Beyond the Vanishing Point Read online

  CHAPTER V

  Glora shouted, "Into the tunnel! This way!" She held her wits and dartedto one side, with Alan and me after her. We ran through a narrow passagebetween two fifty-foot boulders which lay close together. Momentarilythe giant was out of sight, but we could hear his heavy tread andpanting breath. We emerged having passed him. He was taller now. Heseemed confused at our sudden scampering activity. He checked hisforward rush, and ran around the twin boulders. But we had squeezed intoa narrow ravine. He could not follow. He threw a rock. To us it was aboulder. It crashed behind us. To him, we were like scampering insects;he could not tell which way we were about to dart.

  Alan panted, "Glora, does this lead out?"

  The little ravine seemed to open fifty feet ahead of us. Alan stopped,seized a chunk of rock, flung it up. I saw the giant's face above us. Hewas kneeling to reach in. The rock hit him on the forehead--a pebble,but it stung him. His face rose away.

  Again we emerged. The tunnel-mouth was near us. We reached it and flungourselves into its ten-foot width just as the giant came lunging up. Hewas far larger than before. Looking back, I could see only the lowerpart of his legs blocked against the outer light.

  "Glora! Alan, where are you?"

  For a moment I did not see them. It was darker in this tunnel of brokenrocky walls, and jagged arching roof than outside.

  Then I heard Alan's voice: "George! Over here!"

  They came running to me. For a moment we stood, undecided. My eyes werebecoming accustomed to the gloom. The tunnel was illumined by a dimphosphorescence from the rocks. I saw Alan fumbling for his vials, butGlora stopped him.

  "No. We are the right size."

  We were about a hundred feet back from the opening. The giant's legsdisappeared. But in a moment the round, light hole of the exit wasobscured again. His head and shoulders! He was lying prone. His greatarms came in. He hitched forward. The width of his expanding shoulderswedged.

  I think that he expected to reach us with a single snatch of histremendous arms. Or perhaps he was confused, or forgot his growth. Hedid not reach us. His shoulders stuck. Then suddenly he was trying toback out, but could not!

  It was only a moment. We stood in the radiant gloom of the tunnel,confused and frightened. The giant's voice roared, reverberating aroundus. Anger. A note of fear. Finally stark terror. He heaved, but therocks of the opening held solid. Then there was a crack, a gruesomerattling, splintering--his shoulder bones breaking. His whole giganticbody gave a last convulsive lunge, and he emitted a deafening shrillscream of agony.

  I was aware of the tunnel-mouth breaking upward. Falling rocks--anavalanche, a cataclysm around us. Then light overhead.

  The giant's crushed body lay motionless. A pile of boulders, rocks andloose metallic earth was strewn upon his head and torso, illumined bythe outer light through a jagged rent where the cliff-face had fallendown.

  We were unhurt, crouching back from the avalanche. The giant's mangledbody was still expanding; shoving at the litter of loose rocks. In amoment it would again be too small for the broken cliff opening.

  I found my wits. "Alan, we've got to get out of here. God--don't you seewhat's happening?"

  But Glora restrained us. She realized that the effect of the drug thegiant had taken was about at its end. The growth presently stopped. Thathuge noisome mass of pulp which once had been human shoulders no longerexpanded.

  I shoved Glora away. "Don't look!" I was shaking; my head was reeling.Alan's face, painted by the phosphorescence, was ghastly.

  Glora pulled at us. "This way! The tunnel is not too long. We go."

  But the giant had drugs, and perhaps weapons. "Wait!" I urged. "You twowait here. I'll climb over him."

  I told them why, and ran. I can only leave to the imagination that briefexploratory climb. The broken body seemed at least a hundred feet long;the mangled shoulders and chest filled the great torn hole in the cliff.I climbed over the litter. Indescribable, horrible scene! A river ofwarm blood was flowing down the declivity outward....

