The Midget From the Island
A COMPLETE NOVELETTE
_By H. G. Winter_
_"For God's sake, Hagendorff, what's come over you?"_]
[Sidenote: Garth Howard, prey to half the animals of the forest,fights valiantly to regain his lost five feet of size.]
In the chill of an early morning, a rowboat drifted aimlessly down theDetroit River. It seemed to have broken loose from its mooring andbeen swept away; its outboard motor was silent and it swung in slowcircles as the currents caught at it. But the boat carried apassenger. A man's nude body stretched face downward in it.
It was a startling figure that lay there. The body was fully maturedand had a splendid development of rounded muscles--and yet it was notmore than three feet in length. A perfectly formed and proportionedmanikin! The two officers in the harbor police launch which presentlyslid alongside to investigate were giants in comparison.
They had not expected to find such weird cargo in a drifting rowboat.They stared at the naked, unconscious midget in utter amazement, as ifseeing a thing that could not be real. And when one of them reacheddown to lift the tiny body aboard, his eyes went wider with addedsurprise. His lift was inadequate. The dwarf's weight was that of anormal-sized man!
This was mystery on mystery. But they got the uncannily heavy figureaboard at last and ascertained that, though the skin showed manywounds and was blue from long exposure, the heart was still beating.And realizing that the life might flicker out beneath their eyesunless they took action immediately, they proceeded to work over him.
After some minutes, the dwarf gave signs of returning consciousness.His lids fluttered and opened, disclosing eyes that filled suddenlywith terror as they stared into the faces, huge in comparison, thatleaned over his. One of the officers said reassuringly:
"You're all right, buddy: you're on a harbor police launch. But who inthe devil are you? D'you speak English? Where'd you come from?"
* * * * *
The midget struggled to speak; struggled desperately to tell somethingof great importance. They bent closer. Gasping, high-pitched wordscame to their ears, and the story that those words told held themspellbound. When the shrill voice ceased and the dwarf sank back intothe coat they had thrown around him, the two policemen gazed at eachother. One whistled softly, and his companion said soberly:
"We'd better phone up and have the local police tend to this rightaway, Bill."
Thus, two hours later, several miles up the river, another launchcontaining three officers came to its destination, a solitary,thickly-wooded island that brooded under a cloak of silence where theriver leaves broad Lake St. Clair. The launch crept up to a mooringpost a few feet from a small, rough beach, and was tied there.Quickly, the men waded ashore and tiptoed up a winding trail that wasbarred from the sun by dank foliage. They soon came to a clearingwhere a large cabin had been built. There, one of them whispered,"Guns out!"
Then the three men crossed the clearing and cautiously entered thecabin.
For a moment there was silence. Then came a terrified shout, followedby the bunched thunder of a succession of pistol shots. Thereverberations slowly died away, and some time later the policemenreappeared and stood outside the door.
One of them, dazed, kept repeating over and over, "I wouldn't havebelieved it! I wouldn't have believed it!" and another nodded inwordless agreement. The third, white-faced, stared for a long timeunseeingly at the cloud-flecked bowl of the sky....
But it would be best, perhaps, to tell the story as it happened.
* * * * *
The incredible events that shaped it began two nights before, when thelarger of the two rooms in the island cabin was bathed in the baldglare of a strong floodlight that threw into sharp prominence theintent features of two men in the room, and the complicated details ofthe strange equipment around them.
Garth Howard, the younger of the two, was holding a tiny, squawling,spitting thing, not more than three inches long, which might haveseemed, at a quick glance, to have been a normal enough kitten. Closerinspection, however, would have revealed that it had a thick, smoothcoat, a lithe, fully developed body and narrowed, venomouseyes--things which no week-old kitten ever possessed. It was a maturecat, but in the size of a kitten.
Howard's level gray eyes were held fascinated by it. When he spoke,his words were hushed and almost reverent.
"Perfect, Hagendorff!" he said. "Not a flaw!"
"The reduction has not improved her temper," Hagendorff articulatedprecisely. His deep voice matched the rest of him. Garth Howard'sclean-muscled body stood a good six feet off the floor, yet the othertopped him by inches. And his face compared well with his bulky body,for his head was massive, with overhanging brows and a shaggy mop ofblond hair. Athlete and weight-lifter, the two looked, but in realitythey were scientist and assistant, working together for a common end.
* * * * *
The room in which they stood was obviously a laboratory. Bulky gasengines and a generator squatted at one end; tables held racks oftools and loops of insulated wiring and jars of various chemicals. Onelong table stretched the whole length of the room, placed flushagainst the left wall, whose rough planking was broken by a lonewindow. There were racks of test tubes on this table, and tools,carelessly scattered by men intent on their work.
Still another table was devoted to several cages, containing the usualmartyrs of experimental science: guinea pigs and rabbits, rats andwhite mice. Beside these was a large box, screen topped, in which, inseparate partitions, were a variety of insects: beetles and flies andspiders and tarantulas.
But the thing that dominated the laboratory was the machine on thelong table against the wall. Its chamber, the most striking feature,was a cube of roughly six feet, built of dull material resemblingbakelite. Wires trailed through it from the glittering plate, whichwas the chamber's floor, and a curved spray-shaped projector overhead,to an intricately constructed apparatus studded with vacuum tubes. Asmall switchboard stood beside the chamber, and from it thick cablesled to the generator in the rear of the room.
"Let us return her to normal," Hagendorff rumbled after a moment ortwo devoted to prodding and examining the diminutive cat. "Then forthe final experiment."
One whole wall of the cubical chamber was a hinged door, with a tierof several peep-holes. Garth Howard swung the door open, placed thetiny, struggling cat inside and quickly closed it again. "Right," hesaid briefly, and pressed his eyes to the bottom peep-hole.
* * * * *
A switch was pulled over, and the dynamo's drone pulsed through theroom. Hagendorff's fingers rested on a large lever that jutted fromthe switchboard. Slowly, he pulled it to one side.
The imprisoned cat, small as a rat, had been nervously whipping itstail from side to side and meowing plaintively; but, as the leverswung over, there came a change. The vacuum tubes behind theswitchboard glowed green; a bright white ray poured from the spray inthe chamber, making the metal plate below a shimmering, almost moltenthing. The animal's legs suddenly braced on it; its narrowed eyeswidened, glazing weirdly, while the tail became a stiff, bristlingramrod. And, as a balloon swells from a strong breath, the cat's bodyincreased in size. It grew not in spurts, but with a smooth, flowingrhythm: grew as easily as a flower unfolding beneath the sun.
In only a few seconds its original size was attained. Howard raisedhis hand; the lever shot back and the white beam faded intonothingness. A full sized and very angry cat tore around the inside ofthe chamber.
"Normal?" Hagendorff questioned. The other nodded and prepared to openthe door.
"Wait! She always was a little undersized; I give her a few inchesmore as a reward."
"Not too much," warned Garth. "She's got a nasty temper; we don'twant a wildcat prowling round here!"
The white beam flashed, the tubes glowed and almost instantlyflickered off again. When the chamber's door was opene
d, an indignantand slightly oversized cat bounded through, leaped from the table witha squawled oath of hatred and streaked into the front room of thecabin.
* * * * *
Garth turned and faced Hagendorff, a smile on his lips and a gleam inhis eyes. He ran his fingers through his black hair.
"Well," he said, "now it's time for the final experiment. Who shall itbe?"
