by Sylvia Waugh
Vateelin grasped the nearest handgrip, part of the mechanism that held the wiper's blade. He struggled round into a sitting position, then gazed about him, trying to make sense of his location.
His eyes first focused on himself, of course, his own body, his own clothes. The hem of his coat was torn ragged. The knuckles of his hands were scraped. His face felt sore, as if he had been punched. From his pocket he took his handkerchief and wiped his mouth. Even that was painful. His lips were bruised and swollen.
A wider exploration revealed a something he was clinging to, something too close to be identified. And beneath him was polished paintwork with the feel of metal.
Where am I?
How did I get here?
Then he realized with horror what must have happened.
He had diminished. At the wrong time, in the wrong place, he had diminished. But how? But why?
Then he remembered….
He felt the rush of air that had preceded the crash, heard the colossal noise that had followed, metal ramming metal.
I should be dead.
A wave of pain came over him and once more he ceased to think.
The next time he regained consciousness, he tried to see more. Identifying what was close to him, other than his own self, was strangely difficult. So he focused on as long a range as he could manage. He was fuzzily aware of streetlamps and shop fronts signaling a town.
Then he saw the face of a clock high up in a stone clock tower. It seemed very far away but so large that its golden digits were clearly visible.
That was his point of reference.
When I raise my head I can see the face of an enormous clock.
And the clock is in a tower made of stone.
And the tower is in, is in … ?
The middle of the road.
He had seen that clock before, the clock of a country town, a place he had visited with Tonitheen on a summer's afternoon. Morpeth, he thought, I am in Morpeth.
He drew his gaze closer and closer to himself again, being sure to miss nothing in between. But as his gaze shifted to the nearer ground it became increasingly difficult to make out what he was seeing. It was like looking through a microscope and seeing specks of dirt the size of boulders. He failed, rested, and prepared to start again. Far distance, middle distance, and then … ?
Over and over and over again he moved his eyes from the recognizable clock to the mysterious place where he was lodged. He soon deduced that his own size was the problem, his own relationship to the things about him. This should never have happened. His size now was what was needed for inside the spaceship. It was totally out of kilter with the planet Earth.
His eyes still kept shifting from the clock to the thing he was holding on to, focusing out and in, and out and in, over and over again. And meanwhile his brain sifted all the information he could recall while his heart cried out for his lost son, and other emotions including raw fear and dazed bewilderment made him feel utterly fuddled.
He was still unable to get the focus right. The clock, the tower, the street, the chemist's shop with Moss written in large letters above its window, a lamppost, a stationary car somewhere down the road, another one further away.
But where am I? Where do I figure in this scene?
Eventually it was his reason that told him the answer. His eyes were simply not equal to the task of recognition as he looked up at the windscreen wiper. It could have been the arm of a giant crane, the sort that stands on the dockside. Reason told him that this nearby, tangible object had to be much smaller than the clock. The polished metal beneath him seemed to slope downward into infinity.
Then, as a stroke of luck, the headlights of a passing truck flashed on a silver metal circle projecting from the lower side of the slope; unmistakably, it was the Mercedes insignia. The clue was not a very good one, but sufficient for Vateelin's desperate thoughts to turn it to good use.
This is a car.
I am sitting on the bonnet of a Mercedes, close to the windscreen, and this projection I am clinging to must be part of the base of the windscreen wiper.
Then there followed hours of thinking, deep into the night. He curled himself up in the corner of the wiper blade and began methodically to try to work things out.
What he must do was find the spaceship. That was the only way he could be sure of solving the problem of his discordant size. His chances of finding Tonitheen depended on it.
With a pang of guilt Vateelin remembered his failure to give his son proper instructions on what to do in just such a situation as this.
He knows that our names are keys.
He knows that in the direst of circumstances he must reveal them. They are his signal to me. He can guess that—without my having told him more.
He need not know how it works.
Tonitheen is clever and resourceful.
Vateelin went through a whole catalog of selfcomfort. What he knew was that somehow his son must broadcast the names so that the spaceship would pick them up, detect where they came from, and retain them as a sort of homing device, to serve till time ran out.
And time would run out on the twenty-sixth of December. That was the day on which the spaceship was programmed to begin its return journey to Ormingat. In a perfectly neat and tidy situation, he and his son should have been safely established inside the vessel at least a week before liftoff. The twenty-sixth was the extreme limit. Vateelin himself did not know what would happen if they failed to reach the spaceship before then. The thought made him aware of his own culpable stupidity.
He looked down at his watch. It was two-thirty, already Saturday, the nineteenth of December—exactly a week to go. No problem for someone big enough to get on a train and travel north, no problem for someone big enough to walk to a station ten human minutes away. But for Vateelin merely to descend from the bonnet of a car apparently left parked for the night was a problem not yet solved and perhaps insoluble.
Vateelin had been trained never to panic in the face of the unexpected.
