“Sure,” Craig burst out excitedly. “Sure—we’ll forget the theory! But think, if your ideas are correct, and they certainly sound plausible, we might be able to look at the supra-world through the telescope in the top of the vehicle! We couldn’t point it away from the earth when we were our normal stature, but now we may be able to focus it in any direction we desire.”
“Good idea, Nev. Let’s go!”
Quickly they circled the spiral stairway, reaching the observatory in a few moments. True to Craig’s prediction, the apparatus yielded to their superior strength; they had little difficulty in pointing it directly above their heads, toward the source of the light.
Eagerly they focused the instrument, yet withal, carefully, even gingerly, lest their unpracticed fingers injure the intricate mechanism. Minutes passed by while they experimented—then slowly a clear-cut vision appeared on the screen in the center of the device.
At first, a white glow in a sea of crimson. The glow taking form—resolving itself into a gigantic, transparent disc, smooth and radiant. Beyond it towered a formless red shape, huge, gigantic. Sight of the supra-world!
Slowly, as the minutes passed by, and the vehicle sped on up the crimson pillar, the two men came to a realization of what they were gazing upon. The glowing, transparent disc was the lower, smaller lens of a microscope; the figure looming above it, a Red-man peering into the infinitely minute!
Suddenly the wonder of it all dawned upon Kennard—its vastness—its minuteness! Earth, myriads of light-years away—yet only an inch from the microscope! The pillar of light incalculably long, a colossal, funnel-shaped beam from infinity, converging upon the moon—yet only a fraction of an inch in length, and microscopically fine! A matter of viewpoint, that was all.
Rapidly the vehicle grew beneath the microscope. With their expanding visual viewpoint—sight of the Red-men and the room beyond—this velocity seemed to Kennard and Craig to be almost indiscernible. Yet it was only a few moments until the red-metal vehicle floated over a smooth, glass-like surface, in the center of which lay a huge boulder. As they continued growing, they realized that the plain was a glass slide, and that the boulder was a fine grain of sand! Myriads of planets, suns, galaxies, universes—all in a particle of dust!
A moment later the vehicle floated free from the microscope and settled upon the crimson floor. It continued growing until it reached its normal, proportionate size; then the great, circular opening appeared in the side of the vehicle; and automatically the mass of machinery in the central chamber slowed down—and was still.
The flight into infinity was ended.
CHAPTER V
The Supra-World
STANDING motionless on the edge of the portal in the wall of the vehicle, Kennard and Craig gazed intently around them, inspecting their surroundings with curious eyes. They seemed to be in a huge laboratory, a great vaulted, cylindrical room, with floor, walls and ceiling of crimson metal. Long, metal tables holding a profusion of strange instruments stood in orderly rows that filled half of the chamber. At regular, though infrequent intervals there were tall, very narrow, paneless apertures in the walls that evidently served as doors and windows.
In the very center stood a table; on it lay the complex mass of tubes, lights and lenses that were the microscope through which the Red-man had peered into the infinitesimal. And beside the microscope crouched the Red-man.
Kennard and Craig stared at him in wonder. He seemed amazingly small, no more than five feet tall, about a foot shorter than themselves. For a moment they pondered; then they realized that they had undergone another change of perspective and viewpoint. Somehow their visual senses refused to credit their inexplicable growth, with the result that they viewed everything with their increased size as a normal standard. It was by that standard that they judged everything they saw while in the Supra-world.
As they studied the Red-man, they realized more forcefully than ever before how grotesquely disproportionate these Supra-world beings were. So puny and fragile was this creature that the men from earth felt that they could crush him with their bare hands. At the chest and shoulders, the widest portion of his body, he appeared to be only about four inches in width.
Incredible creature! Long, thin head, bulbous chest, narrow waist and hips, unbelievably thin limbs—a human caricature of a Daddy-long-legs! A human spider.
