Chapter 2

"Professor, are you there?"

"I'm here, Kellie." The voice came only through her earphones now and sounded out of breath.

"What's going on?" she wanted to know.

"I'm making my escape."

Kellie blinked at the news. "Where am I?"

"In my coat pocket."

"Is that safe?"

"As long as you stay where you are inside that cave."

"Uh, that's what I wanted to talk to you about." Kellie was floating, no longer heavy enough, she guessed, to be affected by gravity.

"Actually, that's not the case," Grove advised her. "You are being pulled equally from every direction now. That's why you float."

"Am I... ?" She wasn't sure of the terminology.

"Adrift in molecular space? Not yet. Can you see anything?"

"I'm blind as a bat," Kellie said. "No light anywhere." She paused. "Actually, that's not true. I seem to be shining myself." She could just make out a shimmering greenish radiance encircling her arms and hands. "Is that the field?"

"I imagine it is, yes. Thank, you. Thank you very much." Kellie heard someone else in the background, a couple of people.

"They're looking for me, aren't they? That's why you left."

Grove grunted, "Uh-huh."

"Hope you don't get caught then," she murmured, surprised that she meant it. The only thing keeping her from hysteria was the sound of Grove's voice--and knowing it would be there in the future, whatever the future held. Sudden homesickness and dread, powerful as a thrust sword, skewered her heart. She would never again see her mom and dad, her brother and sister, her friends ... she broke out in scalding tears.

"I hate you," she blubbered. "Why did you do this to me?" Kellie heard the sound of a car door open and then slam closed.

"Something I didn't tell you before," Grove huffed. He was too fat for all this exertion, she thought; another worry. "It's part of you now-Shrinx. It understands your feelings, and experiences them with you, Kellie. It's ultra intelligent and has the ability to halt your shrinkage at any time."

"What?" Kellie shouted with aching hope. "Are you kidding me? It can reverse this?"

An engine started and for a moment Kellie heard the faint drone of classical music in the background.

"No. It can't do that," Grove said.

Kellie felt crushed again.

"But it can halt your shrinkage. And will, if and when you discover a suitable planet with human-like inhabitants and breathable air. It has no desire to see you shrink for the rest of eternity."

Kellie felt immense relief. Not that she was joyous at the prospect of spending life among imitation humans, but she certainly didn't want to shrink into eternity.

"How long ... how long might this take?" Anxiety grabbed her around the throat again.

"Based on my calculations, it should occur within 27 landfalls."

This felt like an eternity in itself. Kellie whined, "27 landfalls? I have to visit 27 planets before I can stop?"

"That's only a calculation. Based upon best estimates." He paused a moment. "There are no certainties here. It could happen on your 1st planet, or never at all. I'm sorry."

"Professor... !" Kellie again burst into tears.

"I'm sorry," Grove repeated.

"Fuck you being sorry!" Kellie screamed and tore the headphones from her ears.

Sometime later, once she'd calmed and become lonely for Grove's voice, Kellie repositioned the earphones. She knew they still worked because she'd heard Grove yelling at her. He'd sounded quite frantic.

"Something's going on," she said simply. Grove sighed deeply into her earphones.

"I thought I'd lost you, kid."

"You almost did," Kellie muttered bitterly. She had almost hurled the headphones away into space. "Something's out here with me." She squinted at iridescent patches of light, appearing to be great distances away, but surrounding her in all directions. She twisted her head to see if that were true. It was. She described what she saw and Grove became excited.

"My God! You're there! Intergalactic space. How big do they appear to be?"

Kellie found she had better luck observing them peripherally.

"I don't know. As big as my hand, maybe?"

"How many are there?"

Kellie couldn't guess.

"On the order of thousands?" Grove asked excitedly.

"Maybe millions," Kellie supposed. The sight was truly breathtaking.

"Individual stars?" Grove asked.

Kellie shook her head. "No, wait." In a cluster off to her left, a single point of light blazed intensely for an instant, and then vanished. Un-focusing, she observed the same phenomenon in other clusters, in all directions. Some clusters exhibited multiple flashes, occurring in different parts of the cluster. Jubilant, Grove informed Kellie what she was seeing were supernovae.

