"No! Escape to the other room!"
Dr. Kent was stamping the things upon the floor; pouring acids upon them. Some eluded him. The air in the room was unbreathable....
Alan and Glora reached the bedroom. The laboratory was a hideous chaos.
They were aware of its outer door opening, disclosing the figure of Polter who, undoubtedly, had been attracted by the noise. He shouted a startled oath. Alan heard it above the beating wings of the monstrous fly. Things lurched at the opened door; Polter banged it upon them and rushed away, shouting the alarm through the palace.
Dr. Kent was stammering, "Not the enlarging drug, Glora, child, the other! Hurry!"
Alan helped Glora with the opalescent vial. Things were lurching toward this room, from the laboratory. Alan, with averted face, choked by the incoming fumes, slammed the door upon the gruesome turmoil.
They took the diminishing drug. The bedroom expanded. The hideous sounds from the laboratory, and the whole palace now ringing with a wild alarm, soon faded into blessed remoteness of distance....
"I think this is the way, Alan. Off there--a doorway from my bedroom.
Polter always kept it locked, but it leads into a corridor. We must get out of here. A crack under the door--is that it, off there?" Dr. Kent pointed into the gloomy blur of distance. "We"re horribly small--it"s so far to run--and I"ve lost my sense of direction."
The drug had ceased its action. The wooden floor of the room had expanded to a spread of cellular surface, ridged with broken, tubelike tunnels; pits and jagged cave-mouths. A knothole yawned like a crater a hundred feet away.
"We are too small," Glora protested hurriedly. "The door is where you say, Dr. Kent, but miles away."
With the other drug, the room contracted. The floor surface shrank and smoothed a little. The door was distinguishable--a square panel several hundred feet in width and towering into the upper haze. The black line of the crack was visible along its bottom.
They ran to it. The top of the crack was ten feet above their heads.
They ran under, across the wide intervening darkness toward a glow of light. Then they came from under the door into a corridor--and shrank against a cliff wall as with a rush of wind and pounding tread the blurred shapes of a man"s huge feet and legs rushed past. The upper air was filled with rumbling shouts.
"We must chance it!" exclaimed Dr. Kent. "It"s too far in this size. We must get larger--and if they see us, we"ll fight our way out!"
In the turmoil of the doomed palace no one noticed them. They cast aside all restraint. It was too dangerous to wait. The excessive dose they took of the drug made the corridor shrink with dizzying speed. They rushed along its length. Alan hurled a little man aside who was in their path. They were already larger than Polter"s people.
They squeezed out of a shrinking doorway. The dwindling island was a turmoil. Little figures were pouring from the palace. At the edge of the water. Alan, Glora and Dr. Kent stood for an instant looking behind them. The palace was rocking. Its roof heaved upward and then smashed and fell aside with the clatter of tumbling masonry. The monstrous fly, its hideous face mashed and oozing, reared itself up and, with broken torn wings, tried to soar away. But it could not. It slipped back. The drone and buzz of its fright sounded over the chaos of noise. Other things came lurching and twisting upward, slithering out....
The expanding body of the fly was pushing the palace walls outward. In a moment it collapsed and the fly emerged.
To Alan and his companions the scene was all shrinking into a miniature chaos of horror at their shoe tops. A diminuendo of screams mingled down there. Overhead were the stars, shining peacefully remote. Nearby lay a rapidly narrowing channel of shining water. A tiny city was across it.
Lights were moving. The panic had spread from the island to Orena.
Beyond the tiny city, was a range of mountains, a cliff, gleaming in the starlight, and tunnel-mouths.
Suddenly against the stars off there, Alan saw the enlarging figure of Polter, his hunched shape unmistakable. He was facing the other way. He lunged and scrambled into a yawning black hole in the mountains. Polter was escaping! None of these people except himself had the drugs. He was escaping with the golden cage, out of this doomed atomic world to the Earth above.
Glora murmured, "There is our way out. Your way. And that is Polter going. I do not think he saw us. So much is growing gigantic here."
Dr. Kent muttered, "We will wait a moment--wade across--or leap over, and follow him out. Babs is with him--dear G.o.d I hope so! This is a doomed realm!"
