“Came then, on Earth, the painful upward surge of changing, ascending species, the long road from anthropoid to troglodyte to modern man. The structures of the atomic people crumbled soon, until only a few remnants were left. Overall, the world it was as if their invasion had never been, nor did men dream that such people had held the Earth ages before themselves. And up in a Scottish hill, under a great stone that was covered by the drifting dirt of ages, lay a grain of sand that held war and death and terror, in a single atom of which the atomic people were prisoned for all time.”

-3-

“Such was the colossal epic the inscription narrated. And it was so convincing that neither Powell nor I doubted it. But now a dispute arose between us. I believed that we should heed the warning of the inscription and not delve farther into the thing, lest we loose dread upon the world. But Powell was afire with curiosity and would not listen. So, with help, we removed the great circular stone and set it to one side. And beneath it, as it had foretold, we found the sand-grain that held the atomic world.

“Under the circular stone was a cube of the same smooth rock, some six feet square. On the upper surface of this cube was set a small plate of smooth metal, at the center of which lay the sand-grain, set in the metal. Around this metal plate, embedded within the surface of the cube, was a circle of seven little blocks that glowed steadily with a feeble purple light. In daylight the little blocks seemed merely purple in color, and it was only in darkness that their luminosity became apparent. Without doubt that circle of glowing blocks was the producer of the force mentioned in the inscription, the force that made size-changing impossible within their field, that held the atomic people prisoners in the sand-grain.

“From that day onward Powell took me less and less into his confidence. He had fitted up a small laboratory near the cabin and began working there on some problem connected with what he had found. Once or twice, he consulted me concerning the meaning of certain technical parts of the inscription, but aside from that he told me nothing of what he was doing, and I decided that I was wasting time to stay. It was on the very day that I meant to tell Powell so, and leave, that he came running toward me excitedly, with the news that his experiment had succeeded.