Hagendorff did not answer at once, and the American went on:
"I think it'd better be me. There's a slight risk, of course, and I,as the inventor, could never ask an assistant to do anything Iwouldn't. Is it all right with you?"
Hagendorff nodded quickly in answer. Garth stood reflecting for amoment.
"Guinea pigs, rabbits and insects have survived reduction toone-twentieth normal size," he said slowly. "It should be safe for thehuman body to descend just as far. But stop me at about two feet thisfirst time. I'm not taking any chances; I want to be alive and kickingwhen I announce the success of my experiments to the scientificworld."
His assistant said nothing.
"Well, here goes," Garth added. "I'd better take off my clothes if Idon't want to be buried in them. They're not affected by the process.Must be because of the lack of organic connection between their fibersand the human body."
A few minutes later, nude, he jumped onto the laboratory table. Hepresented a perfect specimen of well-developed manhood as he stoodbefore the door of the chamber. His smooth skin, under which therounded muscles rolled easily, gleamed white beneath the glare of thefloodlight. His gray eyes glanced at the stolid assistant, who alreadyhad one hand on the switchboard's lever. Garth saw that the hand wastrembling slightly, and smiled as he realized Hagendorff was asexcited as he. He said:
"I'll leave the door ajar, so you can more easily watch every phase ofthe reduction. If it's painful--well, I guess I can stand anything acat can!"
Then, stooping slightly, Garth stepped in and drew the door almostshut.
* * * * *
He relaxed as much as possible from the tremendous excitement thatfilled him, and nodded at Hagendorff.
"I'm ready," he said. "Go ahead!"
The ray came to his body as the crash of thunder comes to the ear. Hisnerves leaped as it struck and enveloped him. He felt as if he wereentombed in ice, and yet his veins were aflame. Fiery shafts fangedhim all through and resolved, presently, into a measured, tinglingbeat.
His thoughts raced. He knew that those minute particles of matter, theatoms of his body, were being compacted; he sensed that his legs wererigid, his body stiff, his eyes clamped ahead in a glazed stare. Hewas only half-conscious of the objects outside, but the dim sight ofthem was fantastic and nauseous.
There was Hagendorff's face peering in at him--growing! Swelling asthe cat's body had swollen; and yet receding and rising until Garth,momentarily forgetting that he was the one whose size was changing,thought that the man's titanic body would fill the room. But the roomwas growing, too: the stools were becoming leviathans of wood, thewalls were like cliffs, the compact switchboard was a large surfaceof black, and the chamber in which he stood grew into a high-roofedvault, its sides shooting up and retreating as if shoved by invisiblehands.
And still he sank, and still the terrible light devoured him.
Suddenly a delirious sensation engulfed him; his senses went reelingaway, and he staggered. Then with a wrench he came to. As he regainedcontrol of his mind he knew the lever had been switched off and theprocess completed.
He found that he was gasping. He passed a hand over his sweat-studdedface and looked around.
* * * * *
Outside was the room of a giant. And in a moment a giant becamevisible. His vast bulk filled the chamber's doorway; his mammoth facepeered in. Garth's eardrums quivered from a deep bass rumble, soundinglike thunder on a distant horizon.
"Are you all right, Howard?"
A finger half the length of his own arm reached forward and proddedhim. For a second Garth could do nothing but stare at it. It broughthome to him starkly the puny size of his body, only two feet inheight. He felt suddenly afraid. But that was foolish, he thought; andhe laughed, his voice ludicrously high and shrill.
"I'm all right," he cried. "But I can hardly understand you. If I weremuch smaller, I probably couldn't--your voice'd seem so deep. Gangway,Hagendorff, I'm coming out!"
His eyes were just below the level of the giant's shoulders. Hestepped from the black chamber and stared amazedly at the room, at thechairs, the objects in it--at the laboratory table on which he wasstanding, along which he might have sprinted thirty yards. A surge ofexultant animal spirits flowed through him. His dream had become areality; the machine had passed its last test! His body was sound andwhole; he felt perfectly natural; he had not changed, save in size;and in size he was like Gulliver, confronted with a Brobdingnagianroom!
He hurdled a five-inch-high box of tools, ran down the creaking tableand stood laughing in front of a rack of test tubes half as high as hewas. Three strides took Hagendorff opposite him; and from above thethunderous voice rumbled:
"What were your sensations?"
"Probably as close as man'll ever get to the feelings of a spark ofelectricity!" the midget replied. "But bearable, though I was freezingand burning at the same time. My body was rigid, paralyzed--just likethe animals we used. I couldn't move."
"You're sure you couldn't move? You were helpless?"
* * * * *
The booming voice throbbed with sudden interest. Garth looked upcuriously. "No," he repeated. "I couldn't move. But lift me down,Hagendorff. I want to take a walk on the floor."
A hand wrapped around his body, tensed and strained upwards. Thetwo-foot-high man was not quite pulled off the table. Then Hagendorffgrunted and relaxed his grasp.
"I had forgotten," he rumbled. "Your weight remains the same. You areone-third my size, yet you weigh almost as much as I do. Weight, whichis the sum of the mass of all the atoms in you, is not, naturally,affected by compacting those atoms."
It was only by a great effort that he was able to deposit the manikinon the floor.
For a while Garth strolled around, savoring to their full thefantastic sensations his diminished stature gave him, at once amusedand somehow frightened by the overwhelming size of the laboratory. Tohis eyes, the tables were like bridges; Hagendorff's broad figureloomed monstrously over him, and the guinea pigs and rabbits in theircages seemed as big as fair-sized dogs. With a grin, he looked up atthe giant who was his assistant.
"Think I'll make the return trip, and give you a chance," he said."I've had my share, and the process has been proven. It's weird, beingdown in this new world all alone. I'd hate to think what would happenif a rat came along!"
Silently, Hagendorff stooped and grasped him again. But Garth, when hestood once more inside the chamber, regarded his huge, rough-mouldedface curiously.
"Say," he said, puzzled, "your hands are trembling like the devil!What's wrong? You're more nervous than I am!"
Hagendorff did not answer. He advanced to the switchboard. Hisnarrowed, deep-set eyes shot a quick glance at the small, nude maninside the chamber, and for a second one hand hovered over the leveron the panel.
* * * * *
In that tense second a flash of intuition, of deadly fear, came toGarth Howard, and he leaped wildly forward. But his rear foot did notleave the floor of the chamber, and his shout of alarm was chokedmidway. Again the fierce ray paralyzed every muscle in him, and he waslocked motionless where he was.
Helplessly, his glazed eyes stared at Hagendorff, while every momenthis rigid little body melted downwards. He was becoming rapidlysmaller, not larger!
Through the agony of the stabbing electrical waves, in vain Garthtried to wrench his legs free. The few inches that separated him fromthe door were an impassable barrier. Sheer panic clutched him. He wastrapped. But why? W
hy had Hagendorff tricked him?
As if reading the question, the giant outside came close to thechamber's door and regarded his captive with eyes that were lit by apeculiar flame. He grunted, then reached backward and returned theswitchboard lever almost to the neutral point, reducing the speed ofthe decreasing process.
"Yes, that is better," the German gloated, in a deep, satisfied tone."It will be slower, now. Slower--and more interesting to watch!... Ifancy your eyes are reproachful, my friend. Why have I done it, youwonder? _Ach!_ This machine, it will startle the world of science; itwill make its inventor famous--not? Yes; and did you think I was goingto stand by and see all the credit go to you? No! To me it shallgo--me alone! And you--" He chuckled and rubbed his hands before goingon.
