(2/15) The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume II: An Anthology of 50 Short Stories

by Various

  Size-change? Lee's numbed mind turned over the words and found them almost meaningless.

  "From the window there--what you can see will be very wonderful," the man said again. "He would want you to study it. Please do that."

  The doorslide closed....

  What you can see from the window will be very wonderful. No one, during the days that followed could adequately describe what Lee Anthony and Thomas Franklin and Vivian saw through that lens-window. A vast panorama in monochrome ... a soundless drama of the stars, so immense, so awesome that the human mind could grasp only an infinitesimal fragment of its wonders....

  They found the little door which led into another apartment. There were tables and chairs of earth-style, quaintly old-fashioned. Food and drink were shoved through the doorslide; the necessities of life and a fair comfort of living were provided. But their questions, even as the time passed and lengthened into what on Earth might have been a week or more, remained unanswered. There was only that gentle but firm negation:

  "We have decided that he would want us to say nothing. We do not know about this girl and this smaller man. We brought them so that they could not remain on Earth to talk of having seen us. We are sorry about that. He probably won't like it."

  "He? Who the devil are you talking about?" Franklin demanded. "See here, if I had you fellows back on Earth now I'd slam you into jail. Damned brigands. You can't do this to me! My--my father's one of the most important men in New York--"

  But now the doorslide quietly closed.

  A week? It could have been that, or more. In a wall recess of the room Lee found a line of tiny dials with moving pointers. Miles--thousands of miles. A million; ten millions; a hundred million. A light-year; tens, thousands. And, for the size-change, a normal diameter, Unit 1--and then up into thousands.

  For hours at a time, silent, awed beyond what he had ever conceived the emotion of awe could mean, he sat at the lens-window, staring out and trying to understand.

  * * * * *

  The globe-ship was some five-hundred thousand miles out from Earth when the size-change of the weird little vehicle began. It came to Lee with a sudden shock to his senses, his head reeling, and a tingling within him as though every fibre of his being were suddenly stimulated into a new activity.

  "Well, my Gawd," Vivian gasped. "What're they doin' to us now?"

  The three of them had been warned by a voice through the doorslide, so that they sat together on one of the couches, waiting for what would happen.

  "This--I wish they wouldn't do it," Franklin muttered. "Damn them--I want to get out of here."

  Fear seemed to be Franklin's chief emotion now--fear and a petty sense of personal outrage that all this could be done to him against his will. Often, when Lee and the girl were at the window, Franklin had sat brooding, staring at his feet.

  "Easy," Lee said. "It evidently won't hurt us. We're started in size-change. The globe, and everything in it, is getting larger."

  Weird. The grey metal walls of the room were glowing now with some strange current which suffused them. The starlight from the window-lens mingled with an opalescent sheen from the glowing walls. It was like an aura, bathing the room--an aura which seemed to penetrate every smallest cell-particle of Lee's body--stimulating it....

  Size-change! Vaguely, Lee could fathom how it was accomplished; his mind went back to many scientific articles he had read on the theory of it--only theory, those imaginative scientific pedants had considered it; and now it was a reality upon him! He recalled the learned phrases the writers had used.... The state of matter. In all the Universe, the inherent factors which govern the state of matter yield most readily to a change. An electronic charge--a current perhaps akin to, but certainly not identical with electricity, would change the state of all organic and inorganic substances ... a rapid duplication of the fundamental entities within the electrons--and electrons themselves, so unsubstantial--mere whirlpools of nothingness!

  A rapid duplication of the fundamental whirlpools--that would add size. The complete substance--with shape unaltered--would grow larger.

  All just theory, but here, now, it was brought to an accomplished fact. Within himself, Lee could feel it. But as yet, he could not see it. The glowing room and everything in it was so weirdly luminous, there was no alteration in shape. These objects, the figure of Vivian beside him, and the pallid frightened Franklin, relative to each other they were no different from before. And the vast panorama of starry Universe beyond the lens-window, the immense distances out there, made any size-change as yet unperceivable.

