Part 5

"The proportion of one to one thousand," he answered readily. "Seven seconds to me, then, was about two hours on earth. Could I have seen the earth when I reached that maximum, it would have made a complete rotation on its axis--a day of yours--in a minute and twenty-four seconds to me.

"It's all clear, isn't it? Suppose I go back to the details of our trip? With ten miles of earthly size, at a velocity of 200 million miles a minute we were dropping into the black void of Space. The Solar System was lost presently, even to telescopic vision, but with the naked eye the firmament of stars was very little changed. I searched with the myrdoscope for the image of the girl, but did not chance to pick it up. We were hot again within the vehicle, from the ether friction--as hot as we had been before.

"Beneath us, in the star-field for which I was heading, was Alpha Centauri. It is, as you know, one of the very closest stars to our Solar System--to our earth. In miles, roughly some 25,000,000,000,000. Four and a third light-years of distance, 4.35 light-years to be exact. At 200 million miles a minute we would have been some eighty-eight days getting there."

"I couldn't have stood a trip so long," Martt exclaimed. "I told him we'd have to increase our size again. Nearly three months to get to the nearest star--with others a thousand times farther on!"

"There was no reason for us to stay so small," Brett agreed. "Out there, with the Solar System so far away, I had no fear of disturbing it."

Again I interrupted. "Brett, the vehicle's velocity was then much greater than the velocity of light----"

"About eighteen times greater."

"It seems inconceivable," I added. "Impossible for any tangible entity in Space to attain such velocity."

"Ah, but Frank, that's where you're using the wrong viewpoint," Dr. Gryce exclaimed warmly. "You're still imagining yourself an observer on earth. But take the viewpoint of the vehicle. Space was proportionately smaller than before. Brett gives you the earth-size figures in order to avoid confusion. From the vehicle's enlarged viewpoint, Brett, what was its comparative velocity?"

"About twelve million miles an hour," Brett said. "As against a former seven and one-half million. Not so great a change, Frank?"

"No," I admitted. "But----"

"But you can not quite grasp how the two velocities can be the same? Existing simultaneously in the same vehicle, only with a differing viewpoint?"

I think that was my trouble. I nodded, and he said at once, "To the larger viewpoint, Frank, the Space had diminished a thousand times, to make a thousand miles become as one mile. Not an _actual_ change--a relative change only. But twelve million miles an hour, with distance diminished one thousand times, is the same as twelve thousand million miles an hour with the distance factor unaltered. You see that, of course. Or consider the relative Time-values. The vehicle's Time was seven seconds to about two hours. The exact figures were one to one thousand. In the vehicle we lived a thousand earth-seconds in one. Applied, then, to the two viewpoints of velocity, it gives identical results for the distance traveled. Whatever the factors involved--the earth-Time; the vehicle-Time; the Space relative to the vehicle; or to the earth; and the velocity, relative either to the vehicle-size or earth-size--the result must be mathematically the same. You see? And, Frank, in describing the progressive size-changes into which we now plunged, I shall give you always Space with earth-standards, and our velocity from the viewpoint of earth. It reached tremendous figures; but you are to remember always that of actuality they must be divided by the relative size factor. They were never greater than you would have expected the vehicle to obtain.

"I was saying that we were headed for Alpha Centauri. Again we started the growth. I threw the switch to its fullest intensity. Martt stayed to watch the dials; I sat on the floor, gazing down through the window at the star-field spread out beneath me. When my head had cleared from the shock of starting the growth, I sat absorbed in watching. Soon visible movements appeared. The star-drifts began to be apparent. And we were going toward these stars; the apparent shortening Space, added to our increasing relative velocity, made their approach visible. In the field to the sides of us, the stars were shifting upward. Those in front were spreading apart with a movement very slow but perceptible as we dropped toward them.

"I do not know how long I sat there; Martt occasionally would call to me from his post at the dials, but I hardly heard him. Alpha Centauri presently came rushing forward. As you know, it is a binary--twin stars a few hundred million miles apart, its components revolving about each other with a period of eighty-one years. It had been one blazing white point of light. Then it separated into two. They stayed visually small, for they were dwindling before the vehicle's growth; but they came rushing toward us. Soon I could see them separated by a narrow black ribbon of the void; and could see them revolving one about the other."

"An eighty-one-year period, and you could see it!" I exclaimed.

"Yes--a very slow movement, but I could see it. I would have passed between them--the ribbon of Space there was widening rapidly, the stars themselves had become great, blazing white-hot suns. But I was afraid of the heat; I altered our course to present a slightly repellent side. The firmament turned partly over. The two stars swung up past our side window; in visual diameter larger than our earthly sun--they mounted upward, closed in above us, drew together to form one; a sun at first; then a brilliant star; then faint, until with the naked eye I lost it.

