Читать книгу The Ray Cummings MEGAPACK ®: 25 Golden Age Science Fiction and Mystery Tales - Ray Cummings - Страница 40

CHAPTER 38

LOST IN SIZE

The Very Young Man stood ankle deep in the turgid little rivulet, a tightness clutching at his chest, and with his head whirling. At his feet his antagonist lay motionless. He stepped out of the water, putting his foot into a tiny grove of trees that bent and crackled like twigs under his tread. He wondered if he would faint; he knew he must not. Away to the left he saw a line of tiny hills; beyond that a luminous obscurity into which his sight could not penetrate; behind him there was only darkness. He seemed to be standing in the midst of a great barren waste, with just a little toy river and forest at his feet—a child’s plaything, set down in a man’s great desert.

The Very Young Man suddenly thought of his friends. He stepped into the middle of the river and out again on the other side. Then he bent down with his face close to the ground, just above the tops of the tiny little trees. He made the human figures out finally. Hardly larger than ants they seemed, and he shuddered as he saw them. The end of his thumb could have smashed them all, they were so small.

One of the figures seemed to be waving something, and the Very Young Man thought he heard the squeak of its voice. He straightened upright, standing rigid, afraid to move his feet. He wondered what he should do, and in sudden fear felt for the vial of the diminishing drug. It was still in place, in the pouch under his armpit. The Very Young Man breathed a sigh of relief. He decided to take the drug and rejoin his friends. Then as a sudden thought struck him he bent down to the ground again, slowly, with infinite caution. The little figures were still there; and now he thought they were not quite as tiny as before. He watched them; slowly but unmistakably they were growing larger.

The Very Young Man carefully took a step backwards, and then sat down heavily. The forest trees crackled under him. He pulled up his knees, and rested his head upon them. The little rivulet diverted from its course by the body of Targo, swept past through the woods almost at his side. The noise it made mingled with the ringing in his head. His body ached all over; he closed his eyes.

* * * *

“He’s all right now,” the Doctor’s voice said. “He’ll be all right in a moment.”

The Very Young Man opened his eyes. He was lying upon the ground, with Aura sitting beside him, and his friends—all his own size again—standing over him.

He met Aura’s tender, serious eyes, and smiled. “I’m all right,” he said. “What a foolish thing to faint.”

Lylda stooped beside him, “You saved us all,” she said. “There is nothing we can say—to mean what it should. But you will always know how we feel; how splendid you were.”

To the praise they gave him the Very Young Man had no answer save a smile of embarrassment. Aura said nothing, only met his smile with one of her own, and with a tender glance that made his heart beat faster.

“I’m all right,” he repeated after a moment of silence. “Let’s get started.”

They sat down now beside the Very Young Man, and earnestly discussed the best plan for getting out of the ring.

“You said you had calculated the best way,” suggested the Doctor to the Chemist.

“First of all,” interrupted the Big Business Man. “Are we sure none of these Oroids is going to follow us? For Heaven’s sake let’s have done with these terrible struggles.”

The Very Young Man remembered. “He stole one of the vials,” he said, pointing to Targo’s body.

“He was probably alone,” the Chemist reasoned. “If any others had been with him they would have taken some of the drug also. Probably Targo took one of the pills and then dropped the vial to the ground.”

“My idea,” pursued the Big Business Man, “is for us to get large just as quickly and continuously as possible. Probably you’re right about Targo, but don’t let’s take any chances.

“I’ve been thinking,” he continued, seeing that they agreed with him. “You know this is a curious problem we have facing us. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. It seemed a frightful long trip down here, but in spite of that, I can’t get it out of my mind that we’re only a very little distance under the surface of the ring.”

“It’s absolutely all in the viewpoint,” the Chemist said with a smile. “That’s what I meant about having an easier method of getting out. The distance depends absolutely on how you view it.”

“How far would it be out if we didn’t get any larger?” the Very Young Man wanted to know.

