Part 1
Beyond the Stars
by Ray Cummings
Ace Books Inc. 1120 Avenue of the Americas New York 36, N.Y.
RAY CUMMINGS’ novels in Ace editions: THE MAN WHO MASTERED TIME (D-173) BRIGANDS OF THE MOON (D-324) BEYOND THE VANISHING POINT (D-331) WANDL THE INVADER (D-497) THE SHADOW GIRL (D-535)
BEYOND THE STARS
Copyright ©, 1963, by Ace Books, Inc.
[Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
An Ace Book, by arrangement with Gabrielle Cummings Waller.
Magazine version serialized in _Argosy All-Story Magazine_.
To DONALD A. WOLLHEIM
_With affectionate regard and appreciation_ _of his loyal friendship through the years._
Printed in U.S.A.
ONE OF THEIR ATOMS—OUR UNIVERSE!
“The scene outside my window was a chaos: showers of white sparks were rushing at us. I tried to shout a warning, but instead I laughed with a touch of madness. I realized then that these sparks were really stars—and they were passing through us. I could see their luminous white points beaming within the vehicle as the stream flowed through. These stars were mere electrons and our vehicle comparatively was a puff of vapor.”
Racing through the vast depths of space in a vehicle larger than the universe itself—a fantastic concept and one that only the mind of a master pioneering science-fiction writer could conceive and then translate into a classic tale of exciting adventure in a cosmos _BEYOND THE STARS_.
Beyond the Stars
I “CALLING FOR HELP!”
There is a saying in the Service that when Liner 40 N runs late the whole world waits. It may be true enough; I suppose it is. But to me, as Commander 3 of Liner 40 N on that night in May, 1998, it was a particularly annoying truth.
For I was running late; at the Azores I was a good twenty-eight minutes behind where I should have been, and it hardly made things any easier for me to contemplate an impatient world awaiting me.
All the way from Madrid our port meter 8 had been giving trouble. Then at 15 W. I had no sooner left the coast than a surge of wind from the northwest had swung down upon us, and I lost a good eight minutes trying unsuccessfully to climb over it. A mood of ill-nature possessed me. I was just twenty-four years old, the youngest of the three commanders who alternated on successive flights of the 40 N; this was only my seventh circle since promotion from the small equatorial liner of the East, and running the famous 40 N late under the eyes of a disapproving world disgruntled me.
At Meridian 45 W. the connecting Director at New York called me up. The Northern Express, flying north on Meridian 74 W., was already at New York waiting for me. The Director wasn’t very pleasant about it. If I held up the express in its flight over the Pole and down 106 E., every connection in the Eastern Hemisphere would be disarranged.
The mercurial screen on my desk glowed with its image of the director’s reproving face.
“You can’t expect McIleny to make up your lost time,” he told me. “Not on a night like this. The Bureau reports head winds for him all up to Baffin Land.”
“I’m having a few head winds myself,” I retorted.
But I grinned, and he caught my grin, and smiled back at me.
“Do the best you can,” he said. And disconnected.
I made no ocean stops; but the director at 55 was a fussy fellow. I was due to pass him at ten thousand feet, to clear the north-south lanes for the non-stop Polar freighters; and with this wind and the fog which was now upon me I knew I would receive a sharp rebuke from 55 if I passed too high.
A hum sounded at one of the dozen mercurial screens beside me. Director 55 already annoyed! But it was not he. The small rectangle of screen glowed with its formless silver blurs, took form and color. A girl’s face, ash-blond hair wound around her forehead, her white throat, with the square neck of a pale-blue jacket showing. And her earnest azure eyes searching mine, lighting with recognition as on her own screen she caught my image. Alice!
My annoyance at the threatened director’s call-down died. I seized my headphone, heard her voice.
“Len?”
“Yes, Alice.”
