"Marvelous stuff, eighty-five," Matt went on. "Any living thing, exposed to the lead-filtered emanations it gives off when disintegrated electrically to precisely the right degree, is reduced indefinitely in size. I could have made that dog as small as a microbe, even sub-visible perhaps, if I chose. Curious.... Maybe the presence of eighty-five in minute quantities on earth is all that has kept every living thing from growing indefinitely, expanding gigantically right off the face of the globe...." * * * * * But now Dennis was hardly listening to him. A notion so fantastic, so bizarre that he could not at once grasp it fully, had just struck him. "Listen," he said at last, his voice so hoarse as to be almost unrecognizable, "listen--can you reverse that process?" Matt nodded, and pointed to the viscous deposit in the dome of the bell. "The protoplasmic substance is still there. It can be rebuilt, remolded to its original form any time I put the dog back in the bell and let the particles of eighty-five, which are suspended in the vacuum tubes, settle back into their original, inert mass. You see, there is such a close affinity--" Dennis cut him short almost rudely. It wasn't causes, marvelous though they might be, that he was interested in; it was results. "Would you dare ... that is ... would you like to try that experiment on a human being?" * * * * * Now for once the inventor's entire interest was seized by something outside his immediate work. He stared open-mouthed at Dennis. "Would I?" he breathed. "Would I like ..." He grunted. "Such a question! No experiment is complete till man, the highest form of all life, has been subjected to it. I'd give anything for the chance!" He sighed explosively. "But of course that's impossible. I could never get anyone to be a subject. And I can't have it tried on myself because I'm the only one able to handle my apparatus in the event that anything goes wrong." "But--would you try it on a human being if you had a chance?" persisted Denny. "Hah!" "And could you reduce a human being in stature as radically as you did the dog? For example, could you make a man ... ant-size?" Matt nodded vigorously, eyes fairly flaming. "I could make him even smaller." Dennis stared at Jim. His face was transfigured. He shook with nervous eagerness. And Jim gazed back at Dennis as breathlessly and as tensely. "Well?" said Dennis at last. Jim nodded slowly. "Yes," he said. "Of course." And in those few words two men were committed to what was perhaps the strangest, most deadly, and surely the most unique, adventure the world has yet known. The improbable had happened. A man who lived but for dangers and extraordinary action, and a man who would have gambled his soul for the scientist's ecstasy of at last learning all about a hidden study--both had seen suddenly open up to them a broad avenue leading to the very pinnacle of their dreams.