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Kent was stamping the things upon the floor; pouring acids upon them. Some eluded him. The air in the room was unbreathable.... Alan and Glora reached the bedroom. The laboratory was a hideous chaos. They were aware of its outer door opening, disclosing the figure of Polter who, undoubtedly, had been attracted by the noise. He shouted a startled oath.
The little figure moved away from us and disappeared. Alan and I lay as we had before. But now we could whisper. We tried to anticipate what would happen; tried to plan, but that was futile. The thing was too strange, too astoundingly fantastic. How long Glora was gone I don't know. I think, not over three or four minutes. She came from her hiding place, crouching this time, and joined us.
So passed their lives until Finola sang, one day, "The Second Woe has passed the second period of three hundred years," when they flew out on the broad ocean, as was decreed, and went to the island of Inis Glora. There they spent the next three hundred years, amid yet wilder storms and yet colder winds.
Even as we stood together, the creeping platform floor was separating us. A moment passed. Glora was urging us on vehemently: "Come! You must not stand there!" We started walking. The railing around the slab was knee-high. The slab itself was a broad, square surface. The fragment of golden quartz lay in its center. It was now a jagged lump nearly a foot in diameter.
He was escaping with the golden cage, out of this doomed atomic world to the Earth above. Glora murmured, "There is our way out. Your way. And that is Polter going. I do not think he saw us. So much is growing gigantic here." Dr. Kent muttered, "We will wait a moment wade across or leap over, and follow him out. Babs is with him dear God I hope so! This is a doomed realm!" Alan held Glora close.
Flying for days above the sea, they alighted at the palace once so well known, but everything was changed by time even the walls of their father's palace were crumbled and rain-washed. So sad was the sight that they remained one day only, and flew back to Inis Glora, thinking that if they must be forever solitary, they would live where they had lived last, not where they had been reared.
They thought they heard approaching footsteps. A moment passed but no one came into the room. "Hurry," urged Glora. "That was nothing. We're waiting too long." "My boy Alan, after all these years " As they were about to take the diminishing drug a very queer sound came from across the room. A scuttling, scratching, and the drone of wings. "God, Father look!"
I would have called him now forty, or older. Beyond even that there was an abnormality. A man old before his time; or younger than he should have been for the years he had lived. An indescribable mingling of something of the two worlds, perhaps. It marked him with a look at once unnatural and sinister. These were instant impressions. Glora was plucking at me.
Yet, from the other viewpoint, I had only descended perhaps an eighth, or a quarter of an inch, beneath the broken pitted surface of a little fragment of golden quartz the size of a walnut into just one of its myriads of golden atoms! "My world," Glora was saying. "You like it? See the starlight on the lake? I have heard that your world looks like this at night, in summer.
The outer world of Earth was under my feet, instead of overhead. Then we went level. I forgot the confusion: this was normality here. We turned upward a little. Cross tunnels intersected ours at intervals. I saw caverns, open, widened tunnels, as though this mountain were honeycombed. "Look!" said Glora. "There is the way out. All these passages lead the same way."
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