PAGE 6
The World Beyond
by
* * * * *
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!