Part 4

Dr. Weatherby went on; “I remember remarking to you, Leonard, that there would be no need for navigation. We will grow, with an infinite velocity, to an infinitely gigantic size. Conversely, all this—” He waved his hand at the window, the firmament of white blazing suns—“all this immeasurable space we see out there will shrink to a size infinitely small. It will, later on, be smaller than our vehicle itself. Smaller than my body, my hand.”

His voice rose to a sudden vehemence. “Don’t you get the conception now? All this, our celestial space, will shrink to a pinhead—an atom. We will emerge from it into some tremendous greater emptiness, some greater space. As much greater as the space of a bedroom interior would be to the head of a pin lying on a bureau! What matter whether we emerge on one side of the pinhead or the other? The distance will be infinitesimal!”

What matter indeed! I clung to the conception. So simple, yet so vast! And suddenly there sprang before me a vision of our little earth back there, already invisible, circling its tiny orbit, a mere nothing in the cosmos of infinite nature. An electron! Less than that—the merest infinite particle of an electron.

This whole universe of stars, merely a cluster of tiny particles, clinging together to form an atom of something else! And trillions of such atoms making up the head of a pin, lying on someone’s bureau!

Dr. Weatherby’s voice quieted. “Suppose ultimately, we were to cross our atom and emerge in exactly the wrong direction. We would find no vastly great emptiness, but merely other atoms like our own, going downward, so to speak, into the pin’s head, instead of merging from it.

“But that cannot happen. Nature, in all its natural phenomena, always chooses the path of least resistance. We could not increase our velocity without adequate distance to transverse, nor increase our size without adequate emptiness to fill.

“You see! We may be going wrongly now. It makes no difference; the ultimate distance will be infinitesimal. But I know that by all natural laws we are seeking greater spaces. We will find, beyond these stars, an infinitely greater emptiness.

“Our size ultimately will fill it. But we will have turned to seek an emptiness still vaster, until, at last, freed from these clusters of substance which themselves are clinging together to form that pinhead, we will emerge.”

V EMERGING FROM INFINITE SMALLNESS

Alice and I were sitting in the small round tower that projected some six feet above the top of the vehicle, near its forward end. Through the windows here—eight of them, and one above us—the huge, inverted black bowl of the heavens lay fully exposed.

Myriad swarms of stars were thick-strewn everywhere. Freed from the distortion of the earth’s atmosphere, they blazed like balls of molten fire: white, blue-white, yellow and red. Red giants and dwarfs, the old and the young, occasionally a comet with its millions of miles of crescent, fan-shaped tail.

Clusters of stars appeared, blended by distance: binaries, revolving one upon the other, multiple stars; single white-hot suns, blazing victorious with their maturity. And far off the spiral nebulae—patches of stardust, suns being born anew, or complete, separate universes. It was a glorious, awesome sight!

The red Elton Beta ray now preceded us. From here in the tower we could see it, flashing ahead like a dim searchlight beam. We had picked up velocity rapidly, had reached now some three hundred and sixty thousand miles a second, nearly twice the speed of light. Yet in all this scene, these whirling stars at which we were plunging, there was no visible movement. To an ant, crawling along a hillside ledge, the distant mountains seemed coming no nearer.

The dials showed our velocity to have reached very nearly one light-year per hour. No longer was it possible to use the unit of miles: our instruments showed now only light-years. Light travels 186,400 miles a second, and in our earthly year there are 31,536,000 seconds. A light-year, then—the distance light can speed in a year—represents 5,883,000,000,000 miles. This sum now was our smallest unit of measurement.

We were now 4.25 light-years from earth. Alpha Centauri, nearest of all the stars to earth at 4.35 light-years, loomed ahead of us. I stood at one of the forward windows regarding it. Two stars it is, in reality, for it is a binary.

Its components were beginning visually to separate now: two white blazing suns, millions of miles apart, slowly revolving upon a common center with a revolution that took thousands of years.

