Part 2

“Exactly. Our microscopes show nothing which is actually more solid than the sky itself. From here, on earth, to the Milky Way is to us a tremendous distance. But suppose that we were so gigantic—so vast in comparative size—that we needed a powerful microscope even to perceive that space. What would we see? A multiplicity of vibrating particles! And without the microscope the whole space would seem solid. We could call it . . . well, say a grain of gold.”

For a moment we were silent. There was to all this an awesome aspect. Yet its actual simplicity was overwhelming.

Dolores said timidly, “It seems strange that so simple a thing should have been unknown for so long.”

“Not at all,” said Dr. Weatherby. “The knowledge came step by step. It is only the final conception which seems so startling. To me it is the logical, inevitable conclusion. How could the facts be otherwise?

“Always, therefore, we have conceived ourselves and our earth to be some masterful dividing line between what is smaller and what is larger than ourselves. That is fatuous.

“We call the one our microscopic world. The other our astronomical world. And we sit between them, puzzling over their difference! They are both one, and we are in them—a mere step of the ladder.”

“It makes me feel very small,” said Alice.

“Or large,” I said. “According to the viewpoint.”

I added to Dr. Weatherby, “I realize now why no size, no motion, no time, nor density can be absolute. Everything must be relative to something else.”

“Exactly,” he nodded.

Jim was puzzling. “This voyage we’re going to make—beyond the stars. How are we going to make this trip? What in? By what method? By the nine airy demons, Dr. Weatherby, there’s an awful lot you haven’t told us yet!”

“Not so much,” said Dr. Weatherby smilingly.

“Because,” I interposed, “you don’t need to know very much, Jim.”

“We’re going in a projectile,” said Dolores. “At least they say it looks like a projectile.”

“Like Mallen’s moon rocket of 1989,” Tim exclaimed.

Dr. Weatherby shook his head. “The various anti-gravity methods devised so far would help us very little, except Elton’s electronic neutralization of gravity. I use that principle merely in starting the flight. A trip to the moon, such as Mallen’s rocket made, had nothing in common with this journey of ours.”

“They say Mallen is going himself next year—to Mars,” Alice remarked.

“Let’s see our projectile,” Jim demanded.

“In a moment,” Dr. Weatherby said. “There is, first, one conception I want to make sure you have grasped. Forget our earth now. Forget yourself. Conceive the material universe to be a vast void in which various densities are whirling.

“From the infinitely small to the infinitely large, they are of every size and character. Yet all are inherently the same, merely apparently solid. I will ask you, Leonard, this space between the earth and Mars—of what would you say it is composed?”

I hesitated. “Nothingness,” I ventured finally.

“No!” he exclaimed warmly. “There is where you fail to grasp my fundamental conception. The void of space itself is a mass of particles, a mass of densities, of every possible size and character.

“The earth is one; a wandering asteroid is another. And meteors, meteorites, down to the smallest particles of dust. And still smaller, are the particles of light, far flung everywhere through space. Other entities are again still smaller—call them intimes—down in size to infinity.

“Space then, you must realize, is not empty. The emptiness, the nothingness, is only the infinitely small. Ah, I see now that you begin to understand!”

I said slowly, “I’m imagining space as . . . as a jelly. Unsolid, because we ourselves are more solid, and it seems unsolid to us. But . . . if we were less dense, and larger . . . gigantic—” I stopped.

“That,” said Dr. Weatherby, “is precisely the point of view I’ve wanted you to get. You can understand now why to beings of some greater outside realm all our interstellar space would shrink into apparent solidity, and they would call it an atom.

* * * * *

“Conceive yourself now a scientist of that vast universe outside. You are living on a density—a great conglomeration of particles clinging together—and you call it your earth.

“One tiny particle of your earth is beneath your microscope. You call that particle a grain of gold. You examine it. You find it is not solid. You see ‘empty spaces.’ They are not really empty, but the particles of matter swimming in them are too small for you to see. But you do see what you call molecules of gold.

