Bambi's mind spun. She was clearly shrinking, of that there was no doubt. The room was growing constantly all around, the tables and chairs rising further and further up towards the ever-distant ceiling. But how? How could this be happening?
Even while her emotional mind tried to grapple with sudden disbelief, fear, and horror, the scientific side of her brain came up with an answer. The enlarging field, attached to the ant at her side, was collapsing, taking her with it!
Well, there was only one remedy to that, though she was loath to do it. She had no choice, though. Hurriedly, she grabbed hold of the ant and tugged at it desperately. It continued to hold on as though it were part of her, until finally its thick, rubbery body gave out and it snapped in half. She threw the abdomen and thorax away, trying to ignore the greenish ichor now leaking from the head, and looked around at the room hopefully.
Unfortunately, she was still getting smaller. The nearest chair now dwarfed her in size, its bottom edge already above her head and moving steadily upwards. While she struggled to control her panic, the logical part of her mind estimated she was now only about a foot tall!
"Damn you!" she swore, tugging at the giant ant head at her side. The jaws were clamped on as securely as if she were hooked into giant vise, pinching her skin beneath the leather almost directly into her pelvis. There was no way she could get free by simply sucking in a deep breath. Instead, she resorted to banging on the dead thing with her gloved fists. Despite her efforts, however, the blasted creature would still not let go.
Finally, in desperation, she looked around for some kind of tool she could use to extricate herself from the mandibles. Underneath the table she saw a paper clip and hurried over to it, surprised at its immense size. It looked to her like it was a foot long! Still, it was perfect for her purposes, so she lifted it up and tried bending it open, trying to ignore how it was slowly growing in her grip. With some effort she managed to pry it open enough to be of use to her, before it was so large she couldn't bend the thick metal any further.
With some effort she maneuvered the increasingly unwieldy paper clip over the ant's head and started prying at it. It was impossible to get any kind of leverage, however, so she resorted to just beating on the insect in frustration. As the clip got larger and heavier in her hands, she began to see some success, as the head started to fragment under the constant torture.
Finally, after one last downward stroke, she managed to break one of the mandibles loose. The paper clip, now the size of a tennis racket, dropped to the floor with a clatter as she savagely ripped the remains of the ant from her body and flung them aside in anger.
Almost frantically she looked around. She was now standing underneath one of the laboratory tables, in amidst what had once been a thin layer of dust but now seemed like a soft gray carpet. The floor underneath was grainy and pitted, not at all the smooth surface she had once thought it to be. Next to her, rising into the distance above, stood one of the table's legs, looking for all the world like an immense redwood tree, cut square and relieved of all leaves and branches. High above, the underside of the table now filled her sky.
"Oh, God, what have I done?" she muttered under her breath, her voice echoing hollowly in the massive chamber. "What have I done?"
She took a few tentative steps out into the laboratory. A few minutes ago it had been as comfortable a place as she could ever have known. Now it looked like an alien landscape. Ahead, a chair rose into the distance like a bizarrely shaped mountain. The paper clip she'd used moments ago lay at her feet, looking like it was well over two feet long. The desks and cabinets she once paid little attention to, except for their use as furniture, now mocked her with their massive size, as though laughing at how tiny she'd become.
Suddenly she remembered that the camera on her helmet was still running. Choking back tears, she forced the scientific half of her brain to regain control. "I-I'm still here," she said weakly. "There's not m-much left of me, but I'm here. If you're watching this--well, it should be obvious what's happened. The enlarging field around the ant collapsed while it was attached to me, and I--I shrank along with it. From the looks of things, I can't be more than--more than t-three inches high!"
She stopped and thought about that for a second. Had she been able to pull off the ant before the field's collapse was complete? She didn't think so, but couldn't know for sure until she found a tape measure. "It's possible I got the head off of me before the collapse was complete, but it doesn't look like it," she muttered, almost to herself. Somehow, talking seemed to calm her fears, so she kept on speaking, though somewhat numbly. "Since I had the machine set for a twenty-five hundred percent rating, that means I was reduced to--to one-twenty-fifth my normal height. I'm normally five foot six, so that would make me, let's see...a little over t-two and a half i-inches t-tall..."
Bambi almost choked on those last words. Two and a half inches! If she weren't seeing it for herself, if she wasn't looking up and out at the immense world that now surrounded her, she wouldn't have believed it.
She walked out a little further into the lab, around one of the corners. From here she could see all the way to the door, which rose like a light brown monolith from out of the distant horizon. The ceiling far above, diffused by the glare of fluorescent lighting, was a featureless haze. "Interesting," she mumbled dully into the microphone, her the scientist part of her babbling away while she struggled to control her emotions. "My eyes are so small, things at a distance appear distorted. My brain must not be used to resolving light waves against the reduced curve of my retina. This is curious, too. I would expect my voice to be so high-pitched as to be inaudible, but I can hear myself just fine. Perhaps my ears, being as small as my vocal cords, are able to register it properly. Hopefully, the camera is able to pick it up as well, though what good this tape will be is as yet unknown."
Now that the initial shock of being shrunk had begun to fade, Bambi started to let her scientific curiosity take control. She began to explore the humongous lab, keeping an eye out for the cockroach she knew was loose in here somewhere. "It's difficult to describe what I'm seeing," she said to the recorder. "Everything's twenty-five times bigger than normal, but it's more than just that. There's a texture to everything now. The floor is very rough, and the legs of the tables, even though sanded and varnished, are bubbled and scored with cracks." She stopped and focused the camera on these things as she spoke, taking off a glove and touching the surface for herself. "It feels even rougher than it looks, like coarse sandpaper. Apparently there's no such thing as 'smooth' to someone as small as me. No wonder insects have no trouble climbing something like this!"
She found a pencil, up against the side of one of the desks, and knelt down to look at it. "Even a pencil is different," she went on. "The wooden part has so many holes it looks like a sponge, though it feels solid enough. The paint is all rippled and wavy. The metal part is covered with tiny bumps and scratches. Even the eraser looks and feels different. It's sort of like a gritty automobile tire, cast in pink instead of black."
Replacing her glove on her hand, she tried to lift the pencil, but it was like trying to pick up a fallen telephone pole--the best she could do was start it to rolling to one side. "It's incredibly heavy," she said to the camera, her explanations coming almost automatically now. "I would've thought my muscles would be more efficient at this size, but apparently not. Objects are just as heavy as they might appear to be."
Leaving the pencil behind, she took a few more steps into the gigantic lab, looking up and around at the monstrous furniture that surrounded her. She had never before felt so tiny and vulnerable. If Nathan were to walk in right now, he could easily step on her without knowing it!
Trying to control her emotions, she forced herself to continue talking. "I'm so s-small!" she muttered, beginning to feel more than just a little bit frightened. "I-I need to describe what I'm feeling, but it's hard. I've never felt like this before--I don't think anyone has. If you're watching this, you can see how big everything is, but you can't know what it's like, can you? I'm so tiny I can't even pick up a p-pencil! But it's not that I feel small, really. I look the same to myself, and I feel normal enough. It's like--like the lab has grown twenty-five times larger! It doesn't even look like the real world any more."
She shuddered and forced herself to go on. "Worse yet, I don't even know if this can be reversed," she managed. "If the collapse took me with it, a residual field might still be there, waiting for me to reverse the polarity. Or, it could be gone, and the best I can hope for is to temporarily enlarge myself."
She suddenly whirled around and began running towards the table where the enlarging machine stood, high up in the sky. "There's only one way to find out which," she said as she hurried along, her tiny boots clacking on the hard, rough floor. "I have to get back up there somehow!"