Yet, as I stood there, I fancied I could see them turning! We were heading directly for them; they were leaping up out of the void. There was a slow but visible movement throughout the firmament now. The stars in advance of us were opening up, spreading apart, drifting past our side windows, closing together again behind us. Dr. Weatherby was at my elbow.

“I shall keep away from Centauri,” he remarked. “And presently, we must go faster, Leonard.”

* * * * *

He went to his instrument table. The red Beta ray preceding us seemed to intensify a trifle; the firmament shifted slightly as our direction was altered. As I stood there, in ten minutes or so, the twin blazing suns of Alpha Centauri came up and swept past us.

I hastened to a side window to watch them. Blazing giants they were, floating off there a million miles away, each of them so large that our own huge sun would have been a match flame beside them.

But suddenly I wondered, blinked and stared with my breathing stopped by the shock of it. Were these indeed blazing giants a million miles off there? Or were they white points of fire a mile away? Abruptly my whole viewpoint changed. I saw these stars, all the blazing white points in the firmament, not as giant suns unfathomably distant, but only as small glowing eyes quite close.

These were gleaming eyes in a black night, gleaming eyes close around me. Eyes no larger than my own! Our vehicle . . . myself—gigantic! I realized it now. All this unfathomable distance around me had shrunk. I saw our giant vehicle floating very slowly, very sedately onward between the staring, crowding eyes.

Dr. Weatherby smiled when I told him. “It is all in the viewpoint, Leonard. In my computations I shall cling to the viewpoint of earth. Miles then light-years. Earthly standards of time, distance, and velocity. But shortly we shall have to abandon them entirely. Sit down, Leonard. I want to talk to you. Where is Dolores?”

“In the galley, I think,” I said, sitting down at the instrument table beside him.

“I don’t want Dolores to hear me. I’ve been wondering whether I should try and have her communicate again with the outside. It has been a month since we did that.”

This, almost more than any other aspect of our adventure, interested me. “Tell me about those thought communications, Dr. Weatherby.”

“There is nothing else to tell. There seem to be two . . . shall we call them people? A young man and a girl. They are in dire distress. The man is intelligent—more so than we are, I should judge. He was surprised to have us answer him.”

“Does he know where we are?”

“No, I think not. But when I told him, he seemed to understand. Dolores gets, not words, but ideas, which naturally she can only translate into our English words. But, Leonard, I do not conceive these beings will be physically of an aspect very different from ourselves. We are . . . so close to them.”

“Close!”

He smiled. “Quite close, Leonard. One of them might be holding us—our whole universe—on the palm of his hands. An inch from a thumb, a foot from his ear. I was thinking of that when I was trying to fathom the possible velocity of thought-waves. It’s all in the viewpoint. His thoughts would not have to travel far to reach us. His brain gives orders to his muscles in a fraction of a second over a far greater distance.”

The dials showed us to be ten thousand light-years from earth, our velocity fifty light-years an hour, when Dr. Weatherby called to us all to assemble in the instrument room. Days, or what would have been days on earth, had passed since we started.

I had lost all count, though upon Dr. Weatherby’s charts the relative time-values were recorded. We ate regularly, slept when we could.

Dr. Weatherby was tired, almost to the point of exhaustion, for though Jim, Alice and I alternated on watch in the tower, Dr. Weatherby remained almost constantly at his instrument table.

Ten thousand light-years from earth! But ahead of us the star-points stretched unending.

Dr. Weatherby faced us. “We are not going fast enough. I have not dared, but now I must. I want you all to understand. I have had the red Beta ray at very nearly its weakest intensity. I am going to turn it on full, to the intensity I used for the model.

“There will be a shock, but only momentarily. You, Leonard, go to the tower. If anything too large or too dense for safety seems coming at us, you can warn me.”

He smiled. “But we will encounter nothing of the sort, I am sure. I’ll sit here at the controls. The rest of you I suggest stay here with me for a while.”

