IIILAUNCHED 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 aforce, 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.”
I said, “There was a red ray from the little building. The projectile seemed to follow it.”
“Exactly,” he exclaimed. “That was the Elton Beta ray. It is flung straight out, whereas the Alpha ray is circular. The Beta is a stream of particles moving at over four hundred thousand miles a second. More than twice the speed of light!”
He chuckled. “When they discovered that, Leonard, the Einstein theories held good no longer. The ray bombarded and passed through the electric wall of the room, and the projectile went with it, drawn by it, sucked along by the inherent force of the flying whirlpools. The projectile with its infinitely greater mass than the mass of the flying particles of the ray, picked up speed slowly. But its density was lessening.
“As it gained velocity, it lost density. Everything does that, Leonard. I intensified the rapidity of the changes, as I told you. We shall take it slower. Hours, for what you saw in minutes.”
He tossed away his cigarro and stood up over the instrument table. “When we start, Leonard, here is exactly what will happen. Our gravity will be cut off. Not wholly, I have only gone to extremes in describing the theory.
“With a lessened attraction from the earth, the moon will draw us. And passing it, some other planet will draw us onward. And later, the stars themselves.”
He indicated his switches. “I can make the bow or the stern, or one side or the other, attractive or repulsive to whatever body may be nearest. And thus, in a measure, navigate. But that, Leonard, will be necessary for a few hours only, until we are well out beyond the stars.”
He said it quite quietly. But I gasped. “Beyond the stars . . . in a few hours?”
“Yes,” he said. “In our case, differing from my experiment with the model, we carry the Elton Beta ray, the ‘red ray,’ with us. The gravity principle we use only at the start, to avoid a possible collision. With the red ray preceding us, we will follow it. Ultimately at four hundred thousand miles a second.
“But the source of the ray,being with us, will give the ray constant acceleration, which we in turn will attain. Thus an endless chain of acceleration, you see? And by this I hope to reach the high speeds necessary. We are going very far, Leonard.”
“That model,” I said, “grew larger. It spread—or did I fancy it?—over all the sky.”
He smiled again. “I have not much left to tell you, Leonard. But what there is—it is the simplest of all, yet the most astounding.”
Jim’s voice interrupted us. “We’ve finished, Dr. Weatherby. Everything is aboard. It’s nearly dawn. How about starting?”
The dawn had not yet come when we started. Dr. Weatherby’s workmen were none of them in evidence. He had sent them away a few days before. They did not know his purpose with this vehicle; it was thought among them that he was making some attempt to go to the moon. It was not a startling adventure. It caused very little comment, for since Elton’s discovery many such projects had been undertaken, though all had not been successful.
Dr. Weatherby’s activities occasioned a few daily remarks from the National Broadcasters of News, but little else.
There was, however, one of Dr. Weatherby’s assistants whom he trusted with all his secrets: a young fellow called Mascar, a wordless, grave individual, quiet, deferential of manner, but with a quick alertness that bespoke unusual efficiency.
He had been on guard in the workshop since the workmen left. When Jim and I arrived, Dr. Weatherby had sent Mascar home for his much needed sleep. But he was back again, now before dawn, ready to stand at the Elton switch and send us away.
Dr. Weatherby shook hands with him, as we all gathered by the huge bull’s-eye lens which was swung back to give ingress to the vehicle.
“You know what you are to do, Mascar. When we are well outside, throw off the Elton switch. Lock up the workshop and the house and go home. Report to the International Bureau of News that if they care to, they can announce that Dr. Weatherby’s vehicle has left the earth. You understand? Tell them they can assume, if they wish, that it will land safely on the moon.”
“I will do that,” said Mascar quietly. He shook hands with us all. And his fingers lightly touched Dolores’ head. “Good-bye, Miss Dolores.”
“Good-bye, Mascar. Good-bye. You’ve been very good to Grandfather. I thank you, Mascar. You wait at home. We will be back soon.”
“Yes,” he said. He turned away, and I could see he was striving to hide his emotion.