“Based on the size of a normal Oroid adult, and using the terrestrial standard of feet and inches as they would seem to us when Oroid size, I should say the distance from Arite to the surface of the ring would be about one hundred and fifty to a hundred and sixty thousand miles.”

“Holy mackerel!” exclaimed the Very Young Man.

“Don’t let’s do much walking while we’re small.”

“You have the idea exactly,” smiled the Chemist.

“Taking the other viewpoint,” said the Doctor. “Just where do you figure this Oroid universe is located in the ring?”

“It is contained within one of the atoms of gold,” the Chemist answered. “And that golden atom, I estimate, is located probably within one one-hundredth of an inch, possibly even one one-thousandth of an inch away from the circular indentation I made in the bottom of the scratch. In actual distance I suppose Arite is possibly one-sixteenth of an inch below the surface of the ring.”

“Certainly makes a difference how you look at it,” murmured the Very Young Man in awe.

The Chemist went on. “It is obvious then, that although when coming down the distance must be covered to some extent by physical movement—by traveling geographically, so to speak—going back, that is not altogether the case. Most of the distance may be covered by bodily growth, rather than by a movement of the body from place to place.”

“We might get lost,” objected the Very Young Man. “Suppose we got started in the wrong direction?”

“Coming in, that is a grave danger,” answered the Chemist, “because then distances are opening up and a single false step means many miles of error later on. But going out, just the reverse is true; distances are shortening. A mile in the wrong direction is corrected in an instant later on. Not coming to a realization of that when I made the trip before, led me to undertake many unnecessary hours of most arduous climbing. There is only one condition imperative; the body growing must have free space for its growth, or it will be crushed to death.”

“Have you planned exactly how we are to get out?” asked the Big Business Man.

“Yes, I have,” the Chemist answered. “In the size we are now, which you must remember is several thousand times Oroid height, it will be only a short distance to a point where as we grow we can move gradually to the centre of the circular pit. That huge inclined plane slides down out of it, you remember. Once in the pit, with its walls closing in upon us, we can at the proper moment get out of it about as I did before.”

“Then we’ll be in the valley of the scratch,” exclaimed the Very Young Man eagerly. “I’ll certainly be glad to get back there again.”

“Getting out of the valley we’ll use the same methods,” the Chemist continued. “There we shall have to do some climbing, but not nearly so much as I did.”

The Very Young Man was thrilled at the prospect of so speedy a return to his own world. “Let’s get going,” he suggested quickly. “It sounds a cinch.”

They started away in a few minutes more, leaving the body of Targo lying where it had fallen across the river. In half an hour of walking they located without difficulty the huge incline down which the Chemist had fallen when first he came into the ring. Following along the bottom of the incline they reached his landing place—a mass of small rocks and pebbles of a different metallic-looking stone than the ground around marking it plainly. These were the rocks and boulders that had been brought down with him in his fall.

“From here,” said the Chemist, as they came to a halt, “we can go up into the valley by growth alone. It is several hours, but we need move very little from this position.”

“How about eating?” suggested the Very Young Man.

They sat down at the base of the incline and ate another meal—rather a more lavish one this time, for the rest they had taken, and the prospect of a shorter journey ahead of them than they had anticipated made the Doctor less strict. Then, the meal over, they took the amount of the drug the Chemist specified. He measured it carefully—more than ten of the pills.

“We have a long wait,” the Chemist said, when the first sickness from this tremendous dose had left them.

The time passed quickly. They spoke seldom, for the extraordinary rapidity with which the aspect of the landscape was changing, and the remarkable sensations they experienced, absorbed all their attention.

In about two hours after taking the drug the curving, luminous line that was the upper edge of the incline came into view, faint and blurred, but still distinct against the blackness of the sky. The incline now was noticeably steeper; each moment they saw its top coming down towards them out of the heights above, and its surface smoothing out and becoming more nearly perpendicular.

They were all standing up now. The ground beneath them seemed in rapid motion, coming towards them from all directions, and dwindling away beneath their feet. The incline too—now in form a vertical concave wall—kept shoving itself forward, and they had to step backwards continually to avoid its thrust.

