* * * *

Now for once the inventor's entire interest was seized by something
outside his immediate work. He stared open-mouthed at Dennis.

"Would I?" he breathed. "Would I like ..." He grunted. "Such a question!
No experiment is complete till man, the highest form of all life, has
been subjected to it. I'd give anything for the chance!" He sighed
explosively. "But of course that's impossible. I could never get anyone
to be a subject. And I can't have it tried on myself because I'm the
only one able to handle my apparatus in the event that anything goes
wrong."

"But--would you try it on a human being if you had a chance?" persisted
Denny.

"Hah!"

"And could you reduce a human being in stature as radically as you did
the dog? For example, could you make a man ... ant-size?"

Matt nodded vigorously, eyes fairly flaming. "I could make him even
smaller."

Dennis stared at Jim. His face was transfigured. He shook with nervous
eagerness. And Jim gazed back at Dennis as breathlessly and as tensely.

"Well?" said Dennis at last.

Jim nodded slowly.

"Yes," he said. "Of course."

And in those few words two men were committed to what was perhaps the
strangest, most deadly, and surely the most unique, adventure the world
has yet known. The improbable had happened. A man who lived but for
dangers and extraordinary action, and a man who would have gambled his
soul for the scientist's ecstasy of at last learning all about a hidden
study--both had seen suddenly open up to them a broad avenue leading to
the very pinnacle of their dreams.

CHAPTER III

_Ant-Sized Men_

Next morning, at scarcely more than daybreak, Jim and Denny stood,
stripped and ready for the dread experiment, beside Matthew Breen's
glass bell. The night, of course, had been sleepless. Sleep? How could
slumber combat the fierce anticipations, the exotic imaginings, the
clanging apprehensions of the two?

Most of the night had been spent by Denny in dutifully arguing with Jim
about the advisability of his giving up the adventure, in soothing his
conscience by presenting in all the angles he could think of the risks
they would run.

"You'll be entering a different world, Jim," Denny had said. "An
unimaginably different world. A terrible world, in which you'll be a
naked, soft, defenseless thing. I'd hate to bet that we'd live even to
reach the termitary. And once inside that--it's odds of seven to one
that we'll never