"You shall be what the newspapers call a martyr to science. You shallsink to a foot, to six inches--to one inch--even less, I think!Eventually the reduction will kill you, of course; and your body shallbe proof of how you died--in an experiment--and shall also prove themachine's power and my genius!"
* * * * *
He laughed thunderously, a blond and malevolent titan. He did notnotice that, with the lessening of the reduction's speed, a slighttrace of control over his muscles had returned to the midget inside.His tiny body was slowly diminishing, and complete, hopeless paralysisand death was not far away. But Garth was fighting every second,fighting desperately with the trace of strength he possessed to slideto the door, break the contact and get out from under the ray'sremorseless influence. Almost imperceptibly, the effort laceratinghim with pain, he slid his feet forward. Hagendorff talked on. Heseemed to be blinded by the vision of the fame his treachery wouldbring him.
"We shall have an experiment, my Professor; and then you will have aninteresting death! The ray will suck you down; you will crumple andcrumple till you're not much bigger than my thumbnail! And then Ishall--_ah!_"
Garth had torn loose. Calling on every ounce of strength and will, themidget, now no more than one foot high, had reached the edge of thefloor plate and pitched out onto the long laboratory table.
Giant and dwarf faced each other. For a moment neither spoke or moved.A breathless tensity hung over the laboratory. The machine droned on,forgotten. From outside, startlingly near, came the eery hoot of anowl.
A tight smile broke through the angry surprise on Hagendorff's face."Well, well!" he said, with gargantuan, macabre humor. "We object! Itwas foolish, eh, to reduce the power? Next time, it shall not be so.We--_object!_"
With the word, he lunged, and his bulky arms lashed down in a wide,grasping sweep.
But Garth's taut muscles, retaining all the strength and vigor oftheir normal size had been awaiting just such a move, and his tinybody described the arc of a tremendous leap that neatly vaulted onehuge arm and started him sprinting swiftly down the table.
* * * * *
At the end he wheeled, and before the other overcame his surprise atsuch a nimble retreat, burst out indignantly:
"For God's sake, Hagendorff, what's come over you? Be sensible! Youcan't do this; you can't really mean it! Why--"
"So!" roared the assistant, and his rush cut short the midget'sshrill, frantic words. But his grasp this time was better judged;Garth felt the great fingers slip over his body. Remembering hisstrength, he lashed out at one with all his might. Hagendorff gruntedwith pain; but instead of continuing the attack, he suddenly turnedand strode to the door leading into the other room, and closed it witha bang.
"You cannot escape," he growled, advancing again; "you merely delay."
Panting, Garth glanced around the room. He was, in truth, trapped.There was but the one door; and even if he could reach it, he couldnot get it open, for the handle would be far above him. The room was asealed arena. For a little while it would go on--a wild leaping anddodging on the table, a hopeless evading of mammoth hands ... andthen, inevitably, would come a crushing grip on his body, followed byexperimentation and the agony of death in the black chamber.
Fearful, he waited, a perfect, living statuette, twelve incheshigh....
A grunt preluded the giant's vicious charge. The American staggeredfrom the brush of a sweeping hand; then, twisting mightily, he doveunder it, like a mouse slipping under the paw of a cat. In doing so hefell sprawling; and though he was up in a moment, his arm was held. Ahoarse, exultant rumble came to his ears.
"Caught, my friend!"
But Hagendorff spoke too soon. With a great wrench, Garth broke free,and made a tigerish dash back along the table toward the window. Andeven as the clumsy titan jumped to the side and grabbed again at him,he hurled his tiny, heavy body against the pane, and went plungingthrough a shower of glass into the cool dark night outside.
* * * * *
He fell five feet, and the wind was jarred out of him as he crashedthrough the branches of a bush under the window into the sodden earthbeneath. Unhurt, save for a few lacerations from the glass, hestaggered to his feet, gasping for his breath, and started to runacross the clearing towards the fringe of dense forest growth thatringed the cabin.
Then he heard thunderous footsteps and, a second later, the sound ofthe front door being pulled open. Garth turned in his tracks, andstumbled back beneath the cabin, thanking heaven that it was raised onshort stilts. But the ruse did not give him much of a start, and bythe time he had painfully threaded his way between the piles of timberleft underneath the cabin, Hagendorff had discovered the trick and wasscouting back.
Then, with the strength of the hunted, Garth was out from under theother side and sprinting for the doubtful sanctuary of the forest.
His tiny feet, carrying the weight of a normal-sized man, sank anklehigh into the muddy ground, several times almost tripping him. Even ashe got to where a trail through the bush began, and passed from thecold starlight into spaces black with clustered shadows, he heard abellow from behind, and, glancing back, saw a monstrous shape comeleaping on his tracks.
He had only seconds in which to find refuge; he could not stick to thetrail. Thick bush, dank and heavy from recent rains, was on eitherside, fugitive streaks of pale light from above painting it eerily.Garth plunged into the matted growth, dropped to hands and knees andwormed forward away from the trail. Earth-jarring footbeats soundedclose. With frantic haste he wrenched though the scratching tendrilsand came to a miniature clearing.
* * * * *
He saw the tilted shape of a rotted tree-stump, its roots half washedaway and exposing a narrow crevice between them. Gasping, the nude,foot-high figure tumbled down into it, and lay there, trying to hushhis labored breathing.
He was a mere twenty feet from the trail; and though to him the bushwas a jungle, to his pursuer it was only chest-high. A towering shadowmoved along the trail. The thud of heavy footbeats came more slowly tothe listening midget. Hagendorff was searching, puzzled by the vagueshadows, for where Garth had left the path.
Silence fell.
Garth's heart was pounding like a trip-hammer. He held himself alert,ready, if need be, to struggle up from the moist crevice and dart onfurther into the bush. He could not see the giant, but could picturehis huge, sullen face all too clearly. Still no sound came. Riskingall, he gripped a root and hauled himself up slightly. Then he peeredaround the stump.
Hagendorff was standing in the thick of the bush. He was not ten feetaway, striving in the gloom to discern the other's tell-tale tracks.Garth drew his head back, hardly daring to breathe. Shivering, hisnaked body miserably cold, he waited, pressed down in the soggy earth.His betraying tracks were there; the shadows alone befriended him.
The silence was drawn so fine that the faint cheep of a night-birdsounded startlingly loud. But then came thunder that sent the birdwinging away in fright, and the night and the forest echoed with theroar of a wrathful, impatient human voice.
"You hear me, wherever you are! And hear this: I leave you now, but inten minutes I have you!
You little fool--you think you can get free?It is only by minutes you delay me!"
Snarling a curse, the treacherous giant turned and crashed through thebush and took his huge form striding back towards the cabin.
* * * * *
Garth was thinking of many things as he scrambled back wearily fromhis refuge to the trail. He was cursing the unwanted publicity whichprying reporters had given his work in Detroit, and which had led himto lease the lonely island and build a laboratory in the wilderness.Had it not been for that publicity, he would never have needed anassistant, and the vision of fame would never have come to deludeHagendorff and turn his thoughts towards murder.
