For the next few days, Louise waited, but there was no reply. For the second time since their first exchange of emails, Louise wondered if she had gone too far.

14th September 2001…

Louise jumped in surprise at the presence of a new email from Phil in her inbox.

“Dear Louise, I’m sorry it’s taken a few days to compose myself to tell you this. Most of my family were in the twin towers when they went down on the 11th. I lost them. I’ll always remember you and all you’ve done for me, but I can’t bear the thought of anyone else grieving over losing me, the way I’m grieving now. That’s what would happen if your story about your shrinking ring turned out to be true. I can’t even discuss the idea now. Goodbye,

Phil.”

“Don’t shut me out,” she typed, “Don’t leave me. Let me comfort you. Let me be there for you. It doesn’t have to be…”

She stopped typing in tears, and cancelled the email without sending. She felt the cold sting of truth in the emotions she’d poured into those two deleted and unsent lines, but couldn’t bring herself to send them. She thought back over everything, to the night he’d had indigestion. She wondered if she’d wanted it just that little bit less, if he’d loved her just a little bit less than she loved him. She knew that being eaten might not appeal (even to a giantess vore lover) as much as the idea of eating someone. Yet she couldn’t shake the thought that, if she had been the one with indigestion, neither that nor anything else would have stopped her from sending another reply that night. And she had hinted at wanting clues to his address twice before September 11th, and he’d not answered those parts of her emails.

How could she return to dating guys who didn’t care for her fantasy now? Nothing meant anything after Phil. She briefly went on one date with a much shorter and younger guy, so that she could fantasize about him being shrunken, but at one point late in the date, she asked him to look into her mouth, and opened it wide.

“No,” he had said abruptly, “I’m not a doctor.”

This was all the proof she had needed to know that the new guy would not have been interested in her fantasy, nor even tolerated it. He had pursued her keenly, but only for an ordinairy dull non-vore romance.

She’d faced tragedy herself in life before, but she’d never shut out the people who could have helped her get through it. Yet the whole situation seemed to rob her of any opportunity to appeal to Phil to look at it that way. She had been cheated in perhaps the worst way possible by whoever had planned the destruction of the Twin Towers, and that made her look at some unwatched videos she’d once been given by a friend in the underground media in a whole new light.

February 2005, Boatstreamingin Cove, USA…

“So I put my shrinking ring to another use,” said the voice of Louise Waters, “With it, I fought my way into your cult, and by shrinking myself too small to be seen, I got in here undetected and reduced your colleagues to sub atomic size. Now you’re next. Be glad that the last words of the man you drove away from me have dissuaded me from shrinking you down to four inches and then biting off your rotten heads.”

“For God’s sake! Don’t do it!” said Judas Galt.

“You’ve never served God in your life. Your whole agenda has been the opposite. Yet you have the gall to use his name in vain now!” said the voice, “Carry that blasphemous appeal down to your new home then!”

Judas Galt, leader of the Sons of Molech was the last to go. Somewhere in a tiny microcosm on the floor of his old headquarters, he would live out his life in loneliness, where none of his accumulated wealth would do him any good at all.

Louise turned the ring on herself again, this time twisting it to activate the reverse setting. She enlarged to full size, and thought about that database that the Sons of Molech had brought to her attention. She soon had a suitable search window open and typed in two words: Phil Hermuth.

June 2005…

Phil was on his way home from work late one afternoon. The walk from the station to his home took him through a small nature reserve, which had scenic pathways and plants to look at. He heard a rustling sound in the garden to the left of the path and turned his head. Suddenly he found himself diminishing in size.

He ran into the garden on the right side of the path, as far from the source of the rustling as possible. It would have been quite a coincidence, if the rustling and the shrinking had been unrelated. Just as he reached some cover, he looked back and saw Louise Waters come crawling out of the opposite garden. She stood up and stepped over to look down in at him, towering with confidence.

“How did you find me?” he asked.

“By using the database once owned by the people who caused 9/11,” she said, “They took you from me once. It seemed only fair that they helped me to get you back.”

“Did you … eat them?”

“I thought about it, but I sent them into wherever people go after being shrunken out of sight. The privilege of being eaten is reserved for you,” she said, kneeling down and moving her fingers in between the flowers, heading towards him.

“I told you I don’t want to do this anymore!” said Phil.