“I’ve been trying to get you all the way from Greenwich. They wouldn’t let me through, not until I told them it was important—I had to get you.” She spoke fast against the moment when the Vocal Traffic Timer would cut her off. “Len, grandfather wants you to come up and see us. At once—when you’re through with this circle. Will you?”
She saw the question on my lips.
“Don’t ask me now—no time, now, Len. But it’s important, and grandfather . . . do you know where I can find Jim? We want him too, you and Jim.”
“He’s in the Anglo-Detective Division, London Air Service, New York Branch.”
“Yes, I know. But he’s in the air tonight. How can I get him?” Her smile was whimsical. “When I asked for a tracer, the Timer over there told me to get the hell off the air. I guess he thought I wanted to find Jim just to tell him I loved him.”
Her image blurred.
The Mid-Atlantic Timer’s voice broke in. “Fifteen seconds. Last call.”
“I’ll get Jim,” I said hastily. “Bring him with me. Soon as we can get there.”
“Yes. We’re waiting for you. And Len, you won’t need to sleep first. You can sleep after you get here. And tell Jim—”
A click silenced her. The screen went dark.
What could she want of me? It was pleasant to have seen and heard from her, this granddaughter of old Dr. Weatherby. In the stress of getting my appointment and continuous examinations and tests between voyages, I had not seen Alice since leaving the Equatorial Run. Nor Jim Dunkirk either.
I went after him now. The tracers could not rebuff me as they did Alice. They found him at last—at 120°E., 85°N. He was coming up over the Pole, and down Baffin Bay making for New York. His jolly face, with its ever present grin and the shock of fiery red hair above it, glowed on my screen.
“Well, Len, say, it’s great to see you!”
“Alice just called me—Alice Weatherby. Doc wants us both—you and me—something important. Wants to see us. You off at New York?”
“You bet,” he grinned. “Had a chase down through Tibet; every cursed murderer thinks the grand idea is for him to swoop it for Lhasa and parts unknown. I have one here, now. When I get him in his airy cage I’m off duty for a while. Alice wants us?”
“Yes. I don’t know what for. She didn’t have a chance to—”
“Fifteen seconds. Last call.”
“The infernal bedamned it is!” came Jim’s belligerent voice.
“Last call, Liner 40 N—limit ninety seconds by general orders.” The Timer was imperturbably impersonal.
But not Jimmy Dunkirk. “You cut me off,” he roared. “I’ll have the General Inspector tell you who you are in thirty seconds. This is Chief Dunkirk, Patrol Liner A 22, Anglo-Detective Division. I’ve got a murderer here—understand? A murderer! Important official business.”
With the Timer cowed, Jimmy would have talked all night. But I was on duty.
“Good,” I said. “I’ll call you at your office after you get in.”
“Old Weatherby wants us?”
“Yes. Off, Jim.”
* * * * *
It was well toward dawn when I hooked up with him; together we flew up the river, where on the Tappan Zee, at the northern borders of the city, Dr. Weatherby had his home.
Alice was under the landing stage when we descended in the hand lift.
“Len, Jim, I’m glad to see you.” She gave each of us one of her cool white hands. “Grandfather is waiting to—Jim, let go of my hand; you’re squeezing my fingers. That hurts!”
He flung it away. He had always done that with Alice, to devil her.
“Next time,” she said soberly, “you bow to me. That’s all.”
He laughed gleefully. “Right. Sure, that’s safer when you look so pretty.”
She was indeed pretty. A tall, slender girl—an inch taller than Jim. Big, serious blue eyes she had, and that braided mass of ash-blond hair. She was dressed now in a pale blue jacket like a tunic, to her thighs, and long silver stockings from beneath the China-silk trousers that flared above her knees.
She smiled at Jim. “I’d never take _you_ seriously. Dolores says—”
Jim sobered. “Dolores.”
“Dolores is waiting to see you both. She’s very excited.”
Dolores, the little sister of Alice. I never saw her without a pang. In this great age of science she is a pathetic example of what science cannot do.