"It happens that fast?" she asked doubtfully.

"For you, yes. Relative to the rest of the universe, you are aging immensely slow, experiencing millions of years of expansion per minute. Remember, Kellie, for right now, you are far and away the largest, most massive object in this universe. Your presence there affects everything. You are something totally unexplainable to any intelligent species observing you. Impossible."

His tone suggested awe, but Kellie was beyond awe. She discerned that her iridescent patches were globular clusters, spiral galaxies, oblong shapes that twisted like glowing worms. One particularly odd shape were two galaxies in collision, she realized.

"My, God!" Grove enthused. "I can't wait to get there. Are they growing larger?"

"Quickly," Kellie realized. A spiral galaxy similar to illustrations she had seen of her own galaxy caught her eye. She, or it, was closing the distance between them rapidly. It was the width of an old LP record, and as she watched, individual stars resolved themselves along the spiral arms. Supernovae no longer went off like flashbulbs, but appeared and grew in strength and then faded away to nothingness in perhaps five seconds. The approaching galaxy expanded and resolved into thousand of stars, and then millions of stars. Before she knew it, the galaxy was bigger than she was.

"Professor ... this is happening really fast."

"Tell me about the stars, Kellie."

Kellie described the different colors, the different apparent sizes, how many of them-most--seemed to be two or even three-star systems.

"Can you see any planets?" Grove asked.

Kellie hesitated. "I'm inside one of the spiral arms, Professor."

"No! No, Kellie, you shouldn't be that close!"

"Well, I am," she said defensively. Stars, hundreds and thousands of them swept past her, many thrown wildly behind her into swirling, smoke like patterns. She remembered his admonitions about disruptions and blurted: "It's not my fault, Professor. The galaxy just sorta reached out and grabbed me."

Grove sounded both aggravated and resigned. "Gravitational attraction. I guess there's no getting around it. Just try to be as non-disruptive as possible, Kellie."

Kellie held motionless, let the stars flow around her as they pleased. Suddenly she was out of the arm and into interstellar space again, between spiral arms. The oncoming rush of stars gave her quite a crunch of anxiety. "Professor... ?"

Grove heard the alarm in her voice. "What's wrong?"

Kellie shuddered and closed her eyes. "Nothing. I'm just freaking out." She described being between the arms; how oddly, the onrushing stars seemed to have put on the brakes.

"You're constantly reducing in scale. The stars are much bigger now, right? I'd be surprised if you didn't experience some warming from their output. Be careful not to let any penetrate your field."

Kellie wondered why none had so far. "There's so many of them. They were flowing around me like fireflies, or sparks. But none came closer than maybe a foot from my skin. How come?"

"Because you are so immense-or were so immense-your field acted as a buffer zone. Your atmosphere is trillions of times denser than the interstellar void around you. Even the vast clouds of interstellar gas and dust created by supernovae are nothing compared to your field. It's virtually impenetrable at your present scale. That won't last much longer though. You'll have to be very attentive. Don't let anything penetrate your field."

With trepidation, Kellie watched the stars approach. They were bigger now, as Grove had predicted, and ranging everywhere in color from brilliant, almost unobservable white, to the deepest, darkest red. The red stars, she noted, were also among the largest, and she questioned Grove on this.

"Supergiants: stars that have burned up the hydrogen in their cores and are verging on supernovae stage. Keep away from them, Kellie. They are very dangerous. Also very large blue stars. They're not as common, but they are also supernova candidates." While he spoke, the stars arrived and Kellie was engulfed. She almost panicked as dozens, and then hundreds of stars came within inches of her skin.

"Professor... !" she cried in alarm.

"How close?"

"Like, close enough that I can feel their heat." Indeed, each passing star lit a swath across her bare skin or clothing that made her want to jump back. Some passed so close as to feel like a too-close match-head on her skin. She was on the verge of panic. Could these things light her on fire, she wondered, ignite her clothing? Burn a hole through her skin? Some of these stars were the size of marbles now.

