Colonel Strothers was ushered into an office deep within the Pentagon, to meet privately with General Rogers. The matter was Top-Secret, and Colonel Strothers was being let into the loop.

“What’s this all about?” Colonel Strothers asked.

“This is going to sound incredible,” the general began, “but six months ago we met up with a traveler from a parallel universe named Doctor Zachary Vindakhan. He materialized inside the Pentagon walls!”

“That is incredible!” Colonel Strothers proclaimed. “This isn’t a psychological eval to determine if I’d buy this load of crap, is it general?”

“I know it seems that way,” General Rogers continued, “but I’ll introduce him to you in a couple of minutes after I brief you on the situation. His equipment was damaged, and he needed our help to build an anti-matter reactor to sustain an inter-dimensional cascade reaction that will allow him to return to his own world.”

“Why am I being informed of this?” Strothers asked.

“The President assigned you to this project,” the general explained.

“How far along is the construction of the anti-matter reactor?” Strothers asked.

“It’s completed. He’s about to demonstrate his inter-dimensional portal in a few minutes. Come with me, colonel.”

The two men marched through six security checkpoints, until they came to a mechanical sliding door where General Rogers slid an I.D. card through a scanner and typed in a nine-digit code. When the door slid open, the colonel was amazed. A reactor two stories tall dominated the center of a large room, and a smaller control console sat off to the side, with large cables and wires running from the console to the reactor. A dozen United States Marines stood sentry on a second story catwalk, machine-guns in hand.

A thirtyish man with black hair and brown eyes approached. General Rogers introduced him to Colonel Strothers as Doctor Zachary Vindakhan.

“He looks thirty,” the general explained, “but he’s actually one-hundred and twenty years old!”

“That’s amazing!” Colonel Strothers said. “What’s the key to your longevity?”

“I’m from twelve-thousand years in the future,” Dr. Vindakhan explained, “and science on my world in that time has eliminated the aging process.”

Zachary Vindakhan walked over to the control console, and explained it to Colonel Strothers. “I can open an inter-dimensional cascade vortex at any point of latitude and longitude on Earth.”

Vindakhan punched in a series of keys on the main keyboard of the console. “I’ve locked onto a reality I call the Shrunken Planet. All of the inhabitants of that world are only two inches tall! Now watch as I pull a cow from a pasture on this world at random into their world…”

At that moment, in the cow pasture Vindakhan had locked onto, 14-year-old Bobby Cartwright and his 13-year-old sister Bethany were running across the pasture.

“Hurry, Bethany!” Bobby shouted. “One of these bulls might charge!”

The two teenagers came near a cow feeding in the middle of the field when Dr. Vindakhan activated the inter-dimensional cascade effect; Bobby, Beth, and the cow were pulled into a parallel universe. The two teenagers kept running, while the cow remained in place.

Back at the Pentagon, an alarm sounded, and an automated voice informed Dr. Vindakhan that two humans had been pulled into the dimensional cascade.

“There’s a problem!” Dr. Vindakhan yelled to General Rogers.

“What is it?” the general asked.

“Two kids got pulled through the vortex to the shrunken planet! Hopefully, I can pull them back when I return the cow!”

Vindakhan pushed a series of buttons frantically, re-initiating the inter-dimensional cascade effect.

“According to my scanners, only the cow returned!”

“Can you return the two kids to our world?” General Rogers asked.

“Not with my damaged equipment!” Dr. Vindakhan replied. “I’m going to shrink myself down to the same size as the inhabitants of that shrunken world, and find the kids myself. I lost the lock on their coordinates when I pulled the cow back, so it could take several weeks, or even months, for me to find them! I’m wearing a GPS transponder, so my machine should be able to lock onto my signal, and initiate an inter-dimensional cascade reaction that will pull the two kids and me back to this world!”

“Why do you have to shrink yourself?” Colonel Strothers asked.

“I don’t want to interfere with the balance of the eco-system on the shrunken planet. There’s already two giants there, they don’t need three of us! General Rogers, allow me to instruct you how to operate this equipment while I’m in that other world!”

