as flowing down the declivity
outside....

I came back to Glora and Alan. Under my arm was a huge cylinder vial.
It was black--the enlarging drug. I set it down. They stared at me in
my blood-stained garments.

"George! You're--"

"His blood, not mine, Alan." I tried to smile. "There's the drug he
carried. Evidently Polter was only sending him out. Just the one
drug."

"What'll we do with it?" Alan demanded. "Look at the size of it!"

"Destroy it," said Glora. "See, that is not difficult." She tugged at
the huge stopper, and exposed a few of the pellets--to us as large as
apples. "The air will soon spoil it."

We left it in the tunnel. I had brought a great roll of paper; had
found it folded in the giant's belt, with the drug cylinder. We
unrolled it, and hauled its folds to a spread some ten feet long. It
was covered with a scrawled handwriting in pencil, but its giant
characters seemed thick blurred strokes of charcoal. We could not read
it; we were too close. Alan and Glora held it up against the tunnel
wall. From a distance I could make it out. It was a note written in
English, signed "Polter," evidently to one of his men.

I read it:

"The two men prisoners, kill them at once. That is better. It will be
too dangerous to wait for my return. Put their bodies with their
airplane. Crash it a mile or more from our gate."

Full directions for our death followed. And Polter said he would
return by dawn or soon after.

* * * * *

It gave me a start. By dawn! We had been traveling four or five hours.
The dawn was up there now!

"No," said Glora. She and Alan cast away the paper. "No, the time in
here is different. A different time-rate. I do not know how much
difference. My world speeds faster; yours is very slow. It is not the
dawn up there quite yet."

Again my mind strove to encompass these things so strange. A faster
time-rate prevailed in here? Then our lives were passing more quickly.
We were living, experiencing things, compressed into a shorter
interval. It was not apparent; there was nothing to which comparison
could be made. I recalled Alan's description of Polter--not thirty
years old as he should have been, but nearer fifty. I could understand
that, now. A day in here--while our gigantic world outside might only
have progressed a few hours.

We walked the length of the tunnel. I suppose it was a quarter of a
mile, to us in this size. It wound through the cliff w