His position seemed a horrible delirium from which he must presentlyawake. Naked, dwarfed by each ordinary forest weed, unarmed, andtrembling from the wind-sharpened night, he hardly knew which way toturn. His body was blotched with blood and mud, and under it theragged gashes made by glass and bush stung painfully; he was hungryand stiff and tired and miserable. He remembered Hagendorff's threatof capturing him in ten minutes, and forced a smile to his face.
"Looks kind of bad," he muttered, using his voice in an attempt todispel some of the lonely grip of the night, "but we'll keep moving,anyway! He's coming back soon. Let's see: I'd better make for thestream. It'll be hard for him to follow my tracks through that. Andthen...."
Then--what? The island was small. He realized he could not stand manyhours of exposure. Inevitably--But he turned his mind from the futureand its seeming hopelessness, and concentrated on the immediate need,which was to hide himself. Forcing the pace, he struck off on ashambling trot down the dim trail, on into the deepening, sinistershadows towards the island's lone stream.
* * * * *
Obstacles that normally he would not have noticed made his pathtortuous. His great weight sank his feet ankle-high in the moist,uneven ground. Time and time again he stumbled over some imbedded rockthat, potato-sized, was like a boulder to him. Time and time again hefell, and when he rose his legs were plastered with soggy earth thatdid not dry; and the damp, fallen leaves and twigs he pitched intoclung to his coating of mud. Each broken limb and branch, dropped fromthe whispering gloom of the trees above, drained the energy from histiring muscles. Soon he was conscious of a vague numbness creepingover him, a deceptive, drowsy warmth into which he longed to sink, butwhich he drove back by working his arms and legs as vigorously as hecould.
On he went, with teeth clenched and eyes fixed on the half-seen trailahead--a fantastic, tiny creature hunted like a wild animal by a giantof his own kind!
Presently, through the shroud of darkness traced by ghostly slivers ofstarlight, came the sound of trickling water. The trail rose, dippeddown; and through that hollow crawled the stream, winding from ahidden spring to the encompassing river below. Garth was winded whenhe came to it; to his eyes it seemed a small river. His legs were sonumb they hardly felt the cold bite of the water that lapped aroundthem.
Some furry water animal leaped away as Garth trudged upstream, alarmedby the strange midnight visitant and the self-encouraging mutteringsof a shrill human voice....
* * * * *
He had waded what seemed to him a weary distance--in reality only afew hundred yards--through the winding, icy creek, when suddenly hehalted and stood stock-still. Listening, he heard the ordinary soundsof the wind through the fir-spires, and the slow trickle of water;heard the beating of his own heart. Nothing else. And yet.... He tookanother step.
Then he swung quickly around and peered back, senses alert. There wasno mistaking the sound that had come again. It was the crunch of heavyfeet, thudding at even intervals on damp earth. They wereHagendorff's; and he was armed with light!
A long beam of white speared through the tangle of bush and treetrunks far below. It came slanting down from above, prying for thestory recorded by miniature footprints in the ground. By its distancefrom him, Garth could tell Hagendorff had come to where his trail ledinto the stream. The ray held steady for minutes. Again it prowlednervously around, hunting for tell-tale signs, sweeping in wideningcircles. Then, it was punctuated by the crunch of a boot.
The giant was following upstream!
With the flashlight, he might even be able to trace the prints in thebed of the creek. Stooping, Garth crept ahead, as silently as hecould, though the stir of water at his feet seemed terribly loud.There were keen ears behind, craned for sounds like that. He knew hewould have to hide again--quickly--and at that moment he saw a place.
A cleft in the bank to his right held a small hole, dimly limned by awisp of starlight. On hands and feet the midget scrambled cat-like toit. It slanted down and inwards, only inches wide, so that the earthwas close to his body when he slid feet-first inside. But it was warmand dry, for it was shielded by a ledge from rain, and with the warmththe hunted manikin's spirits rose somewhat. The ray of light, which hecould see sweeping back and forth downstream, was still followingslowly, as if Hagendorff were having trouble making out thewater-covered trail. Garth breathed easier, cuddled down--and then,for some unaccountable reason, he felt uneasy.
* * * * *
He had not noticed it at first, but now his nostrils were filled witha queer, musky odor that electrified his nerves and tensed hismuscles. He felt the short hairs on his neck rise; felt his lipstighten and draw back over clenched teeth. Some long-buried instinctwas warning him of danger--and suddenly he sprang from the hole andswung around.
From it, a killer came snaking out, its bared fangs thirsty for hislife blood!
Arching and swaying its lithe-muscled body, it slid forward in itsgraceful, savage way--a weasel, the deadliest pound-for-pound killerthat prowls the forest. It was as long as the naked human who faced itwas tall. Unwittingly, he had chosen its hole as a refuge.
Retreat would have been impossible, but Garth for some reason did noteven think of it. A strange new sensation poured through his tensebody, a sensation akin to fierce joy. Gone was his tiredness; histeeth too were bared, matching the wicked fangs before him. Two primalcreatures they were, tooth to tooth and claw to claw, the man as nakedand intoxicated with the blood lust as the ten pounds of bone andsinew that now darted suddenly for his throat.
With the lightning quickness that had come to him with small size,Garth stepped aside. And as the weasel's head streaked by he calledon man's distinctive weapon, and put every ounce of his weight behinda right arm swing that landed square on a cold black nose and doubledthe weasel back in midair.
Stunned, it writhed for a second on the slippery bank; and then againit was up, mad with pain now and swaying slightly as it gathered for asecond leap against this creature that fought so strangely.
* * * * *
But in the momentary respite Garth had reasoned out his best chance.He did not try to fight off the second dart with his fists, but wentboldly in. Ducking through the needle claws with head lowered, histiny hands streaked in on the furry throat. He found it, and hisfingers thumbed into the wind-pipe; but not before the weasel smelledthe blood its claws had drawn and went utterly berserk. For a momentthere was a wild flurry of furry, tearing legs and a blood-streakedwhite body between them, trying desperately to evade their slicingstrokes. They pitched down the bank together, animal and manstruggling silently to the death; and when they jarred to a stop inthe water below, Garth's strategy was achieved.
He was uppermost; his grip was steel around the throbbing throat, andthe hundred and eighty pound weight of his body was holding the legspowerless. Not an inch from his face the weasel's fangs clashedfrantically together. Garth maintained his clutch, squeezing withevery bit of his mighty strength. The animal shuddered; then writhedin the death convulsions; at last lay still.
Panting, his mind a welter of primate emotions roused by the kill, theman shook it a last time, jumped to his feet and glared around--to seethe beam of a flashlight only a dozen yard
s away. His more deadly foe,the human foe, was upon him. Perhaps the sounds of the fight hadreached his ears.
Garth lost not a moment. Quickly he slung the weasel's body back intothe hole and jammed himself down after it.
* * * * *
Hagendorff approached slowly, mumbling and cursing to himself insullen ill-humor. Things were not going as he had expected them to.The white ray scoured the banks of the stream, searching doggedly.Nearer he came, and with each step the watching midget's rapidbreathing grew tighter. The towering body was more than shadow now.Another ten feet and the flashlight would find the marks of the fight.
But the titan's patience gave out. Closer than he had yet been to hisquarry, he paused, and again the thunder of his voice broke thenight's hush.
"Bah! This is foolish! In daylight I find him certainly. I have waitedlong; I can wait a little more. I need sleep. To-morrow, it will bedifferent!"