Meanwhile, back in the alternate universe, Bobby and Bethany were still running. They slowed down when they approached an 18-inch high wall that resembled the Great Wall of China. They stopped.

“Why is everything so small?” Bethany asked. She bent over and ripped a miniature tree out of the ground and examined it. “Where are we?”

“I think that energy field we ran through took us to another world!” Bobby replied.

“You mean in a different part of the galaxy,” Bethany asked, “like a stargate?” “Either that, or a parallel universe! Let’s find some inhabitants, and see whether or not they speak English!”

“Okay!” Bethany replied, and the two of them stepped over the small wall, and headed toward a miniature town in the distance.

Back at the Pentagon, Dr. Zachary Vindakhan made the final preparations and said farewell to General Rogers and Colonel Strothers.

“I’ve programmed the neutrino dissimilator to shrink me a fraction of a second before the inter-dimensional cascade effect is initiated! General Rogers, will you do the honors?”

Zachary Vindakhan stood alone in the middle of the room, several yards from the equipment. When General Rogers activated the control panel as he had been instructed, a field of energy formed around Zachary as he shrank down to two inches tall, and vanished.

He materialized within a walled city. He was two inches tall, but because everything and everyone else was the same proportionate size as him, it seemed to him that he was normal size. The level of technology appeared to be equivalent to Earth during Biblical times. He needed to find out if anyone had spotted “giants.”

By that time, Bobby and Bethany had reached the perimeter of a walled city on another part of the planet. The wall was eighteen inches high, but to the two-inch tall people on the other side of the wall, it was fifty-four feet high. The two teens quickly and easily climbed over the wall, and entered the city. From the perspective of the two-inch tall inhabitants, it seemed they were being invaded by giants. At between five and six feet tall, Bobby and Bethany stood nearly two-hundred feet tall by the measurement of the tiny people.

Some of the people ran away, but others hoped to appease the towering teens. They bowed low to the ground, and chanted, “Titans, titans!” over and over again. “Look,” said Bethany, ”they’re calling us titans! I think I could definitely get used to this place!”

“They’re about two inches tall,” said Bobby.

“Swallowing size!” said Bethany, with a sinister smile.

“They appear to be less technologically advanced than us,” said Bobby, “so I guess they won’t hurt us if you try to swallow one of them!”

“You’re the science nut!” said Bethany.

The diminutive worshippers were about six feet away from Bethany. She walked toward them, and stopped when she was about a foot away.

“Your goddess requires a sacrifice!” said Bethany, as she stood there like an avenging goddess, with her hands on her hips. Bethany knelt down and put her bare right knee on the cobblestone street, and collected one of the tiny men. Bethany stood up, with the captive in her hand.

“Titans can never be appeased!” said Bethany, but her brother interrupted her.

“Bethany, I don’t think it’s such a good idea for you to swallow one of them!”

“Who can stop me? We’re like gods on this world!” Bethany opened her mouth, and lifted the captive above her head.

“What I they make war with us?” said Bobby. “If they used bows and arrows on us, they might be able to kill us, if there’s enough of them!”

Bethany lowered her captive for a moment, to respond to Bobby. “Get real! They’re so tiny, they couldn’t hurt a flea! I’m swallowing him!”

Bethany lifted the captive above her mouth, and lowered him down onto her tongue. Once he was inside her mouth, she clamped her lips shut and thrust the captive to the back of her mouth, tilted her head back, and swallowed him.

“It was easier than I thought! They’re just a little bit smaller than those little green toy army men you used to play with!”

While Bobby and Bethany were getting to know the natives, Zachary Vindakhan had made his way out the city gate, and was heading into the rural area outside of the town. He had not come unprepared; in his backpack was a miniature rocket that was powered by anti-matter. Nobody was around, so he set it of, and the rocket blasted off into space. Now all he had to do was let it make several orbits and use built-in tracking devices to inform him where the two kids were. Zachary used a replication unit to replicate a nutrient bar that he ate while he waited for the results. As he munched away, he could see images on a hand held monitor that relayed signals from the rocket he had launched.