Astronauts -- Fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space flight -- Fiction; Space ships -- Fiction
"Yes--no--now it is gone." The rock seemed empty. Somewhere down
in there the little mechanism lay dwindling. Forever it would grow
smaller. Dwindling into an infinity of smallness; but always to be with
things of its size--and things yet smaller. . . .
As I turned from the glass, I became aware that Martt and Frannie were
not in the room. Dr. Gryce and Brett, absorbed in the test, quite
evidently had not noticed them leave. There had been two other models
on the table--there was now but one.
Then from the garden outside the house a cry reached us. A shout--a cry
of fear--terror. Martt's voice.
"Father! Brett! Help us! Help! Quick!"
* * * * *
We rushed from the room.
Crowning wonder, yet horrible! A surge of fear swept me. In the garden
quite near the house stood the other model. Small no longer. It had
grown--_was growing_--until already it was as large as the house
itself. Around it the flowers, shrubs, even a tree had been pushed
and trampled by its expanding bulk. It stood gleaming white in the
sunlight, motionless save for that steady, increasingly rapid growth.
Its windows and doors loomed large dark rectangles; its balcony was
broad as a corridor; its cone tower was already reared higher than the
nearest trees.
"Father! Help!"
At the doorway of the vehicle, standing just outside it, were the
terror-stricken Martt and Frannie. They were holding the end of a long
metallic pole which projected into the doorway. Struggling with its
weight, striving to throw the switch inside.
We reached them. The expanding bulk of the gleaming side of the
vehicle had pushed them back into a thicket of shrubbery. Near them a
tree, uprooted as though it were a straw sticking upright in sand, was
pushed aside and fell with a crash.
Martt and Frannie were livid with terror; breathless, almost exhausted
with their futile efforts.
Martt panted, "We can't--lift the pole! It's--too heavy--too large
inside."
Within the huge doorway, by the sunlight streaming through the windows,
I could see the interior half of the pole, bloated by growth, huge,
heavy.
Brett shoved Frannie away. "Frank! Here--take hold with us."
Dr. Gryce was with us. Together we four men got the interior end of the
pole upon the table inside. A tremendous switch lever was there. But
the pole slipped, rolled down. I expected it to break at the doorway
point where it was so small outside, but it did not. The expanding
doorway had pushed us farther back. Another tree on the other side
fell. Above us the vehicle's tower loomed like a cathedral spire.
Tremendous now, the vehicle had grown until it was almost touching the
house. A fence had been trampled, had vanished beneath its giant bulk.
And the growth was increasingly rapid. If we could not check it . . .
If it got wholly beyond control--this monster, growing . . . forever
growing, to a size infinitely large--larger than our earth itself. . . .
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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