“You increase the power of your microscope. You examine just one molecule of this gold. Now you see more supposedly empty spaces, with smaller whirling entities which you choose to call atoms.

“You examine one atom. The same result and you call the still smaller particles electrons. Down and down—who can say how far? Until, at last, you are looking into one intime. You see yet smaller particles whirling in space. That is the space between our stars!

“And these whirling points of light—perhaps you can distinguish no more than a million of them. They are the million largest, brightest of our stars. You cannot see our own sun; it is too small. Or our earth—too small. And too dark.

“But if you did see our earth, and were a fatuous scientist, you might say, ‘Ah, at last I have seen the _smallest thing_!’ Which is amusing, because our earth has a good many rocks composing it. And each rock goes down to pebbles, grains of sand, molecules, atoms, electrons—to infinity.

“Do you get the conception now? This whole universe we see and feel from here on earth, from a greater viewpoint would all shrink into a tiny, apparently solid particle.”

“I can visualize it,” I said. “It’s stupendous.”

But Jim interposed, “This trip we are to make—”

Alice interrupted him, explaining, “Grandfather has been making tests. We have several models; he saved one of them to show you. We can see it now?” She looked inquiringly at her grandfather.

Dr. Weatherby rose to his feet. “We’ll try it now. I’ll show you the model and we’ll send it . . . away.

“Come,” he added. “When you see it start, you will understand.”

We left the house. Night had closed down, a soft, cloudless night. Never had I seen the stars so brilliant.

Dr. Weatherby led us up a path, beneath spreading trees, past gardens of flowers, past his lake with its pool and a cascading brook for its outlet down the hillside to the Hudson; past the shadowy landing stage where high overhead my plane lay moored; up the slope of a hill to a long, narrow outbuilding.

Jim and I had noticed this building when we landed at dawn. It was new to us, erected during the year or so since we had last been here.

“My workshop,” Dr. Weatherby said as we approached it.

* * * * *

I gazed at it curiously. It was a single-story building, without windows, flat-roofed and no more than twenty feet high. In width, possibly thirty feet, but it was at least five times that long.

It lay crosswise on the hill. At a glance I could not guess of what materials it might be constructed. Wood, stone, metal—it seemed none of these. Its aspect was whitish, not silvery, or milky; rather was it a dead flesh white, with a faintly lurid cast of green to it.

In the starlight it lay silent and unlighted. But there seemed to it a glow, as though it were bathed in moonlight. And then I saw that the glow was inherent in it, almost a phosphorescence. Abruptly I felt that there was something uncanny, unnatural about this structure.

I made no comment. But I saw surprise on Jim’s face, and at the lower end of the building where there appeared to be a door, he stopped, irresolute.

“Is . . . is the projectile in here?”

“Yes,” said Alice. “Inside. But we’re going to the test room first, aren’t we, Grandfather?”

We went through a door and along a narrow passage. It was dimly illumined by small blue vacuum tubes overhead. I found myself with Dolores.

“It’s very wonderful,” she said. “You will see, very soon. Oh, yes, where is Jim? I want Jim to see it.”

“You’re not afraid, Dolores? Afraid of this voyage they talk about?”

“Afraid? Oh, no!”

The passageway widened. “Here is Jim,” I said. “Jim, stay with Dolores. She wants to show you this . . . this thing we’ve come to see.”

We entered a room some thirty feet square. Dr. Weatherby switched on the lights. There were furniture, rugs, small tables of apparatus, instruments, and banks of vacuum tubes on tripods standing about, with wires in insulated cables connecting them. The cables littered the floor, like huge snakes.

Dr. Weatherby drew aside a portiere which cut off a corner of the room. Lying on a large table, flooded with a vacuum light from above, was a model of this building we were in. It was about two feet wide, by ten feet long—the same dead white, uncanny-looking structure. A thought sprang to my mind. Was this building we were in itself the projectile? I think I murmured the question, for Dr. Weatherby smiled.

