Page:Stirring Science Stories, March 1942.djvu/15



OLF Cameron lapped four grimy slim fingers thoughtfully across his stubbly chin. His thumb gently massaged the slightly outsize member roofing his upper lip. Absent-mindedly he brushed back the lock of unruly dark hair that curtained his slitted right eye.

"No reason," he muttered, "why it shouldn't work. Same hook-up, same series exactly.

"Sent two pencils and a mouse through the thing an hour ago. Must be a bug somewhere in it"

His eyes probed deep into the snarled vitals of two unlovely jumbles of tubes, condensers, metal plates, and dull bluish plastic. Ten feet of emptiness separated the twin transparent domes that were the heart of the weird machines.

On the dull bluish base of one of the domes—the mattercast—a long yellow pencil, one end sprouting a bulging red rubber eraser, lay unchanged. The other receiving dome was empty.

The stubborn problem confronting Rolf was that of transmitting, via a radio beam, the basic atoms of matter and reforming them into their original unharmed state.

The modern newsheet transmitter that snaps your freshly printed copy of the from your receiver slot daily is essentially the same invention as that conceived by Rolf Cameron back there in the Twentieth Century However the transmission of matter has nothing to do with this story, so

"She's okay," Rolf scowled, shrugging his shoulders. "Maybe a little more juice will do the business."

As he spoke he drove home the knife-switches that cut in the power and gingerly adjusted the control knobs. Slowly the power built up until a muted hum of steady power beat out from the banks of tubes.

But the pencil lay unchanged and yellow beneath a weird flaming bath of greenish light.

Rolf stepped forward toward the other machine—the receiver—and for the moment was squarely in the path of the transmission beam. His fists were clenched and his deep-set gray eyes blazed angrily as he leaned over the impotent machine.

Then it happened!

A sudden blast of flame ripped through the soldered patchwork of the mattercast as a circuit shorted; a mighty surge of unleashed force sucked him into its vortex, and then blackness, inexorable chill emptiness, swallowed his senses.

ELVETY greensward was beneath Rolf's prone body when he groaned and rolled over, centuries later it seemed. Three inches from his left eye there glistened the bright golden cap that gripped the big red eraser and the painted yellow wood of a pencil equally. And scattered about were other scraps of shattered epuipment.

Unsteadily he climbed to his feet, eyes shuttering rapidly as they took in the unfamiliar outlines of his surroundings. He shook his heavy, dully throbbing head. His jaw dropped and he thoughtfully tugged at his ear as he saw the village sprawling beyond the low hedge.

The houses were doll houses, less than four feet in height despite the steepness of their thatched roofs. Unpainted, roughly constructed shacks they were and the crooked paths that wound between them were powdery rills of dust. So near was he to the little town—a hundred yards or less—that he could see its inhabitants, manlike in every respect save size, moving busily about their works.

A foot tall were most of them. They wore a single, loose-fitting coverall garment of drab brown or a discouraged yellow, and a silly little black helmet balanced precariously atop each miniature skull. Nowhere did the young creatures play together—instead they somberly weeded the geometrical rows of growing things beside their elders. For all the world like a colony of ants thought Rolf.

Rolf's startled eyes quested along the horizon—the familiar rugged outline of the distant hills was there, unchanged. But something was wrong with his immediate surroundings. A crazy six inch wall of stone wandered in a drunken circle about the barren patch of earth that outlined with green the shape of his extended body. And groves of fruit and shade-trees—stunted five foot growths that should have arched high overhead—surrounded him.

He was a giant in this strange, yet familiar, environment.

Then he saw a little creature, one of the manlike insect things, regarding him timidly from the concealing shade of a Lilliputian