"Just relax, Kellie. You should very soon be small enough to-"

"Don't tell me that!" she cried, barely restraining the urge to swat away a small yellow-white sun brushing past her nose. What saved the errant star and its coterie of tiny planets was her noticing the planets in time. There were four of them, no bigger than the size of pinheads. "Oh, my God..."

"What? What is it, Kellie?"

Kellie watched open-mouthed as the star glided past. The planets, too small yet to distinguished any colors, whirled rapidly around the star's middle. The closest was a hands-distance out from the star, the three outer spheres, one and half times that distance each. Her impression was that the closest planet was second largest in size; the two outer orbs half the size of the second.

"I have to be really careful," Kellie said in awe.

"Planets?" Grove guessed.

"Planets," she confirmed breathlessly.

"There are many of them?"

Kellie stared at another, slightly larger yellowish star with a blue-white companion half its size, and made out another planetary system. This one had half a dozen large orbs and half a dozen smaller ones, barely distinguishable against the blackness, even when squinting. Unlike the planets of the yellow-white star, these orbited the binary system in different planes. It reminded her of animations she had seen on TV or in class of an atom.

"Wow. This is really cool." She described what she saw. Grove ate up the news in jubilation.

'I knew it! Didn't I tell you! Star systems, just like ours!"

Kellie counted two dozen or more systems with planet counts ranging from two to fifteen. Some of the stars were single; most had one or more companions. One system she observed had an impossible five stars, caught in a wobbly dance of gravitational attraction. This group had only one large, very distant satellite. That didn't surprise Kellie at all. She described the anomaly for Grove.

"Incredible. Simply incredible. I can't imagine the complexities of their interactions. Keeping an eye out for black holes?"

Kellie snorted. "Like I could really see one."

"You would. There would be an accretion disk the width of a solar system with no star in the middle. Or pulling gas off a companion star. Or the remains of a supernova, with gas and dust expanding outward from an invisible center point. One way or the other, you'd recognize it. Keep your eyes open, kid."

Kellie did. And saw nothing like that until just before exiting the second spiral arm, spotting a glowing ball of gas that expanded minutely even as she watched. She started to pass along the news to Grove when a star, twenty feet off to her right, exploded into incredible brightness.

"Holy shit!" she cried. Mercifully her head and shoulders were already free of the spiral arm and the instinctive sheltering of her eyes caused minimal disturbance. Through fingers and squinted lids, Kellie could still not look anywhere near the intense explosion.

"That was close!" she gasped. "What if that had been closer?"

"You were lucky," Grove agreed. "But novas are few and far between. You should be okay if you keep an eye out for candidate stars."

"Right," she grumbled. "Like I inspect every one."

She was now completely free of the spiral arm and watched the next approach with the same trepidation. It wasn't nearly so bad this time, however, not with her earlier experience, the fact that she was smaller now and not such a huge target. The wall of stars, nearly thirty feet long in its sweep outward from the galactic center, moved toward her at no more than walking speed. It was ten minutes before Kellie encountered the first stars. She slid right in among them.

"I'm in the third spiral arm now, Professor. Either I've slowed the galaxy's rotation, or its gravity is dragging me along. I'm hardly moving at all, in relation to the stars. In fact..." She eyed a bright yellow star with a dozen orbiting planets approaching off to her left. "I think I better start looking around for possible planets." She was quiet a moment. "Professor... ? Once I select one, how do I get to it?"

Grove chuckled.

"I hope that means you've already thought this out and are laughing at my naiveté?"

Grove chuckled again.

"Come on, professor ... a little help?"

Grove said: "Try swimming."

"Excuse me?"

"Swim. You are immensely huge in interstellar terms and interstellar space is jam packed with residual dust and gas. It should be plenty enough to act as a friction source. Dog paddle. When you get small enough not to interact with any nearby stars, of course. Don't do it until then."

Irritated, antsy, Kellie waited until her shrinkage had placed her equidistant from her chosen solar system, and the next closest in her longitudinal plane. As long as she didn't kick, she'd be okay. The closest system was five feet directly below her, a double star with three plants. She'd stick with her yellow-white star.

"I'm gonna try it," she said.

"Use your arms, Kellie. Dog paddle."

