“They had science, a strange sort of science, and now, at the time of their greatest need, one of their scientists announced a startling discovery. He had found a way by which the size of any object could be increased or decreased indefinitely, at will. And the secret of this was stunning in its very simplicity.

“We know that the universal, all-pervading ether is the base of everything. Vibrations of that ether, in a certain octave, cause light; in a different octave, radio waves; in still another, chemical rays. But what we do not know as yet, what the scientists of the atomic people had learned, is that all matter itself is but another vibration of that ether, in a different lower octave. That stone, that tree, you and I, all but different vibrations in the ether. And the atomic scientists had found that as a stone is simply an etheric vibration, by raising the frequency of vibration the stone would be made larger, by lowering that frequency it would be made smaller.

“Their method of changing that frequency was told by the inscription. They would ascertain the frequency of vibration of an object, then concentrate on its other artificial electric vibrations, much like radio waves, which would change the vibratory frequency of the object just as the rate of swing of a pendulum can be raised or lowered by a tiny force applied to it at the correct moment. Thus, these atomic people could make any object, make even themselves, large enough to dwarf their world or small enough to disappear entirely.

“It was a chance to relieve their crowding numbers and they seized it at once. Using their discovery to grow in size, they burst up from their own atom into this world, into our Earth, and found that the atom that was their universe was an atom of a simple grain of sand, on Earth. That sand-grain, though, held their world, so they built a great structure around it, in what is now Scotland, so that it would always be there as a refuge for them to flee to, in case of need. That attended to, up from the atom, out of the sand-grain, streamed their people, gigantic masses of them.

“The Earth then was savage and forbidding, but nothing daunted, they spread over its surface, began to raise their structures of stone, to shape this world to their will. It must have seemed to them that they were secure forever in this greater universe.

“But now came disaster. Certain adventurous spirits among them were not satisfied to stop in this universe. They saw the sun and its attendant planets and realized that this, our own solar system, was after all only an atom in a still greater universe. So, a number of them, using the same method of changing size, grew again until they had entered the world above this, the universe in which ours is but an atom.