“No. Here is a small replica of the vehicle.”

He unbolted the roof of the model. Resting inside was a tiny, dead white object some six inches long, cigarro-shaped, but with a pointed end and blunt stern. It rather suggested the ancient sub-sea vessels.

It had fin-shaped projections, like very small wings for its slow transit through air. A tiny tower was forward, on top, and there were bull’s-eye windows lining the sides and in every face of the octagon tower.

Dr. Weatherby pointed out all these details to us, speaking in his low, earnest voice. “I’m wondering, Leonard, and you, Jim, if you’re familiar with Elton’s principle of the neutralization of gravity?”

“No,” I said, and Jim shook his head. “Not in detail.”

In 1988 Elton perfected it. I knew of it only as an electronic stream of radiant matter which when directed against a solid substance, destroyed—or partially destroyed—the attraction of that other substance for the earth.

“I’ll explain it when we get in the vehicle itself,” Dr. Weatherby said.

He was connecting wires to the little model building on the table; and he closed its roof, and opened a wide doorway at its end. “I am going to charge this small building with the Elton current. The electronic stream will carry that tiny projectile with it.

“This will be the same as the start of our own voyage, Leonard, except that with this model, I have intensified the rapidity of the successive changes. What happens here in minutes, will take us hours. Sit down over there, all of you.”

* * * * *

We ranged ourselves in the gloom across the room. The model of the building, with its end doorway open like an airplane hangar, was pointing past us. Jim and I sat together, with Alice near me, and Dolores by Jim. He put his arm around her.

A moment, and then Dr. Weatherby touched a switch. The room was plunged into darkness. From the table came a low electrical hum.

I strained my eyes. A glow was over there. It brightened. The little building on the table was glowing with a faint, blue-white light. A minute passed, or it might have been ten minutes. I do not know.

The hum of the Elton current intensified; a whir, then a faint, very tiny screaming throb. The building was now outlined completely: a luminous white, shot through with a cast of green, and red and yellow sparks snapping about it. From where I sat I could see partially into its opened doorway, as the interior was not dark. It was glowing inside, and now I became aware of a very faint red stream, like light, pouring from the doorway, crossing the room, spreading like a fan.

It was the Elton ray, escaping its bonds, its tiny particles plunging outward with the speed of light, or more. The red glow struck the blank, dead white wall of our room, stained the wall with its red sheen. Sparks were snapping in the air around me. To my nostrils came a faint, sulphurous smell. My skin was prickling.

“Look,” whispered Alice.

The opposite wall where the red ray was striking, now seemed glowing of itself, a blank, opaque wall, stained red by the billions of imponderable particles bombarding it.

But it was no longer an opaque wall. Of itself it was now glowing, becoming translucent, transparent! The stars! Through the wall I could see the placid night outside, the dark hillside, the stars!

I felt Alice’s hand gripping my arm. From the glowing model on the table, the tiny vehicle was issuing. The dead white thing. It came very slowly, floating out the doorway, as though drawn by the red diverging stream of light.

Slowly it passed me, ascending a trifle, no longer dead white, for it was transfigured—alive now, shimmering, its outlines wavy, unreal. It moved a trifle faster, came to the wall of the room, passed through it.

“Watch,” breathed Alice.

The vehicle—that tiny oblong shape smaller than my hand—was outside over the treetops, plunging onward in the red stream of light. Yet at that distance I could see it plainly, its image as large as when it was a few feet from my face.

And suddenly I realized I was staring after a thing gigantic. It showed now far over the hilltop. I could have sworn it was but some great air liner. A patch of stars was blotted out behind it.

Another moment; the silver thing off there was far away. Was it as far as the moon? It was larger now than the moon would have seemed, hanging out there!

I watched. I could still see it as plainly as when it started. But then suddenly came a change. Its image became fainter, thinner, and rapidly expanding. There was a faint image of it out there in the heavens, an image larger than the hillside.