A moment they gazed at the being; then Kennard sprang from the forty-foot height of the portal—it seemed only ten feet now—with Craig at his heels. They floated down lightly, landing without a jar about twenty feet away from the Red-man. Kennard stepped forward, a light spring that carried him a surprising distance. The Red-man shrank back, his skeleton fingers creeping beneath his single, crimson, chain mail garment.
Kennard moved a few feet closer—and the Red-man’s hand emerged, bearing a small, crimson cylinder. A high-pitched, chattering stream of jargon flowed from the circular orifice that was his mouth, and his protruding eyes blinked rapidly.
Kennard hesitated, then stepped forward again—and stopped short in mid-stride. A beam of blood-red radiance had leaped from the Red-man’s cylinder, and had bathed him in its alien light. Kenneth shuddered, then crumpled to the floor, paralyzed.
With a sharp cry of anger Craig leaped toward the diminutive, Supra-world being. In midair the stabbing beam found him; he too fell in rigid paralysis.
For a second the Red-man looked down upon them, then turned quickly away. They heard his bare feet padding rapidly across the floor for a moment—then he was gone. He had evidently made his way through one of the narrow doorways.
As Kennard lay there, striving with all his will to move, to speak, his mind was filled with gloomy thoughts, their entry into the Supra-world was anything but satisfactory. If this was an example of how they were going to remove the pillar of light, the moon and earth were a long way from freedom. Other thoughts came too, thoughts of Norcott, the theory of the infinitesimal and of largeness unfathomable, intermingled with conjectures about the Supra-world.
In the midst of his mental soliloquy, cutting it short, he heard the padding of numerous approaching feet. A second later there came within the range of his and Craig’s vision eleven Red-men. One, they recognized as the being whose ray had paralyzed them.
The eleven beings gathered around the recumbent figures, and began discussing them in their excited, high-pitched, chattering voices, examining with amazement their hair, the texture of their skin, others jotting down hurried notes. One expression seemed common to all—without exception they eyed Kennard and Craig with awe, marveling, probably, at their, to them, enormous breadth.
The being who had paralyzed them drew forth his cylinder after a while, and called it to the attention of the oldest member of the group, apparently the leader, and gestured at the same time toward the motionless men. As they discussed them, Kennard began to feel a tide of strength surging through his body. The chains of paralysis were gradually breaking.
Finally the older Red-man reached beneath his garment and drew therefrom a second cylinder. He pointed it suggestively toward Kennard and Craig.
As he did so, Kennard, with a tremendous effort of will, broke the invisible bonds and sprang high into the air. His clenched fist flashed out like a flail and tossed the broken body of the older Red-man to the far side of the room. He landed with a sickening thud, and lay still.
Kennard saw a fleeting vision of the scene of death and destruction on earth that they had viewed while on the moon, and it filled him with cold fury. His arms swung out again and again, each blow sending his fist crashing through a fragile, crimson body, as though it had been an eggshell. In a few moments he alone was left standing.
He circled the laboratory with his eyes, and shuddered. Fragile, brittle bodies strewn about, broken, crushed; the crimson floor stained a deeper red. Shaking his head in revulsion, he turned toward Craig who was just crawling to his feet.
“Had to do it, Nev; it’ll pay for a few of those lives th
at the beam from Tycho crushed out. I got them all, didn’t I? None escaped to tell of our arrival, did they?”
Craig nodded regretfully. “One got away. It was the creature who paralyzed us. When you struck the old boy, he leaped headlong for a doorway, and escaped.”
“That’s too bad! We’ll have to be on our guard constantly, then, for he’s bound to tell of our arrival, and what I did. And if that paralyzing ray is a sample of the tricks they have up their sleeves, we won’t be having a picnic!”
As Kennard paused, Craig asked a question. “Don’t you think, John, it’d be a good idea for us to plan as closely as possible just what we intend doing?”
“Yes, it would—if we could. But there’s so much of the unknown involved, that I’m afraid it’s practically impossible. We’ll do well, though, to keep our chief objective in mind, namely, to get rid of the ray, thus preventing any other invasions from the Supra-world, and at the same time we’ll try to get back to the moon in time to help Norcott, if it’s possible to do so.
