Part 1

THE GIRL FROM INFINITE SMALLNESS

By RAY CUMMINGS

Into a different space-sphere bursts Lea, terrified Princess of the microcosmic Heanas, searching for an earthling champion. For the vicious Taroh had thieved the secret of transcendant growth, and he's marching to crush the gentle sub-world of Helos.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1940. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Young George Carter had always particularly liked the little rock garden which lay on the declivity behind his home. His mother, now dead, had designed and planted it with loving care. In the spring, and particularly on hot summer evenings when the moonlight patched the garden with silver, it was his favorite spot, the place where he liked to sit alone, smoking and dreaming.

Despite his intention of following in his father's footsteps and becoming a scientist, there was incongruously much of the dreamer, the romanticist, in young George Carter. At nineteen now, six feet tall, he was lean and rangy, with a rugged, handsome face, dark eyes and unruly, longish black hair. Admiring college girls had sometimes told him that he was a combination of Abe Lincoln and Lord Byron. That pleased him, though in his heart he knew it really wasn't very important.

He was finished with his studies now, ready for the world of achievement. His father, a retired Professor of Ethnology, had arranged the financing of an exploring expedition. Alice--George's twin sister, who from birth had been blind--was going to visit distant relatives. George and his father would go to central Asia. Perhaps they would find some Neanderthal skeletons, crumbling bones that could be pieced together thrillingly to throw more light upon the nature of our savage ancestors of a few million years ago.

It was an exciting prospect to young Carter. All the spirit of adventurous youth stirred within him at the thought of it. But nevertheless, this summer more than ever, when the night breeze rustled the leaves and the moonlight patched his mother's little rock garden, he found himself liking to lie out there alone, smoking and vaguely dreaming of things less remote than Asiatic Neanderthal skeletons of a million years ago.

Undoubtedly--this particular July evening--young Carter drowsed off into complete unconsciousness, with his long lanky figure sprawled in the chair. He was awakened by a faint vague sound so abnormal to the somnolent little garden that at once it snapped him into alertness. It sounded like a faint cry--a little gasp of human fear. He sat up, startled, but the sound was gone. There seemed nothing here but the patches of moonlight and the dim outlines of the garden.... Then Carter sucked in his breath and tensed, with his hands gripping the sides of his canvas chair. There was a girl standing off there between the sundial and the distant hedge--a girl smaller than Alice, with the moonlight shining on the pale fabric of her dress that hung from her shoulders to above her knees. A gray-blue cord crossed to divide her breasts, encircled her slim waist and hung with tassels down one side to her knees. He saw her face, with hair streaming down to frame it--a face that stared at him with terror.

"Well," he murmured. "Good Heavens, where did you come from?"

He jumped to his feet. Again she gave the little cry of fear, and like a faun darted backward until the hedge stopped her. She had come into a brighter patch of moonlight now, and the sight made him gasp. Her short tasseled robe was torn and soiled. Her bare legs were scratched and splotched with blood that had dried. On her feet, buskins tied with thongs about her ankles were ragged, dirty and bloodstained. Her whole aspect suggested an arduous, perhaps desperate journey.

Thoughts are instant things. For that moment he stared, transfixed; and like a trapped little animal she gazed back at him. He saw that she was young, fifteen or sixteen perhaps. A girl in a fancy dress costume, who had run a long way and was cowering here in terror. But then he saw her pale-gold hair, almost silvery in the moonlight; the flesh of her neck and arms and face, queerly seeming to glow, as though opalescent--saw her face of exquisite, but very strange beauty. Oriental? He knew it was not that. And all his sudden thoughts of rationality were stricken from him with the startled idea that this girl could belong to no race that had ever been known on Earth. Idiotic thought! But he could not thrust it away.

He was advancing upon her now. "Who the devil are you?" he demanded. "How did you get in here? What's happened to you?"

She was trembling as a faun might stand its ground and tremble, so that now he was beside her, with her face at his shoulder as she stared up at him. Then she was murmuring something, in a language of soft limpid syllables. A language of Earth? Certainly it didn't seem so. She was breathing hard; her whole aspect showed exhaustion.

"You're all in," he murmured. "Good Heavens, you look as though you'd walked from California and climbed half a dozen mountains."

Idiotic words, especially as obviously she couldn't understand them. His hand went to her shoulder. Perhaps she was badly hurt.... He must get her into the house....

But at his touch she twitched loose. She was staring past him now to where the moonlight glistened on the rippling little lily pool. Then she darted away; and at the pool knelt down, plunging her face, drinking deeply, greedily as one drinks who has been much loo long without water....