Even without training, that would have been part of his nature. Panic is a sort of despair and Vateelin was naturally hopeful. He knew that the worst could happen, and sometimes did. Keldu had died, leaving him desolate. Yet that was no reason to expect the worst, to give up without a fight. Keldu had fought to the end.
Vateelin's position against the hub of the wiper was reasonably secure and not too uncomfortable. He sat back and gave quiet thought to his situation.
The car was stationary and there was every hope that it would remain so at least till morning. It had been parked for long enough now to suggest that its driver could be staying in Morpeth overnight.
If his guess about the driver was correct, there should be at least a further three hours before he needed to move.
But it would be necessary to be clear of the car before it had the chance to go elsewhere. I am here in a town I know. In it there is a mainline station. Trains go north from here to Edinburgh. Edinburgh is where I need to be.
So …
He would have to get to the ground and find some way of reaching the station.
It was a strange situation to be in. He could look down at himself and see an ordinary human body clad in ordinary human clothes. He could feel the document case in his pocket. Everything about him was totally intact. He still felt bruised and sore but he could move his limbs. There were, he felt sure, no broken bones.
It was the problem of size that was staggering. Never before had he faced a situation in which he was so dysfunctional.
To cross the road would be a long journey. It would take time, and time is a limited resource.
It occurred to him that thinking he had till the twenty-sixth of the month was probably to give himself too great a leeway. Where is Tonitheen? What is he doing? How is he coping with being alone?
Vateelin knew that his son had not been hit by the tanker. He had seen him reach the pavement in that split second when everything had happened. What he did afte
r that, his father could only guess, and one guess fought against another for probability.
Vateelin knew he had little hope of finding his son without the aid of the spaceship, especially not in his present situation. So what mattered now was to get to the ship with the least delay possible.
Vateelin clenched his fists and fought desperation.
One step at a time, he thought, one step at a time.
Don't think about getting to the station till you have got down from this car.
The car was a Mercedes—his glimpse of the emblem had told him so much. So he set himself to think of the form of the Mercedes and to consider whether it would be best to slide forward to the emblem and descend from there, or to find some way of abseiling down the side. He decided on the latter. The emblem was too far away. To slide in a straight line, and to control his speed on the shiny slope, was not something he was sure of being able to do.
For abseiling, he would need some sort of rope. Carefully, so as not to lose it, Vateelin took off his coat and wedged it beside the wiper. Then he removed the sweater he was wearing underneath. After putting his coat on again, he sat back and set to work. He bit the wool at the bottom of the sweater so that he had a loose thread and then he began to unravel the knitting and roll the wool into a ball. Once finished, he tied one end of the wool securely round a tiny projection on the windscreen wiper. The ball he held in both hands, ready to play out the yarn as he slid toward the side of the bonnet.
A good enough plan, perhaps, but the rope was not long enough!
It was just sufficient to take Vateelin over the edge. His distance from the ground was awesome; to fall would be for him the equivalent of jumping from a skyscraper.
Vateelin hung there like a spider hanging from a thread. He looked toward the ground, which was far away and too dark to make out clearly. He gripped the wool tightly and was filled with fear.
To let go and fall to the ground would take courage, but what alternative was there?
Then he thought, There are two things in my favor. Being small can be an advantage—big things fall much harder. And I have been hurt so much now that a few extra bruises will make little difference.
He took a deep breath, let go with both hands, and plunged downward, spinning round and round, before reaching the road and rolling toward the gutter. There he lay for over an hour, dazed and bruised.
The next time he looked at his watch it was twenty past five.
The Mercedes had not moved. It rose up before him like the north face of the Eiger. One happy thought came to him as he crouched in the gutter: At least I won't have to do that again.
He tried to apply some logistics to the task before him. The railway station would have to be his objective. Up the street he was on, turn right at the junction, along another street, turn left up the hill, and there would be the station. But given that Vateelin's size bore no relation to the space to be traveled, it might as well have been a million miles away.
He looked at the world before him, a much more limited world than he had been able to see from the bonnet of the car. A cleft in the stone where he was sheltering he deduced to be at the point where two curbstones met. Taking a longer view, he was aware of the iron edge of a grating and gasped as he realized how near he had been to ending up somewhere in the sewers. And could still, could still, at one false step. So he had to stay close to the curb, close to the angle with the gutter.
Then what? Begin a valiant walk in what would seem to be the right direction? He set out to reach the back of the car, to give himself a clear view of the roadway. It took ages and his limbs hurt each step of the way.
Vateelin stopped to rest, looked at the small distance he had covered, and groaned. Walking to the South Pole would be about the normal human equivalent of reaching the station, or so it seemed to him now.
It was daylight and Vateelin's watch informed him that it was already eight-thirty. Things were moving. The world above was becoming populous. Sounds increased, distant, echoing and unidentifiable. What could he see? To his right, not far away, were the rear wheels of the blue Mercedes. In the road, cars were going in the direction he would have to follow, but at the junction some would go left, some right, and some straight ahead. Hitching a lift on a moving vehicle would be truly impossible, athletic beyond belief. Hitching a lift on a stationary vehicle was pointless, for who could know when or where it would go?
