rough
here. And over there--behind you--a little doorslide to another room.
You and these other two can be comfortable--"

"For how long?" Lee demanded.

"It should not seem many days. Soon we shall go fast. Please watch it at
the window--he would want that. You have been taught some science?"

"Yes. I guess so."

To Lee it was a weird, unnatural exchange between captor and captive.
The voice, intoning the English words so slowly, so carefully, seemed
gentle, concerned with his welfare ... and afraid of him.

Abruptly the doorslide closed again, and then at once it reopened.

"He would want you to understand what you see," the man said. "You will
find it very wonderful--we did, coming down here. This was his room--so
long ago when he used it. His dials are there--you can watch them and
try to understand. Dials to mark our distance and our size. The
size-change will start soon."

Size-change? Lee's numbed mind turned over the words and found them
almost meaningless.

"From the window there--what you can see will be very wonderful," the
man said again. "He would want you to study it. Please do that."

The doorslide closed....

What you can see from the window will be very wonderful. No one, during
the days that followed could adequately describe what Lee Anthony and
Thomas Franklin and Vivian saw through that lens-window. A vast panorama
in monochrome ... a soundless drama of the stars, so immense, so awesome
that the human mind could grasp only an infinitesimal fragment of its
wonders....

They found the little door which led into another apartment. There were
tables and chairs of earth-style, quaintly old-fashioned. Food and drink
were shoved through the doorslide; the necessities of life and a fair
comfort of living were provided. But their questions, even as the time
passed and lengthened into what on Earth might have been a week or more,
remained unanswered. There was only that gentle but firm negation:

"We have decided that he would want us to say nothing. We do not know
about this girl and this smaller man. We brought them so that they could
not remain on Earth to talk of having seen us. We are sorry about that.
He probably won't like it."

"He? Who the devil are you talking about?" Franklin demanded. "See here,
if I had you fellows back on Earth now I'd slam you into jail. Damned
brigands. You can't do this to me! My--my father's one of the most
important men in New York--"

But now the doorslid