Kellie mimicked the words silently and mouthed a few insults to boot. But the concept worked surprisingly well and she watched in fascination as the chosen solar system slowly approached. She halted her motion when she'd approached to within two feet.

"Not too close," Grove warned. "Your mass could throw the system completely out of synchronization. You're a hundred times as massive as the entire solar system. Getting too close this soon could eject the outer planets and disrupt the inner."

Grunting agreement, Kellie slowly backed away. Grove was right: She was still the length of the system's orbital plane and her presence, even though she couldn't verify it with her bare eyes, was causing fluctuations in the orbits. She knew it instinctively, and settled down to wait.

"You know, I hate you, Professor."

Grove acknowledged that fact. "I'm very sorry for doing this to you, Kellie. I truly am."

Kellie eyed the outermost planet, a frozen chunk of ice the size of a baseball. "Are you serious about me holding up on some livable planet?"

"Completely." In the background, a door opened and closed. "I'm home," he informed her.

"You promise me that? You won't let me keep shrinking and shrinking and shrinking forever?"

"Of course not. You know--"

"Because you know I'd probably commit suicide, if I had to face that, Professor."

"Kellie..." Kellie heard the sound of jingling keys and a deadbolt being unlocked, and then the unmistakable sound of a front door opening, the seals breaking loose from the metal surface. "Remember," he said, closing the door again. "I'm making the same trip myself. I'm no more enthused by the thought of shrinking forever than your are." Kellie heard keys dropping to a hard surface, probably a foyer table. Then a shuffling sound as Grove likely removed his coat. Then an almost reverential silence as Grove held the cube in the palm of his hand.

"How deep into that cube, am I, Professor?"

Grove's voice sounded startled. "Oh. I wouldn't suppose more than a few millimeters in. If that. Why?"

"Just curious," she said. An aquamarine giant approached, basketball-sized with discernable cloud layers thousands of feet thick, great bands of swirling, green and blue that Kellie guessed was methane from her science class, encircled by a gaggle of marble-sized and smaller moons that varied in color and reflectivity from jet black, to iridescent white. The two largest moons had moons of their own, Kellie noted. She wondered if life existed on the larger moons. The others looked quite dead. She described the passing globe to Grove.

"Forget it, Kellie. It's a gas giant: totally unacceptable. Inhabitable planets will reside in the inner solar system, n the bio-zone, like our planet. About 90 million miles out from the sun."

Kellie snorted at the concept of determining millions of miles of distance. She was millions of miles long herself, wasn't she? The concept rattled her. "I'm moving in then, Professor."

"Take your time, Kellie. You're still quite big."

Kellie guessed her length as a quarter that as the star system now. She couldn't wait any longer; fear of growing too small to successfully navigate the system and find an acceptable planet had her stomach in knots and her chest feeling like someone knelt on it. She constantly worried that she'd run out of oxygen. Could the shimmering green liquid generate oxygen from nothing? She was too afraid to ask.

"Any suitable prospects?" Grove asked. Kellie sensed the tightness in his voice, knew he was worried about this too. She didn't want to consider what might happen if she shank out of existence in the void of interplanetary space. Could she nuzzle up to a dust particle, she wondered, a molecule of gas? That likelihood sent a shudder rolling down her spine.

"Still too far out. There's another gas giant on the other side of the sun, and another one just inside that, about three-quarter the other one's size. I think they're both bigger than the planet that passed me by, but I can't be sure. What if the planet I want is over there with the others? What do I do then?" She gulped audibly.

"You wait," Grove said. "The planet will come to you eventually."

"You're sure of that?"

"The closer the planet, the faster its described arc. Once you get within the bio-zone, the planet should orbit four or five times around the sun as you shrink to proper size. Just coincide your approach like a runner making a handoff. Swim along its orbit, letting it catch up to you, slowly, and capture you gravitationally. Try to make your landfall when you are approximately half the height as its atmosphere. The best scenario would be coming in feet first, landing on your toes. You'll just have to play it by ear. And Kellie... ?"

"Yes, Professor?" she grumbled.