He swung away from the stream, and in a few minutes the rip and crashof his progress through the bush had died. In the silence, GarthHoward considered his situation.
He faced it squarely, as was his custom. He did not brood over thetreachery of his assistant, or of how unfairly and suddenly it hadplunged him into peril and robbed him of his normal body. He acceptedhis position and searched for possible angles of escape. There werenot many hours left in which to make a decisive move. The island wassmall, and, as Hagendorff had said, discovery would be inevitable indaytime.
Garth thought of the machine, and of the giant sleeping. A desperateplan came to him, and his jaws set decisively. "I'll do it!" heexclaimed aloud.
The lever which controlled both increase and decrease could be workedfrom inside the chamber if he rigged up a system of turning it with awire or rope. If he pulled it to the increase only part way, he would,he knew, have sufficient power over his muscles to pull it back off,or slide again from the chamber, as he had done before. Whether or nothe could do this depended on Hagendorff's being asleep. Possibly hecould be locked in the living room, if he were there. Or tied. Theincrease, even at half speed, would only take about forty seconds.Once back to his size there would be a fight without odds, Garththought grimly.
* * * * *
It was a big risk, and there was probably only a small chance ofsucceeding, but it meant getting back to six feet, back to a normalworld, back to equal terms. That was the magnet which drew himpresently toward the cabin laboratory.
He went slowly, to allow Hagendorff plenty of time to fall soundlyasleep. The giant, as he had said, needed sleep--needed it badly--for,like Garth Howard, he had done without it for forty-eight hours underthe excitement of imminent success in their work. Garth consideredthat his move would be totally unexpected, being made right into theother's territory. There was a chance.
And so, cold and weariness banished by thoughts of the goal ahead, heprowled back along the trail like any small creature of the forest.
It was half an hour later when he came in sight of the cabin. Hisheart drummed excitedly as he stood in the shadows surveying it. Hewondered if Hagendorff was still awake; if he was, perhaps, waitingfor him. Certainly he did not seem to be: the cabin was dark andsilent, and the only door was tightly closed. Still--it might bewiser to retreat while still free....
"No, by heaven!" Garth Howard exclaimed in his thoughts. "I'm goingthrough with it!" Stooping slightly, he left the shadows and ranboldly into the starlight.
He half expected to hear a scuffle of feet and see the giant comeleaping out at him; but nothing broke the silence. He made his carefulway along the side of the cabin to the place where a trough for wasteliquids led through a small hole at the level of the floor, and withgreat care wormed through.
* * * * *
As he started to cautiously reconnoiter, he was suddenly arrested inhis tracks. He had caught the sound of deep, rhythmic breathing.Hagendorff was asleep, not in the adjoining living room--but in thelaboratory!
For a moment, Garth did not know what to do. Caution urged him toretreat; but that would not get him back to his size. On tip-toe, heexplored around. The boards squeaked beneath his great weight, but thenearby breathing beyond continued in regular rhythm.
His eyes were toned to the darkness of the laboratory; he saw thechamber of his atom-compacting machine, its outer sides ghostly in thefaint, reflected starlight, and stared at it with a pang of fiercelonging. So near, it was--so very near! Holding the stolen size of hisbody; holding all that was vital to him; holding life itself--itrested there silently, within reach of a few steps and a quick climbup one of the table legs. So he thought, his brain whirling withmingled emotions, his tiny body shivering and aching with cold and itsmany hurts. The machine was near--but a barrier blocked the way.
Hagendorff's bulk lay outstretched on a side table, black in theshadows, and from him came the level breathing of a sound sleeper,climaxed now and again by a rumbling snore. He was taking no chances;his presence there seemed to destroy any hope of the midget'sregaining normal size. But Garth was desperate, and for a minute or sohe considered.
* * * * *
Forty seconds, the increase would take, at half speed. It might bethat long before the giant would waken thoroughly and see what washappening. He, Garth, might start the process, and, when he saw thehuge figure stirring and waking from the noise of the dynamo, switchoff the ray and get out. No matter how short a time it took Hagendorffto throw off the fogginess of his sleep, he would be somewhatincreased in size, and the odds of combat would not be so great.
It was a terrible risk. Did he dare take it? He thought of the forest,of the raw night, of what was threatened in the morning.... Yes!
Silently, the manikin clasped the nearest table leg, shinnied up andhauled himself over the top. As he got there his heart leaped. A sharpthumping had come from behind. He dropped to his knees and glancedround; but he immediately rose again, reassured. It was only therabbits in their cage, disturbed by the strange figure on the table.He thanked God that they--and his tarantulas and other insects--couldmake no alarming noises.
Garth found a long strand of wire. The panel's control lever, swung tothe left, controlled increase; to the right, decrease. Garth's planwas to wind the middle of the wire around it, relay each end aroundthe two supporting posts of the switchboard, and thus have both endsof the wire in his hands when he stood inside the chamber. One end ofthe wire would enable him to pull the lever over for increase, andthe other to pull it back to neutral when the increase was completed,or when Hagendorff arose.
Quickly he started to arrange the wire. Then suddenly his handsdropped and he stared dismayed at the control panel.
The power switch had been removed!
* * * * *
It was Hagendorff's work, of course. He had guarded every angle.Without that switch, the mechanism was lifeless and literallypowerless. It worked on a delicately adjusted and enclosed rheostat;there was nothing that could be substituted for it. It would takehours to improvise one in the heart of the apparatus.
The switch, Garth reflected bitterly, was probably concealed somewhereabout the giant's body.
He considered the possibility of tying him. He knew where there was acoil of light, pliable wire on the floor; he might be able to loop itover the giant's hands and legs while he slept, tie him securely, andthen go through his pockets for the switch. Another hazard! But therewas nothing else to do.
Garth lowered himself over the table's edge and slid quietly down theleg. He glanced at the sleeping man, then over across the room towhere, beneath another table, the wire was--and his nerves jumped atwhat he saw there.
From the darkness under the table two spots of greenish fire, close tothe floor, held steadily on him.
As he stared, they vanished, to reappear more to the right. With themovement, he glimpsed the outline of a lithe, crouching animal, andknew it to be the cat he and Hagend
orff had experimented on earlierthat night. It was stalking him in the deliberate manner of its kind!
* * * * *
It came edging around, so as to leap on him from the side. He knewthat he represented fair prey to it; that if he tried to run, it wouldpounce on him from behind. Wearily he tensed his miniature body,standing poised on the balls of his feet and never dropping his eyesfor a moment. He could not repress a grim smile at the ludicrousnessof being attacked by an ordinary house-cat, even though it wastiger-sized to him. Though his victory over the weasel, a far deadlierfighter, made him confident he could dispatch it, there was anotheraspect to the approaching struggle. It would have to be fought insilence. Not four feet away, Hagendorff slept. There lay theoverwhelming danger.
Even as these things flashed through his brain, the cat steadilyinched nearer on its padded paws. Ghostly starlight framed it now;Garth could see the eager, quivering muscles, the long tail, flatbehind, twitching slightly, the rigid, unstirring head and the slowlycontracting paws. The terrible suspense of its stalking scraped hisnerves. There would be a long pause, then an almost imperceptiblehunching forward, with the tail ever twitching; then the same thingagain, and over again. It became unbearable. Garth deliberatelyinvited the attack.
He pretended to turn and run, his back towards it. At once he sensedits tensing body, its bunching muscles--then knew that it had sprung.
