Weird. The grey metal walls of the room were glowing now with some
strange current which suffused them. The starlight from the window-lens
mingled with an opalescent sheen from the glowing walls. It was like an
aura, bathing the room--an aura which seemed to penetrate every smallest
cell-particle of Lee's body--stimulating it....
Size-change! Vaguely, Lee could fathom how it was accomplished; his mind
went back to many scientific articles he had read on the theory of
it--only theory, those imaginative scientific pedants had considered it;
and now it was a reality upon him! He recalled the learned phrases the
writers had used.... The _state of matter_. In all the Universe, the
inherent factors which govern the state of matter yield most readily to
a change. An electronic charge--a current perhaps akin to, but certainly
not identical with electricity, would change the state of all organic
and inorganic substances ... a rapid duplication of the fundamental
entities within the electrons--and electrons themselves, so
unsubstantial--mere whirlpools of nothingness!
A rapid duplication of the fundamental whirlpools--that would add size.
The complete substance--with shape unaltered--would grow larger.
All just theory, but here, now, it was brought to an accomplished fact.
Within himself, Lee could feel it. But as yet, he could not see it. The
glowing room and everything in it was so weirdly luminous, there was no
alteration in shape. These objects, the figure of Vivian beside him, and
the pallid frightened Franklin, relative to each other they were no
different from before. And the vast panorama of starry Universe beyond
the lens-window, the immense distances out there, made any size-change
as yet unperceivable.
* * * * *
But the size-change had begun, there was no question of it. With his
senses steadying, Lee crossed the room. A weird feeling of lightness was
upon him; he swayed as he stood before the little line of dials in the
wall-recess. Five hundred thousand miles from Earth. More than twice the
distance of the Moon. The globe had gone that far with accelerating
velocity so that now the pointers marked a hundred thousand miles an
hour--out beyond the Moon, heading for the orbit-line of Mars. Now the
size-change pointers were stirring. Unit One, the size this globe had
been as it rested on Earth, fifty feet in height, and some thirty feet
at its mid-section bulge. Already that unit was two, a globe--which, if
it were on Earth, would be a hundred feet high. And Lee himself? He
would be a giant more than twelve feet tall now.... He stood staring at
the dials for a moment or two. That little pointer of the first of the
size-change dials was creeping around. An acceleration! Another moment
and it had touched Unit four. A two hundred foot globe. And Lee, if he
had been on Earth, would already be a towering human nearly twenty-five
feet in height!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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