There was an instant when I fancied that the image had expanded over all the sky—a wraith, a dissipating ghost of the projectile.

It was gone. The stars gleamed alone in the deep purple of the night.

A click sounded. The hum of the Elton ray died into silence. The luminous wall of the room sprang into opaque reality.

I sat up, blinking, shivering, to find Dr. Weatherby standing before me.

“That, Leonard, is the start. Shall we see the vehicle itself?”

III LAUNCHED INTO SPACE!

We were to leave at dawn, and during that night a thousand details ended our attention: Jim’s resignation from the service, which he gave to the superior through verbal traffic department without so much as a word of explanation; my own resignation, leaving the post of Commander 3 of the 40 N temporarily to Argyle.

Temporarily! With what optimism I voiced it! But there was a queer pang within me, an exaltation—which I think was as well a form of madness—was upon us all. This thing we were about to do transcended all our petty human affairs.

I was standing at the door of the workshop, gazing at a tree. Its leaves were waving in a gentle night breeze, which as I stood there fanned my hot, flushed cheeks with a grateful coolness. I found Alice beside me.

“I’m looking at that tree,” I said. “Really, you know I’ll be sorry to leave it. These trees, these hills, the river—I wouldn’t like to leave our earth and never come back, Alice. Would you?”

“No,” she said. Her hand pressed mine; her solemn blue eyes regarded me. She was about to add something else, but she checked herself. A flush rose to her cheeks; it mantled the whole column of her throat with red.

“Alice?”

“No,” she repeated. “We’ll come back, Len.”

Dr. Weatherby called us. And Jim shouted, “This infernal checking! Len, come here and do your share. We’re going at dawn. Don’t you know that?”

* * * * *

I shall not forget the first sight I had of the vehicle. It lay in the great main room of the workshop. A hundred feet long, round like a huge cigarro, a dead white thing, lying there in the glow of the blue tubes.

Even in its silent immobility, there seemed about it a latent power, as though it were not dead, but asleep—a sleeping giant, resting quiescent, conscious of its own strength.

And there was about it too, an aspect almost infernal in its sleek, bulging body, dead-white like bloodless flesh, in its windows, staring like bulging, thick-lensed eyes. I felt instinctively a repulsion, a desire to avoid it. I touched it finally; its smooth side was hard and abnormally cold. A shudder ran over me.

But after a time these feelings passed. I was absorbed in examining this thing which was to house us, to bear us upward and away.

Within the vehicle was a narrow corridor down one side. Corridor windows opened to the left. To the right were rooms. Each had a window opening to the side, a window in the floor beneath, and in the roof above.

There was a room for Jim and me, another for Dolores and Alice, and one for Dr. Weatherby. An instrument and chart room forward, with a tower room for keeping a lookout, and a galley with a new Maxton electronic stove, fully equipped. And other rooms—a food room, and one crowded with a variety of apparatus: air purifiers, Maxton heaters and refrigerators, piping the heat and cold throughout the vehicle. There was a score of devices with which I was familiar, and another score which were totally strange.

Dr. Weatherby already had the vehicle fully equipped and provisioned. With a tabulated list of its contents, he and Jim were laboriously checking the items to verify that nothing had been overlooked.

“I don’t want to know how it works,” Jim had said. “Not ’til after we start. Let’s get going. That’s the main idea.”

Then Alice took the list. She and Jim went from room to room. Dolores stood a moment in the corridor, as Dr. Weatherby and I started for the instrument room.

“Jim! Oh Jim, where are you?”

“He and Alice are farther back, Dolores,” I said. “In the galley, I think. Don’t you want to come forward with us?”

“I guess not. I’ll go with Jim.”

She joined them and I heard her say, “Oh, I’m glad to find you, Jim. I was a little frightened, just for a moment. I thought something was wrong here on board.”

I turned and followed Dr. Weatherby to the instrument room.

