"From the window there--what you can see will be very wonderful," the
man said again. "He would want you to study it. Please do that."
The doorslide closed....
What you can see from the window will be very wonderful. No one, during
the days that followed could adequately describe what Lee Anthony and
Thomas Franklin and Vivian saw through that lens-window. A vast panorama
in monochrome ... a soundless drama of the stars, so immense, so awesome
that the human mind could grasp only an infinitesimal fragment of its
wonders....
They found the little door which led into another apartment. There were
tables and chairs of earth-style, quaintly old-fashioned. Food and drink
were shoved through the doorslide; the necessities of life and a fair
comfort of living were provided. But their questions, even as the time
passed and lengthened into what on Earth might have been a week or more,
remained unanswered. There was only that gentle but firm negation:
"We have decided that he would want us to say nothing. We do not know
about this girl and this smaller man. We brought them so that they could
not remain on Earth to talk of having seen us. We are sorry about that.
He probably won't like it."
"He? Who the devil are you talking about?" Franklin demanded. "See here,
if I had you fellows back on Earth now I'd slam you into jail. Damned
brigands. You can't do this to me! My--my father's one of the most
important men in New York--"
But now the doorslide quietly closed.
A week? It could have been that, or more. In a wall recess of the room
Lee found a line of tiny dials with moving pointers. Miles--thousands of
miles. A million; ten millions; a hundred million. A light-year; tens,
thousands. And, for the size-change, a normal diameter, Unit 1--and then
up into thousands.
For hours at a time, silent, awed beyond what he had ever conceived the
emotion of awe could mean, he sat at the lens-window, staring out and
trying to understand.
* * * * *
The globe-ship was some five-hundred thousand miles out from Earth when
the size-change of the weird little vehicle began. It came to Lee with a
sudden shock to his senses, his head reeling, and a tingling within him
as though every fibre of his being were suddenly stimulated into a new
activity.
"Well, my Gawd," Vivian gasped. "What're they doin' to us now?"
The three of them had been warned by a voice through the doorslide, so
that they sat together on one of the couches, waiting for what would
happen.
"This--I wish they wouldn't do it," Franklin muttered. "Damn them--I
want to get out of here."
Fear seemed to be Franklin's chief emotion now--fear and a petty sense
of personal outrage that all this could be done to him against his will.
Often, when Lee and the girl were at the window, Franklin had sat
brooding, staring at his feet.
"Easy," Lee said. "It evidently won't hurt us. We're started in
size-change. The globe, and everything in it, is getting larger."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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