Within another hour a similar concave wall appeared behind them which they could follow with their eyes entirely around the circumference of the great pit in which they now found themselves. The sides of this pit soon became completely perpendicular—smooth and shining.

Another hour and the action of the drug was beginning to slacken—the walls encircling them, although steadily closing in, no longer seemed to move with such rapidity. The pit as they saw it now was perhaps a thousand feet in diameter and twice as deep. Far overhead the blackness of the sky was beginning to be tinged with a faint gray-blue.

At the Chemist’s suggestion they walked over near the center of the circular enclosure. Slowly its walls closed in about them. An hour more and its diameter was scarcely fifty feet.

The Chemist called his companions around him.

“There is an obstacle here,” he began, “that we can easily overcome; but we must all understand just what we are to do. In perhaps half an hour at the rate we are growing this enclosure will resemble a well twice as deep, approximately, as it is broad. We cannot climb up its sides, therefore we must wait until it is not more than six feet in depth in order to be able to get out. At that time its diameter will be scarcely three feet. There are nine of us here; you can realize there would not be room for us all.

“What we must do is very simple. Since there is not room for us all at once, we must get large from now on only one at a time.”

“Quite so,” said the Big Business Man in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone.

“All of us but one will stop growing now; one will go on and get out of the pit. He will immediately stop his growth so that he can wait for the others and help them out. Each of us will follow the same method of procedure.”

The Chemist then went on to arrange the exact quantities of the drugs they were each to take at specified times, so that at the end they would all be nearly the same size again. When he had explained all this to Oteo and Eena in their native language, they were ready to proceed with the plan.

“Who’s first?” asked the Very Young Man. “Let me go with Loto.”

They selected the Chemist to go first, and all but him took a little of the other drug and checked their growth. The pit at this time was hardly more than fifteen feet across and about thirty feet deep.

The Chemist stood in the centre of the enclosure, while his friends crowded over against its walls to make room for his growing body. It was nearly half an hour before his head was above its top. He waited only a moment more, then he sprang upwards, clambered out of the pit and disappeared beyond the rim. In a few moments they saw his huge head and shoulders hanging out over the side wall; his hand and arm reached down towards them and they heard his great voice roaring.

“Come on—somebody else.”

The Very Young Man went next, with Loto. Nothing unusual marked their growth, and without difficulty, helped by the Chemist’s hands reaching down to them, they climbed out of the pit.

In an hour more the entire party was in the valley, standing beside the little circular opening out of which they had come.

The Very Young Man found himself beside Aura, a little apart from the others, who gathered to discuss their plan for growing out of the valley.

“It isn’t much of a trip, is it, Aura?” the Very Young Man said. “Do you realize, we’re nearly there?”

The girl looked around her curiously. The valley of the scratch appeared to them now hardly more than a quarter of a mile in width. Aura stared upwards between its narrow walls to where, several thousand feet above, a narrow strip of gray-blue sky was visible.

“That sky—is that the sky of your world?” she exclaimed. “How pretty it is!”

The Very Young Man laughed.

“No, Aura, that’s not our sky. It’s only the space in the room above the ring. When we get the size we are going to be finally, our heads will be right up in there. The real sky with its stars will be even then as far above us as your sky at Arite was above you.”

Aura breathed a long sigh. “It’s too wonderful—really to understand, isn’t it?” she said.

The Very Young Man pulled her down on the ground beside him.

“The most wonderful part, Aura, is going to be having you up there.” He spoke gently; somehow whenever he thought of this fragile little girl-woman up in his strange bustling world, he felt himself very big and strong. He wanted to be her protector, and her teacher of all the new and curious things she must learn.

The girl did not reply at once; she simply met his earnest gaze with her frank answering smile of understanding.

The Chemist was calling to them.

“Oh, you Jack. We’re about ready to start.”

The Very Young Man got to his feet, holding down his hands to help Aura up.

“You’re going to make a fine woman, Aura, in this new world. You just wait and see if you don’t,” he said as they rejoined the others.

