The Girl in the Golden Atom | Page 5

Man impulsively.
"And you shall." He settled himself more comfortably in his chair.
"Gentlemen, I am going to tell you, first, as simply as possible, just
what I have done in the past two years. You must draw your own

conclusions from the evidence I give you.
"You will remember that I told you last week of my dilemma after the
destruction of the microscope. Its loss and the impossibility of
replacing it, led me into still bolder plans than merely the visual
examination of this minute world. I reasoned, as I have told you, that
because of its physical proximity, its similar environment, so to speak,
this outer world should be capable of supporting life identical with our
own.
"By no process of reasoning can I find adequate refutation of this
theory. Then, again, I had the evidence of my own eyes to prove that a
being I could not tell from one of my own kind was living there. That
this girl, other than in size, differs radically from those of our race, I
cannot believe.
"I saw then but one obstacle standing between me and this other
world--the discrepancy of size. The distance separating our world from
this other is infinitely great or infinitely small, according to the
viewpoint. In my present size it is only a few feet from here to the ring
on that plate. But to an inhabitant of that other world, we are as remote
as the faintest stars of the heavens, diminished a thousand times."
He paused a moment, signing the waiter to leave the room.
"This reduction of bodily size, great as it is, involves no deeper
principle than does a light contraction of tissue, except that it must be
carried further. The problem, then, was to find a chemical, sufficiently
unharmful to life, that would so act upon the body cells as to cause a
reduction in bulk, without changing their shape. I had to secure a
uniform and also a proportionate rate of contraction of each cell, in
order not to have the body shape altered.
"After a comparatively small amount of research work, I encountered
an apparently insurmountable obstacle. As you know, gentlemen, our
living human bodies are held together by the power of the central
intelligence we call the mind. Every instant during your lifetime your
subconscious mind is commanding and directing the individual life of

each cell that makes up your body. At death this power is withdrawn;
each cell is thrown under its own individual command, and dissolution
of the body takes place.
"I found, therefore, that I could not act upon the cells separately, so
long as they were under control of the mind. On the other hand, I could
not withdraw this power of the subconscious mind without causing
death.
"I progressed no further than this for several months. Then came the
solution. I reasoned that after death the body does not immediately
disintegrate; far more time elapses than I expected to need for the
cell-contraction. I devoted my time, then to finding a chemical that
would temporarily withhold, during the period of cell-contraction, the
power of the subconscious mind, just as the power of the conscious
mind is withheld by hypnotism.
"I am not going to weary you by trying to lead you through the maze of
chemical experiments into which I plunged. Only one of you," he
indicated the Doctor, "has the technical basis of knowledge to follow
me. No one had been before me along the path I traversed. I pursued
the method of pure theoretical deduction, drawing my conclusions from
the practical results obtained.
"I worked on rabbits almost exclusively. After a few weeks I succeeded
in completely suspending animation in one of them for several hours.
There was no life apparently existing during that period. It was not a
trance or coma, but the complete simulation of death. No harmful
results followed the revivifying of the animal. The contraction of the
cells was far more difficult to accomplish; I finished my last
experiment less than six months ago."
"Then you really have been able to make an animal infinitely small?"
asked the Big Business Man.
The Chemist smiled. "I sent four rabbits into the unknown last week,"
he said.

"What did they look like going?" asked the Very Young Man. The
Chemist signed him to be patient.
"The quantity of diminution to be obtained bothered me considerably.
Exactly how small that other universe is, I had no means of knowing,
except by the computations I made of the magnifying power of my lens.
These figures, I know, must necessarily be very inaccurate. Then, again,
I have no means of judging by the visual rate of diminution of these
rabbits, whether this contraction is at a uniform rate or accelerated. Nor
can