CHAPTER VI

_The Chase into Smallness_

Drake and I took the small pellets which Dianne offered. She had them in a phial at her waist. She said hurriedly: "Ahlma, you stay here. Keep her with you, father. Stay here in the room. Watch us--then, when you can't see us any longer, sit down! Don't move about--you might trample on us!"

It seemed that we had last seen the figure along the inner wall, away from the door or the windows. This was a small room. Two windows on one side, and the single door. It had once been a bedroom; but it was furnished meagerly now, with a small table and a few chairs.

"Here," said Dianne, "I think this is the best place. He may be--right here now. He could not go far--not far from this particular spot--when he is so small. Stand beside me, Drake. Here, Frank."

Father stammered: "You--you won't be gone long?"

"No," said Dianne. "Togaro would not dare go far into smallness here. It would lead him into the unknown--he would get lost. We will be back--in an hour perhaps. You ready, Frank? Ready, Drake?"

The pellet tasted a trifle sweetish. It dissolved on my tongue. I gulped and swallowed. Cold beads of sweat stood on my forehead. But it was fear only. My head reeled. The room seemed to take a dizzying, sweeping lurch. Dianne's steadying arm was around me and Drake; and in a moment my senses cleared. I later learned the details of this drug's effect. A contraction of the cells of my body, preserving their form, contracting each of them in normal relation to the others. An aura of its effect, like a magnetic field, was around me. My garments contracting; even the air, as I breathed it, was diminished in all its inherent molecules and atoms.

Dianne's voice said: "You feel all right?"

I heard Drake mutter: "Yes. But--Dianne--strange."

I was standing still, yet everywhere the room was in movement--a crawling, flowing movement. I could see the near-by wall at which I stared, moving upward, expanding, growing steadily larger. The ceiling over me, lifting. The wall receding. A moment ago I could have touched it. Not now. It was drawing back from me. A visual enlargement of all my surroundings. An illusion, because I was dwindling.

I was still dizzy; I did not dare turn my head or shift my gaze. Beside me was a chair. I could see it out of the tail of my eye. The chair was shifting away, and growing huge. Already its seat loomed higher than my head. I saw Dianne and Drake beside me; in all this movement they alone were unchanged.

And I could feel the movement. The floor under my feet was shifting with a steady crawl. It was spreading out, expanding. The pull of it drew my feet apart so that every moment I had to take a step to keep from falling. All this in what perhaps was a minute.

Dianne cast me off. "You're all right now. Come on--I think we should stand nearer the wall."

The wall seemed ten feet or more from us now. We walked toward it. The effect was dizzying, but we overcame that presently. Dianne turned and waved her hand upward. Drake and I swung around to follow her gesture.

This room gigantic! The ceiling seemed thirty or forty feet above us. The opposite wall was farther than that. High up were huge rectangles of windows. The chairs and the table were enormous.

We moved again toward the wall. We ran this time. A foot or two away we stopped.

Another minute passed. The room wall was white plastered, and it had a lower baseboard of wood. The plaster surface rose sheer a hundred feet now. It was like a great cliff-face. The lamplight up there was a yellow glow. The baseboard was twice the height of our heads, with a ledge on top upon which we could have walked. The wood looked rough and jagged.

The visual growth went on. The wall was again far away, and receding so fast that if we ran we might fail to reach it. The board floor under us was turning rough--uneven, with ridges and undulations everywhere.

Another minute.

In the distance behind us one of the table legs rose like a huge monolith into the heights of the lamplight. Shadows and blurred, dark outlines were up there. Farther away on the rolling, jagged surface which was now the floor I could see a formless dark blur which might have been one of father's feet. Half a mile away, perhaps, and receding in the distance.

Then even the nearer wall was gone! Vaguely, as though it were some ten miles off, it loomed like the white sheen of an ice cliff. Then vanished.

We stood alone in the midst of a tumbled region. A great tumbled plain--crudely level. Vacant distance everywhere. Overhead, in what to us was now the sky, a faint yellow sheen of radiance mingled with the haze of space.

There were pits all about us now; depressions, in depth twice the height of our bodies, with steep but jagged sides. We were still diminishing; the landscape crawled with expanding movement. It kept us active now. At our feet, often a small hole would open up so that we would have to move to a higher ridge to keep from falling or sliding into the yawning hole.

We stood precariously upon a small peak. With unnatural microscopic clearness it seemed to me that my vision might carry a hundred miles across this tumbled landscape. Weird vista! Like nothing I had ever seen on earth. Not even like pictures of the lunar landscapes. Some unknown planet, perhaps, might look like this. A land convulsed by an angry nature, flung and tumbled by some great cataclysm into this broken chaos.