* * * * *

It was several weeks before Professor Carter, Alice and George had any clear idea of who the strange, weirdly beautiful young girl might be, or where she had come from. Her name, which almost at once she was able to indicate to them, sounded as though it might be Lea--a limpid syllable as near that as they could determine. Professor Carter had told no one in the quiet little New England village about her. For the first few days, vaguely it had seemed that from some distant place a hue and cry would be raised for her; news that such a girl had escaped from some asylum, circus or Heaven knows what.

But nothing developed. No such girl seemed missing. It confirmed George and his father's own conviction; incredibly this timid, new little inmate of the prosaic Carter household was of a race so far unknown.

"Why, look at her, George," Professor Carter had exclaimed that first evening. "That complexion, creamy, ivory-tinted--perfect for an earth-girl. But don't you see that glow of opalescence in it? God, that's weird, unnatural, unexplainable. And look at the shape of her skull--not our shape. Not Neanderthal. I'd call it perhaps more in the line of Cro-Magnon. Yet hardly that either. My guess is that the skeleton formation, particularly the skull, certainly in many ways represents a development different from ours."

Professor Carter was scientifically enthusiastic, amazed and thrilled by this mysterious specimen of living young female so miraculously here for him to study. George's father was a stocky, thick-set man of nearly sixty, square-rigged like a brig. His face was solid, heavily lined from almost a constant habit of grimness. He had a sunburned baldspot with a fringe of iron-gray hair. There was nothing of the dreamer, the romanticist in the practical scientific nature of Professor Carter--save that to him, everything scientific was the essence of romance. His deep-set gray eyes were sparkling with earnestness as he regarded the queerly beautiful little Lea.

"A primitive race, George. And yet, look at her expression. Those delicately chiseled features. She has artistic feeling--a mentality different from ours, but perhaps in some ways even more advanced."

To young Carter, the classification was repugnant, as though this frightened, wild little creature were a bug under a microscope. And Alice evidently felt the same.

"Father, stop it!" she exclaimed. "Don't boom at her like that. She's still too frightened."

George's blind sister was slender, brown-haired. Her face had a gentle, wistful beauty, enhanced into pathos by the blankness of her pale-brown eyes. Here in her own home where she had lived all her sightless life, she could move with almost normal freedom. It was she who took care of Lea at first. But as the days passed into weeks the strange little visitor, alert of mentality, always with a whimsical smile, began taking care of the blind girl. Lea's language of soft, weird syllables defied Professor Carter's classification. He and George could do nothing with it. But from the first, with extraordinary concentration and abnormal aptitude, at once Lea began learning English. That her mentality was different, and in this respect certainly far superior to their own, immediately became apparent. With amazing rapidity she memorized and understood the words and phrases with which patiently they drilled her. With Alice as her constant companion, she made an immediate effort to fit into what was for her, the strangeness of their household. Often she would laugh with what obviously was a keen sense of whimsical humor--a little rippling rill of girlish laughter....

The knowledge of who she was and where she had come from, of necessity was imparted gradually to the still incredulous Carters. Obviously now she was struggling with their language with the desire to tell them. There was still another mystery about her which that very first evening, Alice had discovered. Beneath one of her armpits, held by a strap around her body, there was a small vial, seemingly of some tough vegetable fiber. She had wildly, vehemently resisted everyone's effort to touch it; she would never let it leave her person.

Then at last came her ability to make them really understand that she had come from a strange world of infinite smallness. A world so tiny that it was vastly beyond the reach of any microscope. A world in an atom.

"I watch--very careful as I grow large," she said. "I can show you now from where I come." Then she led them, amazed and, of course, still incredulous, out into the garden. At the broken old sundial she indicated to them its metal pointer, near the end of which there was a tiny abrasion.

"From there," she insisted. "I notice it well when I come. You wait--I tell to you soon--when the English for me get better."

To young Carter who watched her always with a mixture of struggling emotions which he could not himself understand, it seemed that a shadow crossed her expressive little face as she showed them the spot on the green-bronzed aged pointer of the old sundial. A single atom, down there in the metal, housed her world. She was worried about her people....

Amazing infinity of smallness! As a scientist, young Carter had been reared upon the contemplation of how little one can really know of the multiplicity of things which exist in the Universe. The remoteness of inter-stellar space to him had always been awesome. And here was an opposite remoteness. An infinity of smallness....

Lea's English was sometimes quaint, but adequate to her task, that evening when in detail she told them....

* * * * *

My people--Lea said--live in the mountains and in the forests around the big lake. The main city, it is called Helos. We are the Heanas, most civilized people in our world....

It was a strange picture which the girl evoked of her world within an atom of the sundial pointer. From a shimmering, luminescent lake in a region of soft-glowing twilight, hills of a strange blue-gray vegetation rose in great undulating terraces toward the distant mountains. The Heanas were a peaceful people. Nature had always been kind; food was readily grown; the people's few wants always had been easily supplied. Crime among them had always been very little. But there was some, of course--crimes of fundamental motive; love, hate, jealousy, cupidity, revenge. Wherever humans exist, such crimes are inevitable.

