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. The _nearest_ star 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 the _nearest 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. Our _size_ is 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.”
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.