"I watch—very careful as I grow large," she said. "I can show you now from where I come." Then she led them, amazed and, of course, still incredulous, out into the garden. At the broken old sundial she indicated to them its metal pointer, near the end of which there was a tiny abrasion.
"From there," she insisted. "I notice it well when I come. You wait—I tell to you soon—when the English for me get better."
To young Carter who watched her always with a mixture of struggling emotions which he could not himself understand, it seemed that a shadow crossed her expressive little face as she showed them the spot on the green-bronzed aged pointer of the old sundial. A single atom, down there in the metal, housed her world. She was worried about her people....
Amazing infinity of smallness! As a scientist, young Carter had been reared upon the contemplation of how little one can really know of the multiplicity of things which exist in the Universe. The remoteness of inter-stellar space to him had always been awesome. And here was an opposite remoteness. An infinity of smallness....
Lea's English was sometimes quaint, but adequate to her task, that evening when in detail she told them....
My people—Lea said—live in the mountains and in the forests around the big lake. The main city, it is called Helos. We are the Heanas, most civilized people in our world....
It was a strange picture which the girl evoked of her world within an atom of the sundial pointer. From a shimmering, luminescent lake in a region of soft-glowing twilight, hills of a strange blue-gray vegetation rose in great undulating terraces toward the distant mountains. The Heanas were a peaceful people. Nature had always been kind; food was readily grown; the people's few wants always had been easily supplied. Crime among them had always been very little. But there was some, of course—crimes of fundamental motive; love, hate, jealousy, cupidity, revenge. Wherever humans exist, such crimes are inevitable.
It happened that when Lea was just emerging from childhood—perhaps a thousand times of sleep ago—there was a man in Helos named Taroh. He had been what might be called a chemist—his work created substances which kept the fields fertile so that foods might easily and swiftly be grown. Neither Lea nor her father—who was ruler of the city of Helos—liked this Taroh. And shortly after that, the fellow was caught and convicted of killing another man. For punishment he was banished from the land of the Heanas—sent to live forever in the region of darkness beyond the mountains, in the country of the Malobs, as it was called.
For a thousand times of sleep, little was heard in Helos of this Taroh. But it was known that he had risen to be a ruler of the colony of banished criminals like himself; that he had organized them, and organized the savage tribe of Malobs—men who lived in caves or roamed the black distant forests and killed the lurking animals for food.