Collected Short Fiction, page 112
“Been—” Larry stopped, breathless with astonishment.
“See the little airplane,” Agnes said, pointing under the table.
Larry gasped.
Beneath the table stood a toy airplane. The spread of its glistening, perfect wings was hardly three feet. A wonderful, delicate toy, accurate in every detail of propeller, motor and landing gear, of brace and rudder and aileron. Then he realized that it was no toy at all, but a faithful miniature of a commercial plane. A complete, tiny copy of one of the latest singlemotor, cabin monoplane models.
“It looks like it would fly,” he said “a friend of mine has a big one, just like it! Taught me to fly it, last summer vacation. This is the very image of it!”
“It will fly!” Agnes assured him, now composed enough to smile at his amazement. “I have been with the doctor to the Pygmy Planet in it.
“You stand in the violet ray until you’re about three inches high,” she explained, “and then get into the plane. Then you fly up and into the violet ray at the point where it touches the planet, and remain there while you grow smaller. When you are the right size, all you have to do is drop to the surface, and land. To come away, you rise into the red ray and stay in it till you grow to proper size, when you come down and land.”
“You—you’ve actually done that?” he gasped. “It sounds like a fairy story!”
“YES, I’ve done it,” she assured A him. Then she shuddered apprehensively. “And the things—the machine-monsters, Dr. Whiting called them—have learned to do it, too. One of them came down the red ray, and attacked him. The doctor had a gun—but what could he do against one of those?” She shivered.
“It carried him back up the violet beam. Just a few minutes ago, I started to phone you. Then I was afraid you would be hurt—”
“Me, hurt?” Larry burst out. “What about you, here alone?”
“It was my business. Dr. Whiting told me there might be danger, when he hired me.”
“And now, what can we do?” Larry demanded.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I’m afraid one of the monsters will be back after a new victim. We could smash the apparatus, but it is too wonderful to be destroyed. And besides, Dr. Whiting may have escaped. He may be alive there, in the deserts!”
“We might fly up, in the little plane,” Larry proposed, doubtfully. “I think I could pilot it. If you want—”
The girl’s body stiffened. Her brown eyes widened with sudden dread, and her small face went pale. She slipped quickly from the stool, drawing in her breath with a sort of gasp. The hand that gripped the automatic trembled a little.
“What’s the matter?” Larry cried.
“I thought—” she gasped, “I think I see something in the ray! The machine-monster is coming back!”
Her lips tightened. She lifted the little automatic and began to shoot into the pillar of crimson fire beside the tiny, spinning globe.
Larry, watching tensely, saw a curious, bird-like something fluttering about in the red ray, swiftly growing larger!
Deliberately, and pausing to aim carefully for each shot, the girl emptied the little gun at the figure. Her body was rigid, her small face was firmly set, though she was breathing very fast.
A CURIOUS numbness had come over Larry. His only physical sensations were the quick hammering of his heart, and a parching dryness in his throat. Terror stiffened him. Though he would not have admitted it, he was paralyzed with fear.
The glittering thing that fluttered about in the crimson ray was not an easy target. When the gun was empty, it seemed still unharmed. And its wings had increased to a span of a foot.
“Too late!” Agnes gasped. “Why didn’t we do something?”
Trembling, horror-stricken, she shrank toward Larry.
He was staring at the thing in the pillar of scarlet light.
It had dropped to the crystal disk upon which the red ray fell from the huge, glowing tube above.
It stood there, motionless except for the swift increase of its size.
Larry gazed at it, lost in fear and wonder. It was like nothing he had ever seen. What was it that Agnes had said, of machine-monsters, of human brains in mechanical bodies? His brain reeled. He strained his eyes to distinguish the monstrosity more clearly. It was veiled in crimson flame; he could not see it distinctly.
But suddenly, when it was as tall as himself, it sprang out into the room, toward Larry and the shuddering girl. Just off the crystal disk, beyond the scarlet pillar of fire, it paused for long seconds, seeming to regard them with malevolent eyes.
