Chapter IV

He paused briefly, then went on: "Our first sensation was one of shock--a reeling of the senses. But it was not severe--it passed almost at once. We found ourselves clinging there to the instrument table. To me the room seemed swaying dizzily. My forehead was damp with cold moisture; a nausea possessed me. I was oppressed; the air of the room was heavy to breathe."

"The air was snapping with the current," said Martt. "I could see it, and feel it tingling against my face. And it was heavy to breathe, as Brett says."

Brett resumed: "But we felt better after a moment. I saw the change first on the dials. The pointer of the lowest unit dial of the size series was slowly but visibly moving. I watched as it crept from 1 to 2. We had doubled in size. I gazed about the room. It was unchanged; and now as my body rapidly adjusted itself to the new conditions, I began to feel almost normal. Except a queer whirring in my head, and the nausea which persisted for perhaps an hour, I felt no evidence of the growth. The room, the vehicle was untrembling. No slightest evidence within the vehicle of the size-change going on--except the creeping pointer of the lowest dial. It was moving faster; it had reached 10. The pointer of the dial beside it--registering in units of a hundred--now seemed stirring."

Brett gazed at us earnestly. "I want to make myself absolutely clear. We were then--I suppose a minute or so had elapsed--we were ten times our original size----"

"Much faster than the vehicle grew in the garden," I exclaimed.

"Yes. I had chanced the possibility of severe shock and thrown the lever at once to a quarter strength. Martt and Frannie, in the garden, had put it on only to the one-hundredth part of its power. At all intensities, the growth, you understand, constantly accelerates. At unit 10, which we reached in possibly the first minute, we were ten times our starting size--that is, for earth measurements, our vehicle from base to tower-top was then one-tenth of a mile. But soon the pointer had passed 50. And then 100--and the pointer of the hundred-unit dial had crept to 1.

"With recovered normality of senses we had gone to the windows. I want you to visualize first what always before we had seen. An inky black void everywhere surrounding us, in the center of which seemingly we hung motionless. The brilliant firmament of stars, freed from the distortion of earth's atmosphere; glittering, blazing like great diamonds. Pure white, blue-white, or tinged with yellow and red. The whole extent of the heavens swarming with them. The huge, spiral nebulous masses fleecy white, with tiny points of blazing white fire in them. And behind them all that distant ring of seeming star-dust--immeasurably distant yet glowing like a silver veil, which in the ancient books they called the 'Milky Way.'

"Near at hand, above us were the tiny planets of our Solar System. The sun, only a pale white disk from out here near Saturn; the earth--a star very faint; red Mars, a tiny reddish dot. But Jupiter was brilliant; and Saturn from our proximity was stupendously beautiful. The globe itself--a great silver disk, with the sunlight to make a narrow portion of it into a blazing crescent. The darkened areas of the globe, even on the shadowed portion, were plain almost as the bands of Jupiter. And Saturn's rings! Concentric rings--the inner one a trifle darker--opened up to a narrow angle--a glowing silver band like a broad hat-brim encircling the planet--a hat-brim over 37,000 miles broad.

"This we saw, with ourselves of unchanging size. But now we were growing. The change was at first apparent only in the aspect of Saturn--since it was closest to us. The planet seemed to become a little smaller--shrinking and creeping toward us. A contraction of its size--and as though the space between us were diminishing. Yet--as a seeming paradox--the visual diameter of the globe and the rings remained almost the same.

"It is difficult to describe. We seemed moving closer to Saturn, yet in no sense was there any apparent motion. The effect--the result--of seeming motion--not the motion itself. Martt presently went back to watch the dials. He called out to me when we had reached unit 1,000. A thousand times our original size--the vehicle now ten miles in earthly height. The change had now affected very slightly the entire firmament. Everywhere a seeming contraction--not so much in the aspect of the blazing star-points, but in the black void of Space itself. As though the void were smaller--contracted so that everything in it were of necessity a little nearer to us. But it was as yet barely noticeable. I might even have thought it a psychological co-action with the change in Saturn's aspect--a change unmistakable.

"Saturn, as we grew, had been seemingly smaller and coming visually nearer to us. Yet our velocity away from it was--in our original size--seven and one-half million miles an hour. Can I make you realize that the effect of _both_ motions was apparent? It was as though we were moving forward to lengthen a dwindling distance, with Saturn following after us simultaneously to shorten it.

"It was at the thousand unit point--ourselves then ten miles of earthly height--that I shut off the size-switch. Of visual diameter, Saturn had really not altered materially."

Brett stopped as though carefully to choose his words. "I'm striving to give you a clear picture. A distant object of great size may appear of the same diameter as something smaller and closer. But you can generally tell which is which. There is a difference of aspect--impossible to describe, but readily seen. Saturn was like that--the change in the planet was like a progressive change from the one condition to the other. It had appeared large and distant; it changed, to be smaller and closer. Just before I shut off the size-switch, when our rate of growth had become comparatively rapid, Saturn took on other motions--I'll tell you about them in a moment.

"Do I make myself clear? I want to. . . . With our growth checked, there was at once a striking, visual result. We seemed receding from Saturn so fast that its apparent diameter dwindled very rapidly--a normal dwindling of rapidly added distance. Presently it was a mere star--then a pin-point of light. Then it was vanished. Our other planets of the Solar System had preceded Saturn into invisibility. Then our sun itself became so faint a star that I lost it. We were beyond the Solar System--itself wholly lost to the naked eye among the great star-clusters enveloping it."