forgot it in my
interest in examining this unusual personage.

The little man had dropped the cloth now, and was staring in my
direction. Of course, "my direction" was very general to him; but he
seemed to be conscious of me. He certainly impressed _me_ as being
awfully different, but what his reactions were, I didn't know.

But someone else knew.

* * * * *

In a world deep down in Smallness, in an electron of a dead cell of a
piece of wood, five scientists were grouped before a complicated
instrument with a horn like the early radios. Two sat and three stood,
but their attention upon the apparatus was unanimous. From small
hollowed cups worn on their fingers like rings, came a smoke from
burning incense. These cups they held to their noses frequently, and
their eyes shone as they inhaled. The scientists of infra-smallness were
smoking!

With the exception of a recent prolonged silence, which was causing them
great anxiety, sounds had been issuing from the instrument for days.
There had been breaks before, but this silence had been long-enduring.

Now the voice was speaking again; a voice that was a telepathic
communication made audible. The scientists brightened.

"There is much that I cannot understand," it said. The words were
hesitant, filled with awe. "I seem to have been in many worlds. At the
completion of my experiment, I stood on a land which was brown and black
and very rough of surface. With startling suddenness, I was propelled
across this harsh country, and, terrifyingly, I was falling. I must have
dropped seventy-five feet, but the strange buoyant atmosphere of this
strange world saved me from harm.

"My new surroundings were grey and gloomy, and the earth trembled as a
giant cloud passed over the sky. I do not know what it meant, but with
the suddenness characteristic of this place, it became very dark, and an
inexplicable violence shook me into insensibility.

"I am conscious, now, of some giant form before me, but it is so
colossal that my eyes cannot focus it. And it changes. Now I seem
confronted by great orange mountains with curving ledges cut into their
sides. Atop them are great, greyish slabs of protecting opaque rock--a
covering like that above our Temples of Aerat--'on which the rain may
never fall.' I wish that you might communicate with me, good men of my
world. How go the Gods?

"But now! These mountains are lifting, vanishing from my sight. A grea