The Pygmy Planet
Page 4
henoticed, not that he appeared to become smaller, but that thelaboratory seemed to be growing immensely larger.
The walls seemed to race away from him. The green-blue sphere of thetiny planet which he proposed to visit expanded and drew away abovehis head.
Abruptly fearful, alarmed at the hugeness of the room, he turned tolook at the bottle he had placed to serve as a standard of size. Ithad grown with everything else, until it seemed to be about three feethigh.
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 manyyards across, and leaped from its edge. It was a dozen steps to wherehe had left the bottle. And it was as tall as himself!
He started across the floor of the laboratory toward the table underwhich the toy plane stood. The incredible immensity of hissurroundings awed him strangely. The walls of the room seemed distant,Cyclopean cliffs; the roof was like a sky. Table legs towered up likeenormous columns.
It seemed a hundred yards across the strangely rough floor to theplane. As he drew near it, it gave him huge satisfaction to see thatit 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 theastounding fact that a little while ago he had opened that door with ahand larger than his entire body now was.
"I guess this is my day of wonders!" he muttered. "Allah knows I hadto wait long enough for it!"
First he examined the weapons in the cabin. There were two heavysporting rifles and two .45 automatics. There were also two smallerautomatics, which, he supposed, had been intended for Agnes' use. Andthere was abundant ammunition.
Then he inspected the plane. It looked to be in excellent condition inevery 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 foundmusical.
When the motor was warm, he opened the throttle and taxied out frombeneath the colossal table, and across the laboratory floor toward theTitanic mechanism in the center of the room. The disk of crystal wasset almost flush with the floor, its edge beveled. The plane rolledeasily upon it, and out into the Cyclopean pillar of violet flame.
Once more, Larry felt the sensation that everything about him exceptthe plane itself, was expanding inconceivably in size. Soon thelaboratory's walls and roof were lost in hazy blue distance. He coulddistinguish only the broad, bright field formed by the surface of thecrystal disk, with the floor stretching away beyond it like a vastplain. And above, the green-blue sphere of the tiny planet, bright onone 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 ofthe instrument board, which he had not seen at first. One end of itsgraduated scale was marked, "Earth Normal," the other, "Pygmy PlanetNormal." 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 abottle," he muttered.
When the area of the crystal platform appeared to be about half asquare mile, he decided that he would now have sufficient space tospiral up the violet ray toward the planet. If he waited too long tostart, the distance would become impossibly great.
He gave the little plane the gun. The motor thundered a throbbingsong; 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 violetradiance, he climbed steadily and as rapidly as possible, keeping hiseyes upon the brilliant half-moon of the Pygmy Planet.
The strangest flight in the annals of aviation! He was flying towarda goal that, a few minutes before, he could have touched. Toward agoal that, at the beginning of his flight, was only a few lengths ofhis plane away. And his size dwindled so rapidly as he flew that theplanet seemed to swell and draw away from him.
As Larry and the plane grew smaller, the relative size of the violetray 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 passesfaster for a small animal than for a large one, because nerve currentsrequire a shorter time in transit, and all thought and action isconsequently speeded up. It took a hundred-foot dinosaur nearly asecond to know that his tail had been pinched. A fly can get under wayin time to escape a descending swatter. The Pygmy Planet rotated in afew 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 thatthe time of the world he had left appeared to move more slowly, as headventured 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 flewtoward it steadily, until he knew, by the fading before him of theviolet flame which now seemed to fill all space, that he was near theedge of the ray. And as he flew, he watched the little scale, uponwhich the black needle was now nearing the line marked, "Pygmy PlanetNormal."
Circling slowly, keeping always on the level of the planet's equator,and near the edge of the violet ray, so as to be as close as possibleto his landing place when he reached the proper size, he watched thecreeping black needle.
Too, he scanned with eager eyes the planet floating before him. Bare,red deserts; narrow strips of green vegetation; shrunken, blue oceans;silvery lines of rivers, passed in fascinating panorama beneath hiseyes. The rate of the planet's spinning seemed continually to lessen,with the changing of his own sense of time.
Agnes! Larry thought of her with a curious, eager pain in his heart.She was somewhere on that strange, ancient world, a prisoner of weirdmachine-monsters! Intended victim of a grotesque sacrificial ceremony!
Could he find her, in the vastness of an unfamiliar world? And havingfound her, would there be a chance to rescue her from her hideouscaptors? The project seemed insane. But Larry felt a queer, unfamiliarurge, which, he knew, would drive him on until he had discovered andsaved her--or until he was dead.
* * * * *
At last, when it seemed to Larry nearly three hours since he had begunthis amazing flight, the crawling ebon needle reached the mark, "PygmyPlanet Normal."
He flew out of the wall of violet flame toward the planet's surface.Before, the distance between the planet and the ray's edge had seemedonly the fraction of an inch. Now it appeared to be many miles.
Abruptly the Pygmy Planet, which had seemed to be _beside_ him,appeared to swing about, so that it was _beneath_ him. He knew that itwas a change merely in his sensations. He was feeling the gravitationof the new world. It was pulling him toward it!
He cut the throttle, and settled the plane into a long glide, a glidethat was to end upon the surface of a new planet!
In what seemed half an hour more, Larry had made a safe landing uponthe Pygmy Planet. He had come down upon a stretch of fairly smooth,red, sandy desert, which seemed to stretch illimitably toward therising sun, which direction Larry instinctively termed "east."
To the "west" was a line of dull green--evidently the vegetation alonga stream. The ocher desert was scattered with sparse clumps ofreddish, spiky scrub. Larry taxied the plane into one of thosethickets. Finding canvas and rope in the cabin, he staked down themachine, and muffled the motor.
Then, selecting a rifle and a heavy automatic from the weapons in thecabin,
and filling his pockets with extra ammunition, he left theplane and set out with brisk steps toward the green line ofvegetation.
"I'll follow along the river," he reasoned. "It may lead me somewhereand it will show the way back to the plane. I may come acrosssomething in the way of a clue. Can't go exploring by air, or I'llburn up all the gas and be stranded here!"
* * * * *
To his surprise, the water course proved to be an ancient canal,walled with crumbling masonry. Its channel was choked with mud andthorny, thick-leaved desert shrubs of unfamiliar variety; but a feeblecurrent still flowed along it.
After some reflection, Larry set out along the banks of the canal.
He followed it for two days.
Curious straight bars of light were visible across the sky--a band ofviolet in the morning; one of crimson at evening. Their apparentmotion was in the same direction as that of the sun. The bars oflight puzzled