Whirling, he had a fleeting impression of a supple body in midair, ofbristling claws and bared, needlepoint fangs. But he was ready. Theweasel had taught him his best weapon, the great weight of his body.He streaked in beneath the wide-spread paws, shot his hands into thefur of the throat and threw himself against the shock of the animal'ssuddenly arrested leap.
There was no standing his weight. Over the cat went, its back thuddinginto the floor, its claws held powerless by the hundred and eightypounds of hard flesh that straddled it.
* * * * *
The fall had made little noise; but, as Garth tightened the grip ofhis fingers and bored inward, a dull, steady thumping began to sound.It was the cat's tail, pounding on the floor!
Desperately he tried to hook a leg over it, but could not reach farenough. It beat like a tom-tom. From above, there came the sound of ahuge frame stirring, and the rumble of a sleepy grunt.
In a moment, the titan would be thoroughly awake.
By the drumming tail alone, Garth realized, his chance of regainingfull size was sent glimmering. There was nothing but retreat, now, anda hasty one, if he valued life. Another noise came from the wakingHagendorff. He was sitting up, staring around. Garth jumped to hisfeet, threw the cat's twitching body beneath the table, and dodged atfull speed for the hole whereby he had entered.
Like a mouse he wriggled through, leaped to the ground, scrambled upand made for the forest. He ran with all the speed at his command, andwas almost surprised when he reached the black fringe of the forest insafety. In the protecting gloom, he dared to pause and look back.
Hagendorff was not pursuing him. From the sound, he was merelyboarding shut the drain hole, to prevent another entrance in that way;then, afterwards, the windows.
Garth was puzzled. "I don't understand it," he said aloud. "Why is heso sure he can get me in the morning? Isn't he afraid I'll leave theisland? Why I've _got_ to try to get away, now. It would be death tobe here after the dawn!"
He stood there making his plans. They had a rowboat below, poweredwith an outboard motor. Even in his present size, he might possiblyrun it, if he could get it started. He would strike down-river forDetroit, and when the gas gave out, the current would carry him on.Some river boat might pick him up and carry him to friends in thecity. His grotesquely dwarfed body would prove his story, and theywould bring him back and end Hagendorff's mad dream of fame, and helphim to regain his normal size. He could superintend the constructionof another machine if the present one was wrecked.
When he started down the trail to the river, he seemed to be walkingthrough a haze. He felt curiously light-headed, and his body wascompletely numb. The long exposure was telling on him, and there wasmuch more of it to come. He wondered if he could hold out until hereached the mainland.
But his mind cleared of the daze the cold and near-exhaustion hadbrought it to when at last he came to the beach and realized thatagain Hagendorff had anticipated him. The rowboat was gone! No wonderthe giant could afford to wait until daylight.
* * * * *
Garth floundered down to the beach and ran to where the craft usuallylay. There was only a groove in the rough, pebbly surface, a grooveleft by the boat's keel. He followed it up the bank, and twenty yardsin found the dinghy chained and locked firmly to a large tree.
The midget's face grew suddenly very haggard as he stood there,staring at what looked like his death sentence. He should have knownHagendorff would secure the boat, he told himself bitterly. It was acruel blow, and sheer misery of mind and body gripped him as he turnedand peered through the darkness of wind-whipped water and sky toward ahorizon that was already lightening. Down-river lay Detroit, afriendly, everyday world. It was not far in miles, but it seemed lostto him forever....
Garth took his eyes from that prospect with a wry twist to his mouth.It chanced that they fell on the painter of the rowboat.
It was a stout Manila cord, some twenty feet in length, and tiedtightly to a ring in the bow of the boat. He looked at it dully for afull minute before the idea came to him. Then suddenly the lethargybred of hopelessness left him. Garth remembered a pocket knife he hadleft in the boat the day before. He climbed over the side and began tofumble about in the darkness. First he came upon a torn handkerchiefwhich he hastily tied about his loins. Further probing disclosed theknife wedged under a seat in the boat. When he had finally extricatedit, he threw the knife over the side and climbed out.
After some minutes of frantic cutting and hacking he severed the rope,and, quickly taking up one of the ends, ran with it further along thebank.
There was still a way of getting off the island. A cold and risky way,but better than waiting miserably for capture. On the bank was a pileof sawn logs, intended for firewood; and a strong rope was in hishands. Much indeed could be done now.
* * * * *
The making of his raft proved a herculean task, a racking and almostimpossible one for a man limited by doll-sized hands and a foot-highbody. First the logs had to be rolled to the water's edge, six ofthem. Each was as thick as he was tall, and this first part of histask took him a precious half hour, every minute of which broughtnearer the dawn. Ripples like ordinary waves washed up the strugglingmanikin and left him gasping as he stood braced in the cold water andtugged one log after another out and wound the rope under and over it.The raft had to be built in water; he would never have been able todrag the whole thing off the beach.
When at last he wearily tied the rope end to the last log, and stuckhis knife handy in it, the clouds on the horizon were flushed by thecoming sun. But his means of escape was completed; and hanging on theend, he shoved the raft out into the river. Right then he almost losthis life. For when his feet left the sloping bottom, his great weight,out of all proportion to the size of his body, pulled him under, andit was only by virtue of a desperate clutch on the raft that heescaped drowning. Thrashing furiously, he struggled up from the water,and lay, totally blown, on the logs. It was then he first realizedthat his chance of life was no stronger than the rope which held themtogether. For swimming was out of the question, and one or two logswould never support his hundred and eighty pounds.
The end which he lay on was well under water, and the waves splashedup between the bobbing logs. The current he was headed for swept downfifty yards offshore, which was a sixth of a mile to the little legsnow thrust out behind and making a rhythmic flutter.
He was off the island! Freedom and life were near! Though his teethwere chattering, his fingers crushed by the jarr
ing logs, and his bodyutterly wretched, he grinned with joy as the stretch between him andthe gloomy mass of the island slowly widened.
* * * * *
Then came the sun. The skies faded from gray into a delicate,cloud-flecked blue; slowly the air warmed, and the surface of thewater seemed to calm under it. Though the sun was good on his body,Garth realized night was more friendly to him, for in the growinglight his craft was all too conspicuous to the giant who wouldpresently be following his tracks down to the beach. He chided himselffor not having thought of camouflaging the raft with leafy branches.Doggedly, he forced it out.
When at last he felt the pull of the current, he ceased his wearykicking and glanced up into the swiftly advancing dawn. There was abird soaring through the keen air up there, gliding in easy circleswith almost motionless wings. Garth gazed at it somewhat wistfully,envying its freedom and power of flight. And then he shut his eyes. Hewas very tired....
He must have dozed off for a moment, for he awoke to find himselfslipping off. With a sudden jerk he regained his position--and thatwas what saved his life at that moment. For without warning, while hewas nodding, plumed death struck from the skies.
It dropped like a plummet, as was its manner. It had been circlingabove and judging its swoop, and by rights its curved talons shouldhave arched deep into the unguarded back of the naked figure on theraft. But at the last second the figure moved aside--too late for thehawk to alter its swoop.
The raft rocked under the impact; for a moment Garth Howard, dazed bythe sudden attack, did not know what had happened. Huge scratchingwings were thrashing about him; his left arm stung from where a clawhad raked it; and he wrenched around to stare into two wicked slits ofeyes behind a fierce, rounded beak that jabbed at him.