“And I told you that you were lucky I didn’t have you in my clutches. It’s hardly for you to decide anymore, is it? Besides, I’ve been watching you for some time, and you also told me you’d love to be chased through a garden. You seem to like this one, and you walk through it five days a week. Do you ever think of being chased through it?”

“I used to, and I have to admit that this is turning me on like nothing else,” said Phil, backing away out of reach, as other plants concealed him and blocked any further approach from her hand.

“You know you won’t escape me for long, but you’re so cute and keen for trying,” she said and stood up again, stepping carefully into the garden.

He looked up, as he continued to edge away from her, but she now had a direct vertical line of sight down to any place that he ran to. When she felt confident that the foliage could not offer him any immediate cover, he saw her reaching down and surrounding him with her hands. They closed gently together, herding him onto the palms and then rose up to hold him in front of her chest, while he looked up at her towering neck and then the mouth which had definite plans for him.

“Couldn’t we just have you put me into your mouth and role play it a bit and then let me out again?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” said Louise, “I know what you wrote in your last email, but you’ll just have to trust me that this will all work out for the best. You don’t have any choice now.”

She took him to his own house.

“It’s a lovely home you have here, especially the dining room,” she said, and licked her lips, “You do still like that, don’t you?”

“I’m … flattered that you can remember what I said about watching women eating and licking their lips,” he said.

“Are you going to be a gentleman and tell me where your cream and fruit are kept?” she asked.

He reluctantly complied, and watched her whipping cream and pulling stalks off strawberries. Then she left him on the cupboard top and went back to her car and came in with a pavlova she’d bought. She took it out, and lowered him into it without mercy or concern.

“Don’t let the stickiness bother you,” she said, “I’ll soon lick it all off. Don’t pretend you won’t enjoy that part of our dinner date.”

“Don’t YOU pretend you can expect me to enjoy getting lost in your stomach.”

“Okay, I won’t, but you can’t avoid it either.”

He watched as she put the pavlova into the oven and sat in front of the glass door smiling in at him and licking the tip of her finger to prepare him for his own upcoming experience. Then she took him to the bench, added the cream and strawberries and took him to the dining room table.

Louise laughed, as she ate pavlova eagerly with her spoon, licking her lips frequently and gulping and swallowing and cleaning her mouth with water from a glass and jug.

She took out a list and he noticed a series of lines, with boxes next to them.

“Shrink to tiny size,” she said, and ticked that one off, “Chase through a garden, tick. Lick my lips, tick. Cook, tick. Sorry I couldn’t manage the dates, but you made that difficult. Now all that remains is to be able to tick off eating you.”

“Well that really will tick me off,” he said.

Louise laughed again.

“Puns in the face of … or should I say the mouth of adversity,” she added, “You knew where you were headed from the moment you saw me in the nature reserve. It’s almost over now. Goodbye little man.”

Louise forced him into her mouth and slid him back and forth, eagerly sucking all the pavlova remains from his tiny body. Then she pushed him to the back of her tongue. He sat and held tightly to her back teeth, while he watched each of her fingers coming into her mouth, one by one, to be cleaned by a quick slide along the front half of her visible tongue. Her soft pink fingers looked adorable, as did the palm of her retracting hand each time he could focus clearly on it. That such a hand had held him after reducing him that day, he considered, had been pleasant in itself, if not for the overlying experience that was to come.

Then he saw her fingers opening and closing in her hand, and realised that she was doing the kind of wave that models did when seeking to acknowledge the attentions of their fans either on catwalks or in public places where they had been seen. Louise was, he still felt, more lovely to him than any model, and she was about to do something to him which no model had ever thought of before.

“I never had those kisses and dates we talked about,” he called, “Maybe we could do that firs-“

Suddenly he felt drawn backwards and fell feet first uncontrollably into Louise’s throat. She gulped with no effort at all, and he went down inside her chest, and towards her tummy, and then suddenly, he was back on the table looking up at her.

“I told you to trust me,” she said, “I added a teleportation effect to the ring’s design. Nobody has to grieve you. I read your emails. I never stopped loving you, and I never stopped working on giving you a solution that would work for both of us … if you’d ever consider wanting it again. If you don’t, I’ll let you go.”

“Like this I guess I do,” he said, “Can that thing make me big again, and then small again?”

“Of course. I just wish you hadn’t shut me out before.”

“People died, Louise. I needed time.”

“You let me think you needed forever, forever without me and everything we dreamed and talked about.”