  * * * * *

  But the size-change had begun, there was no question of it. With his senses steadying, Lee crossed the room. A weird feeling of lightness was upon him; he swayed as he stood before the little line of dials in the wall-recess. Five hundred thousand miles from Earth. More than twice the distance of the Moon. The globe had gone that far with accelerating velocity so that now the pointers marked a hundred thousand miles an hour--out beyond the Moon, heading for the orbit-line of Mars. Now the size-change pointers were stirring. Unit One, the size this globe had been as it rested on Earth, fifty feet in height, and some thirty feet at its mid-section bulge. Already that unit was two, a globe--which, if it were on Earth, would be a hundred feet high. And Lee himself? He would be a giant more than twelve feet tall now.... He stood staring at the dials for a moment or two. That little pointer of the first of the size-change dials was creeping around. An acceleration! Another moment and it had touched Unit four. A two hundred foot globe. And Lee, if he had been on Earth, would already be a towering human nearly twenty-five feet in height!

  Behind him, he heard Franklin suddenly muttering, "If only I could change without everything else changing! Damn them all--what I could do--"

  "You're nuts," Vivian said. "I don't see anything growing bigger--everything here--jus' the same." Her laugh was abruptly hysterical. "This room--you two--you look like ghosts. Say, maybe we're all dead an' don't know it."

  Queerly her words sent a shiver through Lee. He turned, stared blankly at her. This weird thing! The electronic light streaming from these walls had a stroboscopic quality. The girl's face was greenish, putty-colored, and her teeth shone phosphorescent.

  Maybe we're all dead and don't know it.... Lee knew that this thing was a matter of cold, precise, logical science.... Yet who shall say but what mysticism is not mingled with science? A thing, which if we understood it thoroughly, would be as logical, as precise as the mathematics of science itself? Death? Who shall say what, of actuality, Death may be. A leaving of the mortal shell? A departure from earthly substance? A new state of being? Surely some of those elements were here now. And, logically, why could there not be a state of being not all Death, but only with some of its elements?

  "I--I don't like this," Franklin suddenly squealed. On the couch he sat hunched, trembling. "Something wrong here--Lee--damn you Lee--don't you feel it?"

  Lee tried to smile calmly. "Feel what?"

  "We're not--not alone here," Franklin stammered. "Not just you and Vivian and me--something else is here--something you can't see, but you can almost feel. An' I don't like it--"

  A presence. Was there indeed something else here, of which now in this new state of being they were vaguely aware? Something--like a fellow voyager--making this weird journey with them? Lee's heart was so wildly beating that it seemed smothering him.

  * * * * *

  Unit Ten ... Twenty ... a Hundred.... With steady acceleration, the lowest size-change pointer was whirling, and the one above it was moving. The globe was five thousand feet high now. And on Earth Lee would have been a monstrous Titan over six hundred feet tall. A globe, and humans in that tremendous size--the very weight of them--in a moment more of this growth--would disarrange the rotation of the Earth on its axis!...

  And then abruptly Lee found himself envisaging the monstrous globe out here in Space. A thing to disarrange the mechanics of all the Celestial Universe! In an hour or
two, with this acceleration of growth, the globe would be a huge meteorite--then an asteroid....

  He stared at the distance dials. With the growth had come an immense augmentation of velocity. A hundred thousand miles an hour--that had been accelerated a hundred fold now. Ten million miles an hour.... Through the window-lens Lee gazed, mute with awe. The size-change was beginning to show! Far down, and to one side the crescent Earth was dwindling ... Mars was far away in another portion of its orbit--the Moon was behind the Earth. There were just the myriad blazing giant worlds of the stars--infinitely remote, with vast distances of inky void between them. And now there was a visible movement to the stars! A sort of shifting movement....

  An hour.... A day.... A week.... Who shall try and describe what Lee Anthony beheld during that weird outward journey?... For a brief time, after they swept past the orbit of Mars, the great planets of Jupiter and Saturn were almost in a line ahead of the plunging, expanding globe. A monstrous thing now--with electronically charged gravity-plates so that it plunged onward by its own repellant force--the repellant force of the great star-field beneath it.