  I came back to Glora and Alan. Under my arm was a huge cylinder vial. Itwas black, the enlarging drug. I set it down. They stared at me in mybloodstained garments.

  "George! You're--"

  "His blood, not mine." I tried to smile. "Here's the drug he carried.Evidently Polter was only sending him out because I found just the onedrug."

  "What'll we do with it?" Alan demanded. "Look at the size of it!"

  "Destroy it," said Glora. "See, that is not difficult." She tugged atthe huge stopper, and exposed a few of the pellets--to us as large asapples. "The air will soon spoil it."

  We left it in the tunnel. I also had with me a great roll of paper whichhad been folded in the giant's belt, with the drug cylinder. We unrolledit, and hauled its folds to a spread some ten feet long. It was coveredwith a scrawled handwriting in pencil, but its giant characters seemedthick blurred strokes of charcoal. We could not read it; we were tooclose. Alan and Glora held it up against the tunnel wall. From adistance I could make it out. It was a note written in English, signed"Polter," evidently to one of his men.

  It read:

  _The two prisoners, kill them at once. That is better. It will be toodangerous to wait for my return. Put their bodies with their airplane.Crash it a mile from my gate._

  Full directions for our death followed. And Polter said he would returnby dawn or soon after.

  That gave me a start. By dawn! We had been traveling four or five hours.It was already dawn up there now!

  "No," Glora explained, "the time in here is different. A differenttime-rate. I do not know how much difference. My world speeds faster;yours is very slow. It is not the dawn up there quite yet."

  Again my mind strove to encompass these things--so strange. A fastertime-rate prevailed in here? Then our lives were passing more quickly.We were living, experiencing things, compressed into a shorter interval.It was not apparent: there was nothing to which comparison could bemade. I recalled Alan's description of Polter--not thirty years old ashe should have been, but nearer fifty. I could understand that, now. Aday in here was equal to only a few hours on our gigantic world outside.

  We walked the length of the tunnel. I suppose it was a quarter of amile, to us in this size. It wound through the cliff with a steadydownward slope. And suddenly I realized that we had turned downwardnearly half the diameter of a circle! We had turned over--or at least itseemed so. But the gravity was the same. I had noticed from thebeginning very little change.

  The realization of this tunnel brought a mental confusion. I lost allsense of direction. The outer world of Earth was under my feet, insteadof overhead. Then we went level. I forgot the confusion: this wasnormality here. We turned upward a little. Cross tunnels intersectedours at intervals. I saw caverns, open, widened tunnels, as though thismountain were honeycombed.

  "Look!" said Glora. "There is the way out. All these passages lead thesame way."

  There was a glow of light ahead. I recall that I was at that momentfumbling at my belt in two small compartments in which I was carryingthe two vials of the drugs which Glora had given me. Alan wore the samesort of belt. We had found them in the wrecked dome-room. I heard aclick on the ground at my feet. I was about to stoop to see what I hadkicked--only a loose stone, perhaps--but Glora's words distracted me. Idid not stoop. If only I had, how different events might have been!

  The glow of light ahead of us widened as we approached, and presently westood at the end of the tunnel. A spread of open distance was outside.We were on a ledge of a steep rocky wall some fifty feet above a widelevel landscape. Vegetation! I saw trees--a forest off to the left. Arange of naked hills lay behind it. A mile away, in front and to theright, a little town nestled on the shore of shining water. There wasstarlight on the water! And over it a vast blue-purple sky was studdedwith stars.

  I gazed, with that first sudden shock of emotion, into the infinitedepths of interplanetary space! Light years of distance. Giganticworlds, blazing suns off there shrun
ken by distance now to little pointsof light. A universe was here!

  But this was an inch of golden quartz!

  Above my head were stars which, compared to my bodily size now, werevast worlds ten thousand light-years away! Yet, from the otherviewpoint, I had only descended perhaps an eighth, or a quarter of aninch, beneath the broken pitted surface of a little fragment of goldenquartz the size of a walnut--into just one of its myriads of goldenatoms!