Gingerly Vateelin stepped away from the safety of the gutter and looked up at the pavement, where already people were walking, though not as many as in Casselton.
This was a small town on a Saturday morning. Vateelin noted a man with an umbrella over his arm, a boy carrying a sack full of newspapers, a woman pushing a pram. There would be more passersby, more and more of them as the shops opened. Hitch a lift on a person? Several persons. On and off and on, depending on the direction they took. People with shoelaces would be best. Take a leap for the lace and hang on tight.
Provided he could keep the directions clear in his head and observe the clues he knew how to look for, the plan seemed not such a bad one. It had another merit, of course. It was the only one!
At the noise of the Mercedes' engine starting, Vateelin leaped toward the curb again and began his climb up the space between the curbstones, bracing his back against one and using his feet against the other to propel him. In a short time he reached the pavement and crouched ready to jump as soon as a suitable shoe, traveling at a reasonable speed in the right direction, should present itself.
The first suitable shoe was on the foot of a little girl walking with her mother. It was easy for Vateelin to leap onto the upper and cling to the swath of lace that had been tied into a large, floppy bow. The child was dawdling and being pulled away from the curb by her harassed parent.
They continued to the corner of the street, where a signpost informed travelers that the station was somewhere along a road to the right. The little girl and her mother turned left. Vateelin, nerves tensed, felt the turn, and knew from the map in his head that the change of direction was wrong for him. He jumped down onto the pavement, scuttled to the edge, and waited for another lift. Someone would have to be crossing the road.
Oh, wonder of wonders, someone was! It was a boy on a bicycle. He put one foot to the ground and was looking carefully before crossing. The bicycle's front wheel pointed in the direction of the station. Vateelin, just in time, sprang onto the boy's shoe and was carried up with the pedal as the cycle set off across the junction.
Unfortunately, success was short-lived. It was not long before they came to the side road that led toward the station. The boy pedaled straight past, remaining on the shopping street. Vateelin was stuck. He knew what was happening, but he was trapped. He was going up and down with the shoe on the pedal, an experience that can only be compared to whizzing round on a demented Ferris wheel. It was impossible to leap from there to the ground. Even at its lowest point the pedal was too high and it was moving much too fast.
The station road was left behind them. It was heartbreaking to be so near and yet so far away—and getting farther still. Then a set of traffic lights had the grace to turn red. The boy dropped his foot to the ground. Vateelin took a deep breath and hurled himself in the direction of the pavement.
This time he found himself at the foot of a lamppost. The pavement was busy with people. Vateelin shook himself and breathed deeply before he tried to work out how to retrace the distance to the turning for the station. Survival increases determination. I know where I must go and faith will take me there.
There would surely be another opportunity, another cycle slowing down, another shoe on a dawdling foot.
But what happened next was totally unexpected. All the light of the world was suddenly eclipsed.
Vateelin felt warm air breathing down at him through the darkness. He was, though he did not know it, looking up at the muzzle of a dog, a snuffling, bristly dog investigating the smells beneath the lamppost, tongue out and ready to lick the
dirt.
Vateelin jumped back out of the shadow and gasped as he saw dog face, dog teeth, dog jaws! One thoughtless flick of that long red tongue, one gulp of the throat, and he would be in the creature's belly!
Terror shook Vateelin from head to foot. He was still in the body of a man, still his own size to himself. His smallness did not make him feel safe. The tongue was ready to lick him up. There was no time to turn and run. He threw himself to one side, leaping upward, just as he had done when the tanker crashed.
And this time he landed on his size ten feet, a solid, grown human being, suddenly, almost intrusively, visible to man and beast.
The dog gave a yelp of terror, turned tail, and ran back to its master. And only the dog had any inkling of what had really happened.
A woman with a basket walked straight into Patrick and glared at him.
“You want to watch where you're going,” she snapped, but hurried on and said no more when she saw the state he was in. His coat was filthy, his face was all bruised, and his fair hair was matted with dirt. Canty would not have recognized his “well-off” friend!
Others on the street were aware of seeing someone they had not noticed before, someone of disreputable appearance who would be best avoided. If they were startled, they could not relate this to seeing the stranger materialize from nothing. That sort of thing simply does not happen.
But it does and it did! Patrick smiled a smile that reached from his lips right down to his toes. I have survived. I have survived. Whatever happens now, I can win.
Patrick turned to walk in the direction of the road that led off to the railway station. He walked, as he had always walked in this manifestation, with his head held high and his stride purposeful. The triumph of his return to his normal Earth size, together with his anxiety to reach his destination, gave him speed and helped him to become temporarily unaware of all the bruising his body had suffered and all the pain he would still have to endure.