It happened that when Lea was just emerging from childhood--perhaps a thousand times of sleep ago--there was a man in Helos named Taroh. He had been what might be called a chemist--his work created substances which kept the fields fertile so that foods might easily and swiftly be grown. Neither Lea nor her father--who was ruler of the city of Helos--liked this Taroh. And shortly after that, the fellow was caught and convicted of killing another man. For punishment he was banished from the land of the Heanas--sent to live forever in the region of darkness beyond the mountains, in the country of the Malobs, as it was called.

For a thousand times of sleep, little was heard in Helos of this Taroh. But it was known that he had risen to be a ruler of the colony of banished criminals like himself; that he had organized them, and organized the savage tribe of Malobs--men who lived in caves or roamed the black distant forests and killed the lurking animals for food.

"Like our Neanderthals," Professor Carter interjected, when Lea had further described to them the savage, primitive Malobs.

* * * * *

In Helos they were beginning to fear that Taroh might have become a menace. Occasional visitors to banished relatives in the Malob colony brought darkling hints back to Helos that Taroh was promising to have his revenge; that some day there would be a war like the ancient wars; the exiles and the Malobs would be victorious and they would rule and enjoy the better lands and better climates which the Heanas now were ruling. It had frightened Lea's father and his counselors. Secretly they had selected a young Heana named Artone, who volunteered to pretend that he was convicted of a crime and banished; and thus go and as a spy join Taroh to find out what was going on. This was known to Lea. She liked Artone--he was young, handsome and courageous. She feared for him; his mission was dangerous.

Then, during one of the times of sleep, Artone had returned to Helos, riding one of the swift iguaras. Lea had met him, before he met anyone else in Helos. And his news was terrifying. Even before Taroh had been banished--Artone had learned--he had been experimenting with a diabolical, dangerous drug. It was finished now. A drug which effected the growth of living cell-organisms. Young Artone had been clever. He had gained Taroh's confidence, so that one night the drunken Taroh and an evil woman who called herself Tara after him, gloatingly told Artone all about it.

Lea had only partially understood the depth of scientific principles involved. To enlarge the bodily size of a living human, for instance, Taroh had said, engaged no deeper problem than does a slight expansion of tissue--or the rapid growth of a single cell--except that it must be carried farther. The problem was to find a combination of chemicals, sufficiently unharmful to life, that would so act upon the cells as to cause an increase of their bulk without changing their shape--a uniform proportionate rate of growth of each cell, so that the body shape would not be altered.

Taroh, experimenting with simple living organisms, had progressed to insects, and then to himself. He had found, too, that any object of animal or vegetable cell structure which is held in close physical contact with the enlarging body, likewise would be expanded, because they would be within the natural aura of magnetic field with which every living thing is surrounded. Thus a man's garments, his weapons closely held against him--unless they were mineral--would grow large with him.

"And Taroh planned to take this drug?" George Carter exclaimed. "And grow large? A man a hundred feet tall perhaps--so that he could come and devastate your city of Helos? Why of course he could do that!"

It had been Taroh's boasted intention. But Lea, hearing of it from the breathless Artone, had ridden back at once with Artone on the huge iguara. It had pleased and flattered the drunken Taroh that the girl, out of attraction for him, had come to join him, so that Lea had been able to learn from him where he kept the diabolic drug.

"You did that?" Professor Carter exploded. "Look here, young woman, you mean to say on a thing of importance like that you didn't tell your father and his counselors? You dared take the thing into your own hands?"

Lea's slant eyes beneath her long lashes flung him a sidewise glance; her lips twisted into a whimsical smile.

"It could be that there are some things," she said demurely, "where a woman's wit is better than the strength of a man's arms." And she added slyly, "You are much like my father, Professor Carter."

She had gotten the drug. And with it, upon the verge of being trapped, she had no recourse but to take the drug herself, and by growing gigantic, escape from Taroh. The drug at first had blurred her senses. That, and her terror, had sent her reeling out into the faintly luminous darkness of the Malob country. Quite evidently she had taken far more of the drug than she planned. Half conscious, she had been aware of the dwindling rocky landscape--gullies closing in upon her so that she had to draw her expanding body upward or its bulk in the apparently shrinking space would have crushed her.

* * * * *

It had been a weird and ghastly journey to the terrified Lea. Professor Carter, George and Alice sat tense, amazed as they tried to visualize what so earnestly she was describing. Then at last the dose of the drug she had taken wore off. She had desperately climbed from a shrinking valley into a new vista of barren rocky waste. Exhausted, she had slept. Then she was cold, hungry and thirsty. For hours and for miles she had wandered over the gigantic, empty, naked terrain of metallic rocks. Without food or water, she knew she would die. There was nothing she could do save to take more of the drug, with the monstrous landscape again shrinking until at last there was different air, different light.