"Beneath us, the star-field in front was rushing upward much faster now. The constellations opening; the stars shifting--everywhere was movement--strange movement, unnatural, fantastic. I confess, Father, that I was injudicious. Martt was absorbed, fascinated in watching the dials, and when occasionally he would call to me, I told him everything was all right."

"I didn't know what was going on," said Martt. "You told me to sit there and I sat there."

"Of course you didn't know what was going on," Brett smiled. "But I did, and I think for a time I lost my wits. The stars were thick and close around us. The nebulæ were opened into individual points of fire. Everywhere was movement, unreal. Stars rotating visibly; binaries shifting about each other; other stars shifting about each other; other stars seeming to enlarge in size, or to diminish, to swing this way or that with all the optical vagaries of our velocity, our changing Time and Size; and always those of the star-field in front--beneath us--spreading to the sides, rushing past our windows, closing in above us and fading into invisibility.

"A myriad universes in fantastic motion. And suddenly I realized that these giant suns were very close to us, and very small! Some I had recognized--blazing globes 100 million miles and more in diameter, and thought myself ten times that far from them. But it was not so. I stared at a giant globe 100 million miles in diameter, and with my viewpoint suddenly changed I saw that it was no more than a tiny glowing meteor, sweeping past a few miles away!

"All this star-field, little balls, rolling close upon us. A miracle that none hit us, though some time before, I had had the wit to call to Martt to make all the faces repellent. By inertia only, we plunged onward, repelling what lay in our path.

"I saw a wandering asteroid--a few hundred miles perhaps in diameter. It was whirling on its axis like a ball thrown into the air. A whimsical humor--a madness perhaps--had descended upon me. There was nothing but the asteroid momentarily close before us, and I called to Martt to throw attraction into the bottom of the vehicle. The asteroid came rushing. But shrinking--shrinking until I laughed aloud to see it dwindle to a ball I could have held in my hand; and dwindle further until impotently it struck the floor window with a tiny point of fire from its fusing rock and metal. A burning cinder which scarce would have hurt me had I caught it in my naked hands.

VI

"How long my mood of ironic madness may have lasted I can not say. I barely noticed our actual entry into the Galactic Plane. Enormous suns whirling past, now relatively not many times bigger than the vehicle itself. Others, distant a mile or so--or a billion miles if you want the other viewpoint--with their magnified drift making them dart crazily past. I gave no heed to passing time; I remember only that at last the star-field beneath us was thinning out. Stray clusters--a myriad glowing little balls hurled aside by our rush. But there were visibly less and less of them, until, quite suddenly, I realized that unbroken inky darkness lay ahead. And to the sides and above us, the star clusters, nebulæ swirling like silver mist--it was all fading. Winking little points up there behind us--winking and vanishing.

"We were in blackness unbroken. Dropping into a void of blackness with velocity inconceivable. Suddenly I was frightened. Stiff from so long upon the floor, I rose and hurried to Martt. We shut off the size-switch; made all the faces repellent. But there was nothing to repel; nothing to stop our downward rush into that blackness. It seemed all at once a blackness pregnant with unseen things of fearsome aspect. . . . The size-dials showed us to be near unit 50,000,000. Fifty million times our original size! The vehicle 500,000 miles high!

"The relative Time-dials--showing relative earth-Time--were whirling. Our Time in the vehicle was less than a single second to a year on earth. My mind leaped back to you. Every second we lived there in the vehicle you here on earth were living more than a year. A century of yours was little more than a minute to us. The earth's future, whirling on a thousand years while Martt and I sat there confused at the instrument table. A tiny little earth, spinning like a top upon its axis, flashing around its tiny sun with a complete revolution every second!

"The velocity indicators, as well, were in rapid motion. The indicator of the miles-per-hour unit was an indistinguishable blur. And miles per minute--and per second--we could read none of them, so fast were they moving. The light-year distance pointers were in motion. We were piling up light-years of distance every moment. The total stood--as momentarily I read it--at between eleven and twelve thousand light-years of total distance traveled. Light, speeding at 186,000 miles a second, must go a year to make a light-year unit of distance. And we had gone nearly 12,000 light-years! I read our present velocity on the light-year velocity-dial. It was 3480 light-years per hour! And still rapidly accelerating!

"The panic of fear possessed us at the strangeness of it all--at that void of blackness--soundlessness--into which we were plunging; and even our plunge unmarked by the faintest trembling of the vehicle. A panic. I started to use the aurometer to search for your ray. Absurd! The absurdity of it made me laugh hysterically. Your ray had been extinguished thousands of years in my Past. I tried the myrdoscope--to locate the image of the girl--to verify our direction, for abruptly I realized I had, in that empty black void, nothing by which I might locate our position.

