploring."

This darkling abyss of rocks! I conjured enemies lurking in every shadow ready to spring upon us. Giants--or tiny humans smaller than insects. Enemies of every size and of shifting stature.

We kept steadily upon our way. The crescent pit opened into a valley with towering mountain ranges for its walls. Then we entered a tunnel mouth. Timing it with unaltering size between one of the pellets, I saw it as a miniature tunnel which our bodies almost blocked. We followed it, from one gloomy cavern to another--a distance seemingly only a few paces. Yet I could envisage that with another pellet it would be a black march of hours in a vast dark void and a desolation of rocks. An army of our enemies might be marching here like that now!

We encountered no other Togarites, yet I think that many were passing close to us in size. Going out, I wondered? If they showed themselves, father and Foley would make an end to them promptly.

We stopped once and ate our sandwiches, keeping one of them only against disaster. We finished the water in the vacuum bottle. There was water now occasionally to be seen in pools on the rocks.

The landscape had been continually changing. The light from overhead was long since gone. Occasionally we were in some tunnel or cave of darkness. Yet there always seemed a little light--as though the rocks themselves were radiating a glow.

The air was changing. A brittle crispness. A dryness. And then, when at the termination of the effect of our fourth pellet we found ourselves on a vast metallic plain sloping down into darkness, it incongruously began to rain. A slow, fine drizzle. Overhead I could see moving dark clouds.

We came upon a patch of soil, almost barren, but not quite, for there was sickly vegetation struggling in it. Tiny green things growing. Clumps of them, with small rock ridges a foot high lying like snakes.

The drizzle was fine as a mist. After a few moments, it ceased. Abruptly I realized that the puffs of cloud were very small and close over our heads. And again my whole viewpoint shifted. I was a tremendous giant standing here, towering to the clouds. A tiny forest was here at my feet; the ridges were rocky ranges of hills.

I strove to encompass thought of the journey as a whole. We had been only a few hours. It seemed that we had descended thousands of feet into the bowels of some vast world of naked rock. Perhaps we had. In our present size, I am sure the entire trip would have been miles of distance. Yet to father, up there now in that inconceivable titanic world, we were still near the surface of the porous rock fragment.

We took another pellet, and the landscape grew.

Alt gripped me. "See--the light!"

A steady red spot of light was visible near by.

Alt said: "Drake's signal."

We saw Drake first. He stood in the growing forest as our dwindling bodies came down into it. The red light painted his figure as he leaned against a stunted tree-trunk.

"Frank!"

"Drake--Drake, we see you!"

We adjusted our size. He came running forward. He called back: "Dianne! Ahlma, Dianne--they've come!"

It was so good to feel his handclasp!

"Father all right, Frank?"

"Yes."

"You've got the rock guarded?"

"Yes, Drake, we--"

And then I saw Dianne. The glory of her beauty swept me. She ran up and kissed me.

"Frank, dear--"

I do not know what I was to her then. But to me, this was not my sister. A thousand times more strongly now, I felt it. And no princess this. Just a girl!