Astounding Stories, August, 1931 Part 24

In that tense second a flash of intuition, of deadly fear, came to Garth Howard, and he leaped wildly forward. But his rear foot did not leave the floor of the chamber, and his shout of alarm was choked midway. Again the fierce ray paralyzed every muscle in him, and he was locked motionless where he was.

Helplessly, his glazed eyes stared at Hagendorff, while every moment his rigid little body melted downwards. He was becoming rapidly smaller, not larger!

Through the agony of the stabbing electrical waves, in vain Garth tried to wrench his legs free. The few inches that separated him from the door were an impa.s.sable barrier. Sheer panic clutched him. He was trapped. But why? Why had Hagendorff tricked him?

As if reading the question, the giant outside came close to the chamber's door and regarded his captive with eyes that were lit by a peculiar flame. He grunted, then reached backward and returned the switchboard lever almost to the neutral point, reducing the speed of the decreasing process.

"Yes, that is better," the German gloated, in a deep, satisfied tone.

"It will be slower, now. Slower--and more interesting to watch!... I fancy your eyes are reproachful, my friend. Why have I done it, you wonder? _Ach!_ This machine, it will startle the world of science; it will make its inventor famous--not? Yes; and did you think I was going to stand by and see all the credit go to you? No! To me it shall go--me alone! And you--" He chuckled and rubbed his hands before going on.

"You shall be what the newspapers call a martyr to science. You shall sink to a foot, to six inches--to one inch--even less, I think!

Eventually the reduction will kill you, of course; and your body shall be proof of how you died--in an experiment--and shall also prove the machine's power and my genius!"

He laughed thunderously, a blond and malevolent t.i.tan. He did not notice that, with the lessening of the reduction's speed, a slight trace of control over his muscles had returned to the midget inside.

His tiny body was slowly diminishing, and complete, hopeless paralysis and death was not far away. But Garth was fighting every second, fighting desperately with the trace of strength he possessed to slide to the door, break the contact and get out from under the ray's remorseless influence. Almost imperceptibly, the effort lacerating him with pain, he slid his feet forward. Hagendorff talked on. He seemed to be blinded by the vision of the fame his treachery would bring him.

"We shall have an experiment, my Professor; and then you will have an interesting death! The ray will suck you down; you will crumple and crumple till you're not much bigger than my thumbnail! And then I shall--_ah!_"

Garth had torn loose. Calling on every ounce of strength and will, the midget, now no more than one foot high, had reached the edge of the floor plate and pitched out onto the long laboratory table.

Giant and dwarf faced each other. For a moment neither spoke or moved.

A breathless tensity hung over the laboratory. The machine droned on, forgotten. From outside, startlingly near, came the eery hoot of an owl.

A tight smile broke through the angry surprise on Hagendorff's face.

"Well, well!" he said, with gargantuan, macabre humor. "We object! It was foolish, eh, to reduce the power? Next time, it shall not be so.

We--_object!_"

With the word, he lunged, and his bulky arms lashed down in a wide, grasping sweep.

But Garth's taut muscles, retaining all the strength and vigor of their normal size had been awaiting just such a move, and his tiny body described the arc of a tremendous leap that neatly vaulted one huge arm and started him sprinting swiftly down the table.

At the end he wheeled, and before the other overcame his surprise at such a nimble retreat, burst out indignantly:

"For G.o.d's sake, Hagendorff, what's come over you? Be sensible! You can't do this; you can't really mean it! Why--"

"So!" roared the a.s.sistant, and his rush cut short the midget's shrill, frantic words. But his grasp this time was better judged; Garth felt the great fingers slip over his body. Remembering his strength, he lashed out at one with all his might. Hagendorff grunted with pain; but instead of continuing the attack, he suddenly turned and strode to the door leading into the other room, and closed it with a bang.

"You cannot escape," he growled, advancing again; "you merely delay."

Panting, Garth glanced around the room. He was, in truth, trapped.

There was but the one door; and even if he could reach it, he could not get it open, for the handle would be far above him. The room was a sealed arena. For a little while it would go on--a wild leaping and dodging on the table, a hopeless evading of mammoth hands ... and then, inevitably, would come a crushing grip on his body, followed by experimentation and the agony of death in the black chamber.

Fearful, he waited, a perfect, living statuette, twelve inches high....

A grunt preluded the giant's vicious charge. The American staggered from the brush of a sweeping hand; then, twisting mightily, he dove under it, like a mouse slipping under the paw of a cat. In doing so he fell sprawling; and though he was up in a moment, his arm was held. A hoa.r.s.e, exultant rumble came to his ears.

"Caught, my friend!"