He swung on his heel, crossed the room, and stood quiet, with a firm hand upon the Elton switch.
Jim called impatiently, “Come on, everybody. Let’s get away.”
For one brief instant my gaze through the forward opened end of the building caught a brief vista of the peaceful Hudson countryside. Hills, and trees in the starlight, my own earth—my home.
The huge convex door of the vehicle swung ponderously closed upon us.
“Come to the instrument room,” said Dr. Weatherby.
We sat on the couch, huddled in a group. The bull’s-eye windows, made to withstand any pressure, were nevertheless ground in such a way that vision through them was crystal clear. The one beside me showed the interior of the workshop with Mascar standing at the Elton switch.
He had already thrown it. I could not hear the hum. But I saw the current’s effect upon Mascar. He was standing rigid, tense, and gripping the switch as though clinging. And then, with his other hand, he seized a discharging wire planted near at hand, so that the current left him comparatively unaffected.
Still I could feel nothing. My mind was whirling. What was it I expected to feel? I do not know. Dr. Weatherby had assured us we would undergo no terrifying experience; he seemed to have no fear for the girls. But how could he be sure?
The walls of the workshop now were luminous; Mascar’s motionless figure was a black blob of shadow in the glowing, snapping interior of the room. Sparks were crackling out there. But here in the vehicle there was nothing save a heavy silence; and the air was cold, dank, tomblike.
Then I felt the current; a tingling; a tiny, infinitely rapid tingling of the vehicle. It was not a vibration; the electric floor beneath my feet was solidly motionless. A tingling seemed to pervade its every atom.
Then I realized my body was tingling! A whir, a tiny throbbing. It brought a sense of nausea and a giddiness. Involuntarily I stood up, trembling, reeling. But Dr. Weatherby sharply drew me back.
Alice and Dolores were clinging to each other. Jim muttered something incoherent. I met his smile, but it was a very weak, surprised, apprehensive smile.
I tried to relax. The nausea was passing. My head steadied. But the tingling grew more intense within me. It was a humming now. Not audible. A humming I could feel, as though every minute cell of my body was throbbing.
It was not unpleasant after a moment. A peculiar sense of lightness was upon me. A sense of freedom. It grew to an exaltation. I was being set free! Unfettered at last. The chains that had bound me to earth were dropping away. But the mood upon me was more than an exaltation, an intoxication: a madness! I was conscious that Alice was laughing wildly.
I heard Dr. Weatherby’s sharp command, “Don’t do that! Look there; see the red ray?”
I clung to my reeling wits.
Jim muttered, “Look at it!”
The interior of the workshop was a whirling fog drenched in blood. I could see the red streaming out its open doorway.
“We’re moving!” Alice cried. “Dolores, we’ve started!”
The enveloping room of the workshop seemed gliding backward. Not a tremor of the vehicle. Mascar’s figure moved slowly backward and downward beyond my sight. The workshop walls were sliding past. The rectangle of its open end seemed expanding, coming toward us.
And then we were outside, in the starlit night. A dark hillside was dropping away. A silver ribbon of river was slipping beneath us, dropping downward, like a plummet falling.
The red ray had vanished. Dr. Weatherby’s voice, calm now, with a touch of triumph to it that all had gone so well, said,
“Mascar has extinguished the red ray. We used it only for starting. We must start slowly, Leonard.”
The river had vanished. A huge Polar liner—I recognized its group of colored lights as Ellison’s, flying in the forty thousand-foot lane—showed overhead. But it, too, seemed falling like a plummet. It flashed straight down past our window and disappeared.
Dr. Weatherby went to the instrument table. Time passed. It seemed only a moment or two though.
Dolores murmured, “Are we still moving, Jim? You must tell me. Tell me everything you see.”
The room was stiflingly hot. We were all gasping.
“I’ve turned on the refrigeration,” said Dr. Weatherby, “to counteract the heat of the friction of our passage through the atmosphere. It will be cool enough presently. Come over here. Don’t you want to look down?”
