"We must get the rest of that enlarging drug away from her," Professor Carter said. "I didn't want to tackle her tonight—she's been so unreasonable about that package under her arm. We'll get it, George, I'll demonstrate it to the scientific societies to prove our statements, and then, good God, it must be destroyed. Too damn dangerous. Why, if a thing like that fell into the wrong hands here, it could devastate the world!"
But George was thinking only of poor little Lea. Marooned here. She was worried about her people, of course.... After Professor Carter had gone to bed that night, for a long time George sat alone in the sitting room, pondering. To his father the fate of that tiny world was only an interesting scientific thesis. He realized that a billion billion other atomic worlds might be struggling, unseen, inaccessible to us....
Upon impulse, young Carter suddenly left the sitting room and went quietly upstairs. Very gently he knocked on Lea's door.
"Lea? You asleep?"
"Oh—that is you, George? Come in."
Clad in a pair of Alice's blue pajamas, Lea was sitting on the bed—slim little figure with the lamplight softly painting her, glinting in her pale-gold hair with tints of burnished silver. Her hair was streaming down over her shoulders; it framed her face on which now a shadow of terror had gathered.
"You heard what I mentioned to father," George said. "About Taroh maybe making more of the drug?"
"Yes. That I did. Oh, George—I thought what I did for my world was the best."
Contrition was upon her. "It was," he said hastily. He had closed the door behind him; he lowered his voice. "Lea, father wants to get that drug away from you and destroy it. But I was thinking—chemists here, analyzing it, might be able to create its reverse."
She stared. "I mean," he added earnestly, "I don't want to abandon your world, Lea. Not by a jugful I don't. If a drug can be made to increase bodily growth, why couldn't one be made to diminish it? I don't care what father says, I'm going to get the best chemists in the country to try and analyze it—try and create its opposite."