She emerged finally, with other, decreasing doses of the drug which now she had learned to regulate--emerged upon the pointer of the Carter sundial. And growing still larger, had been able to drop to the surface of the sundial itself, and then with more growth, to the ground. She was in the Carter garden, where presently the last tiny taste of the drug wore off. With size unchanging she stood terrified and amazed in the strange silver and black world--and then she had seen the strange-looking man who was George Carter, lying in his chair....

For a moment the Carters were silent as Lea ended her amazing narrative. It seemed incredible, but they had to believe it; the girl was so earnest; her words carried such a wealth of corroborating detail. It made them realize anew what a vast multiplicity of human life must be hidden away beyond our ken in the Universe!... Later that evening, George and his father discussed it.

"Naturally the human life within atoms of our own earth has developed in our own image," Professor Carter was saying. "The same life-source--same general lines of evolution. A different environment--that, and a different size. But still fundamentally the same. Why, I'll be able to lecture on this, George. That girl Lea--she can appear with me." He slapped George enthusiastically on the back. "This will be a big thing for us, boy. We'll be world famous, once we make it known."

"Will we?" Young Carter sat with his gaze focused far through the walls of the living room--gazing out to the conjured vision of a world of Heanas, and savage Malobs. The lamplit living room here was silent. Alice had gone to bed. Lea had retired to her room up there also.

"I was thinking," George said. "That fellow Taroh--Lea stole his drug, but he can make more. Why not? Maybe by now that's what he's done. To trample gigantic, upon Lea's people--to wreck that little city--"

It seemed that there was a faint noise at the top of the hall stairs. George and his father glanced up inquiringly, then decided that it was nothing.

"We must get the rest of that enlarging drug away from her," Professor Carter said. "I didn't want to tackle her tonight--she's been so unreasonable about that package under her arm. We'll get it, George, I'll demonstrate it to the scientific societies to prove our statements, and then, good God, it must be destroyed. Too damn dangerous. Why, if a thing like that fell into the wrong hands here, it could devastate the world!"

But George was thinking only of poor little Lea. Marooned here. She was worried about her people, of course.... After Professor Carter had gone to bed that night, for a long time George sat alone in the sitting room, pondering. To his father the fate of that tiny world was only an interesting scientific thesis. He realized that a billion billion other atomic worlds might be struggling, unseen, inaccessible to us....

Upon impulse, young Carter suddenly left the sitting room and went quietly upstairs. Very gently he knocked on Lea's door.

"Lea? You asleep?"

"Oh--that is you, George? Come in."

Clad in a pair of Alice's blue pajamas, Lea was sitting on the bed--slim little figure with the lamplight softly painting her, glinting in her pale-gold hair with tints of burnished silver. Her hair was streaming down over her shoulders; it framed her face on which now a shadow of terror had gathered.

"You heard what I mentioned to father," George said. "About Taroh maybe making more of the drug?"

"Yes. That I did. Oh, George--I thought what I did for my world was the best."

Contrition was upon her. "It was," he said hastily. He had closed the door behind him; he lowered his voice. "Lea, father wants to get that drug away from you and destroy it. But I was thinking--chemists here, analyzing it, might be able to create its reverse."

She stared. "I mean," he added earnestly, "I don't want to abandon your world, Lea. Not by a jugful I don't. If a drug can be made to increase bodily growth, why couldn't one be made to diminish it? I don't care what father says, I'm going to get the best chemists in the country to try and analyze it--try and create its opposite."

"Your father--and the big men of science--they would never allow that," she said. "I heard your father say that this enlarging drug, it could devastate your world. He is right. And so could one that made people smaller, so that they would vanish forever into smallness. Is that not so, George?"

"I don't care," he asserted. "I'll take a chance. I'll be careful what chemists I give it to. And father needn't know what I'm going to do anyway. Let's see the drug."

She opened the neck of her pajama top; and produced a flat brown box, of a strange hard fiber which undoubtedly was vegetable. Within it were two small vials of the same material.

"This one I used," she said. "There is some of the drug here left." Opening it, she showed him a number of tiny white pellets. A luminous phosphorescence seemed to stream up from them when they were held in shadow. "The dose I first took was three," she added. "But at the journey end, no more than did I touch one to the tip of my tongue."

* * * * *

The other vial, identical in size, shape and color, was sealed with a wax-like gum. George opened it. They stared; Lea faintly gasped as he poured the tiny pellets out into his palm. They were not white like the others, but a deep violet, with the same luminescence seeming to stream up from them.

"Why, what is that?" Lea murmured. "I thought that all the drug was the same."

"But Taroh maybe figured he wouldn't want to stay gigantic," George exclaimed with rising excitement. "Why not? Maybe our work is all done for us, Lea."