We gathered over the instrument room’s floor window. Stars were down there, white, red, and yellow stars in a field of dead black: a narrow crescent edge of stars, and all the rest was a gigantic dull red surface. Visibly convex! Patches of dark, formless areas of clouds. An ocean, the vaguely etched outlines of continents, the coastline of the Americas.
We were launched into space!
IVEXPANSION!
Then the vehicle cooled rapidly. Soon we had the heaters going. The coldness of space enveloped us penetrating the vehicle’s walls. But with the heaters we managed to be comfortable.
Dr. Weatherby sat at the instrument table. His chronometer there showed 5a.m.We had started at 4a.m.On one of the distant dials the miles were registering in units of a thousand. The dial-pointer was nearing XX6. Six thousand miles:
Dr. Weatherby glanced up as I appeared. Alice and Dolores, and Jim with them, had gone astern to prepare a broth. We were all of us still feeling a bit shaky, though the sense of lightness had worn off.
Dr. Weatherby had a chart on the table. It showed our solar system. The sun was at its center, and the planetary orbits in concentric circles around it. The planets and our own moon and a few of the larger comets and asteroids were all shown, their positions given progressively for each hour beginning at our starting time.
“I’m heading this way, Leonard. Holding the general plane in which the planets lie.” His finger traced a line from the earth, past the moon, past Mars. Jupiter and Saturn lay over to one side, and Neptune to the other. Uranus was far on the opposite side, beyond the sun.
Dr. Weatherby added, “The moon is drawing us now. But I shall shortly turn a neutral side toward it, and Mars will draw us. We are more than a freely falling body. We are being pulled downward.”
I sat beside him. “What is our velocity now?”
He gestured toward a dial, an ingenious affair. He had already explained its workings, the lessening rate of the earth’s gravitational pull shown by a hair-spring balance as a figure on the dial.
“Three thousand miles an hour, Leonard.” But as I watched, the figure moved to 4; and then to 5, 6 and 7.
The moon, nearly full, lay below us, ahead of us, white, glittering and cold, with the black firmament and the stars clustering about it. We were falling bow down. Overhead, above our blunt stern, the giant crescent earth hung across the firmament. It was still dull red; its configurations of land and water were plainly visible. A silver sunlight edged it.
“Ah, the sun, Leonard!” Abruptly we had emerged from the earth’s conical shadow into the sunlight. But the heavens remained black. The stars blazed with a cold, white gleam as before. And behind us was the white sun with its corona of flame leaping from it.
I have said we were falling—our projectile falling bow down, like a plummet. Gazing through the window it seemed so. But the effect was psychological. I could as readily picture us on a level, proceeding onward.
It was as though we were poised within a giant hollow globe of black glass, star encrusted. There could be no standards of up, or down; it was all as the mind chanced to conceive it. But within the vehicle itself, its soundless, vibrationless, level floor beneath our feet, a complete sense of normality remained.
“Dr. Weatherby,” I said, “that model . . . you remember, it grew gigantic. But we . . . we’re still the same size at which we started?”
For an hour past, a thousand questions had been seething in my mind. This navigation of space was clear enough. All my life scientists had been discussing it. We were moving now at a velocity of some twelve thousand miles an hour. But what was that? Less than the crawling of an ant using the equator of the earth as a race track! Twelve thousand miles an hour—or twelve billion—would get us nowhere among the distant stars in a lifetime!
Dr. Weatherby answered my spoken question: “We are only very little larger than when we started, Leonard. An infinitesimal fraction, for our velocity is nothing as yet. I’ll use the Elton Beta ray once we get farther out.”
He turned to his switches. Through the window I saw the firmament swing slightly. He was navigating, heading for some distant realm beyond all the stars that we could see, all the stars that could exist out there. This tiny vehicle, threading its way. How did he, how could he possibly know his way?
