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Then realising, it seemed, that she was losing us, our old guide turned; for the first time looking in our faces, she smiled, and said in her sweet, weak voice, like the sound from the strings of a spinet long unplayed on: "Don' you wahnd to see the dome-room: an' all the other rooms right here, of this old-time place?" Again those words! We had not the hearts to disappoint her.
As we stood swaying I saw that the chair was huge, and its seat level with my head. The great barrel-cylinder of the microscope slanted sixty feet upward. The dome roof was a distant spread three hundred feet up in the dimness. The dome-room was a vast arena now. Alan and I must have hesitated, confused by the expanding scene a slow, steady movement everywhere. Everything was drawing away from us.
The men were shouting, clambering to their feet. Alan and I stood swaying. The dome-room had contracted to half its former size. Near us was a little platform, chair and microscope. Small figures of men were rushing at us. I shouted, "Alan! Watch yourself!" We were unarmed. These men might have automatic weapons. But evidently they did not. Only knives were in their hands.
Then realising, it seemed, that she was losing us, our old guide turned; for the first time looking in our faces, she smiled, and said in her sweet, weak voice, like the sound from the strings of a spinet long unplayed on: "Don' you wahnd to see the dome-room: an' all the other rooms right here, of this old-time place?" Again those words! We had not the hearts to disappoint her.
The several men in this huge circular dome-room were dispersing to their affairs; three of them sat whispering by what I now saw was a pile of gold ingots stacked crosswise. But the fellow at the microscope held his place, his eyes glued to its aperture as he watched the vanishing figures of Polter and Babs on the rock-fragment. Alan was trying to convey something to me.
"This is the dome-room, suh and lady; right over the slave-market it is. Here they did the business of the State sure; old-time heroes up therein the roof Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Davis, Lee there they are! All gone now! Yes, suh!"
There was a glow of light ahead. I recall that I was at that moment fumbling at my belt in two small compartments in which I was carrying the two vials of the drugs which Glora had given me. Alan wore the same sort of belt. We had found them in the wrecked dome-room. I heard a click on the ground at my feet.
We ran under it, and cut out upon the white slab a level surface, larger now than the whole dome-room had been. Glora, like a fawn, ran in advance of us, her robe flying in the wind. She turned to look back. "Faster! Faster, or it will be too hard a climb!" Ahead lay a golden mound of rock. It was widening; raising its top steadily higher. Beyond it and over it was a vast dim distance.
I stood, a Titan. And then, with a shock of realization, I saw how tiny I was! This was the broken top of that fragment of golden quartz the size of a walnut! I was standing there, under the lens of the giant microscope in Polter's dome-room laboratory, with half a dozen astounded Quebec police officials peering down at me! I need not detail the aftermath of our emergence from the atom. Dr.
"This is the dome-room, suh and lady; right over the slave-market it is. Here they did the business of the State sure; old-time heroes up therein the roof Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Davis, Lee there they are! All gone now! Yes, suh!"
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