  * * * * *

  Lee stared at Jupiter, a lead-colored world with its red spot like a monster's single glaring eye. With the speed of light Jupiter was advancing, swinging off to one side with a visible flow of movement, and dropping down into the lower void as the globe went past it. Yet, as it approached, visually it had not grown larger. Instead, there was only a steady dwindling. A dwindling of great Saturn, with its gorgeous, luminous rings came next. These approaching planets, seeming to shrink! Because, with Lee's expanding viewpoint, everything in the vast scene was shrinking! Great distances here, in relation to the giant globe, were dwindling! These millions of miles between Saturn and Jupiter had shrunk into thousands. And then were shrinking to hundreds.

  Abruptly, with a startled shock to his senses, Lee's viewpoint changed. Always before he had instinctively conceived himself to be his normal six foot earthly size. The starry Universe was vast beyond his conception. And in a second now, that abruptly was altered. He conceived the vehicle as of actuality it was--a globe as large as the ball of Saturn itself! And simultaneously he envisaged the present reality of Saturn. Out in the inky blackness it hung--not a giant ringed world millions of miles away, but only a little ringed ball no bigger than the spaceship--a ringed ball only eight or ten times as big as Lee himself. It hung there for an instant beside them--only a mile or so away perhaps. And as it went past, with both distance and size-change combining now, it shrank with amazing rapidity! A ball only as big as this room.... Then no larger than Lee it hung, still seemingly no further away than before. And then in a few minutes more, a mile out there in the shrinking distance, it was a tiny luminous point, vanishing beyond his vision.

  Uranus, little Neptune--Pluto, almost too far away in its orbit to be seen--all of them presently were dwindled and gone. Lee had a glimpse of the Solar system, a mere bunch of lights. The Sun was a tiny spot of light, holding its little family of tiny planets--a mother hen with her brood. It was gone in a moment, lost like a speck of star-dust among the giant starry worlds.

  Another day--that is a day as it would have been on Earth. But here was merely a progressing of human existence--a streaming forward of human consciousness. The Light-year dial pointers were all in movement. By Earth standards of size and velocity, long since had the globe's velocity reached and passed the speed of light. Lee had been taught--his book-learning colored by the Einstein postulates--that there could be no speed greater than the speed of light--by Earth standards--perhaps, yes. The globe--by comparison with its original fifty-foot earth-size--might still be traveling no more than a few hundred thousand miles an hour. But this monster--a thing now as big as the whole Solar System doubtless--was speeding through a light-year in a moment!

  Futile figures! The human mind can grasp nothing of the vastness of inter-stellar space. To Lee it was only a shrinking inky void--an emptiness crowded with whirling little worlds all dwindling.... This crowded space! Often little points of star-dust had come whirling at the globe--colliding, bursting into pin-points of fire. Each of them might have been bigger than the Earth.

  There was a time when it seemed that beneath the globe all the tiny stars were shrinking into one lens-shaped cluster. The Inter-stellar Universe--all congealed down there into a blob, and everywhere else there was just nothingness.... But then little distant glowing nebulae were visible--luminous, floating rings, alone in the emptiness.... Distant? One of them drifted past, seemingly only a few hundred feet away--a luminous little ring of star-dust. The passage of the monstrous globe seemed to hurl it so that like a blown smoke ring it went into chaos, lost its shape, and vanished.

  Then at last all the blobs--each of them, to Earth-size conception, a monstrous Universe--all were dwindled into one blob down to one side of Lee's window. And then they were gone....

  * * * * *

  Just darkness now. Darkness and soundless emptiness. But as he stared at intervals through another long night of his human consciousness, Lee seemed to feel that the emptiness out there was dwindling--a finite emptiness. He noticed, presently, that the size-change pointers had stopped their movement; the ultimate size of the globe had been reached. The figures of the Light-year dials were meaningless to his comprehension. The velocity was meaningless. And now another little set of dials were in operation. A thousand--something--of distance. There was a meaningless word which named the unit. A thousand Earth-miles, if he had been in his former size? The pointer marked nine hundred in a moment. Was it, perhaps, the distance now from their destination?