With an effort I turned my thoughts into the other viewpoint. This was a few square inches--a foot or two perhaps--of the rough, scuffled board flooring in the bedroom of our Maine home! It seemed, far away as I stared, that there was a great vertical slash crossing the distant horizon. A cañon deep and wide--I knew that probably it was the space between the boards of the floor. A mile or so away in another direction was a huge caldron; a circular pit a mile wide, with a broken and jagged rim. The crater of some volcano? It was in reality a broken knothole, a blemish in the rough board of the floor.

We had been talking at intervals. I said once, thoughtlessly:

"But, Dianne--going into your atom, would it be so very much farther than this?"

She smiled. Drake exclaimed, "Don't be an ass, Frank!"

Dianne said gently, "This would be just the start. I have the drug in a more powerful form."

"How long a trip, Dianne? To get into your world, from ours, I mean?"

"With greater intensities of the drug, Frank, we diminish much faster. The whole trip--you would call it three or four days, perhaps."

Three or four days! And we had been now some five minutes!

We had, all this time, been watching closely for any sign of Togaro. Dianne was sure that he had vanished somewhere near here.

"But, Dianne, when he was larger than we are now," Drake objected, "Why if he ran off there"--he gestured with a sweep of his arm toward our dim horizon--"he'd be a hundred miles from here by now."

She nodded. "Yes. But he would not dare move far. We would see him. But if he were hiding--"

There were certainly places to hide here now. Caverns--yawning tunnel-entrances opening up everywhere.

Dianne cautioned, "Watch out, Frank!"

We had moved down from the ridge; to stay there would have left us stranded upon a precipitous height. Drake and Dianne seized me--I had nearly fallen as the shifting ground altered under me. We clung to a slope; slid down it. We landed, unharmed, some twenty feet down, in a bowl-like depression.

It seemed now that all this area was a honeycomb. Underground passages opened here into the bowl. Tunnels. Caves, small and elongated. All this underground area a honeycomb of cells. Cellular caves of the wood structure!

Drake started thoughtlessly into a dim passageway. But Dianne stopped him.

"We must not separate. If you get lost--"

We stood in a cave. The light was fading. The opening tunnels and expanding pits near us were dark. And it was all very silent. Our voices seemed dead and muffled.

I presently became aware that the expanding movement around us had ceased. The dose of the drug we had taken had reached its limit. We were no longer diminishing.

We stood, instinctively whispering. Was Togaro near here? How in all these miles of cellular caverns could we ever hope to locate him? We walked, keeping close together, through a tubelike passage; came into another cave. We had gone downward; it was even more dim in here.

It occurred to me suddenly that we had brought no weapons. In the awed fear of our taking the drug for the first time, confronting this unknown experience, we had completely forgotten them.

"Could we have brought them?" Drake asked.

"A small revolver perhaps," said Dianne. "Held under your arm. I never thought of it--we have no such weapons in our world. Togaro, I think, will not have them--and you are two against him."

"We'll never find him," I declared. "Not in such a place as this. How small would he get, do you think?"

"He would not dare get very small. It would lead him--you can see--into the unknown."

I could indeed. These caves here under us--another of those pellets; it would carry us down, with illimitable space opening up around us. Even this small area upon which my foot now rested would open up into a universe if I were to get small enough!

Drake said, "No use exploring here. Not in this size. Dianne, how about us getting larger? A trifle larger--and on the upper surface we can move about--cover a greater area. We might locate him--"

Togaro had the drug in the same size pellets as did Dianne. It seemed likely that he would have taken one--come to this size we now had reached. But to go back he would have to get larger again. We might have our best chance of encountering him going back. Or wait, up there in the room--with a bright light and careful watch.

We stood at the entrance of a huge elongated cavern. A dozen of these tunnel mouths, about as high as our heads, opened into it. The cavern was some two hundred feet in length; half as wide and a hundred feet or so high. A flattened elongated cell. It was dim and shadowed. Our lowered voices reverberated across it with muffled echoes.

Drake said, "No chance this way, Dianne."

But we had miscalculated this fellow Togaro. He had not been attempting to escape us; he was luring us on. Progressively smaller always than ourselves--since he had taken the drug before we did--he had kept within sight of us.

We saw him now, standing along the side of this cavern not fifty feet from us! A stalwart, heavy-set figure; trousers, a white shirt open at the throat exposing a massive hairy chest. He was now somewhat shorter than Drake, though taller than I. He had been lurking in some recess of the cavewall. He came out and the movement attracted us.

I cried, "There he is!"

Drake and I would have rushed at him, but Dianne seized us.

"Wait!"

A glow of light from some overhead opening fell upon the standing figure. Bare-headed; massive, bullet head. A face--the face of the midnight visitor--regarding us sardonically.

And in that instant Drake and I realized why Dianne was holding us. She was fumbling frantically at her belt.

The leering figure of Togaro off there was visibly growing larger! An instant and he was as tall as Drake. Then taller.

He came leaping at us!