I recall that I was at that moment
fumbling at my belt in two small compartments in which I was carrying
the two vials of the drugs which Glora had given me. Alan wore the same
sort of belt. We had found them in the wrecked dome-room. I heard a
click on the ground at my feet. I was about to stoop to see what I had
kicked--only a loose stone, perhaps--but Glora's words distracted me. I
did not stoop. If only I had, how different events might have been!

The glow of light ahead of us widened as we approached, and presently we
stood at the end of the tunnel. A spread of open distance was outside.
We were on a ledge of a steep rocky wall some fifty feet above a wide
level landscape. Vegetation! I saw trees--a forest off to the left. A
range of naked hills lay behind it. A mile away, in front and to the
right, a little town nestled on the shore of shining water. There was
starlight on the water! And over it a vast blue-purple sky was studded
with stars.

I gazed, with that first sudden shock of emotion, into the infinite
depths of interplanetary space! Light years of distance. Gigantic
worlds, blazing suns off there shrunken by distance now to little points
of light. A universe was here!

But this was an inch of golden quartz!

Above my head were stars which, compared to my bodily size now, were
vast worlds ten thousand light-years away! Yet, from the other
viewpoint, I had only descended perhaps an eighth, or a quarter of an
inch, beneath the broken pitted surface of a little fragment of golden
quartz the size of a walnut--into just one of its myriads of golden
atoms!

CHAPTER VI

"My world," Glora was saying. "You like it? See the starlight on the
lake? I have heard that your world looks like this at night, in summer.
Ours is always like this. No day, no night. Just like this--starlight."
Her hand went to Alan's shoulder. "You like it? My world?"

"Yes, Glora. It's very beautiful."

There was a sheen on everything, a soft, glowing sheen of
phosphorescence from the rocks rising to meet the pale wan starlight.
The night air was soft, with a gentle breeze that rippled the distant
lake into a great spread of gold and silver light.

The city was called Orena. I saw at once that we were about normal size
in relation to its houses and people. There were fields beneath our
ledge, with farm implements lying in them; no workers, for this was the
time for sleep. Ribbons of roads wound over the country, pale stream