Our wonderful, marvelous age of science! We pride ourselves on it. But this girl had been born blind, and she was one of those rare cases where all the learned surgeons of our learned world could not bring the light to her.
Jim called, “’Lo there, Dolores.”
“Jimmy! Is that you? I’m so glad to see you!”
See him! There was, to me, a grim pathos in her conventional words.
“Len is here too, Dolores,” Alice said gently.
“Len? Oh, how do you do, Len?” Her hand reached and touched my hair in recognition. Then she turned back to Jim. “I’m glad you’re here, Jimmy. They told me you were coming.”
He swept her up, whirled her through the air like a child, and set her gasping upon her feet.
“Well, well, how’s my little friend Dolores, huh? Want to do that again? Come on!” He whirled her again and panted. “Getting too big . . . all grown up. Say, Len, she’s prettier every day, isn’t she?”
* * * * *
Dr. Weatherby was seventy-five years old at this time when he sent for Jim and me. He met us on the lower terrace of his home. He was a squat, powerfully thick-set figure, with long ape-like arms and a thick back slightly humped.
His head was overlarge, made to seem larger by its great mass of iron-gray hair. His face, large of feature, was unlined, save by the marks of character stamped upon it. A kindly face it was, smiling with friendship, but always stern in repose.
“Well, my boys, you came promptly,” he greeted us. “That’s fine. Come in.” His huge hands gripped us with a strength that made Jim pretend to wince and grin mockingly at Alice. “Come in. We’ll sit in the garden upstairs.”
He led us up the inclines through his rambling house and to its roof, where in the starlight we sat on leafy couches in a garden blooming with flowers, shrubs and coned ferns.
It was about an hour before dawn, cloudless, moonless—a brilliant firmament of gems strewn upon their purple velvet. Venus was rising now to be the morning star and herald the dawn; red Mars, lying opposite and low, glowed like the ashless end of a cigarro.
Below us over the parapet of roof was the crowded countryside, wan and still in the starlight, with the thread of river beyond—a river of silver with the blue-white lights of its boats skimming the surface. A few planes were overhead, the small local airline from Albany skimming past with a whir of its fans.
Dr. Weatherby chatted with us, rebuked me smilingly for running the 40 N late, and listened gravely, with occasional interested questions, to Jim’s vivid account of his world chase after the murderer, while Dolores snuggled up against him, thrilled, and timidly held his hand.
“Well, well, you boys do have an interesting life. Youth coming forward. Youth can do anything—the world waits on youth.”
“It did tonight,” said Alice, with a sly glance at me.
I wondered what Dr. Weatherby wanted us for. He had not hinted at it. He had spoken of a morning meal, and then we must have some sleep.
Then, abruptly he said, “I should not have sent for you unless it was important. It is. The fact that I need you—” He stopped as suddenly as he had begun.
I don’t know why a great tenseness should have fallen upon us all. But it did. I felt it. And in the insuing silence little Dolores left Jim and crept to her grandfather, leaning against him.
I began, lamely, “We came, of course—”
* * * * *
Dr. Weatherby was staring off at the stars moodily, with a look so far away I could have fancied he was gazing, not at the stars, but beyond them. And then he tore himself back, and smiled, lighting a cigarro, flipping the torch at me and asking me to step on it.
“I have so much to tell you,” he said. “I hardly know how or where to begin. You know, of course, something of my life, my work.
“Leonard, and you, Jim, I believe you’re familiar in a general way with what the physicists think of the atom? Radiant matter—these electro-rays that seem to solve everything and yet only add to the mystery?
“You know that savants would tell us that space is curved; so Einstein told us years ago? Well, _I_ will tell you this. To-morrow, after you have slept, I believe I can make clear to you the real construction of our material universe.”
His hand checked us. “I have been working since 1970 along these lines. Alice recently has been helping me. And then Dolores—
“This child here, in the dark, it has been given her to see things denied to our science. Years and years ago a scientist proclaimed that _thoughts_ themselves are a mere vibration, like light and heat and sound, and all these mysterious rays and flying electrons—electricity itself. They are all the same, though we name them differently.”