“Maybe I should have turned to you. I just didn’t know you could teleport me. I thought you could really shrink me and eat me, if your September 10th email was to be believed, and I’m sure now that it is. Back then I just didn’t want it. I’m sorry, but you should be too. You scared me like nothing else today. You could have told me about the teleportation before you ate me.”

“Well from now on you’ll know. I wanted at least one run with you thinking it was forever.”

“I guess that never bothered me when we were emailing. It did add a certain spice to the whole experience. I do still love you more than anyone else, Louise, and in ways that no other guy or girl could understand.”

“I think your dining etiquette’s improved a lot in the last few minutes,” said Louise, “And I still love you too.”

Although Captain Miniature and his friends at the Growe Institute didn’t know it yet, their arch nemesis Red Moll was now without the backing of the organisation that had sponsored and instigated most of her recent activity. Neither did Louise Waters know that she had also shut down the lifeline of Sydney Australia’s leading arch criminal.

January, 1997….

There was a week of the Australian long summer holidays to go. Lewis Rickland was 14 ½ . He lived in Lindfield on Sydney’s North Shore, in New South Wales.  At the end of 9th grade, he had been withdrawn from Rural Dural Boys High School, which had sustained extensive damage from four giantesses (Rash Old Girl, The Gobbler, The Choker and Fatwoman, in previous chapters). At the commencement of 10th Grade, he would be at  another school situated on the boundary of the Lower North Shore and the City, just North of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.  However, while the school holidays were still on, he wrote to Fatwoman at Smoked Ham Asylum for the Culinary Insane:

Dear Fatwoman,

After you ate me, I really enjoyed it for a few hours, but then I felt your tummy about to digest me, and so I began to wish I could get out. Somehow I teleported out of you and found myself back in the school grounds. You were gone, and I later learned where you’d been taken. It was so much fun that I wish we could do it again. I came to you, because I had a crush on the idea of you gobbling me and wanted you to do it. This is my address, so you can write to me ….

He waited for a while, and soon got a reply from Fatwoman.

Dear Lewis,

It’s very sweet of you to contact me the way you did, and to offer your explanation. I really liked the taste of you, and gulping you down was one of my greatest pleasures. I would love to eat you again, but there’s no way out of here for me now, and no way to recover my growing powers, as long as the Gland Band suppresses them.

I think that it’s best for us to go our separate ways, so that you can find a girl your own age and hopefully one who reciprocates your gobbling fantasy with her own appetites.

There will always be a special place for you in my heart … and in my tummy,

Love,

Fatwoman xxx

One Saturday afternoon, he felt like reading a novel in a park, but not a park full of people playing sport and exercising active dogs. He pondered on a suitable location, and then remembered a very small park. It could be reached either by walking through the car park behind the Lindfield library on the Pacific Highway, and past the tennis courts, or by walking down a lane way between the back of the Pacific Highway shops and the railway line.

Lewis chose the latter route and settled himself with his book at around two in the afternoon. He had not been reading that long, when three girls around his own age came over and introduced themselves. They were Georgie Donald, Rosie Villiers and Lynda Fielding. It was Lynda who caught his eye. She had long brown hair, laughing happy teenaged eyes, a breathtaking smile, and the air of someone who could create her own fun wherever she went. She was four feet and eleven inches tall, while he was five foot five.

And her mouth was the very essence of the gts vore crush that Fatwoman had alluded to!

Lewis was only in the early stages of lately developed adolescence. He knew that Lynda had made an unprecedented impression on him, but he had no idea that this was meant to lead to dating and kissing. Though 14 or 15 like himself, Lynda had matured much sooner, and wanted keenly to undertake such experiences. Lewis vaguely sensed her fondness for him, but was unable to respond. The girls had been amusing themselves in the park, while their fathers played tennis on the Saturday afternoons. It seemed, from what they said, that it would continue to be a weekly event.

One thing was for certain. Lewis would turn up at that park again the following Saturday afternoon, as though he intended to read again, and hope that somehow something would be revealed of what might come of his having met Lynda Fielding.

The following Saturday, the one before school went back (to year 10 in his case), he was there again. While he was reading, the girls turned up and called out their ‘hello’ greetings to him. They went into the change rooms and soon came out, wearing a different combination of each other’s clothes, and paraded themselves in poses to gain his attention. He smiled and waited to see what would happen next. They went back into the change rooms once more and then came out in a third reshuffling of their combined wardrobe. Still the boy lacked the slightest inkling of what he was meant to do next.

