The Princess of the Atom by Ray Cummings

Amazing voyage into smallness! I find an adequate picture of it difficult to paint. It was, as Drake had said, a voyage shorter in time than I had been led to expect. Fifteen or twenty hours of elapsed time, perhaps. We tried to preserve a normality of routine. We ate several meals, and I tried to sleep. For the remainder of the time we sat in that small room, by the window; and I gazed at a panorama so singularly awe-inspiring that I am at a loss now to describe it.

For some time the ship did not seem to move. We sat talking. There was obviously no movement. The room was steady, save for a humming vibration. But outside the window things were changing. The forest trees were sliding upward. Expanding, and drawing away. We were dwindling faster than an intensity of the drug. Then I felt the ship lift slightly. We hung poised in a rocky void.

I conjured all manner of wild, gruesome thoughts. Nor were they all picturing danger to myself or to Dianne's world. Nor even the threatened conquest of earth. There was a danger that seemed to me now greater than any of these. Togaro desired Dianne!

I sat close by Dianne. I tried to tell myself that there was nothing to fear. Togaro would not dare get large, here on our ship. For if he did, at once we would seize him.

We discussed it. The thing seemed incredible, that he was here so close to us and we could not find him. Incredible, but true.

We stood at the window, Dianne, Drake, and I. But Alt and Ahlma would not relax their watching of the room. The ship had been dwindling now for more than an hour. The forest was gone.

I saw a dark void, in which seemingly we were hanging in mid-air. At first I thought it was wholly dark. But as I stared, with my eyes -- or perhaps merely my mind -- becoming accustomed to this pregnant darkness, I found that there were things to see.

We hung motionless in the void. But presently rock walls were visible; how far away I could not guess. Great mountains of rock, expanding, sliding upward, and drawing away, though they did not vanish. It seemed that my vision must be sharpening, or that the light was increasing. It was a queer sort of light -- an iridescence, vaguely diffused throughout everything.

For a long while this went on. The visual sensation was that we were falling like a swiftly dropping elevator car. But it was not so. The rock walls were sliding upward, but it was largely an optical illusion.

A meal was served us. The ship was reaching a greater intensity of its shrinking size, dwindling more rapidly.

I could hear the current rising to a higher, sharper and louder whine.

Drake said, "That's a hundred times faster for us now."

Another few hours. The scene outside was undergoing a progressive change. The distant rocks constantly had a different aspect. I could not fathom it -- could not define it. A suggestion of roundness. I stared at the far-away wall. It seemed as though great round things were piled in loose masses. A wall of bowlders loosely piled.

Once, I fancied that they were in movement -- creeping, crawling, one upon the other. And that all the wall was unsolid. A thing of slow, ponderous movement.

I became suddenly aware that once more my viewpoint had abruptly changed. I had envisaged us as a tiny ship, hanging in a great dark void, with dark round things at some inconceivable distance. And then I saw it was not so. We were a tremendous ship! These round objects were tiny particles. Close at hand. Dark, yet glowing. Moving, sliding one upon the other with a suggestion of fluidity. Nor were they just here in this one direction. With my face against the window I could see them overhead. And below. And across the near-by corridor of the ship, a window there showed them the same on that side.

From everywhere they crowded us. Abruptly it seemed that we were not in a void, but in a narrow, confined area with these particles jostling us. They were all of a size -- all of a similar aspect. Tiny things, with space between them. Flowing like a fluid as we pushed our way among them.

Drake said, "They are molecules, Frank. The molecules of the rock fragment. We'll soon enter one -- and then enter our atom."

I did not answer him. My thoughts went winging off. Millions of molecules here. Millions? Countless myriads. They shifted and crawled; jostled; swept past, and away. Then there seemed a darkness as of an empty void. But always I saw them again.

The scene was always changing. Open space now, with banks like clouds of the clustering molecules in the distance. I fixed my attention upon one such cloud. It was coming rapidly nearer -- or perhaps we were speeding toward it. A luminous cloud. It came up and went past. The molecules were huge and few. I thought perhaps in that group there were not more than thirty.

Clouds speeding, with dark voids between. Why, this was space! Gigantic space here.