For the first time, Larry could see it plainly.
Its body, or its central part, was a tube of transparent crystal; an upright cylinder, rounded at upper and lower ends. It was nearly a foot in diameter, and four feet long. It seemed filled with a luminous, purple liquid.
About the cylinder were three bands of greenish, glistening metal. Attached to the lower band were four jointed legs of the same bright green metal, upon which the strange thing stood.
Set in the middle band were two glittering, polished lenses, which seemed to serve as eyes, and Larry felt that they were gazing at him with malevolent menace. Behind the eyes, two wings sprang from the green band. Ingenious, folding wings, of thin plates and bars of green metal.
And from the upper band sprang four slender, glistening, whip-like tentacles, metallic and brilliantly green, two yards in length. They writhed with strange life!
IT seemed a long time to Larry that the thing stood, motionless, seeming to stare evilly at them with eye-like lenses. Then, lurching forward a little, it moved toward them upon legs of green metal. And now Larry saw another amazing thing about it.
Floating in the brilliant violet liquid that filled the crystal tube was a gray mass, wrinkled and corrugated. This was divided by deep clefts into right and left hemispheres, which, in turn were separated into larger upper and smaller lower segments. White filaments ran through the violet liquid from its base toward the three rings or bands of green metal that encircled the cylinder.
In an instant, Larry realized that the gray mass was a human brain. The larger, upper part the cerebrum, the smaller mass at the back the cerebellum. And the white filaments were nerves, by means of which this brain controlled its astounding, mechanical body!
A brain in a machine!
The violet liquid, it came to Larry in his trance of wonder, must take the place of blood, feeding the brain-cells, absorbing waste.
An eternal mind, within a machine! Free from the ills and weaknesses of the body. And devoid, too, of any pity, of any tender feelings. A cold and selfish mind, without emotion—unless it might worship itself or its mechanical body.
It was this monster that had spilt the pool of blood drying on the floor, near the door. And it was these glistening, green, snakelike tentacles that had crumpled the revolver into a broken mass of steel!
Abruptly the machine-monster darted forward, running swiftly upon its four legs of green metal. Slender tentacles reached out toward the shuddering girl at Larry’s shoulder.
“Run!” Agnes gasped to him, quickly. “It will kill you!”
The girl tried to push him back. As she touched him, Larry recovered from his daze of wondering fear. Agnes was in frightful danger, and facing it with quiet courage. He must find a weapon!
WILDLY, he looked about him. His eyes fell upon the tall, heavy wooden stool, upon which Agnes had been sitting.
“Get back!” he shouted to her. He snatched up the stool, and, swinging it over his head, sprang toward the machine of violet-filled crystal and glittering green metal.
“Stop!” Agnes screamed, in a terrified voice. “You can’t—”
She had run before him. He seized her arm and swung her back behind him. Then he advanced warily toward the machine-monster, which had paused and seemed to be regarding him with sinister intentness, through its glistening crystal eye-lenses.
With all his strength, Larry struck at the crystal cylinder, swinging the stool like an ax. A slender, metallic green tentacle whipped out, tore the stool from his hands, and sent it crashing across the room, to splinter into fragments on the opposite wall.
Larry, sent off his balance, staggered toward the glittering machine. As he stumbled against the transparent tube that contained the brain, he clenched his fist to strike futilely at it.
A snake-like metal tentacle wrapped itself about him; he was hurled to the floor, to sprawl grotesquely among broken apparatus.
His head came against the leg of a bench. For a few moments he was dazed. But it seemed only a few seconds to him before he had staggered to his feet, rubbing his bruised head. Anxiously, he peered about the room.
The machine-monster and Agnes were gone!
He stumbled back to the mass of apparatus in the center of the huge laboratory. Intently, he gazed into the upright pillar of crimson flame. Nothing was visible there.
“No, the other!” he gasped. “The violet is the way they went.”