I asked him bluntly, and he looked up from his chart with a smile. “Leonard, in five minutes I could tell you every remaining fundamental of the laws which are governing us. I will tell you, but I want Jim to hear it too. And I’m absorbed now in getting out past the asteroids. A little later, I’ll make it clear.”
We dropped past the moon at a distance of perhaps a hundred thousand miles. We were then some two hundred and forty thousand miles from earth. It was nearly noon, with the earth standard time of Dr. Weatherby’s home. We had been traveling eight hours; constantly accelerating, our velocity at noon had reached a thousand miles a minute.
The moon, as we passed it, floated upward with a quite visible movement. It was a magnificent sight, though the smallest of telescopes on earth brought it visually nearer than it was now.
We ate our first meal, slept, settled down to the routine of life on the vehicle. Another twelve hours passed. Our velocity had reached then a thousand miles a second. But that was only the one hundred and eighty-sixth part of the velocity of light!
We were now—with an average rate of five hundred miles a second from the time we left—some twenty-one million and six hundred thousand miles from earth. Half way to Mars! But in four hours more the red planet floated upward past us. Dr. Weatherby kept well away—a million miles his instrument showed as he measured the planet’s visible diameter.
We had now reached a velocity of some twenty thousand miles a second.
“I shall hold it at that,” Dr. Weatherby said. “It’s too crowded in here, too dangerous.”
We traversed the asteroid region at about that rate. It was a tedious, tense voyage, so dangerous that for nearly five hours one of us was always at the tower window, to avoid a possible collision. The belt in here between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter was thick-strewn with asteroids. But none came near enough to endanger us.
We crossed Jupiter’s orbit. Again Dr. Weatherby accelerated to one hundred thousand miles a second, but it was over an hour before we crossed Saturn’s orbit, four hundred million miles further on. We went no faster for a time.
At this velocity it was tedious. Uranus’s orbit at seventeen hundred million miles from our sun; Neptune at twenty-seven hundred million. And then that last outpost of the solar system, Xavion, discovered in 1964. The planet was at the opposite point of its orbit. We could not see it. Our own sun had long since dwindled into invisibility.
At last we were away! Launched into the realms of outer stellar space, plunging onward at a hundred thousand miles a second. But ahead of us the giant stars showed no change. As imperturbably distant in their aspect as when we started.
We, Jim and I, had had many hours of futile discussion: some in our own room, but more in the little tower where we sat on watch, gazing ahead at the motionless stars, our eyes at the small search-telescopes with which we swept the space into which the projectile was dropping.
We had seen many asteroids, but none near enough to be dangerous. And we passed the hours wondering what it was Dr. Weatherby had to tell us. How did he know where he was going? What was his direction? In all this chaos of immeasurable, unfathomable distance, of what avail to attempt any set direction? By what points could he navigate? It was unthinkable.
And more unthinkable: we had attained a maximum velocity of over one hundred thousand miles a second, only a little more than half the velocity of light. Theneareststar we knew to be over four light-years away. Light, traveling one hundred and eighty-six thousand, four hundred miles a second, took 4.35 years to reach that star. At this rate, we would take some eight years!
And this was thenearest star! Others were a thousand . . . tens of thousands . . . a hundred thousand times farther! Eighty thousand years, even eight hundred thousand years, we would have to travel to reach the distant nebulae! And even then, what realms of dark and empty space might lie beyond! It was unthinkable.
“He’ll explain when he gets ready,” said Jim.
And he did. He called us into the instrument room, shortly after we crossed the orbit of Xavion. He spoke with a slow, precise phrasing: the careful phrasing of a scientist intent upon conveying his exact meaning.
“I think I told you once, Leonard, as a matter of actuality I stumbled upon this thing—these laws which are to govern our flight from now onward. They are definite laws, inherent in all matter.
“We are about to undergo an experience stranger, I think, than any man has undergone before. But not because of any intricate devices with which I have equipped this vehicle. Not at all. Merely the progressive workings of natural laws.
“I have experimented with them for some years. I think I understand them, though I am not sure. But their character, the actual, tangible result of what shortly will happen to us, that, I understand perfectly.”