Not willing to lose heart, despite the boy’s apparent inability to take the lead, Lynda led her friends back to their fathers and asked for some money to take up to the corner store for afternoon tea. Then the girls came over to Lewis and invited him to go with them for a walk up to the shops. When they reached the shops, Lynda asked Lewis if he’d like an ice cream.

“I should have the money to buy you one,” he said, embarrassed at the fact that he had spent all of his allowance earlier in the week.

“No, that doesn’t matter,” said Lynda, and persuaded him to accept one.

They all walked back to the park, eating their ice creams. Lewis was driven into an unexplained series of sensations at the sight of Lynda licking her ice cream. How he wished that she had been eating him. When they had finished, the girls’ fathers concluded their last set of tennis and asked the girls to be ready to go home. Lewis was determined to be there the next Saturday afternoon, if he had to spend the whole week trying to understand what was to be done about the fact that one girl, it seemed, was very important to him.

Yet there was a greater problem to be faced than his latent lack of maturity. In years 7 and 8 at school, Lewis had been lazy and dishonest and disruptive at school, achieving grades far below his potential, trying to get away with a minimum of work, and reaching the point where his pranks and misbehaviour during class time brought him within one step of being expelled from the school.

Throughout year 9, his father had closely policed his homework and monitored his grades. He had moved from one of the lowest positions in the order of class merit to one of the highest. Now, on the Monday night of the first week back at school, and a new school at that, his father told him that he had to take his school certificate year even more seriously and study hard in his bedroom every Saturday afternoon, for the whole year around, not merely wait until a few weeks before the exams at the end of each term.

Lewis was heartsick with the secret loss of his only chance to see Lynda again. It seemed that school work, with all its daunting demands, was going to take over his life. He decided that Friday afternoons had to be his own special time, away from school, and away from home. Instead of alighting from the train at Lindfield after school, he would alight at the next station, Killara, and take a longer walk home, giving himself more time to daydream about his hopes and dreams for life in general.

He walked from Killara station, to Stanhope Road and along that road, until he came to a driveway with a large sign:

SWAIN GARDENS

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC SEVEN DAYS

TEA ROOM OPEN ONLY ON SUNDAY AFTERNOONS.

He walked along the driveway and passed tall bamboo, and came to beautiful footpaths leading over narrow bridges and streams, up slopes, around curves, past trees and the loveliest gardens. It was the most serene enclosure he had ever seen. There was something about this place, which calmed the awful sense of unfairness he had felt all week, since losing his chance to see Lynda. He had moments of daydreaming that Lynda would walk into the Swain Gardens too and say something lovely to him, but it was not to be. Yet this place was like a sanctuary. It seemed to promise to him, that Year 10 would hold many pleasant surprises to come, not a dead end to his newly discovered dreams of being with a special girl.

He was so taken by the beauty of the scenery, that he took his camera, a recent Christmas present, out of his schoolbag and walked around the gardens, carefully selecting locations to shoot from, to make the 24 available photographs on the film last. Soon there were 11 shots left in the camera. He saw that, on the far edge of the gardens, there was a one foot high stone wall, with steps on either side of it. On the far side, the step led down to the start of a long bushwalk pathway. He decided to stand on the far side, in the middle of the pathway, and take a wide angle photograph which would capture as much of the gardens as possible in a single long distance shot.

Yet the pathway was curving out of sight, only metres from the wall. There was no way to get the scenery of his choice framed properly if he stayed on the path. 

He stepped gently over some ferns and stood in the bushes, between two clumps of shrubbery, and began adjusting his stance to a position that would enable him to hold the camera perfectly steady. He remembered what his Grandfather had said about taking a slight breath just before pressing the button to take the picture. He bent his legs slightly for steadiness, looked through the eye piece and exhaled, pressing the button gently.

After taking the picture, Lewis stood up again and felt confused. The shrubbery had seemed shorter before. Now it was up to his neck. Had he been so focussed on taking his picture, that his eyes had not correctly processed the height of the shrubbery? He walked back to the step, and felt confused again. This time the wall seemed two feet tall. He had to exert his legs a little to get up the step. He just didn’t understand it. Everything in the garden seemed to have doubled in height and width, since he’d taken that picture. It was as if the exercise had altered his vision. It just didn’t make sense.