He had been talking swiftly, but quietly. “Tell them, Dolores.”
“A big open space,” she said slowly. “Mountains and a broad valley. A cliffside. People there on a ledge. A young man and a young woman, very white and pale, with blood on the man’s face. They were standing on a height, with a dark cavern behind them.
“Other people, or monsters down in the valley: something vague but horrible as a nightmare with a nameless horror. And the man was calling, _Help_. Not the word. I could not hear that, but I knew. Calling to me. He keeps on calling. I can hear him so often. Calling to _me_!”
She said it so strangely. At once it seemed uncanny, weird, almost gruesome. A thrill very akin to fear ran over me. This was not science. But Dr. Weatherby’s calm, precise voice was scientific enough.
“That was several years ago. We have found since that she is receiving thought-vibrations, not from here on earth, not from the planets, or the stars, but from beyond the stars. The greater realms out there, suspected to exist for so long, which now I know and can prove to exist!”
His voice had risen in an excitement, an exaltation. He went on more swiftly, “But all that is nothing. I wanted you to come here and help me. Dolores has had thoughts from out there beyond the stars . . . and her own answering thoughts have been answered. Communication!
“Oh, I have guarded against delusion! I have sent messages through Dolores of scientific import, and been answered with scientific thoughts all beyond this child’s comprehension. Communications with the great unknown—the infinity of distance unfathomable.
“That started a year ago. Now I have done more. I have learned how to get there. I can transport myself, my girls and you! I am ready to make the journey now. That is why I want you, and need you. We are going. We want you to come with us, out beyond the stars!”
II THE DEAD WHITE THING
“In the plan of the universe,” said Dr. Weatherby, “we find a conception gigantic, infinite, and yet it all has a simplicity. I want most earnestly to have you understand me, Leonard and Jim.”
He gazed at us with a gentle smile. We had had our morning meal, and had slept long and heavily, and now it was evening twilight. We sat in the big livingroom on the lower floor of the Weatherby home. Dolores, as before, cuddled against her grandfather’s side. Alice busied about the house, but presently she joined us. Dr. Weatherby’s manner was as earnest as his words. He added, looking at me, “I want to be very clear, Leonard. This thing that we are to do—this journey, in which if you will not join me I shall make alone—”
“By the infernal, you won’t make it alone while I’m alive,” Jim cried. “The detective service loses its best tracker, beginning right away!”
Dr. Weatherby held out his hand. “My boy!” He could say no more. And on Dolores’ face was a radiance. Then Dr. Weatherby turned to me.
“And you, Leonard—will you go?”
The direct question startled me.
Would I go out there into eternity? Beyond the stars, into eternal time, and over space unfathomable, to encounter what now no human mind could grasp? But, like Jim, I was practically alone in the world and I was free to make any decision without fear of hurting others.
Nevertheless, to give up my commission, as youngest commander of the great 40 N, to disappear, lose all I had earned, gave me pause. To return, perhaps never. Wanderers beyond the stars! Was this not, perhaps, too bold a thing for human endeavor?
I heard my voice saying quietly, “Why, of course I’m going with you, Dr. Weatherby.”
I was aware that Alice had come in to sit beside me, her cool white hand impulsively pressing mine. And Dolores was saying,
“Alice, they’re going! Isn’t that wonderful? We’re all going, just as soon as we can get ready!”
* * * * *
“A strange simplicity,” Dr. Weatherby was saying. “First, let me make this clear: when I say universe—the construction of our universe—I mean everything that exists, or has, or will exist, the smallest entity of our infinitesimal atomic world to the greatest conception of what may lie beyond the stars. Does that sound complicated? Let me say again, it is simple.”
He leaned toward us, with his thick, strong hands gripped in his lap. “I want you to realize first that we are dealing with infinities. The human mind is so finite, so limited. You must cast off most of your instinctive methods of reasoning. You understand me?”