“What are the laws?” Jim demanded.
He gestured. “In a moment, Jim. I will say first that all this is merely a question of velocity. Matter, as it exists everywhere, is, as you well know, in varying states of velocity.
“And as the velocity changes, so does every other attribute of the substance. A group of electrons inherent in a lightning bolt, the intimes of a flying beam of light, are very different in temporary character from those of a bar of iron. But only different by virtue of their temporary velocity.
“Do I make myself plain? Any substance, for a very brief period, tends to maintain its integrity, its independent existence. But countless forces and conditions are assailing it. Wood burns, or rots. Iron rusts. The human body—a conglomeration of cells loosely clinging into a semblance of an independent entity—grows old, dies, disintegrates.
“Nothing is in a permanent state, a permanent condition of substance. The change may be slowly progressive. Or it may be sudden and violent.
“I’ll be more specific. The Elton ray, acting upon the sensitive intimes of electrite, brings a sudden—and to that extent, unnatural—change.
“An added velocity was imparted to this vehicle and we left the earth. The Elton current is operating the vehicle now. We have reached, or very nearly reached, the limit of velocity we can attain by using the force of celestial gravity—one hundred thousand miles a second.
“As I told you, however, we can now use the Elton Beta ray. Our vehicle, carrying the source of the ray forward, will presently attain a velocity—” He stopped, smiled gently, and added, “To our finite minds, it will be infinite. There will presently be no standards by which we can conceive it.”
I would have interrupted him with a question, but he raised his hand. “In a moment, Leonard; then I want you and Jim to ask me any questions you like. All this that I have said, is prefatory. The question is one solely of velocity. The rest is automatic. The natural laws governing the attributes of matter in relation to its velocity are these:
“First: A substance whose velocity is increased loses density proportionately. For instance, our vehicle, I consider it as a whole, you understand. As its velocity increases, it becomes less dense in substance. Comparatively less dense. Everything is comparative, of course. We ourselves have undergone the same change.”
“A loss of density!” I exclaimed. “Then, of course, expanding, becoming more diffuse.”
“Exactly, Leonard. And that is the second law. Oursizeis growing directly in proportion to our growing velocity.”
I grasped it now. An infinite velocity had suddenly been imparted to the model of the vehicle. It had expanded, like a puff of vapor, over all the sky! Dr. Weatherby went on in his same careful voice.
“These two changes—a loss of density and a gain in size—have been going on ever since we left the earth. They amount to little as yet. But presently I am going to increase our velocity immeasurably. External objects—the stars out there, you will see the change when you look at them.
“Do you understand me? The principle is obvious. A cold, dark star is small and dense. And moves slowly. A giant star is hot, of little density, and it has an enormous velocity.” He paused.
Jim interjected, “I think we understand you, Dr. Weatherby. With this infinite velocity, we will pass beyond the stars. And growing in size . . . to be gigantic.”
“So that, proportionately, the stars will shrink to atoms,” said Alice.
Jim nodded. “Yes. I understand that. It sort of makes you gasp.”
“But,” I exclaimed, “Dr. Weatherby, you have held communication with other living minds, other beings, somewhere out here. Dolores’s thought-waves.”
“Yes,” he said. “Thought-waves are infinitely faster than light. No one has ever—”
“I mean,” I went on, “we are hoping to reach those other beings. But how—this is what Jim and I can’t understand—how do you know where you are going? Might we not be heading directly away? Or perhaps Dolores is receiving the thought-waves progressively stronger and thus guiding us.”
“No,” Dolores spoke up. “It is difficult to receive the thoughts. There has been no time since we left—” She stopped, and added, “That makes me realize, didn’t Alice leave us a moment ago?”
“Yes,” said Jim. “It’s time for lunch.”
Dolores left her grandfather’s side. “I must go help her.”
Alice had slipped quietly away. Dolores now joined her in the galley.
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.”
VEMERGING 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!