"I looked at the pill-sized cakes for a minute. Then I shrugged my shoulders and tossed them all down at once, like taking a shot of whiskey neat. For a few seconds nothing happened except for an odd sort of fizzling feeling inside, and then suddenly I started to shrink, just like Alice in Wonderland. I hardly had time to notice that the whole Monahan tribe was shrinking right along with me, before I found that I was having trouble breathing, and it was as if my insides were trying to climb up past my Adam's apple. I couldn't talk, so I tried hard to give Jim Monahan a dirty look before I passed out, which I promptly did.
"I couldn't have been unconscious for more than a few seconds. I woke up to find that I had shrunk to a height of maybe two feet, and that Jim was looking at me with a very worried expression.
"'Boy, was that a lousy job of giffling,' I heard Aloysius say, irreverently. At least, it was Aloysius unless the two boys had exchanged positions while I had been out.
"'Yup, you've got to be careful when you giffle,' agreed his twin sagely.
"'What happened?' I asked weakly. 'And why have you shrunk us down this way?'
"'Shrunk us down?' asked Jim blankly, and then he laughed. 'Oh, I didn't do anything like that to us. That sort of thing is too dangerous to try unless you're a Master Giffler. I don't think even Dad would try a thing like that with a human being. All I did was to enlarge the spaceship. At the same time, of course, I increased the strength of the intermolecular bonds, so that the ship is just as sturdy as it was before. Only now it's big enough to carry a whale.'
"'Only the big jerk forgot that with the space in this room suddenly increased to twenty-five or thirty times as big as it was before, there still wasn't any more ...'
"'... air in it, so you nearly suffocated.' I think it ended with Mike.
"'But he finally had sense enough to gather the air in a ball around your head, so you woke up all right, and I nark that now he had brought in enough air ...'