“We’ll try,” I said.
He nodded and went on.
“Conceive a void of nothingness. No space, no time, no material bodies. Just nothing. That was the beginning. Do not try to wonder _when_ it was. A billion years ago . . . a billion billion. Not at all. You must not think of when, because _when_ implies time. There was no _time_. There could be no time without material bodies to create movement and events. For time in itself is nothing but the measurement between events.
“We have then, a nothingness. A vortex. A whirlpool.”
“A vortex of nothingness?” I exclaimed.
“Exactly. Why, back in the 1920’s, Leonard, scientists recognized that the basic entities of matter were only whirlpools. They hoped then to find some fundamental substance, like ether. But there is none.
“A whirlpool, by its very motion, simulates substance. And, in the last analysis, that is all which exists—an apparent solidity. Divide anything, probe into anything, you find only a _motion_ of something else smaller which is apparently real. But then take that smaller thing. Divide it. You find more empty spaces, more nothingness. And other yet smaller things in violent motion.
“Why, Leonard, don’t you realize that’s what puzzled scientists? From 1900 on, they puzzled over it. They found a solid bar of iron to be composed of molecules. They said: ‘Oh yes, we understand. This solidity of iron is only apparent. It really consists of molecules of iron with empty spaces in between them, and the molecules are in motion.’
“But then, Leonard—this was way back—they suddenly found that the reality of the molecule was only apparent. It was just like the iron! Empty spaces, with atoms in motion. Ah, at last they had got to the bottom of it. Atoms.
“But then they found that an atom was no more a solidity than the molecule, or the iron bar. Still other spaces, with other vibrating particles. And fatuously they said: ‘We have found electrons, revolving around a central nucleus.’ But that meant nothing, and at last they began to realize it.
“Let your mind leap beyond all that, Leonard. It is too fatuous to think that each division of matter is the last, simply because you cannot make another division. Let’s go back to that original vortex of nothingness. It created an apparent solidity, exactly as the vibrating molecules of iron create iron. That’s clear, isn’t it?”
“But,” said Jim, “how small is this smallest vortex?”
Dr. Weatherby laughed. “It has no size. It is infinitely small. An abstract quality, beyond human conception. If you try to name its size, then no longer is it infinitely small. It is not the smallest vortex; there is no such thing. It is the infinitely small vortex, which is very different.
“Conceive, then, this vortex, which creates an apparently solid particle of matter. I call this particle an intime. This intime, in turn, with myriads of its fellows clustering about it, vibrating with empty nothingness between, creates another, larger entity—another apparently solid substance. And so on up to what we now call an electron.”
“Well,” I said, “between the intime and the electron, how many separate densities might there be?”
“An infinite number,” he replied smilingly. “A number that cannot be conceived. Each has distinct characteristics, just as iron differs from lead or gold.”
He paused a moment, but none of us said anything. “With this conception,” he went on, “we can build the definition that a material substance is a density of other substances. It maintains its separate existence by virtue of having around its exterior an emptiness greater than the emptiness of its interior. Think of that a moment.
“The earth itself is such a density. The space around it is greater than any of the spaces within its molecules, its atoms, its electrons—down to its finitely small intimes—to the ultimate nothingness of which it is composed.
“That is our earth. It is in movement. And another density near it we call Venus, and another Mars, vibrating with a space between them. All our starry universe; you see, Leonard?”
My mind leaped with the thrill of it. The great vault of the heavens with its myriad whirling stars shrank before my far-flung imagination into a tiny space teeming with its agitated particles!
Dr. Weatherby added gently, “A fragment of iron is microscopically no different in structure from our starry universe. The distances between our heavenly bodies compared to the size of them are quite the same as the distances between electrons, or intimes, compared to their size. You get my point?”
“I do,” Jim exclaimed. “What we call the sky would seem a solid mass of matter—like a fragment of iron—to some greater viewpoint?”