"If you're too big, your approach and the impact of your feet will cause catastrophic damage. Coming down on land, there'll be devastating, worldwide earthquakes. A water landing will cause tsunamis thousands of feet high that will rush hundreds, perhaps even thousands of miles inland. Any structure within half a continent of you will be completely destroyed. Cities will disappear. Civilizations will vanish. Your mass will most likely alter the planet's balance, its rotation, and its orbital velocity. There's a good chance you might eject the planet from the solar system."

Kellie's mind reeled. She immediately paddled herself to a dead stop. To her right, a planet appeared, approaching at an alarming rate of speed. Kellie backpedaled again and just managed to clear its path before the world barreled past her at the speed of a racehorse. It was basketball-sized, rocky, cratered and utterly barren. She watched it shrink away horror. If that thing had hit her...

"You okay?" Grove asked.

"Had a scare," Kellie admitted. She described the near miss, how she'd only just gotten her legs tucked in time. Her heart hammered and her breathing refused to slow. "That would have been bad."

"Bad," Grove agreed. "You should probably drop below the orbital plane. Get out of immediate danger."

"Good idea." Heart still pounding, breath still ragged, she paddled as though trying to touch bottom in a swimming pool. She even extended her toes in unconscious search of a hard surface. It made her want to laugh. Above, a hundred feet distant and forty feet inboard, another planet had appeared. This one was half-again as large its outboard neighbor, and possessed of a coloration that make Kellie's heart skip a beat and the breath lock in her throat. She unconsciously began paddling upward.

"I see something, Professor."

"A habitable planet?" Grove asked excitedly.

Kellie paddled even harder. Approaching at 30 miles per hour, rotating rapidly so that Kellie found it difficult to discern clear details, the planet was a blue-white blur. The South Pole-south from her vantage point, anyway-was the startling, glistening white of ice and snow. Despite the fast spin, she glimpsed a number of large continents as it neared, ranging in color from dark green to sunburned, desert brown. Two of the continents had large inland seas, or giant lakes. And then the globe was past, speeding away with its two small moons in tow.

"Wow!" she whispered in awe.

"Describe it please! Tell me in detail," Grove ordered.

Kellie did, recalling whatever detail she could remember from her quick glance. "I think this is my world," she breathed hopefully.

"I think so too. And Kellie... ?"

"Yes?"

"Be careful."

"Really?" Kellie answered scornfully. "Will I be graded on my technique? How many earthquakes I don't cause? The number of tsunamis avoided? Think I'll get a better score than I did in your class? Let's hope so. I don't want to repeat it in summer school, Professor."

She sensed his disapproval, and didn't care. Destroying this beautiful world would destroy her. She'd rather dwindle away into nothingness, or-God help her-end it all in the fiery orb of the star. She squinted at it now, glowing merrily at the center of the solar system. She guessed she and it were of comparable size, height-wise, anyway. They wouldn't be for long.

The planet returned surprisingly fast. It was now beach ball size, and moving noticeably slower. Its revolutions had slowed so that Kellie identified not only continents, but a scattering of large islands. It was nothing like her own world; no continent extended north and south through both hemispheres; all were above and below the equator, the largest, a green and brown monster occupying a third of the north hemisphere, was bisected by rugged mountain ranges and crisscrossed by long, meandering rivers, most flowing southward into the sea. The northernmost part of the continent projected into the arctic sea and was heavily glaciated. Kellie counted three--no four--huge inland lakes. She guessed this continent outsized all the landmass of her own world by a good percentage.

Two smaller, mid-sized continents completed the topography. Both were eroded desert with scare vegetation, green only along the coastlines. The smaller sported a pair of large volcanoes on its north coast, spewing ashen smoke into the atmosphere. This continent was below the equator, and roughly X-shaped. Kellie eyed a huge meteor crater on the northern arm of the X, dwarfing anything back home. She estimated its size as five hundred miles across, and fifty miles deep. Water reflected from numerous small lakes at the bottom. Up-thrust rock at the center rose as high, or higher than the crater walls. And then the planet sped away out of sight.

"This is definitely it!" she exclaimed. She described everything she'd seen, working hard not to embellish the description with her youthful exuberance. Even so, her account was littered with huge this, and awesome that, and the most incredible thing you've ever seen. Grove chuckled in her ear.