Nor did it really matter, he decided. The main thing was that he had found such a beautiful retreat from the teenage angst of his life, and the incongruity of the apparent and actual sizes of the garden fascinated him in a strange way which added to the pleasure of the day’s discovery. He walked around the garden, using up his remaining photographs, and then saw the alternative path which had a sign at the start.

ROAD EXIT WALK, Approx 5 minutes.

He decided to go that way, having passed Northcote Road on his way along Stanhope Road. It would be a nice round trip to get to know for future Friday afternoon retreats. The pathway was easy enough to follow, but there was a set of upward steps halfway along, which taxed his leg muscles again, just as the step on the far side of the wall had done.

Soon Lewis reached the street and began walking along the road, until he came to an intersection with a sign that took his breath away.

BRENTWOOD AVENUE.

In a much smaller print, below the words “Brentwood Ave” was the word identifying the suburb of Turramurra.

“But I went in at Killara,” he thought, “And the gardens surely couldn’t have been three suburbs long.”

Lewis had been walking along the footpath, concentrating on the pathway in front of him, but now he looked to the side, at a parked car, and the size of it caught his attention too. He walked over and saw that he was shorter than the car’s height, even when standing on his tiptoes. He could not see over the car. He studied the front fences of houses in the street, having walked past them before and mistaken them for high walls. The more he thought about it, the more the height of the sign seemed unusually high too. Were they really that different in Turramurra?

Then a lady came walking along the footpath with her daughter, who was wearing a school uniform. The girl had the facial appearance of a seven year old. Yet she was around the same height as Lewis, he realised, as they drew closer. Lewis had been used to the fact that he almost came up to the height of the average adult woman, but this lady was so tall, that Lewis estimated her height at around ten foot eight inches. The lady smiled down at him in a friendly way, and asked, “Are you alright, little boy? Is your Mum around somewhere?”

“I’m 14,” he said.

“Is he one of the dwarves, Mum?” asked the girl.

“No Stefanie, don’t say things like that,” said the lady, assuming he must be a midget, “Can I give you a lift home? Our car’s just over there.”

“I guess so,” said Lewis, “I’ve … found myself a long way from Lindfield.”

She drove him to his front driveway and dropped him off. Yet everything about his property seemed as unexpectedly larger by a factor of two as the surprises he’d had in Turramurra. He was about to step into his driveway, to try to puzzle it out, when he noticed an unfamiliar mother playing with an unfamiliar infant son in the front garden. Again, the woman was tall enough to dwarf Lewis Rickland. It wasn’t his family at all! He studied the driveway carefully. There were small garden beds on each side of it. They were twice as large as he expected them to be, yet they were still parallel to each other and to the driveway.

“Parallel! That’s it!” he thought, “It’s wild as can be, but it’s the only thing that could ever explain this, “I’ve come to a parallel earth.”

Something had happened back at the Swain Gardens. When had it occurred? He had first noticed it after he had taken the picture. It had to have something to do with the place he had been standing when he took the shot. He had to get back to the Gardens. On this earth, which he would call Earth B or Earth Double, in deference to the size factor of its people and objects, the identical Swain Gardens had been built in Brentwood Avenue, Turramurra. On his own earth, which he would call Earth A or Earth Single, the Swain Gardens had been built in Northcote Road (and Stanhope Road) in Killara.

“I just hope that my school student railway pass works on the trains on this earth,” thought Lewis, ”I’ve got to get home. I’d love to come here again, but I can’t get home late enough to have to explain all this to my parents.”

He ran himself to exhaustion, heading for Lindfield station with his schoolbag tiring him further. He caught the train to Turramurra, remembered the view from the lady’s high car window of the streets to take, and ran from the station to Swain Gardens Double. He soon reached the Gardens, glad that daylight saving and the warmer time of the year would prevent the sun from going down and stranding him there lost in the dark.

He went to the exact same spot as he had found himself after taking the picture and stood there again, waiting, he hoped, to be shifted back to the familiar earth where everything would suddenly seem normal sized again.

Yet nothing happened. The shrubs were still up to his neck.

“It must have something to do with my positioning on that spot too,” he thought, “What did I do? … Oh yes. I slightly bent my legs. It must have contributed.”

Lewis bent his legs slightly, just as he had done for steadiness when taking the picture, and kept his eyes on the shrubbery. Then it happened. One second the shrubs were up to his neck. The next he was standing next to shrubs that were not even up to his waist. He had visited an alternate earth for his after school sporting activity.