Alan held Glora close. And suddenly he was laughing--a madness, half hysterical. "Why, this, all this--why look, Glora, it"s funny! This little world all excited, an ant-hill, outraged! Look! There"s our giant sailboat!"
Down near their feet the inch-long sailboat stood at its dock. Tiny human figures were rushing for it; others, floundering in the water, were trying to climb upon it. Dr. Kent had stepped a foot or two from the sh.o.r.e, and tiny, lashing white rollers rocked the boat, almost engulfing it.
Alan"s laugh rang out. "G.o.d! It"s funny, isn"t it? All those little creatures so excited!"
"Steady, lad!" Dr. Kent touched him. "Don"t let yourself laugh! A moment now, then we"ll wade across. Polter won"t have much start on us. We mustn"t get too close to him in size, but try and attack him unawares.
We"ve got to get Babs away from him."
The narrowing pa.s.sage rose hardly to their knees. They stepped ash.o.r.e, well to one side of the toy city. Their growth had almost stopped. But suddenly Alan realized that Glora was diminishing! She had taken the other drug.
"Glora! What are you doing?"
"I must go back, Alan. This is my world, doomed perhaps, but I cannot forsake it now. I must give the enlarging drug to my father. And others who can rise and fight these monsters."
"Glora!"
Dr. Kent said hurriedly, "She"s right, Alan. There is a chance they can save their city. For her to leave them would be dastardly."
She cried, "You go on up, Alan. You have enough of the drugs. I am going back!"
"No," he protested. "You can"t! If you do, I"m coming with you!"
She clung to him. He felt her body diminishing within his encircling arms. His love for her swept him--this girl who had cajoled Polter, or tricked him and stolen several of the vials from him, heavens knows how, and followed him up to the other world. This girl whom Alan had come to love, was leaving him, perhaps forever.
As he stood there, with the miniature landscape at his feet in the wan starlight--the panic-stricken tiny city, the island with its monsters rising to overwhelm this tiny world--it seemed to Alan that if he let her go it was the end for him of all life"s promised happiness.
"Alan, lad, come." His father was pulling him along. So horrible a choice! Alan thought that I was back on that island. But Babs, a prisoner in the golden cage, was with Polter, plunging upward in size.
And his father was beside him, pleading.
"Alan--come--I can"t get out alone, or save Babs. And Polter, with the power of this drug, can conquer and enslave our Earth as he has enslaved Orena--just one little city of one tiny golden atom! Believe me, lad, your duty lies above."
Glora"s head was now down at Alan"s waist. He stooped and kissed her white forehead; his fingers, just for an instant, smoothed her glossy hair.
"Good-bye, Glora."
She plunged away, and her tread as she dwindled mashed the forest behind the city. Alan and his father ran for the cliff. They were too large to squeeze into the little hole. But in a moment they made themselves smaller. They climbed as they dwindled; checked the drug action and rushed into the tunnel-mouth.
Alan stopped just for an instant to gaze out over the starlit scene. It was almost the same viewpoint from which he had his first sight of Glora"s world only an hour or two before. The distant island beyond the city showed plainly with the shining water around it. The vegetation there was growing! And there were dark, horribly formless blobs lurching outward and rising with monstrous bulk against the background of the stars!
"Alan! Come, lad!"
With a prayer for Glora trembling on his lips, Alan plunged into the dim phosph.o.r.escent gloom of the tunnel.
CHAPTER X
To Babs and me the ride in the golden cage strapped to Polter"s chest as he made his escape outward into largeness was an experience awesome and frightening almost beyond description. We heard the alarm in the palace on the island. Polter rushed to Dr. Kent"s laboratory door, looked in, and in a moment banged it shut. Babs and I saw very little. We knew only that something terrible had happened; we could see only a blur with formless things in the void beneath our bars; and there were the choking fumes of chemicals surging at us.
Polter rushed through the castle corridor. We heard rumbling distant shouts.
"The drug is loose! The drug is loose! Monsters! Death for everyone!"
The room swayed with horrible dizzying lurches as Polter ran. We clung to the lattice bars, our legs and arms entwined. There were moments when Polter leaped, or suddenly stooped, and our reeling senses all but faded.