HE turned to the companion ray of violet radiance that beat straight down on the opposite side of the tiny, whirling planet. And in that motionless torrent of chill violet flame he saw them.
Tiny, already, and swiftly dwindling!
With green wings outspread, the machine-monster was beating swiftly upward through the pillar of purple-blue flame. And close against the crystal tube that contained its brain, was Agnes, held fast by the whip-like tentacles of glistening green metal.
Larry moved to spring after them, into the torrent of violet light. But sudden caution restrained him.
“I’d shrink, too!” he muttered. “And then where would I be? I’d be standing on the glass platform, I guess. And the thing flying off over my head!”
He gazed at the rapidly dwindling forms of Agnes Sterling and her amazing abductor. As it grew smaller, the machine-monster flew higher in the violet beam, until it was opposite the tiny, spinning planet.
The distance between the red and the violet rays was just slightly more than the diameter of the pygmy world. The sphere hung between them, one side of it a fraction of an inch from the red, the other as near the violet.
Opposite the elfin planet, the monster ceased to climb. It hung there in the violet ray, an inch from the surface of the little world.
And still it swiftly dwindled. It was no larger than a fly, and Larry could barely distinguish the form of the girl, helpless in the green tentacles.
Soon she and the monster became a mere greenish speck. . . . Suddenly they were gone.
FOR a little time he stood watching the point where they had vanished, watching the red and the violet rays that poured straight down upon the crystal disks, watching the tiny, green-blue planet spinning so steadily between the bright rays.
Abruptly, he recovered from his fascination of wonder.
“What did she say?” he muttered. “Something about the monsters carrying off people to sacrifice to a rusty machine that they worship as a god! It took her—for that!” He clenched his fists; his lips became a straight line of determination.
“Then I guess we try a voyage in the little plane. A slim chance, maybe. But decidedly better than none!”
He returned to the table, dropped on his knees, inspected the tiny airplane. A perfect miniature, delicately beautiful; its slim, small wings were bright as silver foil. Carefully, he opened the door and peered into the diminutive cabin. Two minute rifles, several Lilliputian pistols, and boxes of ammunition to match, lay on the rear seat of the plane.
“So we are prepared for war,” he remarked, grinning in satisfaction. “And the next trick, I suppose, is to get shrunk to fit the plane. About three inches, she said. Lord, it’s a queer thing to think about!”
He got to his feet, walked back to the machine in the center of the room, with its twin pillars of red and violet flame, and the tiny world floating between them. He started to step into the violet ray, then hesitated, shivering involuntarily, like a swimmer about to dive into icy cold water.
Turning back to one of the benches, he picked up a wooden funnel-rack, and tossed it to the crystal disk beneath the violet ray. Slowly it decreased in size, until it had vanished from sight.
“Safe, I suppose,” he muttered. “But how do I know when I’m small enough?”
AFTER a moment he picked up a glass bottle which measured about three inches in height, set it on the floor, beside the crystal disk.
“I dive out when I get to be the size of the bottle,” he murmured.
With that, he leaped into the violet beam.
He felt no unusual sensation, except one of pleasant, tingling warmth, as if the direct rays of the sun were beating down upon him. For a moment he feared that his size was not being affected. Then he noticed, not that he appeared to become smaller, but that the laboratory seemed to be growing immensely larger.
The walls seemed to race away from him. The green-blue sphere of the tiny planet which he proposed to visit expanded and drew away above his head.
Abruptly fearful, alarmed at the hugeness of the room, he turned to look at the bottle he had placed to serve as a standard of size. It had grown with everything else, until it seemed to be about three feet high.
And it was swiftly expanding. It reached to the level of his shoulder. And higher!
He ran to the edge of the crystal disk, which now seemed a floor many yards across, and leaped from its edge. It was a dozen steps to where he had left the bottle. And it was as tall as himself!
He started across the floor of the laboratory toward the table under which the toy plane stood. The incredible immensity of his surroundings awed him strangely. The walls of the room seemed distant, Cyclopean cliffs; the roof was like a sky. Table legs towered up like enormous columns.