He thought about the spot that he had chosen for his picture. It was off the path, and it was unlikely that anyone else had seen fit to step into that spot, let alone slightly bend his legs and find himself in another earth. Lewis’s discovery would most likely remain his own private revelry. Swain Gardens was the critical place on both earths. It had a borderline bush section, which contained the one and only position that linked the two earths. He thought of all the television shows, which had hypothesized fictional ways to travel between earths. Some suggested falling through black holes in space. Others involved advanced scientific technology. Others involved using super powers to attain certain speeds or frequencies of vibration. None of these methods had turned out to be accurate, yet the writers of fiction had unknowingly been 100% on target in their speculation about the presence of parallel earths in other dimensions.

The only thing that could have improved on the joy of his discovery would have been the opportunity to share it with Lynda Fielding.

Lewis did not know the scientific facts taught at the Growe Institute (as detailed in an earlier chapter) about the gts genes in boys and girls. Like many boys with giantess fantasies, he had the power of teleportation that inherently came with the gts gene in boys. However, having come to the Swain Gardens, which was actually a grouped series of inter-dimensional gateways, he had found one of the positions in the Swain Gardens, which would allow him to use his teleportation power to travel beyond his own dimension.

Lewis practiced positioning his legs on that spot a few times, and enjoyed the sensation of travelling between the earths. Then he looked at his watch. He would be late for dinner, if he did not head home quickly. He abandoned his plan for a leisurely stroll through the back streets of Killara and Lindfield, and ran home, puffing as he pushed himself to ignore the exertion which had already taken him through the proportionately larger streets of Turramurra Double.

Lewis simply couldn’t wait for the next Friday. He wondered what other geographical inconsistencies existed between the two earths. Was the Swain Gardens the only one, or were there many? On the Sunday morning, Lewis wasted no time in heading straight for the Swain Gardens and into Swain Gardens Double. He had packed a picnic lunch, having truthfully told his parents that he was going for a picnic in a public garden reserve.

He sat down on the lawn to eat, enjoying the double sized version of the beautiful scenery, which had originally caught his eye in Swain Gardens Single. After a while, an older girl came walking into the gardens with a picnic of her own.

“Do you mind if I spread my rug next to yours?” she asked, “This looks like a nice spot you’ve found.”

“Sure,” said Lewis.

“Thank you,” she said, “I’m Jenny Wilmer.”

“I’m Lewis Rickland.”

“What year are you in at school?”

“Year 10,” he said.

“I don’t know how much else you have going on to fill up your week. I’m 18 now, and in my first year at university. I run a youth group on Friday nights at Four Ways Hall in Ryan Road, Turramurra. It’s for all high school years 7 to 12. There’s games and activities and supper. It starts at 6:30 and finishes at 10:00. I’ve been inviting any high school boy or girl I meet along, and the numbers are building up. You’d have a good night at the end of the school week.”

“If my parents don’t mind me going, I’d love to come,” he thought.

“Show them this leaflet with the times and address of the hall, if you like,” said Jenny, and took out a leaflet from a pile in her picnic basket.

“Thank you,” said Lewis, hoping his parents would never drive past the Ryan Road location on his own world, if there was no such place as Four Ways Hall on Earth Single. It would take some explaining, to say the least.

This was an opportunity too good to miss. He would be unlikely to ever have the chance to see Lynda again, but now he could meet other girls. They would all be twice the size of the girls on his own world, but this seemed to make them even more interesting. Most boys were taller than most girls. So most of the girls on earth double would not quite be twice his height, but they would nonetheless be significantly taller.

The pamphlet was like a large poster to Lewis. He folded it and put it in his basket.

He asked his father if it would be alright to go to the youth group each week. His father tentatively approved, on the condition that his school work didn’t suffer.

Suddenly his week of school work, and even the Saturday afternoon which rounded it off, seemed much easier to bear. He threw himself into his studies, and spent around an hour each night lying awake in bed, thinking about the youth group on Earth Double. When Friday came, he went to school as usual, and then went home, discarded his school clothes and changed into his casual clothes for the evening. He walked to Swain Gardens and made the now familiar journey to Swain Gardens Double. He walked the tall streets to Ryan Road, having already been aware of the same streets (which corresponded to those of Earth Single) which led to a point on the map that Jenny Wilmer had given him. Then he was able to use the map to get to Four Ways Hall in Ryan Road.