The MAN from the ATOM
by G. Peyton Wertenbaker
I AM a lost soul, and I am homesick. Yes, homesick. Yet how vain is homesickness when one is without a home! I can but be sick for a home that has gone. For my home departed millions of years ago, and there is now not even a trace of its former existence. Millions of years ago, I say, in all truth and earnestness. But I must tell the tale—though there is no man left to understand it.
I well remember that morning when my friend, Professor Mar- tyn, called me to him on a matter of the greatest importance. I may explain that the Professor was one of those mysterious out- casts, geniuses whom Science would not recognize because they scorned the pettiness of the men who represented Science. Mar- tyn was first of all a scientist, but almost as equally he was a man of intense imagination, and where the ordinary man crept along from detail to de- tail and required a complete model before being able to visualize the results of his work, Professor Martyn first grasped the great re- sults of his contempla- ted work, the vast, far- reaching effects, and then built with the end in view.
The Professor had few friends. Ordinary men avoided him be- cause they were unable t o understand the greatness of his vision. Where he plainly saw pictures of worlds and universes, they vainly groped among pictures of his words on printed pages. That was their impression of a word. A group of letters. His was of the picture it presented in his mind. I, however, though I had not the slightest claim to scientific knowledge, was romantic to a high degree, and always willing to carry out his strange experi- ments for the sake of the adventure and the strangeness of it all. And so the advantages were equal. I had a mysterious personage ready to furnish me with the unusual. He had a willing sub- ject to try out his inventions, for he reasoned quite naturally that should he himself perform the ex- periments, the world would be in danger of losing a mentality it might eventually have need of.
And so it was that I hurried to him without the slightest hesitation upon that, to me, momentous day of days in my life. I little realized the great change that soon would come over my existence, yet I knew that I was in for an adventure, certainly startling, possibly fatal. I had no delusions concerning my luck.
I found Professor Martyn in his laboratory bend- ing, with the eyes of a miser counting his gold, over a tiny machine that might easily have fitted in my pocket. He did not see me for a moment, but when he finally looked up with a sigh of regret that he must tear his eyes away from his new and wonderful brain-child, whatever it might be, he waved me a little unsteadily into a chair, and sank down in one himself, with the machine in his lap. I waited, placing myself in what I considered a receptive mood.
"Kirby," he began abruptly at last, "have you ever read your Alice in Wonderland?" I gasped, perhaps, in my surprise."Alice in—! are you joking, Professor?" "Certainly not," he assured me. "I speak in all seriousness."
"Why, yes, I have read it many times. In fact, it has always struck me as a book to appeal more to an adult than to a child. But what—I can't see just how that is important." He smiled.
"Perhaps I am playing with you unduly," he said, "but do you remember the episode of the two pieces of cheese, if my own recollection is correct, one of which made one grow, the other shrink?"
I assented. "But," I said incredulously, "certainly you cannot tell me you have spent your time in pre- paring magical cheeses?" He laughed aloud this time, and then, seeing my discomfort, unburdened himself of his latest triumph.
"No Kirby, not just that, but I have indeed con- structed a machine that you will be incapable of be- lieving until you try it. With this little object in my lap, you could grow forever, until there was nothing left in the universe to surpass. Or you could shrink so as to observe the minutest of atoms, standing upon it as you now stand upon the earth. It is an invention that will make scientific knowl- edge perfect!" He halted with flushed face and gleaming eyes. I could find nothing to say, for the thing was collossal, magnificent in its possi- bilities. If it worked. But I could not resist a suspi- cion of so tiny a machine.
"Professor, are you in absolute earnest?" I cried.
"Have I ever jested about so wonderful a thing?" he retorted quietly. I knew he had not. "But surely that is merely a model?"
"It is the machine itself!"