I went to the tower. Ahead of us was the faint stream of the red ray. The star-points were floating past us, opening to our advance, streaming past, overhead, to the sides, and beneath, and closing after us. Even with my greater viewpoint, the points of fire were passing swiftly now. Some were very near: they seemed like white sparks. I fancied I could have reached out and struck them aside with my hand.

Dr. Weatherby’s voice reached me as I sat in the tower. “Ready!”

I seemed to feel, or to hear, a hum, a trembling. I saw the Beta ray flashing ahead of us with a deeper, more intense red, but for a moment it reeled before my gaze. The nausea I had had at starting from earth recurred. I closed my eyes, but only momentarily, for the sickness passed as before.

Dr. Weatherby’s voice called to me, “All right, Leonard?”

“Yes,” I responded.

The scene outside my windows was a chaos: flashing points of fire. How could we avoid them? Showers of white sparks rushing at us. I tried to shout a warning, but instead I laughed with a touch of madness. Avoid them! Millions of them were already colliding with us! Sparks showering impotently against our sleek electrite sides.

And then I realized that these sparks, these stars, were passing through us! A steady, flashing stream of them. I could see their luminous white points beaming within the vehicle as the stream flowed through.

Stars no longer. Why, these were mere imponderable electrons! Some were dark, shining only by reflected light-worlds like our earth. But I knew they were not imponderable bodies passing through the density of our vehicle. The reverse.

It was we who were the less dense. Our vehicle comparatively was a puff of vapor, through which these tiny bodies were passing.

A stream of electricity, myriad electrons flowing through a copper wire, are not less dense than the wire. The electrons are the densities; imponderable, of a mass imperceptible, because they are infinitely small. But of a tremendous density; it is the wire which is ponderous.

So now with us, I sat bewildered, for how long I cannot say. I heard at intervals Dr. Weatherby’s voice: “Light-years a hundred thousand. One million. Ten. One hundred million.”

We were a hundred million light-years from earth! The flashing points of fire continued to stream past. But there was a change, a thinning in advance of us; a clustering white radiance behind.

I sat motionless, tense. It might have been minutes, or an hour.

I found Dr. Weatherby beside me, and I turned to him. I was stiff, cramped and cold. I tried to smile. “We’re all right . . . still, Dr. Weatherby.”

“Look,” he said. “We’re beyond them.”

A darkness loomed ahead. To the sides the brilliant star-points seemed rushing together; clustering to form other, fewer white points. And the whole, sweeping backward into the seething radiance which lay behind us. Soon it was all back there, a shrinking white mist of fire; billions of seething particles of star dust shrinking together.

“Watch it, Leonard. It is our universe. Watch it go!”

We turned to the rear window. Everywhere now was empty blackness, except directly behind us. A silver mist hung back there in the void. It was dwindling. Then I saw it as a tiny, flattened, lens-shaped silver disk. But only for an instant, for it was shrinking fast.

A lens-shaped disk! A point of white fire! A single faint star—a single entity! No . . . not a star; nothing but an electron!

For a breath I realized how near it was. A single tiny white spark, trembling outside our window. I could have pinched it with my thumb and finger.

It trembled, vanished into blackness.

* * * * *

A day passed, a day to us because we ate our meals, and slept. But to the worlds, universes outside our windows, congealing behind us into single points, winking and vanishing into an oblivion of space and time, this day of ours was an eternity.

Our dials had long since become useless, a billion light-years from our starting point. A billion billion, and even that dwindling with our changing standards and viewpoint into a space we could have held in our cupped hands. Of what use to try and measure it. Or even conceive it.

The black, empty firmament had only remained empty for a moment. Ahead and off to the sides other luminous points showed. For hours Dr. Weatherby and I sat together watching them.