But Hagendorff spoke too soon. With a great wrench, Garth broke free, and made a tigerish dash back along the table toward the window. And even as the clumsy t.i.tan jumped to the side and grabbed again at him, he hurled his tiny, heavy body against the pane, and went plunging through a shower of gla.s.s into the cool dark night outside.

He fell five feet, and the wind was jarred out of him as he crashed through the branches of a bush under the window into the sodden earth beneath. Unhurt, save for a few lacerations from the gla.s.s, he staggered to his feet, gasping for his breath, and started to run across the clearing towards the fringe of dense forest growth that ringed the cabin.

Then he heard thunderous footsteps and, a second later, the sound of the front door being pulled open. Garth turned in his tracks, and stumbled back beneath the cabin, thanking heaven that it was raised on short stilts. But the ruse did not give him much of a start, and by the time he had painfully threaded his way between the piles of timber left underneath the cabin, Hagendorff had discovered the trick and was scouting back.

Then, with the strength of the hunted, Garth was out from under the other side and sprinting for the doubtful sanctuary of the forest.

His tiny feet, carrying the weight of a normal-sized man, sank ankle high into the muddy ground, several times almost tripping him. Even as he got to where a trail through the bush began, and pa.s.sed from the cold starlight into s.p.a.ces black with cl.u.s.tered shadows, he heard a bellow from behind, and, glancing back, saw a monstrous shape come leaping on his tracks.

He had only seconds in which to find refuge; he could not stick to the trail. Thick bush, dank and heavy from recent rains, was on either side, fugitive streaks of pale light from above painting it eerily.

Garth plunged into the matted growth, dropped to hands and knees and wormed forward away from the trail. Earth-jarring footbeats sounded close. With frantic haste he wrenched though the scratching tendrils and came to a miniature clearing.

He saw the tilted shape of a rotted tree-stump, its roots half washed away and exposing a narrow crevice between them. Gasping, the nude, foot-high figure tumbled down into it, and lay there, trying to hush his labored breathing.

He was a mere twenty feet from the trail; and though to him the bush was a jungle, to his pursuer it was only chest-high. A towering shadow moved along the trail. The thud of heavy footbeats came more slowly to the listening midget. Hagendorff was searching, puzzled by the vague shadows, for where Garth had left the path.

Silence fell.

Garth's heart was pounding like a trip-hammer. He held himself alert, ready, if need be, to struggle up from the moist crevice and dart on further into the bush. He could not see the giant, but could picture his huge, sullen face all too clearly. Still no sound came. Risking all, he gripped a root and hauled himself up slightly. Then he peered around the stump.

Hagendorff was standing in the thick of the bush. He was not ten feet away, striving in the gloom to discern the other's tell-tale tracks.

Garth drew his head back, hardly daring to breathe. Shivering, his naked body miserably cold, he waited, pressed down in the soggy earth.

His betraying tracks were there; the shadows alone befriended him.

The silence was drawn so fine that the faint cheep of a night-bird sounded startlingly loud. But then came thunder that sent the bird winging away in fright, and the night and the forest echoed with the roar of a wrathful, impatient human voice.

"You hear me, wherever you are! And hear this: I leave you now, but in ten minutes I have you! You little fool--you think you can get free?

It is only by minutes you delay me!"

Snarling a curse, the treacherous giant turned and crashed through the bush and took his huge form striding back towards the cabin.

Garth was thinking of many things as he scrambled back wearily from his refuge to the trail. He was cursing the unwanted publicity which prying reporters had given his work in Detroit, and which had led him to lease the lonely island and build a laboratory in the wilderness.

Had it not been for that publicity, he would never have needed an a.s.sistant, and the vision of fame would never have come to delude Hagendorff and turn his thoughts towards murder.

His position seemed a horrible delirium from which he must presently awake. Naked, dwarfed by each ordinary forest weed, unarmed, and trembling from the wind-sharpened night, he hardly knew which way to turn. His body was blotched with blood and mud, and under it the ragged gashes made by gla.s.s and bush stung painfully; he was hungry and stiff and tired and miserable. He remembered Hagendorff's threat of capturing him in ten minutes, and forced a smile to his face.

"Looks kind of bad," he muttered, using his voice in an attempt to dispel some of the lonely grip of the night, "but we'll keep moving, anyway! He's coming back soon. Let's see: I'd better make for the stream. It'll be hard for him to follow my tracks through that. And then...."

Then--what? The island was small. He realized he could not stand many hours of exposure. Inevitably--But he turned his mind from the future and its seeming hopelessness, and concentrated on the immediate need, which was to hide himself. Forcing the pace, he struck off on a shambling trot down the dim trail, on into the deepening, sinister shadows towards the island's lone stream.