* * * * *

We stood before an instrument board of dials and indicators, with wires running upward to a score of gleaming cylindrical tanks overhead. A table was beside us, with a switchboard less complicated in appearance than I have seen in the navigating cages of many small liners.

There were chairs, a narrow leather couch across the room, and another table littered with charts and star-maps. And above it was a shelf, with one of the Grantline comptometers, the mathematical sensation of some years back. It was almost a human mathematical brain.

Under its keys the most intricate problem of calculus was automatically resolved, as surely as an ancient adding machine did simple arithmetic.

Dr. Weatherby began to show me the workings of the vehicle. “I need only give you the fundamentals, Leonard. Mechanically my apparatus here is fairly complicated. But those mere mechanics are not important or interesting. I could not teach you now, in so short a time, how to rectify anything which went mechanically wrong. I shall do the navigating.

“Indeed, as you will see presently, there is very little navigating involved. Mostly at the start—we must only be sure we collide with nothing and disturb nothing. When once we are beyond these planets, these crowding stars, there will be little to do.”

I shook my head. “The whole thing is incomprehensible, Dr. Weatherby. That flight of your little model was almost gruesome.”

“Sit down, Leonard. I don’t want it to be gruesome. Strange, yes; there is nothing stranger, God knows, than this into which, frankly, I stumbled during my researches. I’ll try to make the fundamentals clear. It will lose its uncanny aspect then. You will find it all as coldly scientifically precise as your navigation of the Fortieth North parallel.”

He lighted my cigarro. “This journey we are about to make,” he resumed, “involves but two factors. The first is the Eltonian principle of the neutralization of gravity. Sir Isaac Newton gave us fairly accurate formulae for the computation of the force of gravity. Einstein revised them slightly, and attempted to give an entirely different conception of celestial mechanics.

“But no one—except by a rather vague theory of Einstein’s—has ever told us what gravity really is. What is this force—what causes this force—which makes every material body in the universe attract every other body directly in proportion to the mass and inversely as the square of the distance between them?

“Leonard, I think I can make it clear to you. There is passing between every material body, one with another, a constant stream of minute particles. A vortex of rotating particles loses some on one side, which fly off at a tangent, so to speak, and perhaps gains some upon the other side.

“Seventy-five years ago—about the time I was born, Leonard—they were talking of ‘electrons’, ‘radiant energy’, ‘positive and negative disembodied electricity.’ All different names for the same thing. The same phenomenon.

“All substance is of a very transitory reality. Everything is in a constant state of change. A substance builds up, or it breaks down. Or both simultaneously; or sometimes one and then the other.”

“Electricity—” I began.

“Electricity,” he interrupted, “as they used to know it, is in reality nothing but a concentrated stream of particles—electrons, intimes, call them what you will—moving from one substance to join another. Lightning is the same thing. Such a stream of articles, Leonard, is a tangible manifestation of gravitational force. They had it right before them, unrecognized. They called it, ‘magnetic force,’ which meant nothing.

“How do these streams create an attractive force? Conceive the earth and the moon. Between them flow a myriad stream of infinitesimal particles. Each particle in itself is a vortex—a whirlpool. The tendency of each vortex is to combine with the one nearest to it.

“They do combine, collide, whirl together and split apart. The whole, as a continuous, violently agitated stream, produces a continuous tendency toward combination over all the distance from the earth to the moon. The result—can’t you see it?—must be a _force_, an inherent tendency pulling the earth and moon together.

“Enough of such abstract theory! A while ago, I charged that little model of this building with an Elton ray. The model, and this building itself, are built of an ore of electrite, the one hundred and fortieth element, as they called it when it was isolated a few years ago.

“You saw the model of the building glow? Electrons and intimes were whirling around it. The force communicated to the tiny projectile lying inside. In popular language, ‘its gravity was destroyed.’ Technically it was made to hold within itself its inherent gravitation and the gravitation of everything else was cut off. It was, in the modern sense, magnetized, in an abnormal condition of matter.”