* * * * *
Evidently he represented easy prey to the hawk, for it did not soaraway, but instead came at him again in a flurry of beating wings andstabbing beak, a vicious, feathered fighter from above. Caught offguard by the suddenness and savagery of the onslaught, Garth retreatedstumblingly, forgetting his weight and the size of the raft anddefending himself with his arms as best he could against the rushes ofthe hawk. The raft tilted perilously; water washed around his legs andhe slipped and went under.
He felt his fingers slipping inexorably over the edge of the log hehad gripped; his legs threshed up a welter of foam, but he kept goingdown. Panic clutched him; his weight would sink him like a stone. Butsuddenly his clutching hand was gripped by steel-like talons, andthrough the water he caught a glimpse of the hawk straining backwardswith mighty sweeps of its wings in an effort to lift him bodily intothe air.
His size had deceived it. It could not hoist him, but did manage todrag his head and chest out of the water. That was enough. With aneffort, Garth scrambled onto the raft.
The hawk, probably greatly surprised by its failure to soar away withsuch tiny prey, tore into him again, raking his body painfully. Hardlyknowing what he did, Garth grabbed out as it hovered over him andsucceeded in wrapping his fingers around one of its legs. Then,bracing himself as best he could, and ignoring the scratching wingsand piercing beak, he gave the leg a sharp twist and heard the crackof breaking bone.
He was only half-conscious of the hawk's shrill scream of pain, ofits swift retreat into the blue, with the broken leg danglinggrotesquely. For only a moment he was aware that he had driven it off;then the pain of his wounds and his utter exhaustion swept up overhim, and he flopped down on the raft in a dead faint....
* * * * *
For a long time Garth was dimly aware of familiar noises. At firstthey were faint and scarcely perceptible; but, as his senses slowlybegan to return, disturbing thoughts came to him. He felt that he wason his back, and confined, and when he twisted, to turn over, he foundhe could not. He opened his eyes and blinked.
He was back in the laboratory--lying bound, hand and foot, on the longtable.
The giant Hagendorff appeared over him, and his deep voice rumbled:
"Badly scarred and bruised, my little friend! Cats you have fought,and birds, and each has left its mark. It was useless to run away lastnight--not?"
Garth was suddenly too full of a weary resignation to even think ofspeaking. Remonstrance, he knew, would avail him nothing. The longstruggle for freedom and life was over, and he had lost.
The assistant was apparently in good humor. He went on:
"Really, it is too bad, after that magnificent fight of yours! Ahawk--was it not? I was following your tracks, and had just reachedthe beach when I see a great fuss on the water. A raft, I see! A bird,attacking something on it! A little white figure, struggling! Well, itis that easy. I unlock the boat and go to the raft and find my elusivefriend there, unconscious. So I bring him back here. He has forgotten:we have an experiment to complete."
There was a fire of exultation in the man's eyes as they glared downat the midget who lay on the laboratory table, just a few feet awayfrom the chamber of the machine. He reached out and ran a thick fingerover his victim's body.
"You do not deserve this," he said. "I should kill you outright--but,graciously, I give you death in the machine. Yours will be the firsthuman body to be reduced to an inch; maybe less. This is yourmartyrdom; for this, your name will live, along with mine, for havingperfected the process."
* * * * *
Garth Howard saw that the window was boarded tightly shut. ThenHagendorff caught his eyes as, with a grin, he plunged a hand into apocket and drew forth the missing panel switch. He dangled it in frontof Garth.
"What you would have given for this last night, eh? With your wire topull the lever so carefully arranged! _Ach_, it was too bad!" Heshrugged, then picked up a screwdriver and turned to fix the switch onthe control panel.
The moment his back was turned, Garth gazed frantically around. Thefantastic fate he had striven so desperately to stave off was veryclose now. What could he do?
Some tools lay on the table, just out of his reach, among them a pairof cutting pliers. He stared at the pliers--an overgrown tool, half aslong as his own body. The twist of Hagendorff's wrist driving home thefirst screw brought a cold chill over him. The pliers! It was achance!
He twisted a little, and keeping his eyes on the giant's back, heinched toward them. His hands, tied at the wrists behind him, clutchedfor them; found them. The jaws were open, and there were two sharpcutting edges. He could not hope to manipulate the whole implementwith his bound hands, but he located one edge, painfully brought therope to it and sawed rapidly.
The steel sliced his flesh, and he felt the warm stickiness of blood.But he disregarded this and kept on. Hagendorff was still working, allunconscious--but the last screw was going in. And then some strands ofthe rope snapped, and it loosened.
The next second, Garth had wrenched his hands free.
Then, throwing caution to the winds, he sat up, grabbed the great tooland sliced the rope at his feet.
At that moment, Hagendorff finished his job and turned around.
* * * * *
Their eyes met. For a breathless instant nothing happened, save thatthe smile on the titan's face changed to surprise and then fury. Garthscrambled to his feet. The movement brought a bellow of rage, and themanikin saw two enormous hands converging on him in a sweep that badefair to crush every bone in his dwarfed body.
Leaping backwards instinctively, he hurled the pliers at the giant'shead.
They were well aimed, and he saw them strike the temple, stopping theman in his tracks. He thundered, more from anger than pain. His heartpounding wildly, Garth ran back to a position behind a rack of testtubes. It was from there that he saw Hagendorff, cursing crazily, grabup a machinist's hammer and advance upon him.
All sanity had apparently left the giant. His great face was flushedand distorted, and a growing welt showed where the pliers had clippedhim. Garth suddenly knew that if
he were captured again, death wouldnot come in the chamber, but from those powerful hands, or the weaponthey clutched.
The hammer swung back for a crushing blow. But in the instant it hungpoised, Garth lifted a half-filled test tube from the rack before himand swished its contents forward.
The tube held sulphuric acid, and it sprayed over Hagendorff's face.The hammer pitched from his hand; he clutched at his eyes and stumbledback, shrieking in agony.
Garth at once ran to the edge of the table, swung himself over andslid down the leg to the floor. The laboratory door was open and hedashed for it. But, whether or not Hagendorff could see his franticretreat, he anticipated it, and with a reeling plunge he got therefirst. Fumbling, he found the key in the hole and turned it. The roomwas sealed.
* * * * *
Beginning then, the blind Hagendorff was a man berserk. With a sobbingroar of pain and fury, he lashed round for the foot-high figure thatdodged and wheeled and zig-zagged to keep from his threshing arms andhis hands. A table crashed over, and a flood of chemicals mixed andboiled on the floor; then another, as the giant blundered blindly intoit. The cages of animals split open, and guinea pigs, rabbits andinsects scuttled from their prisons, fleeing to the corners from thewild plunges of the raging German.
Garth went reeling from a glancing blow, and fell against anover-turned stool under a far table where he could hardly breathe forthe mixed odors of spilt chemicals. By some sixth sense, Hagendorffseemed to locate him, for his huge body turned and came directly forhim.
But Garth did not wait. Seizing the stool he whirled it so that itslid smash into the giant's legs. The man pitched over with a grunt,striking the floor so hard that the planks shivered.
He did not rise. He lay there, in a wreckage of glass and splinteredwood and stinking chemicals, moaning slightly.
Garth wasted no time, but gripped a leg of the laboratory table,shinned to the top and with frantic speed fixed his strand of wireonto the control lever and round the supporting posts of theinstrument panel. Then he jumped for the dynamo switch, caught thehandle and jerked it down.
