The fly landed with a thud on the center table. The fumes of the
shattered bottle of chemicals were choking Alan. He flung himself toward
the monster fly, but Glora held him.
"No! Escape to the other room!"
Dr. Kent was stamping the things upon the floor; pouring acids upon
them. Some eluded him. The air in the room was unbreathable....
Alan and Glora reached the bedroom. The laboratory was a hideous chaos.
They were aware of its outer door opening, disclosing the figure of
Polter who, undoubtedly, had been attracted by the noise. He shouted a
startled oath. Alan heard it above the beating wings of the monstrous
fly. Things lurched at the opened door; Polter banged it upon them and
rushed away, shouting the alarm through the palace.
Dr. Kent was stammering, "Not the enlarging drug, Glora, child, the
other! Hurry!"
Alan helped Glora with the opalescent vial. Things were lurching toward
this room, from the laboratory. Alan, with averted face, choked by the
incoming fumes, slammed the door upon the gruesome turmoil.
They took the diminishing drug. The bedroom expanded. The hideous sounds
from the laboratory, and the whole palace now ringing with a wild alarm,
soon faded into blessed remoteness of distance....
"I think this is the way, Alan. Off there--a doorway from my bedroom.
Polter always kept it locked, but it leads into a corridor. We must get
out of here. A crack under the door--is that it, off there?" Dr. Kent
pointed into the gloomy blur of distance. "We're horribly small--it's so
far to run--and I've lost my sense of direction."
The drug had ceased its action. The wooden floor of the room had
expanded to a spread of cellular surface, ridged with broken, tubelike
tunnels; pits and jagged cave-mouths. A knothole yawned like a crater a
hundred feet away.
"We are too small," Glora protested hurriedly. "The door is where you
say, Dr. Kent, but miles away."
With the other drug, the room contracted. The floor surface shrank and
smoothed a little. The door was distinguishable--a square panel several
hundred feet in width and towering into the upper haze. The black line
of the crack was visible along its bottom.
They ran to it. The top of the crack was ten feet above their heads.
They ran under, across the wide intervening darkness toward a glow of
light. Then they came from under the door into a corridor--and shrank
against a cliff wall as with a rush of wind and pounding tread the
blurred shapes of a man's huge feet and legs rushed past. The upper air
was filled with rumbling shouts.
"We must chance it!" exclaimed Dr. Kent. "It's too far in this size. We
must get larger--and if they see us, we'll fight our way out!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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