There was a moment when a single star gleamed far ahead. But soon it was a spiral of whirling star dust. It spread to the sides as we leapt at it. And every myriad particle of it suddenly showed as a tiny swirling spiral mist of yet other particles.

They spread gigantic, each of them a nebula—a universe. One of them whirled directly through us, a white stream of tumbling radiant dust. Behind us it shrank again to a single point. And the billion other points shrank into one. And the one faded and was gone.

A night of this. Was our own universe an electron? I realized it could hardly have been that. Call it an intime. If we had encountered it now, it would have been too small for our sight. The tiniest swirling particle flashing through us now was composed of billions of universes as large as our own.

The night passed. We sat calmly eating our morning meal. The human mind adjusts itself so readily! Physical hunger is more tangible than the cosmos of the stars. Dr. Weatherby gestured toward the windows where the points of luminous mists momentarily were very remote.

“I should say that we . . . this vehicle is larger than any intime now. Possibly larger than electrons.

“Soon we will find ourselves among the atoms, and the molecules. There will then be a change. Very radical.

“A little more coffee, Alice, please. Presently I am going to try and erect our electro-telescope. Then I must get a little sleep.”

He seemed, indeed, upon the verge of exhaustion.

* * * * *

There was a slow change all that day. These glowing things we were passing—universes, stars, or electrons or intimes, call them what you will—they seemed now more uniform; those at a distance, more like opaque globules, gray. And they seemed almost solid and cold. Yet it was the illusion of distance only, for we passed through several of them—streams of white fire mist as always before.

At noon a black void of emptiness surrounded us. It was the longest, the most gigantic we had encountered, an hour of it.

Then again a point showed. It spread to the sides of us. But it was different. I could not say how. It was vague, gray. It streamed past, very distant on both sides and beneath us. At one moment I fancied it appeared as a distant, gigantic enveloping curtain, gray and vague. But then I thought it was a film of tiny globules, solid, entities, unradiant.

I called Dr. Weatherby. But before he arrived, the grayness had all slipped behind us. He saw it as a gray, formless blob. It congealed to a point. And then it vanished.

“That was an atom, Leonard,” he said. His voice had an excitement in it. “That was our first sight of anything of the new realm large enough to have an identity. Substance, Leonard! The substance of which our universe, our earth, is so infinitesimal a part. Everything we see now will be identical with it. The atoms! We are emerging!”

* * * * *

They aroused me from sleep some hours later, calling me excitedly. I found them all in the instrument room crowded around Dolores who was sitting on the couch, her hands pressed against her forehead. Jim cried; “She’s getting thought-waves, Len! Some one is communicating with her!”

Dr. Weatherby was murmuring, “What is it, Dolores? Do you get it clearer now?”

“Yes. Someone is thinking: _We can see you! We see you coming!_”

“Yes, Dolores. What else?”

“That’s all. _We’re watching! We see you coming!_”

Jim murmured in a low voice, “The man on the cliff! The young man and the girl in distress!”

Dolores shook her head. “No. This is someone else. Closer. Stronger. The thoughts are very strong.”

“Can’t you see anything, Dolores?” Dr. Weatherby touched her, shook her gently. “Try, child. Tell them to think about themselves.”

“I see—” she stopped, then stammered; “I see . . . a light. A very big light. There are people—”

“Men?”

“Yes. Men. Three or four of them. Sitting near a light. It shines so white. It hurts.” But she put her hand, not to her eyes but to her temple. “I’m thinking to them, _Why can’t I see you? I want to see you!_ Wait. Now, I understand. He, someone thinks at me, _Try your telescope! Haven’t you a telescope? Soon you will see us. We have seen you for a very long time._”

Alice blurted out, “How long, Dolores? Ask them that.”

“No,” commanded Dr. Weatherby. “That’s absurd. Dolores—”

But her hands had dropped from her forehead. “It’s gone. I’m tired. My head is tired.”

Jim drew me to the window. “Look there! I was on watch. When this began appearing I called everybody. But then suddenly Dolores began getting the thoughts.”