The drone of a generator surged through the room. Then the midget wasstanding in the chamber, both ends of the wire in his hands; and hisheart was thudding madly as he pulled one of them.
It held. Over came the lever, halfway. The brilliant stream of the raypoured down. Dimly the manikin glimpsed the chamber's walls sinkingdown, the wreckage-strewn room outside diminishing to normal size.Fiery pain throbbed through him, but it was lost in the exultationthat filled his mind as the seconds went by. He grew to two feet, twoand a half--three.
* * * * *
But beyond that he was not to go. The swaying shape of Hagendorffloomed outside the cube. Aroused by the drone of the generator andwhat it signified, the giant had floundered up from the floor and nowcame clutching blindly for him.
Garth knew he would have to leave the chamber at once; so, strugglingfor command of his muscles through the paralysis that numbed them, hetensed his hold on the other wire and pulled it a little. The controllever swung back to neutral; the ray faded and Garth jumped out. Hewas only a few feet away from the huge convulsed face as the Germanroared:
"By God, you'll never get back on _this_ machine!"
His purpose was plain; his groping hand had already found the controllever. To prevent his ripping it out, Garth plunged head first intoHagendorff's stomach, and they both went down in a flurry of arms andlegs. Garth, scrambling to get loose, was conscious of the ray pouringdown again in the chamber above. The lever had not been wrenched out,but jerked over, setting the process of increase on.
The next few minutes were a chaos. Now that Howard was three feet tallhe was without some of the advantages of his former smallness andcompactness, and his utmost efforts failed to free him from the deathclutch of the pain-maddened giant. Over and over they rolled on thefloor. Garth trying only to break free, and the other relentlesslyholding on and dragging him over to the chamber again.
It was a losing fight for the diminutive one, weakened as he was byhis exposure and the fierce fights he had had. Little by little,squirming and resisting with all his remaining strength, he wasbrought near--to see the German, at last, pull half the reducingapparatus with a crash to the floor.
The ray in the chamber faded off. The machine was silenced forever, sothat Garth could never hope to regain his full size in this one....
* * * * *
With the realization of this, most of his spirit went, while thesavage giant, successful in smashing the machinery, now turned anddevoted himself exclusively to his victim.
"Now for you!" he roared in frightening triumph, clutching the smallerman's neck with his great hands and bearing him to the floor.
Against those fingers gouged into his wind-pipe like a vise of steel,Garth could do nothing. Feebly he gagged, and feebly he clawed at thepitiless hands--and futilely.
It was the end, he told himself. He had come close, but closeness didnot count. His eyes bulged, and a shroud of black began to obscure hisvision.
And then, suddenly, over the giant's flexed arms, he glimpsed, comingfrom the chamber on the table, something that chilled the blood in hisveins with horror.
It was huge and utterly loathsome. Long, hairy legs folded out, andfollowing them came a furry, bloated body at least five feet thick.Many-faceted eyes fixed themselves coldly on the men on the floor. Inone hideous leap the monster soared from the table all the way to theroom's ceiling, seeming almost to float as it came down. For a momentit teetered on the floor, not five feet from the giant who, blind andall unconscious of it, was throttling his diminutive victim beneathhim.
Garth for a second forgot the grip on his throat in the horror of themonster. He knew at once what it was--a tarantula. It had crawledinside the chamber when its cage was broken, had been there even whilehe had been there, and had been swollen to its present blood-curdlingsize while they were fighting and the ray was on. With the smashing ofthe apparatus, it was free to come out.
* * * * *
It gathered for the final spring, its terrible legs tensingperceptibly--a creature out of a nightmare. Garth Howard tried toshriek out a warning, but Hagendorff was holding his throat too well.He could only struggle weakly and nod toward the horror beyond; butthe message did not get across to the giant.
Then the tarantula sprang again.
For a moment it seemed to hover on Hagendorff's upturned back. When itfloated down, its ragged legs cradled over him, and the egg-shapedbody squatted on his back....
Garth felt his frayed nerves and senses going. A hairy leg wastouching him, chilling his flesh. Above him, the giant was thrashingimpotently, and he found his neck free of the awful grip.
He wormed free. He was hardly conscious of reaching up and unlockingthe door, and closing it tightly again as he stumbled forth. Later, itseemed that it was in a dream that he ran wildly into the splendidsunlight outside and down the winding trail. It was only by atremendous effort that he kept his senses long enough to shove therowboat out from the beach and hop in.
He never started the motor. All that he had seen and suffered on theisland of horror overcame him too soon, and he pitched down in a limp,unconscious heap....
* * * * *
And so it was, that, the next morning, the two harbor policemen founda rowboat with mysterious cargo floating silently down the DetroitRiver. So it was that some time later a launch with three localofficers churned up to the solitary island, and that gunshots echoedin the gloom of a hushed laboratory room, and a man's white-faced bodywas carried from the cabin where he had made his one great treacherouseffort to steal another's fame.
"JAZZING UP THE UNIVERSE"
Centuries of celestial history wheeled across the plaster sky of thenew Adler planetarium at Chicago, recently, at the dedication of theastronomical institution, the first of it
s kind in the WesternHemisphere.
A modern Joshua, working the levers and switches of a complicatedinstrument, commanded a miniature sun to stand still in theheavens--and it did. He bettered the feat of the Biblical prophet bystopping the sun at any given point on its orbit across the skies, andthen ran it backward, its attendant planets, planetoids and starsscampering contrary to all rules of the universe.
The Joshua in the person of Professor Philip Fox, director of theplanetarium on a "made" island in Lake Michigan described theinstrument with which he made the heavenly bodies cut capers, as aprojector, made in Germany at a cost of almost $100,000. As nearly asit can be described by a layman it looks like three immense divinghelmets capping the ends of a tube about six feet long. Each "helmet"is studded with lenses and inside are complicated and strange lightsand projectors which throw the images of the celestial bodies on thewhite plaster dome above that represents the skies. The wheelingmotion of the universe toward the west is obtained by revolving the"helmets" in eccentric circles on an axis. The whole effect makes aspectator feel as if the solar system was revolving around him at agreatly accentuated speed.
As a beginning lesson for the layman who attended the opening,Professor Fox set the machine to represent the latitude of Chicago onMay 10, 1930. Every one turned his eyes to the east, where asilhouette of Lake Michigan, with its lighthouses and ore ships, ispainted on the plaster horizon. The dome was lighted to represent aclear night, and, incidentally, all nights are clear in a planetarium.The machine was started and up from the center of the Lake jumpedMars, red against the darkness.
Professor Fox, with a flashlight that throws the image of an arrow,pointed out the stars as they appeared over the dome. The coming ofMars forecast the dawn of May 10 and in a few moments the sun emergedfrom the proper latitudinal position out of the lake and blazed itsway across the heavens and set behind the silhouette of the StandardOil Building on the west wall of the dome in less than a minute,denoting that the day had passed in review. At 3:43 P. M. centralstandard time, the midget moon arose and sailed its course and thenset behind the darkened picture of the Straus Tower.
Then Professor Fox ran off Sunday, Monday and Tuesday for goodmeasure, each time with Mars heralding the dawn and the sun changingposition as it does in reality. Fifty centuries of astronomicalhistory can be run off in an hour by the machine. The planets arevisible during the day in the planetarium as well as night.