The Girl in the Golden Atom by Raymond King Cummings (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📖

They all remembered then. Targo had stolen the Very Young Man's vial of the enlarging drug. It had never been replaced. Instead the Very Young Man had been borrowing from the others as he went along.

The Big Business Man was seized with sudden panic.

"He'll get lost. We must get smaller with him." He turned sidewise, and stumbling over a rock almost crushed the Very Young Man with the step he took to recover his balance.

Aura, with a cry, pushed several of the others back; Oteo and Eena, frightened, started down the declivity.

"We must get smaller!" the Big Business Man reiterated.

The panic was growing among them all. Above their excited cries the Doctor's voice rose.

"Stand still—all of you. If we move—even a few steps—we can never get small and hope to find him."

The Doctor—himself too confused to know whether he should take the diminishing drug at once or not—was bending over the ground. And as he watched, fascinated, the Very Young Man's figure dwindled beyond the vanishing point and was gone!

The Very Young Man never knew quite how it happened. The Doctor had told them to check their growth: and he took the drug abstractedly, for his mind was on Aura and how she would feel, coming for the first time into this great outer world.

What quantity he took, the Very Young Man afterward could never decide. But the next thing he knew, the figures of his companions had grown to gigantic size. The rocks about him were expanding enormously. Already he had lost the contour of the ledge. The cañon wall had drawn back almost out of sight in the haze of the distance. He turned around, bewildered. There was no precipice behind him. Instead, a great, rocky plain, tumbling with a mass of boulders, and broken by seams and rifts, spread out to his gaze. And even in that instant, as he regarded it in confusion, it opened up to greater distances.

Near at hand—a hundred yards away, perhaps—a gigantic human figure towered five hundred feet into the air. Around it, further away, others equally large, were blurred into the haze of distance.

The nearer figure stooped, and the Very Young Man, fearful that he might be crushed by its movement, waved his arms in terror. He started to run, leaping over the jagged ground beneath his feet. A great roaring voice from above came down to him—the Doctor's voice.

"Don't get smaller!"

The Very Young Man stopped running, more frightened than ever before with the realization that came to him. He shouted upward:

"I can't stop! I haven't any of the other drug!"

An enormous blurred object came swooping towards him, and went past with a rush of wind—the foot of the Big Business Man, though the Very Young Man did not know it. Above him now the air was filled with roaring—the excited voices of his friends.

A few moments passed while the Very Young Man stood stock still, too frightened to move. The roaring above gradually ceased. The towering figures expanded—faded back into the distance—disappeared.

The Very Young Man was alone in the silence and desolation of a jagged, broken landscape that was still expanding beneath him. For some time he stood there, bewildered. He came to himself suddenly with the thought that although he was too small to be seen by his friends, yet they must be there still within a few steps of him. They might take a step—might crush him to death without seeing him, or knowing that they had done it! There were rocky buttes and hills all about him now. Without stopping to reason what he was doing he began to run. He did not know or care where—anywhere away from those colossal figures who with a single step would crush the very hills and rocks about him and bury him beneath an avalanche of golden quartz.

He ran, in panic, for an hour perhaps, scrambling over little ravines, falling into a crevice—climbing out and running again. At last, with his feet torn and bleeding, he threw himself to the ground, utterly exhausted.

After a time, with returning strength, the Very Young Man began to think more calmly. He was lost—lost in size—the one thing that the Doctor, when they started down into the ring, had warned them against so earnestly. What a fool he had been to run! He was miles away from them now. He could not make himself large; and were they to get smaller—small enough to see him, they might wander in this barren wilderness for days and never chance to come upon him.

The Very Young Man cursed himself for a fool. Why hadn't he kept some of the enlarging drug with him? And then abruptly, he realized something additionally terrifying. The dose of the diminishing drug which he had just taken so thoughtlessly, was the last that remained in that vial. He was utterly helpless. Thousands of miles of rocky country surrounded him—a wilderness devoid of vegetation, of water, and of life.

Lying prone upon the ground, which at last had stopped expanding, the Very Young Man gave himself up to terrified reflection. So this was the end—all the dangers they had passed through—their conquests—and the journey out of the ring so near to a safe ending.... And then this!

For a time the Very Young Man abandoned hope. There was nothing to do, of course. They could never find him—probably, with women and a child among them they would not dare even to try. They would go safely back to their own world—but he—Jack Bruce—would remain in the ring. He laughed with bitter cynicism at the thought. Even the habitable world of the ring itself, was denied him. Like a lost soul, poised between two worlds, he was abandoned, waiting helpless, until hunger and thirst would put an end to his sufferings.