"The myrdoscope was inoperative! I could not locate the girl-image--nor anything else. I tried with the electro-telescope at its greatest power--tried frantically to pick up some star-image behind us. I could not. I did not think they were as yet beyond its range--it merely had gone dead. The current in it would not hum. It was dead like the myrdoscope. We wondered then if our dials were working accurately. In our panic we doubted everything. And knew, with a stark terror upon us--knew that we were lost. Lost perhaps in Size and Time. And lost in black Space, empty, soundless, unfathomable!"

_CHAPTER 7_

"A SINGLE STARLIT NIGHT--AN ETERNITY"

Brett had momentarily paused in his narrative, but when we would have plied him with questions he waved us aside.

"Let us finish first. The panic that was upon us with this knowledge--belief--that we were lost out there in Time and Size and Space did not last long, for we fought against it. And presently we were calmer--able to reason. Our size-dials were at rest--we had shut off the switch. By earth standards the vehicle was 500,000 miles in height. Our relative Time was a century of yours, to a little more than a minute of ours. Some 8,000 years into your earth-future had already piled up on the earth standard Time-dial--and we were adding one hundred years to it almost every minute. Our velocity had reached a maximum of 3480 light-years per hour--and we were 12,000 light-years from earth. The velocity was now lessening a trifle; it dropped nearly to an even 3,000. With unchanging size now, with nothing near us to repel or attract, the ether-friction overcame inertia to reach a balance of forces.

"We conquered our fear--began to reason what we should do. It was of course futile to look for your aural ray. It had been extinguished thousands of years. We wanted to go on to our destination, and it was the non-operation of the myrdoscope which worried and puzzled us. . . . I was sure, Father, that up to this point in the voyage I had made no serious error of direction. The image of the girl should have been before us. But the myrdoscope would not work."

"The Time----" I suggested.

"Ah, no, Frank! We had progressed very little into the Time of that girl's life. She should still have been reclining there on the bank; or at least the bank itself should have been there. We puzzled over what could be the trouble with the myrdoscope. We found the trouble----"

"I found it," said Martt eagerly.

Brett nodded. "Yes, it was Martt who reasoned it out. A curious explanation--and one, I think, which involves the greatest of all the issues we had encountered. The myrdoscope would not operate for a very big, but very simple reason. You would think to find the answer in Science? Not so. It was a theosophical reason, Father."

Brett was very earnest, and very solemn. "It was my purpose, you understand, to reach the girl at the _exact moment_ we had always seen her. We planned to make our Time before reaching her, coincident with hers of that given instant. Remember that. Consider then: At this other instant when now we were trying to see her through the myrdoscope, our Time-rate had carried us about 8,000 years into earth's future. But also, it had carried us some forty minutes into the girl's future.

"Not science now. Metaphysics, perhaps--and certainly Theology, and Theosophy. We were destined _to be with the girl during those forty minutes_. And we could not now look ahead and _see ourselves_--see our future actions.

"Father, you've spoken of that. What you said was true. It is not God's way that man should look at his own little future. Not best for us. The Almighty knows it, and has prohibited it. Chaos would result, for we live upon hope. There was no scientific reason why the myrdoscope should not show us what we were destined to do during those forty minutes. Yet--it was dead. Dark. Inoperative.

"And this now I know: With all the science in the world there are some things you can not do--those things which transgress the Creator's laws. Before them--against all scientific reason, logic--we must fail. You can not see your future; you can only live it once. Nor can you go back through Time to stop in your own Past; to live again your life--to do differently than you did before. It is unthinkable--impossible, even though now we have the scientific means to accomplish it. It is not the Almighty's plan--and He will not let us do it.

"We reasoned all this out. It was simple enough. We had our Time-switch which would change our Time-rate irrespective of the normal Time-change inherent to our size. . . . That was what puzzled you awhile ago, Frank? Well, now we used that Time-change mechanism.

"It brought us new sensations. A shock, a queer humming lightness pervading the vehicle, the air, our own bodies. A lightness as though almost we were mere shadows of our former selves. Specters, a ghostly vehicle, humming with an infinite vibration.

"Presently that all wore away; or at least we grew used to it--so that had there been anything in Space to see, as very soon there was, ourselves were the substance--all else the shadows.

"We went backward very slightly in Time. I suppose some forty minutes of the girl's Time. I tested it by the myrdoscope. The instrument flashed on! It was operating! A continuous _retrograde_ action of the Time-mechanism was necessary to hold us upon that single given instant of the girl's existence. The calculation was intricate; I reached it, partly by mathematics, partly by experimentation with the myrdoscope. I saw fragments of the girl's immediate Past, as our Time-change swung us into it. Saw her arrive alone in the woodland dell. Saw her lie down, at ease, with a security unsuspecting; saw the grinning, vicious little gnomes creep upon her; the leering giant appear. And made, then, another startling discovery--I'll tell you about it in a moment.

