"All right. We'd better get up there at once."
He lifted her up to the bottom of the slope. Together, up a great jagged expanding ramp which presently was twenty feet wide, arduously they climbed upward. Inexorable expansion! New spaces every moment were opening up beneath their feet. A tiny rift in the jagged metal ground, in a moment was a little gully. Metal stones were apparent now, and tiny pits into which one might thrust a finger. The edge of the slope chanced to be beside Carter; and he gazed down from here on the top of the pointer—down to the concrete circular top of the sundial. Hundreds of feet down there, a vast, shining moonlit surface spread out now to the blurred horizon! Huge pits, gullies, ravines were inky black. On the jagged spires and little butte-tops the moonlight was molten silver. It was a weird, naked scene of gray and yellow-white rocks, fantastic as a Lunar landscape!
Then just for a moment, with mental viewpoint changed, Carter envisaged the actuality. How big, compared to his original six-foot stature, was he now? A sixteenth of an inch perhaps? If his father were here in the garden, bending close over the sundial pointer with a light, he might still be able to see him and the girl as they struggled up the sloping narrow top edge of the sundial pointer!
Amazing how nothing is absolute, but wholly comparative to something else! He had told Lea that they were not going very far! Only from the house to the sundial in the garden. But, based on his present size, his father and Alice off there in the house now, were at least sixty or seventy miles away!
"This is the valley," Lea panted. "I can recognize now. It almost closed upon me as I grew large. I can remember climbing up to here."
The edges of the giant upward slope had drawn away, so that with tumbled boulders intervening, Carter could no longer see them. He and Lea were in a depression, like a huge cauldron with its scooped-out bottom almost level—a place a hundred feet in diameter. Steadily the crawling expansion of all the scene continued. It seemed a uniform rate of expansion now.
"That pellet lasts a long time, Lea." He tried to grin at her. "Don't you suppose its effect is about over?"
"Oh, no! There is a great distance yet."
Distance; size! Meaningless terms. He and Lea—as his father would view it—were not going very far in terms of distance! Just two tiny creatures, almost too small to be seen, struggling on the one-eighth-inch-thick top of the sundial pointer!
"You say we go into a valley?" he suddenly demanded. "I don't see any valley."