Then the Very Young Man thought of Aura; and with the thought came a new determination not to give up hope. He stood up and looked about him, steeling himself against the flood of despair that again was almost overwhelming. He must return as nearly as possible to the point where he had parted from his friends. It was the only chance he had remaining—to be close enough so if one, or all of them, had become small, they would be able to see him.

There was little to choose of direction in the desolate waste around, but dimly the Very Young Man recalled having a low line of hills behind him when he was running. He faced that way now. He had come perhaps six or seven miles; he would return now as nearly as possible over the same route. He selected a gully that seemed to wind in that general direction, and climbing down into it, started off along its floor.

The gully was some forty feet deep and seemed to average considerably wider. Its sides were smooth and precipitous in some places; in others they were broken. The Very Young Man had been walking some thirty minutes when, as he came abruptly around a sharp bend, he saw before him the most terrifying object he had ever beheld. He stood stock still, fascinated with horror. On the floor of the gully, directly in front of him, lay a gigantic lizard—a reptile hideous, grotesque in its enormity. It was lying motionless, with its jaw, longer than his own body, flat on the ground as though it were sunning itself. Its tail, motionless also, wound out behind it. It was a reptile that by its size—it seemed to the Very Young Man at least thirty feet long—might have been a dinosaur reincarnated out of the dark, mysterious ages of the earth's formation. And yet, even in that moment of horror, the Very Young Man recognized it for what it was—the tiny lizard the Chemist had sent into the valley of the scratch to test his drug!

At sight of the Very Young Man the reptile raised its great head. Its tongue licked out hideously; its huge eyes stared unblinking. And then, slowly, hastelessly, it began coming forward, its great feet scratching on the rocks, its tail sliding around a boulder behind it.

The Very Young Man waited no longer, but turning, ran back headlong the way he had come. Curiously enough, this new danger, though it terrified, did not confuse him. It was a situation demanding physical action, and with it he found his mind working clearly. He leaped over a rock, half stumbled, recovered himself and dashed onward.

A glance over his shoulder showed him the reptile coming around the bend in the gully. It slid forward, crawling over the rocks without effort, still hastelessly, as though leisurely to pick up this prey which it knew could not escape it.

The gully here chanced to have smooth, almost perpendicular sides. The Very Young Man saw that he could not climb out; and even if he could, he knew that the reptile would go up the sides as easily as along the floor. It had been over a hundred feet from him when he first saw it. Now it was less than half that distance and gaining rapidly.

For an instant the Very Young Man slackened his flight. To run on would be futile. The reptile would overtake him any moment; even now he knew that with a sudden spring it could land upon him.

A cross rift at right angles in the wall came into sight—a break in the rock as though it had been riven apart by some gigantic wedge. It was as deep as the gully itself and just wide enough to admit the passage of the Very Young Man's body. He darted into it; and heard behind him the spring of the reptile as it landed at the entrance to the rift into which its huge size barred it from advancing.

The Very Young Man stopped—panting for breath. He could just turn about between the enclosing walls. Behind him, outside in the gully, the lizard lay baffled. And then, seemingly without further interest, it moved away.

The Very Young Man rested. The danger was past. He could get out of the rift, doubtless, further ahead, without reentering the gully. And, if he kept well away from the reptile, probably it would not bother him.

Exultation filled the Very Young Man. And then again he remembered his situation—lost in size, helpless, without the power to rejoin his friends. He had escaped death in one form only to confront it again in another—worse perhaps, since it was the more lingering.

Ahead of him, the rift seemed ascending and opening up. He followed it, and in a few hundred yards was again on the broken plateau above, level now with the top of the gully.

The winding gully itself, the Very Young Man could see plainly. Its nearest point to him was some six hundred feet away; and in its bottom he knew that hideous reptile lurked. He shuddered and turned away, instinctively walking quietly, fearing to make some noise that might again attract its attention to him.

And then came a sound that drove the blood from his face and turned him cold all over. From the depths of the gully, in another of its bends nearby, the sound of an anxious girl's voice floated upward.

"Jack! Oh Jack!" And again:

"Jack—my friend Jack!"

It was Aura, his own size perhaps, in the gully searching for him!

With frantic, horrified haste, the Very Young Man ran towards the top of the gully. He shouted warningly, as he ran.

Aura must have heard him, for her voice changed from anxiety to a glad cry of relief. He reached the top of the gully; at its bottom—forty feet below down its precipitous side—stood Aura, looking up, radiant, to greet him.

"I took the drug," she cried. "I took it before they could forbid me. They are waiting—up there for us. There is no danger now, Jack."

The Very Young Man tried to silence her. A noise down the gully made him turn. The gigantic reptile appeared round the nearby