“Another thing we must remember is to see that one of us is always here to guard the microscope and red beam, for if the light is cut off, it’ll be an utter impossibility for us to get back. There’s not one chance in a million that the beam could be re-directed toward the moon.
“But let’s examine the microscope and source of the light, and see what we have to deal with.”
In a moment they bent over the bewildering device. Nothing could be seen through the eyepiece save a long tube of crimson radiance that vanished far away in a pinpoint of light. That light had its source in an almost microscopically minute bit of apparatus that was affixed to the front of the instrument, close to the nether lens. Kennard stooped to examine this more closely; then suddenly he straightened up.
There was a sound of commotion outside—the steady drone of high-pitched, angry voices—jostling bodies—pattering feet. Hastily Kennard and Craig sprang to a high, narrow window, and looked out.
Several hundred Red-men had gathered before the laboratory. They were moving restlessly about, chattering excitedly, behaving in general like a Terrestrial mob. Suddenly they moved back from a point directly opposite the laboratory to clear a space for five men who appeared at that moment, bearing a strange machine, somewhat like the device that the two Red-men had placed in Tycho. Instead of eleven tubes and nozzles, though, this had but one—and that one pointing toward the building that held Kennard and Craig.
In a short time the machine was ready; after one of the five started it, the crowd fell far back. Again it was a beam of light that sprang toward them—but it was unlike any they had seen before. It was red, but an angry, smoldering red, flecked with minute, darting blues. As it struck the building, Kennard and Craig felt a wave of withering heat like the scorching breath of a furnace.
They flinched. “We can’t stand much of that John,” Craig muttered. Kennard nodded. A moment later his hand came in contact with the wall, and he withdrew, it hastily, a surprised ejaculation upon his lips.
“The walls are growing hot; they’re going to roast us out!”
Rapidly the heat increased, growing uncomfortable in a few moments, and fast becoming intolerable. The removal of their heavy space-suits helped a little; but in another minute the heat was greater than ever. In desperation the men swept the laboratory with their eyes, searching for a means of escape or defense.
Suddenly Kennard’s roving eyes halted, resting upon a crimson cylinder that protruded from beneath one of the battered bodies. “Get one Nev!” he cried. “We may be able to do something with them. It seems to be our only chance; if the cylinders paralyze them as the one did us we may be able to stop them and their heat.”
In a moment each had secured a weapon, and had returned to the apertures in the walls. Reaching out through the openings, themselves protected to some extent from the heat by the walls, they pressed on the little knob on the end of each cylinder, and waved it fanwise toward the mob.
For a split second the voice of the milling throng was stilled; then there broke upon the air a chorus of shrill shrieks of terror, and chattering cries of protest, mingled with the wildly pattering footsteps of the fleeing Redmen. Then suddenly Kennard and Craig realized that the blanket of stifling heat had lifted, that the thin air they breathed had lost its lung-searing quality. They stepped from behind the wall, and looked out through the narrow openings.
“What on earth!” gasped Craig.
The mob was almost gone. In every direction they were fleeing, wild terror lending wings to their feet. But the incredible fact to the two men was the total absence of unconscious bodies.
In a flash the answer dawned upon them. The rays from the cylinders, as they had moved through the mob, had cut great swaths of destruction in the form of disintegration! For as the beams continued darting out, Red-man after Red-man was disappearing, their bodies in some strange way obliterated. In another moment the space before the cylindrical building was empty save for the abandoned heat-wave machine; all who had escaped destruction, had fled from sight.
About to turn away, Kennard and Craig stopped short, eyes caught in wonder by the fantastic, Supra-world landscape.
World of crimson light; dying world of blood-red desolation!
The laboratory was on the crest of a little hill; the queerly desolate landscape lay before them. Cloudless, crimson sky—air that through some peculiar chemical component was likewise crimson. Two great, red orbs turning majestically about each other in the forehead of the crimson dome—smoldering suns, a dying, binary star. Dry, parched land, rock-strewn, dusty—an endless waste of dull, red dust through which jutted the crumbling remains of ancient mountains. Nowhere was there water; Kennard thought that this accounted for the leathery, parchment-like texture of the Red-men’s skins.
