CHAPTER IX

_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!