lylike substance in the top of the bell,"
he said, "what is it?"

"Oh, that." The miracle worker didn't lift his eyes from the tumbler and
the very much alive and protesting bit of life it housed. "That's the
dog. Rather, it's practically all of the dog save for this small residue
of substance that clothes the vital life-spark."

* * * * *

Jim dabbed at his forehead and found it moist with sweat. "But how is it
done?" he said shakily.

"With element eighty-five, as I told you," said Breen, most of whose
attention was occupied by a new stunt he was trying: he had cut a
microscopic sliver of meat off a gnawed bone, and was sliding it under
the glass. Would the dog eat? Could it...?

It could, and would! With a mighty bound, that covered all of a quarter
of an inch, the tiny thing leaped on the meat and began to gnaw
wolfishly at it. The effect was doubly shocking--to see this perfect
little creature acting like any regular, full-sized dog, although as
tiny as a woman's beauty spot!

"Marvelous stuff, eighty-five," Matt went on. "Any living thing, exposed
to the lead-filtered emanations it gives off when disintegrated
electrically to precisely the right degree, is reduced indefinitely in
size. I could have made that dog as small as a microbe, even sub-visible
perhaps, if I chose. Curious.... Maybe the presence of eighty-five in
minute quantities on earth is all that has kept every living thing from
growing indefinitely, expanding gigantically right off the face of the
globe...."

* * * * *

But now Dennis was hardly listening to him. A notion so fantastic, so
bizarre that he could not at once grasp it fully, had just struck him.

"Listen," he said at last, his voice so hoarse as to be almost
unrecognizable, "listen--can you reverse that process?"

Matt nodded, and pointed to the viscous deposit in the dome of the bell.
"The protoplasmic substance is still there. It can be rebuilt, remolded
to its original form any time I put the dog back in the bell and let the
particles of eighty-five, which are suspended in the vacuum tubes,
settle back into their original, inert mass. You see, there is such a
close affinity--"

Dennis cut him short almost rudely. It wasn't causes, marvelous though
they might be, that he was interested in; it was results.

"Would you dare ... that is ... would you like to try that experiment on
a human being?"

*