The princess of the atom

The first of the giants was reported by a small steamship out of Halifax, bound for Portland. The ship had rounded Cape Sable, Nova Scotia, during the night of March 20th. The s...

This same night that I was flying the patrol, father and Drake spent at our home in a small Westchester town near New York. They knew in what I was engaged. They were frequently...

Some six hours later, in the early morning, I arrived. Father and Drake had not been to bed. They described the mysterious midnight visitor. I could make little of it, save that...

I routed him out hastily. The signal was still showing. Drake remembered it, just as I did. We watched it; and after a moment it ceased. The wisp of smoke went up unbroken; and...

Drake and I were transfixed; amazed, doubting the evidence of our senses. Yet there was Dianne at our feet. She stood with a hand holding a fern stalk. Her little face was smili...

Drake and I took the small pellets which Dianne offered. She had them in a phial at her waist. She said hurriedly: "Ahlma, you stay here. Keep her with you, father. Stay here in...

Drake had gulped all of his pellet. He leaped at the oncoming figure of Togaro. They locked together, fighting. I broke from Dianne. As I jumped forward a corrugation of the flo...

We returned to our normal size; and found Drake, father and Ahlma together. Father was shaken by his encounter with Togaro, but unharmed. Drake was bruised, battered and bleedin...

A year passed. Father and I lived permanently now at King's Cove. In a special room, with three trusted guards, the fragment of rock lay carefully watched. Nothing--no one, frie...

Father and I had of necessity changed our whole mode of life when we undertook the watching of the rock fragment. We gave up our Westchester residence, to live the year around a...

Within an hour I was ready. An hour of hurried, feverish preparation. Yet after all, there was not much to do. I wore a bathing suit, with a belt of the drugs strapped about my...

As Alt went past me, I saw his fear-stricken face. The giant--three or four times my own height--was climbing to his feet. Alt was heading for the broken cliff wall. I ran after...

We stood in the shadows of the dark forest, with its gnarled, stunted trees. The red light flamed near by. A dim figure glided up to Drake. He gave an order; the figure hastened...

Amazing voyage into smallness! I find an adequate picture of it difficult to paint. It was, as Drake had said, a voyage shorter in time than I had been led to expect. Fifteen or...

Our cries brought members of the crew. The body of the murdered guard was shoved aside. We jammed the passage, assailing the stout metal door which was glowing with the current...

He handed the bar to Alt and the two men of the ship's crew who had joined us. Ahlma, white and trembling, but eager, stood among us. Drake swept her behind him. He and I stood...

I called softly upward. "I'll be careful. You give me the signal, Drake, when you think I'm small enough to start toward him. And remember the plan. If I can distract his attent...

It was an anxious time for Drake, this hour during which he was waiting for me to make my attack on Togaro. He stood, with Ahlma behind him, watching me dwindle. Then he stooped...

Drake hurried with Ahlma and Alt from the ship. It was a scene of wild confusion as the frightened crowd milled over the moonlit field. In the distance the figure of the running...

An hour or more had passed. The brief night was more than half over. Drake had sat in the palace with the harassed council. Night of turmoil! This brief night, preface to the end.

I must revert now to that moment when I clung to the huge strap which was the back of Togaro's belt and was lifted through the wrecked cabin of our ship. I could see very little...

To Dianne, and to the guard in the doorway, I was a figure an inch or so in height, plainly to be seen if I moved too fast, or left the shadows of the floor. But I did neither....

The last scenes upon the planet Mita, as it was given to me to witness them, were unfolded now beyond this window through which I was gazing. I suppose it took another hour. It...

I have from Drake his impressions of those last hours on Mita. A wild, chaotic picture his memory holds. Jumbled impressions--yet as I record them in that fashion, doubtless I w...

There were some forty thousand people on the Togarite ship, adventuring out upon the conquest of the earth. A few hundred men, who were the Togarite leaders. I think there were...

Six years now since I had been alone with Dianne. She had been my sister. We were alone now in the abyss--I was very conscious of how alone we were. We sat by a rock, resting. W...

Alt had already drawn the girls into the shelter of an overhanging rock. We crouched for a moment, not daring to move. Had we been seen from above? A blast of poisoned liquid fr...

We had clambered down the ten feet of jagged rock. We didn't change size--we had to risk it as we were, for to have got smaller would have made the descent too great. Somehow we...

It was the night of May 14 when Alt had come from the rock with his white flag of truce, and had taken me back into the atom with him. Togaro had been lurking outside; he had go...

I can give only a broad picture of those events which followed during May. They are history today. I saw them, as presently I will explain, from an inside viewpoint; a narrow vi...

Father sat that night in the War Department at Washington. He had been in constant consultation with the authorities, for he, more than any one in the world, could explain what...

It was near the dawn of May 21 when Drake and I, with Dianne and Ahlma, crouched in our boathouse at King's Cove. Giants seemed everywhere outside, towering figures in the moonl...

I need not concern these pages with further details of Drake and Ahlma. I have already made it clear that they escaped that same morning. Drake awakened, just before dawn, to fi...

It seems that there is not much more I need record. A year has passed. It is summer again, and but for the fact I have lived those scenes over in my memory as I set them down he...