e quietly closed.

A week? It could have been that, or more. In a wall recess of the room
Lee found a line of tiny dials with moving pointers. Miles--thousands of
miles. A million; ten millions; a hundred million. A light-year; tens,
thousands. And, for the size-change, a normal diameter, Unit 1--and then
up into thousands.

For hours at a time, silent, awed beyond what he had ever conceived the
emotion of awe could mean, he sat at the lens-window, staring out and
trying to understand.

* * * * *

The globe-ship was some five-hundred thousand miles out from Earth when
the size-change of the weird little vehicle began. It came to Lee with a
sudden shock to his senses, his head reeling, and a tingling within him
as though every fibre of his being were suddenly stimulated into a new
activity.

"Well, my Gawd," Vivian gasped. "What're they doin' to us now?"

The three of them had been warned by a voice through the doorslide, so
that they sat together on one of the couches, waiting for what would
happen.

"This--I wish they wouldn't do it," Franklin muttered. "Damn them--I
want to get out of here."

Fear seemed to be Franklin's chief emotion now--fear and a petty sense
of personal outrage that all this could be done to him against his will.
Often, when Lee and the girl were at the window, Franklin had sat
brooding, staring at his feet.

"Easy," Lee said. "It evidently won't hurt us. We're started in
size-change. The globe, and everything in it, is getting larger."

Weird. The grey metal walls of the room were glowing now with some
strange current which suffused them. The starlight from the window-lens
mingled with an opalescent sheen from the glowing walls. It was like an
aura, bathing the room--an aura which seemed to penetrate every smallest
cell-particle of Lee's body--stimulating it....

Size-change! Vaguely, Lee could fathom how it was accomplished; his mind
went back to many scientific articles he had read on the theory of
it--only theory, those imaginative scientific pedants had considered it;
and now it was a reality upon him! He recalled the learned phrases the
writers had used.... The _state of matter_. In all the Universe, the
inherent factors which govern the state of matter yield most readily to
a change. An electronic charge--a current perhaps akin to, but certainly
not identical with electricity, would change the state of all organic
and inorganic substances ... a r