The Chemist explained his plans to them. “This valley is several times deeper than its breadth; you can see that. We cannot grow large enough to jump out as we did out of the pit; we would be crushed by the walls before we were sufficiently tall to leap out.

“But we’re not going to do as I did, and climb all the way up. Instead we will stay here at the bottom until we are as large as we can conveniently get between the valley walls. Then we will stop growing and climb up the side; it will only be a short distance then.”

The Very Young Man nodded his comprehension. “Unless by that time the walls are too smooth to climb up,” he remarked.

“If we see them getting too smooth, we’ll stop and begin climbing,” the Chemist agreed. “We’re all ready, aren’t we?” He began measuring out the estimated quantities of the drug, handing it to each of them.

“Say, I’m terrible sorry,” began the Very Young Man, apologetically interrupting this procedure. “But you know if it wasn’t for me, we’d all starve to death.”

It was several hours since they had eaten last, and all of them were hungry, although the excitement of their strange journey had kept them from realizing it. They ate—“the last meal in the ring” as the Big Business Man put it—and in half an hour more they were ready to start.

When they had reached a size where it seemed desirable again to stop growing the valley resembled a narrow cañon—hardly more than a deep rift in the ground. They were still standing on its floor; above them, the parallel edges of the rift marked the surface of the ring. The side walls of the cañon were smooth, but there were still many places where they could climb out without much difficulty.

They started up a narrow declivity along the cañon face. The Chemist led the way; the Very Young Man, with Aura just in front of him, was last. They had been walking only a moment when the Chemist called back over his shoulder.

“It’s getting very narrow. We’d better stop here and take the drug.”

The Chemist had reached a rocky shelf—a ledge some twenty feet square that jutted out from the cañon wall. They gathered upon it, and took enough of the diminishing drug to stop their growth. Then the Chemist again started forward; but, very soon after, a cry of alarm from Aura stopped him.

The party turned in confusion and crowded back. Aura, pale and trembling, was standing on the very brink of the ledge looking down. The Very Young Man had disappeared.

The Big Business Man ran to the brink. “Did he fall? Where is he? I don’t see him.”

They gathered in confusion about the girl. “No,” she said. “He—just a moment ago he was here.”

“He couldn’t have fallen,” the Doctor exclaimed. “It isn’t far down there—we’d see him.”

The truth suddenly dawned on the Doctor. “Don’t move!” he commanded sharply. “Don’t any of you move! Don’t take a step!”

Uncomprehending, they stood motionless. The Doctor’s gaze was at the rocky floor under his feet.

“It’s size,” he added vehemently. “Don’t you understand? He’s taken too much of the diminishing drug.”

An exclamation from Oteo made them all move towards him, in spite of the Doctor’s command. There, close by Oteo’s feet, they saw the tiny figure of the Very Young Man, already no more than an inch in height, and rapidly growing smaller.

The Doctor bent down, and the little figure waved its arms in terror.

“Don’t get smaller,” called the Doctor. But even as he said it, he realized it was a futile command.

The Very Young Man answered, in a voice so minute it seemed coming from an infinite distance.

“I can’t stop! I haven’t any of the other drug!”

They all remembered then. Targo had stolen the Very Young Man’s vial of the enlarging drug. It had never been replaced. Instead the Very Young Man had been borrowing from the others as he went along.

The Big Business Man was seized with sudden panic.

“He’ll get lost. We must get smaller with him.” He turned sidewise, and stumbling over a rock almost crushed the Very Young Man with the step he took to recover his balance.

Aura, with a cry, pushed several of the others back; Oteo and Eena, frightened, started down the declivity.

“We must get smaller!” the Big Business Man reiterated.

The panic was growing among them all. Above their excited cries the Doctor’s voice rose.

“Stand still—all of you. If we move—even a few steps—we can never get small and hope to find him.”

The Doctor—himself too confused to know whether he should take the diminishing drug at once or not—was bending over the ground. And as he watched, fascinated, the Very Young Man’s figure dwindled beyond the vanishing point and was gone!