* * * * *

The scene outside was wholly changed. Beneath us, to the sides and ahead, a grayness stretched, a continuous solid grayness. Elusive, formless, colorless; I could not guess how distant it might be save that it stretched beyond the limits of my vision. But ahead and above us, the scene was not gray. A vague, luminous quality tinged the blackness up there. Luminous, as though a vague light were reflected.

There was no visible movement anywhere. But presently, as one staring at a great motionless cloud will see its shape is changing, I began to see changes. The flat gray solidity was not flat, but hugely convex. And it was slowly turning. Huge convolutions of it were, slowly as a cloud bank, taking new forms. And all of it was slowly moving backward.

Then we came to the end of it. Black emptiness ahead. Behind us was a gray-massed, globular cloud. Then another, its twin fellow, came rolling up beneath us in front, spread to the sides, shrank again behind us.

“Molecules,” said Dr. Weatherby. “See how they’re dwindling!”

I saw presently, swarms of them, always smaller. And ahead of us they seemed congealed into a gray solidity—a substance, it was passing beneath us, and to the sides.

Again quite unexpectedly, my viewpoint changed. I saw our vehicle plunging upward, its pointed bow held upward at an angle. A solidity was around us; to the sides, gray, smooth curtains; overhead a glow of white in a dead black void.

A black void? My heart leaped. That was not blackness up there above our bow! It was blue! Color! The first sight of color. A blue vista of distance, with light up there. Light and air!

Beside us the smooth gray walls were smooth no longer. Huge jagged rocks and boulders, a precipice! We seemed in some immense canyon, slowly floating upward. But it was a dwindling canyon. And then abruptly we emerged from it.

I saw its walls close together beneath us. An area of gray was down there; gray with a white light on it. The light made sharp inky shadows on a tumbling naked waste of rock.

The gray area was shrinking to a blob, a blob of gray shining in a brilliant light. Directly beneath us, stretching to the horizon on both sides, lay an undulating white level surface. The single blob of gray was down there on it. And off in the distance, where the surface seemed abruptly to end, gigantic blurs loomed into the blue sky.

Dr. Weatherby was calling me to the tower. I found him trembling with eagerness. “Leonard, I have the electro-telescope working. Look through it.”

I gazed first through the front and overhead tower windows. The white disk filled a perceptible area of the sky. But it was not like a sun; it seemed rather a smooth, flat disk with light behind it, a white disk with a dark narrow rim. Clear, cloudless sky was everywhere else. And very far away, behind and above the white disk, I saw a gigantic, formless, colorless shape towering into the blue of distance.

“Look through the telescope, Leonard.”

I gazed upward through the electro-telescope. Its condensing lens narrowed the whole gigantic scene into a small circular field of vision. I gasped. Wonderment, awe swept over me. The blue sky was the open space of a tremendously large room: I saw plainly its ceiling, floor and distant walls.

The giant shape was a man. He was bending forward over a table—the table was under me. The man’s hunched shoulders and peering face were above me.

For an instant my mind failed to grasp it all. I swung the telescope field downward, sidewise, and up again. And then at last I understood. This was a room, with men grouped at this nearer end of it around the table—men of human form, intent faces framed with long, white hair.

The undulating surface over which our vehicle was floating, was a slide of what seemed glass, a clear glass slide with a speck of gray rock lying in its center. And the white disk over us in the sky was the lower, small lens of the microscope through which these men were examining us!

VI THE NEW REALM

Twenty days! So full of strange impressions I scarcely know how to recount them. Yet, after such a trip, they were days of almost normality.

Our vehicle beneath that microscope had grown rapidly in size. And with our expanding visual viewpoint, and the nearness of solid, motionless objects, its velocity seemed infinitely small. It barely floated past the microscope, settling to the floor of that huge room; and with a normal proportionate size, the Beta ray shut off, it came to rest.