rst glance had been right. The dog was gone
from the bell. Utterly and completely vanished! Or so, at least, they
thought at the moment.

The rising and solidifying process of the vapor went on, while Dennis
and Jim stood, almost incapable of movement, and watched to see what
Breen was going to do next.

His next move came in about four minutes, when the crowding vapor had at
last completely come to rest at the top of the dome like a deposit of
opaque jelly. He stepped to the windlass that raised the bell, and
turned the handle.

Immediately the two watchers strode impulsively toward the exposed
pedestal floor.

"Wait a minute," commanded the scientist, his eyes sparkling with almost
ferocious intensity. The two stopped. "You might step on it," he added,
amazingly.

He caught up a common glass water tumbler, and cautiously moved to the
edge of the platform. "It may be dead, of course," he muttered. "But I
might as well be prepared."

Wonderingly, Jim and Dennis saw that he was intently searching every
square inch of the pedestal flooring. Then they saw him crawl, like a
stalking cat, toward a portion near the center--saw him clap the
tumbler, upside down, over some unseen thing....

"Got him!" came Matt's deep, fuzzy voice. "And he isn't dead, either.
Not by a long way! Now we'll get a magnifying glass and study him."

Feeling like figures in a dream, Jim and Dennis looked through the lens
with their absorbed host.

* * * * *

Capering about under the inverted tumbler, like a four-legged bug--and
not a very large bug, either--was an incredible thing. A thing with a
soft, furry coat such as no true insect possesses. A thing with tiny,
canine jaws, from which hung a panting speck of a tongue like no bug
ever had.

"Yes," rumbled Matt, "the specimen is far indeed from being dead. I
don't know how long it might exist in so microscopic a state, nor
whether it has been seriously deranged, body or brain, by the
diminishing process. But at least--it's alive."

"My God!" whispered Dennis. And, his first coherent sentence since the
physicist had thrown the switch: "So this--_this_--is the overgrown
brute you put under the bell a few minutes ago! This eighth-of-an-inch
thing that is a miniature cartoon of a dog!"

Jim could merely stare from the tumbler and the marvel it walled in, to
the man who had worked the miracle, and back to the tumbler again.

Denny sighed. "That thick, jel