"You just wait," she complained. "You'll be a flabbergasted teenager too."

Grove laughed and Kellie heard the sound of ice tinkling in a glass and the pop-fizz of an opening soda can. She realized how thirsty she was. That, in turn, made her think of the blue-green oceans of the vanished world.

"Professor, how do I know the ocean I'm seeing is really water? Or the atmosphere breathable? What if I splash down and the water is really nitric acid and the air cyanide gas? How do we know anything's what it looks like down there? And please don't tell me I'm taking my chances. Please?"

A universe away, Grove filled his drink glass with soda. She wondered how many times she'd done exactly the same thing, yakking with her friends on the phone. How terribly long ago and unimportant that all seemed. But she'd give her right arm for a soda. The craving was terrible.

Grove said: "I think we can assume, given the apparent similarity between our universe and yours-" Kellie sensed his uneasiness using those words. "-that physical law dictates any planet forming in the bio-zone would possess water oceans, a nitrogen rich atmosphere, and chlorophyll based vegetation. Everything you've described so far mimics our own solar system to a T: the icy outer planets, the gas giants, enlarging in size and density toward the inner solar system, the graduation to smaller, rockier planets close to the sun. The makeup of the planet and its distance from the sun dictate its physical characteristics. The oceans have to be water, the atmosphere nitrogen rich, the vegetation non-life threatening. You should be okay, Kellie."

Kellie snorted. She hadn't considered trees with a taste for human flesh. Leave it to Grove, to bring that up. Which begged the question...

"What about animal life? Should I be concerned? What if this planet is in the Age of Dinosaurs? Do I eat the tyrannosaurs before they eat me? Or will they go extinct shortly after my arrival?" She stopped to consider something. "You know, each revolution around the star is a year, they're time. I've been out here, in their immediate neighborhood, for a couple of years now. Before that, in the outer solar system, for hundreds of year. Thousand of years when I was going through the spiral arms, right? Millions of years when I was in intergalactic space. How many years have gone by on this little planet since I first came into existence?" Kellie shivered at the consideration.

Grove answered slowly. "I would guess, 2 billion years or more. Maybe double that. I don't know, exactly."

Kellie shivered all up and down her length. She'd arrived less than two hours ago and possibly experienced the length of her own planet's existence, maybe the length of her entire universe. Was it possible to outlive a universe, she wondered? She didn't want to find out. The planet was approaching again.

"It's back, Professor. It's a lot bigger now, too."

"How much bigger?"

"Bigger than me. Big as a car, maybe."

"Oh, my," Grove said. "You'd better get moving, Kellie."

Startled, filled with anxiety, Kellie began to dog-paddle. When it became apparent dog paddling wouldn't do the trick, she broke into a full-fledged breast-stroke, kicking madly. Without water to resist her movements, progress was maddeningly slow. The planet swept by even before she gained the orbital plain again. It would be twice the size, three times the size, maybe, on its return. She had to get herself out front and close to a matching speed. Otherwise it would pass her by again ... or run her down.

What if ... what if it didn't come back in time? She started swimming, desperate to catch up. It was hopeless.

"Professor!" She was beginning to pant, wearing out. The planet continued to pull away, twenty yards, thirty, forty ... Kellie stopped her struggles. "Dammit! I didn't stand a chance. This isn't working for shit, Professor. And the smaller I get, the less efficient I am." She swished her hand angrily through the vacuum. It made no change in her position at all. She no longer offered enough surface area to effect the dust and gas.

"Take it easy, kid. You're still too large to attempt a landing anyway. I urged you into action only to get you moving again."

"Well, thanks a lot for that!" she cried indignantly. "Asshole."

Grove laughed at her. She raised both hands with extended middle fingers. "Too bad you don't have a camera in this thing," she said, tapping the headphones.

"I considered that, but video eats up too much bandwidth. I couldn't afford that with the low wattage involved. You'd better get moving, girl."

"Asshole," she muttered again. But she did start paddling again. And stopped a moment later when she realized her efforts were taking her in a straight line. She had no way to swim along an arc, along with the planet. This was just bullshit. She told as much to Grove.