It seemed a hundred yards across the strangely rough floor to the plane. As he drew near it, it gave him huge satisfaction to see that it was of normal size, correctly proportioned to his own dimensions.
“Great luck,” he muttered, “that I can fly!”
HE paused, as he reached the cabin’s open door, to wonder at the astounding fact that a little while ago he had opened that door with a hand larger than his entire body now was.
“I guess this is my day of wonders!” he muttered. “Allah knows I had to wait long enough for it!” First he examined the weapons in the cabin. There were two heavy sporting rifles and two .45 automatics. There were also two smaller automatics, which, he supposed, had been intended for Agnes’ use. And there was abundant ammunition.
Then he inspected the plane. It looked to be in excellent condition in every way. The gasoline and oil tanks were full.
He set about starting the motor, using the plane’s inertia starter, which was driven by an electric motor. Soon the engine coughed, sputtered, and gave rise to a roaring, rhythmic note that Larry found musical.
When the motor was warm, he opened the throttle and taxied out from beneath the colossal table, and across the laboratory floor toward the Titanic mechanism in the center of the room. The disk of crystal was set almost flush with the floor, its edge beveled. The plane rolled easily upon it, and out into the Cyclopean pillar of violet flame.
Once more, Larry felt the sensation that everything about him except the plane itself, was expanding inconceivably in size. Soon the laboratory’s walls and roof were lost in hazy blue distance. He could distinguish only the broad, bright field formed by the surface of the crystal disk, with the floor stretching away beyond it like a vast plain. And above, the green-blue sphere of the tiny planet, bright on one side and dark on the other, so that it looked like a half-moon, immensely far-off.
AS he waited, he noticed a curious little dial, in a lower corner of the instrument board, which he had not seen at first. One end of its graduated scale was marked, “Earth Normal,” the other, “Pygmy Planet Normal.” A tiny black needle was creeping slowly across the scale, toward “Pygmy Planet Normal.”
“That’s how we tell what size we are, without having to look at a bottle,” he muttered.
When the area of the crystal platform appeared to be about half a square mile, he decided that he would now have sufficient space to spiral up the violet ray toward the planet. If he waited too long to start, the distance would become impossibly great.
He gave the little plane the gun. The motor thundered a throbbing song; the ship rolled smoothly forward over the polished surface, gained flying speed and took the air without a shock.
“Feels good to hold the stick again!” Larry murmured.
Making small circles to keep within the upright pillar of violet radiance, he climbed steadily and as rapidly as possible, keeping his eyes upon the brilliant half-moon of the Pygmy Planet.
The strangest flight in the annals of aviation! He was flying toward a goal that, a few minutes before, he could have touched. Toward a goal that, at the beginning of his flight, was only a few lengths of his plane away. And his size dwindled so rapidly as he flew that the planet seemed to swell and draw away from him.
As Larry and the plane grew smaller, the relative size of the violet ray increased, so there was no longer much danger of flying out of it. It seemed that he flew through a world of violet flame.
He met a curious problem in time. It is evident that time passes faster for a small animal than for a large one, because nerve currents require a shorter time in transit, and all thought and action is consequently speeded up. It took a hundred-foot dinosaur nearly a second to know that his tail had been pinched. A fly can get under way in time to escape a descending swatter. The Pygmy Planet rotated in a few seconds of earth time; one of its inhabitants might have lived, aged, and died in the duration of a single day in our larger world.
SO Larry found that time seemed to pass more rapidly, or rather that the time of the world he had left appeared to move more slowly, as he adventured into smallness. He had been flying, it seemed to him, nearly an hour when he reached the level of the planet’s equator.
Now it seemed a vast world, filling half the visible universe. He flew toward it steadily, until he knew, by the fading before him of the violet flame which now seemed to fill all space, that he was near the edge of the ray. And as he flew, he watched the little scale, upon which the black needle was now nearing the line marked, “Pygmy Planet Normal.”
