I had known Dr. Francis Xavier since my early college days—an old friend of my father’s and one of the most brilliant men I’d ever encountered. Even then, there was something extraordinary about him; he possessed that odd intensity of a man whose thoughts constantly escape the present moment. Yet nothing prepared me for the day he summoned me to his home with that cryptic message:

“Come at once. I am ready.”

The note trembled slightly in my hands as I reread it. Ready for what? Xavier had hinted at theories of unimaginable scale: atoms as universes, space as layers upon layers, reality folded into itself like a deck of cards. But he had always cut himself short—“You’ll know soon enough,” he would say.

When I arrived, the old scientist greeted me with that familiar eager glint in his eyes.

“You came quickly,” he said. “Good. You must witness this. I need one sane observer, at least.”

He led me to his laboratory—dark, windowless, lit only by the pale gleam of instruments. In the center of the room stood a strange metal platform with a chair affixed to it, surrounded by coils and glass tubes that flickered faintly.

“This,” he announced, “is my dimensional regulator—my ‘atom reducer,’ if you prefer the vulgar term.”

He pressed his hand to the back of the chair. “Today, I shall prove that an atom is not merely a unit of matter. It is a world.”

I must have looked startled, for he laughed.

“After all, why should size be absolute? A drop of water teems with life invisible to our unaided eyes. Who can say what teems within the atom?”

He seated himself in the device.

“You shall see wonders,” he said.

And he pulled the switch.

---

THE SHRINKING

At first nothing happened. Then a faint humming filled the air, and Xavier’s body shimmered like a heat mirage.

He seemed to tremble… blur… contract.

In a single breath, he diminished by half. His fingers grasped the arms of the chair, shrinking as though drawn inward by some invisible tide. His voice, faint and falling in pitch, reached my ears:

“Marvelous! Perfect! I feel no pain—only… vastness!”

He continued to dwindle.

Now he was no larger than a child. Then the size of a doll, a toy, a thimble. I bent close to see him, but he shrank faster than I could follow.

Soon he was no more than a speck—dancing like dust in a shaft of laboratory light.

“Xavier!” I cried. “Can you hear me?”

A microscopic shout replied:

“Yes! I am… descending! Keep watching!”

But he shrank beyond visibility.

I could hear him no longer.

Only the humming of the machine remained.

---

THE MESSAGE FROM A DISTANCE BEYOND DEPTH

I hovered over the platform, heart racing. Minutes passed. Then—soft as the faintest echo—a voice returned.

It did not come from the chair.
It came from everywhere.

“Listen,” Xavier called. “I have fallen into a world that lies within the atom you know. It is a universe. Vast—limitless—filled with suns and planets.”

His voice quickened, ricocheting strangely.

“The electrons are worlds. Protons—immense suns. The space inside an atom… is as wide as the gulf between stars in our own sky.”

His words thickened with awe.

“I am traveling through galaxies. Oh, if only you could see—colossal globes of fire, spinning worlds drenched in strange light. Civilizations! Yes—there are intelligences here. They pass me by, unaware of my presence. I am smaller than their smallest mote…”

Then the voice dimmed, stretched thin by distance beyond distance.

“I am still shrinking… the stars here begin to dwarf me. I fall deeper—into the atoms of atoms… worlds within worlds… a chain without end…”

The voice dwindled to a whisper.

Then silence.

---

THE RETURN

I stood frozen. All night I waited beside the humming platform, fearing the return of nothing, or worse—some grotesque distortion of my friend.

But at dawn, with the machine still vibrating faintly, a spark flashed above the platform.

Then another.

A ripple of air, a bright shimmer—and suddenly, Xavier materialized, growing upward like a reverse mirage, expanding from a speck to a man in a heartbeat.

He pitched forward into my arms, trembling.

“Water,” he gasped. “And rest.”

He slept for hours, perhaps days. When he finally woke, his eyes bore the weight of a thousand galaxies.

He spoke slowly, carefully.

“There is no smallest point,” he said. “Nor largest. Infinity runs both ways. I traveled downward through universes… and I returned only because I reversed the mechanism in time.”

I asked: “What did you find?”

He stared at the ceiling, voice distant.

“Civilizations in the atoms of my ring, of my blood. Star-clusters within the electrons of a drop of air. And below them—smaller still—other galaxies, and worlds inside the atoms of those.”

“And it does not end,” he whispered.

---

THE TERRIBLE DISCOVERY

After a long pause he added:

“And I realized something more. If every atom contains a universe—as vast and complex as our own—then we ourselves lie inside some greater atom. And that atom lies in another… and another… without boundary.”

He turned to me, face pale.

“What we call reality is merely a rung on an infinite ladder of worlds.”

He touched his machine with a trembling hand.

“And I fear what may happen if I climb again.”

The machine crackled faintly behind us, as if remembering the journey.

Xavier said nothing more.
He never used the device again.

But sometimes, late at night, I would see him seated in his darkened study staring at his hands—as if wondering what galaxies revolved inside the atoms of his skin.

And whether something, somewhere, was staring back.