s
eyes upon the brilliant half-moon of the Pygmy Planet.

The strangest flight in the annals of aviation! He was flying toward
a goal that, a few minutes before, he could have touched. Toward a
goal that, at the beginning of his flight, was only a few lengths of
his plane away. And his size dwindled so rapidly as he flew that the
planet seemed to swell and draw away from him.

As Larry and the plane grew smaller, the relative size of the violet
ray increased, so there was no longer much danger of flying out of it.
It seemed that he flew through a world of violet flame.

He met a curious problem in time. It is evident that time passes
faster for a small animal than for a large one, because nerve currents
require a shorter time in transit, and all thought and action is
consequently speeded up. It took a hundred-foot dinosaur nearly a
second to know that his tail had been pinched. A fly can get under way
in time to escape a descending swatter. The Pygmy Planet rotated in a
few seconds of earth time; one of its inhabitants might have lived,
aged, and died in the duration of a single day in our larger world.

* * * * *

So Larry found that time seemed to pass more rapidly, or rather that
the time of the world he had left appeared to move more slowly, as he
adventured into smallness. He had been flying, it seemed to him,
nearly an hour when he reached the level of the planet's equator.

Now it seemed a vast world, filling half the visible universe. He flew
toward it steadily, until he knew, by the fading before him of the
violet flame which now seemed to fill all space, that he was near the
edge of the ray. And as he flew, he watched the little scale, upon
which the black needle was now nearing the line marked, "Pygmy Planet
Normal."

Circling slowly, keeping always on the level of the planet's equator,
and near the edge of the violet ray, so as to be as close as possible
to his landing place when he reached the proper size, he watched the
creeping black needle.

Too, he scanned with eager eyes the planet floating before him. Bare,
red deserts; narrow strips of green vegetation; shrunken, blue oceans;
silvery lines of rivers, passed in fascinating panorama beneath his
eyes. The rate of the planet's spinning seemed continually to lessen,
with the changing of his own sense of time.

Agnes! Larry thought of her with a curious, eager pain in his heart.
She was somewhere on that strange, a