"At last I had the Time-change correctly gaged; we were--in relation to the girl--standing still in Time. Presently we again increased our size. An alteration of the Time-mechanism was needed; a progressive alteration. But this was simple to calculate and to adjust."

Frannie asked, "What was your discovery?"

He smiled. "Curious as always, little sister? It was that the giant was in the act of becoming _smaller_! The gnomes were growing in size!" He checked our chorus of exclamations.

"I will tell you now: This giant--these gnomes--were three beings who did not belong to the girl's world. They had come there from a greater world outside the atom. By means of science--such means possibly as we now were using with the vehicle--they had diminished their stature to the infinitely small. Had gone down and down into their tiny atom, to come upon the girl and her realm."

II

Again Brett waved us aside. "Not now, please! Oh, yes--I can tell you the structure of this, our little fragment of the material universe! But let me finish first about our voyage.

"With our Time-change corrected, the myrdoscope readily had picked up the image of the girl. A larger image, for we were 12,000 light-years closer to her. The same scene, stricken again of motion. The giant standing there; the gnome climbing upon the girl's ankle; and herself, just aware of her danger, with dawning terror on her face.

"The electro-telescope also was working now. Looking behind us, we could just see the last of the stars. And soon they were gone. A day of our conscious existence went by. At 3,000 light-years an hour we added 72,000 light-years of distance--a total from earth of about 84,000. The black abyss of Space had not remained empty. Off to one side had been a faint glow. A nebula; a patch of star-dust. Through the telescope we could see stars--a complete starry universe. It was as large, no doubt, as that we had passed through.

"It gave us a new idea of the immensity of Space. Separated by some 30,000 light-years from our own universe of stars--of which the Solar System is so tiny a part--this other star-patch was equally as large. And yet it seemed to lie isolated in fathomless Space. It drifted by us and in a few hours was gone. And far off to the other side of us, another patch came past. And others; each several thousand light-years in extent; each isolated from all its fellows.

"We traveled another full day. Over 150,000 light-years from earth. Yet the girl's image was seemingly not coming nearer very rapidly. We felt the voyage would take too long, so again we increased our size."

I interrupted. "Had you calculated the girl's relative size?"

"Yes," he said. "In a moment, Frank, you shall have it. We--our vehicle--was 500,000 miles high, compared to earth. We increased it to 600,000. Our velocity also increased. At a million miles of height--I have made all my stated figures round numbers, but they are approximately correct--at this million-mile height, we reached normality to the girl. It simplified our mechanism adjustments. There was no longer a size-change necessary. A retrograde Time-change, equal to our own now normal rate of existence, held us at that same instant of her life.

"Our velocity was more than proportionately increased. To demonstrate that mathematically would be intricate--would involve several very complicated formulas, which would not interest you now. . . We passed, distantly, a score or more of starry universes--to the sides, and above and below us--lying in every plane; and of every size and general extent. Some were small, a few thousand light-years like our own. Others immense; one which seemed 500,000 light-years at least in diameter.

"We reached ultimately a maximum velocity of about 90,000 light-years an hour. We had previously gone 150,000 light-years from earth. We traveled some eighty additional hours, not all at the maximum--for possibly half that time we were steadily accelerating. And at a total of 4,750,000 light-years from the earth, a faint glow of seeming phosphorescence showed in the blackness beneath us.

"There was a universe to one side, ahead of us. But this was a different light. A radiation from the Inner Surface itself. The Inner Surface of the hollow little atom within which all this Space and its infinitesimal whirling electrons is contained. They are immense suns, to us here on earth, but from the larger viewpoint they were mere electrons, whirling, flashing around in tiny orbits a thousand times a second.

"The girl and her realm, as we had thought, are on this Inner Surface of what we may choose to call an atom. Themselves--this girl and her people--are infinitesimal. This atom of ours is merely some tiny particle of matter in that other world from which the giant and the gnomes had descended. A tiny particle of matter. Call it a grain of sand, lying with trillions of its fellows upon some great ocean beach--lying there in the light of stars shining in infinite Space above it. Lying there for a single starlit night which is all eternity for us. A single starlit night--an eternity! Infinity, of Space and Time? Why, even now I have seen no more than an infinitesimal fragment of them! . . . .

"The giant and gnomes were doubtless normally of the same size--only momentarily did they happen to be different. . . . Wait, Frannie, please! I can't tell it to you any faster. . . . The Inner Surface became visible to our telescopes at about 4,900,000 light-years. A realm of land and water. Vegetation. Strange of aspect, yet normal too. It stretched beneath us in every direction--a huge concave surface.