AT the base of the hill on whose summit they were, lay a city of the Supra-world. Gleaming, crimson-metal cylinders, row upon row, stretched in a wide circle around them. It was into these that the fleeing mob had disappeared.
Bleak desolation—again the thought came to Kennard—a decadent, dying world, devoid of vegetation, of all life, save the puny, fragile, brittle Red-men.
As they turned away from the depressing view, Kennard and Craig became conscious of a terrible dryness, a consuming thirst. It may have been a mental thirst to some extent, induced by the parched landscape, but it was real, nevertheless. They were about to start a search for water when Craig remembered the supply of crimson paste that had been both food and drink to them while they were imprisoned on the moon.
A few minutes later, while satisfying their appetites and slaking their thirst, they fell to discussing the wonder of what had occurred so short a time before.
“Say, John,” began Craig, “what on earth happened when we pointed those cylinders at the mob? Oh, I know they disintegrated—but how? Aren’t these weapons the same as the first Red-man pointed at us? And if they are, why weren’t we destroyed?”
Kennard maintained a thoughtful silence for a moment before he replied. “Well—though it’s pure conjecture, I believe I’ve hit upon a solution. The ray that struck us, I believe, was intended to disintegrate us. It failed to do so for one very important reason. According to that apparently proven theory of ultra- and supra-worlds, a traveler into the infinitesimal would increase in density in direct proportion to his decrease in size. An infra-world being, then, would be of an inconceivably denser structure than a supra-world inhabitant.
“In our trip up to this Supra-world, we lost density in proportion to our increase in size, of course; but I believe we’re still far more solid, far less wraithlike than the creatures of the Supra-world, the Red-men. And since their weapons are intended for use against creatures of their own density, they failed to affect us, except to temporarily paralyze us.”
In a short while they finished their simple repast and made their way to the narrow windows again. For the moment they were undecided as to what to do; they felt that they had better be o
n guard until they arrived at some decision.
“Has it occurred to you, Nev,” remarked Kennard thoughtfully, “that we don’t know how to get back to earth? We came up here through a fluke, an accident, and we haven’t a vestige of an idea how to return!” Craig nodded gloomily. “I know it. If you ask me, it doesn’t look as though we’re doing a great deal—or that we are going to do a great deal. I’ve half an idea that we’ll have to forget about returning, and be content with destroying the ray, hoping that Norcott succeeded in doing the same with the beam from Tycho.” Silent, gloomy, and almost hopeless, they gazed out over the dead landscape.
“Kennard, quick! There goes the answer!” With sudden animation Craig leaped to his feet and pointed toward the metal cylinders at the base of the hill. A slinking Red-man, the one who had greeted them upon their arrival, was moving rapidly from one cylinder to another. “If we could capture him, he could teach us to run the vehicle!”
With a sharp, “Keep on guard, Nev!” Kennard sprang to his feet, darted sidewise through the portal that was barely wide enough to permit his passing, and started down the hill in gigantic leaps.
At the first sign of movement in the laboratory, the Red-man cast caution to the winds, and broke into a dead run. But so rapid was Kennard’s pace that he hadn’t time to reach his destination before the man from earth was upon him.
With a single sweep of his arm, Kennard seized the puny creature, now howling with fright, tucked him under his arm, and started back toward the laboratory. It had been necessary for him to come to the heart of the City of Cylinders to capture the being; suddenly he found himself hemmed in on every side by an endless stream of Red-men that were flowing from their cylindrical homes.
Stabbing beams of radiance leaped toward him; the fragile creatures wound themselves about his legs, attempting to cast him to the ground; stones clattered against him; metal rods, light but effective, bruised his flesh; needlelike points darted at him. He staggered under the weight of those who had leaped upon his shoulders.
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