  Vivian was beside him. "Lee, what's gonna happen to us? Won't this come to an end some time? Lee--you won't let anybody hurt me?"

  She was like a child, almost always clinging to him now. And suddenly she said a very strange thing. "Lee, I been thinkin'--back there on Earth I was doin' a lot of things that maybe were pretty rotten--anglin' for his money for instance--an' not carin' much what I had to do to get it." She gestured at the sullen Franklin who was sitting on the couch. "You know--things like that. An' I been thinkin'--you suppose, when we get where we're goin' now, that'll be held against me?"

  What a queer thing to say! She was like a child--and so often a child has an insight into that which is hidden from those more mature!

  "I--don't know," Lee muttered.

  From the couch, Franklin looked up moodily. "Whispering about me again? I know you are--damn you both. You and everybody else here."

  "We're not interested in you," Vivian said.

  "Oh, you're not? Well you were, back on Earth. I'm not good enough for you now, eh? He's better--because he's big--big and strong--that the idea? Well if I ever had the chance--"

  "Don't be silly," Lee said.

  * * * * *

  The sullen Franklin was working himself into a rage. Lee seemed to understand Franklin better now. A weakling. Inherently, with a complex of inferiority, the vague consciousness of it lashing him into baffled anger.

  "You, Anthony," Franklin burst out, "don't think you've been fooling me. You can put it over that fool girl, but not me. I'm onto you."

  "Put what over?" Lee said mildly.

  "That you don't know anything about this affair or these men who've got us--you don't know who they are, do you?"

  "No. Do you?" Lee asked.

  Franklin jumped to his feet. "Don't fence with me. By God, if I was bigger I'd smash your head in. They abducted us, because they wanted you. That fellow said as much near the start of this damned trip. They won't talk--afraid I'll find out. And you can't guess what it's all about! The hell you can't."

  Lee said nothing. But there was a little truth in what Franklin was saying, of course.... Those things that the dying old Anna Green had told him--surely this weird voyage had some connection.

  He turned away; went back to the window. There was a sheen now. A vague outline of something vast, as though the darkness were ending at a great wall that glowed a
little.

  It seemed, during the next time-interval, as though the globe might have turned over, so that now it was dropping down upon something tangible. Dropping--floating down--with steadily decreasing velocity, descending to a Surface. The sheen of glow had expanded until now it filled all the lower hemisphere of darkness--a great spread of surface visually coming up. Then there were things to see, illumined by a faint half-light to which color was coming; a faint, pastel color that seemed a rose-glow.

  "Why--why," Vivian murmured, "say, it's beautiful, ain't it? It looks like fairyland--or Heaven. It does--don't it, Lee?"

  "Yes," Lee murmured. "Like--like--"

  The wall-slide rasped. The voice of one of their captors said, "We will arrive soon. We can trust you--there must be no fighting?"

  "You can trust us," Lee said.

  It was dark in the little curving corridor of the globe, where with silent robed figures around them, they stood while the globe gently landed. Then they were pushed forward, out through the exit port.

  The new realm. The World Beyond. What was it? To Lee Anthony then came the feeling that there was a precise scientific explanation of it, of course. And yet, beyond all that pedantry of science, he seemed to know that it was something else, perhaps a place that a man might mould by his dreams. A place that would be what a man made of it, from that which was within himself.

  Solemn with awe he went with his companions slowly down the incline.

  CHAPTER III

  Realm of Mystery

  "We wish nothing of you," the man said, "save that you accept from us what we have to offer. You are hungry. You will let us bring you food."

  It was a simple rustic room to which they had been brought--a room in a house seemingly of plaited straw. Crude furnishings were here--table and chairs of Earth fashion, padded with stuffed mats. Woven matting was on the floor. Through a broad latticed window the faint rose-light outside--like a soft pastel twilight--filtered in, tinting the room with a gentle glow. Thin drapes at the window stirred in a breath of breeze--a warm wind from the hills, scented with the vivid blooms which were everywhere.