"It could be that there are some things," she said demurely, "where a woman's wit is better than the strength of a man's arms." And she added slyly, "You are much like my father, Professor Carter."
She had gotten the drug. And with it, upon the verge of being trapped, she had no recourse but to take the drug herself, and by growing gigantic, escape from Taroh. The drug at first had blurred her senses. That, and her terror, had sent her reeling out into the faintly luminous darkness of the Malob country. Quite evidently she had taken far more of the drug than she planned. Half conscious, she had been aware of the dwindling rocky landscape—gullies closing in upon her so that she had to draw her expanding body upward or its bulk in the apparently shrinking space would have crushed her.
It had been a weird and ghastly journey to the terrified Lea. Professor Carter, George and Alice sat tense, amazed as they tried to visualize what so earnestly she was describing. Then at last the dose of the drug she had taken wore off. She had desperately climbed from a shrinking valley into a new vista of barren rocky waste. Exhausted, she had slept. Then she was cold, hungry and thirsty. For hours and for miles she had wandered over the gigantic, empty, naked terrain of metallic rocks. Without food or water, she knew she would die. There was nothing she could do save to take more of the drug, with the monstrous landscape again shrinking until at last there was different air, different light.
She emerged finally, with other, decreasing doses of the drug which now she had learned to regulate—emerged upon the pointer of the Carter sundial. And growing still larger, had been able to drop to the surface of the sundial itself, and then with more growth, to the ground. She was in the Carter garden, where presently the last tiny taste of the drug wore off. With size unchanging she stood terrified and amazed in the strange silver and black world—and then she had seen the strange-looking man who was George Carter, lying in his chair....
For a moment the Carters were silent as Lea ended her amazing narrative. It seemed incredible, but they had to believe it; the girl was so earnest; her words carried such a wealth of corroborating detail. It made them realize anew what a vast multiplicity of human life must be hidden away beyond our ken in the Universe!... Later that evening, George and his father discussed it.
"Naturally the human life within atoms of our own earth has developed in our own image," Professor Carter was saying. "The same life-source—same general lines of evolution. A different environment—that, and a different size. But still fundamentally the same. Why, I'll be able to lecture on this, George. That girl Lea—she can appear with me." He slapped George enthusiastically on the back. "This will be a big thing for us, boy. We'll be world famous, once we make it known."
"Will we?" Young Carter sat with his gaze focused far through the walls of the living room—gazing out to the conjured vision of a world of Heanas, and savage Malobs. The lamplit living room here was silent. Alice had gone to bed. Lea had retired to her room up there also.
"I was thinking," George said. "That fellow Taroh—Lea stole his drug, but he can make more. Why not? Maybe by now that's what he's done. To trample gigantic, upon Lea's people—to wreck that little city—"
It seemed that there was a faint noise at the top of the hall stairs. George and his father glanced up inquiringly, then decided that it was nothing.