FOREWORD
1 FREEDOM IN TIME AND SPACE
2 "THIS COULD DESTROY THE UNIVERSE"
3 EXPLORERS INTO INFINITY
4 THE WATCHERS
5 THE RETURN
6 THE FLIGHT INTO TIME, SIZE AND SPACE
7 "A SINGLE STARLIT NIGHT--AN ETERNITY"
8 THE ENCOUNTER IN THE FOREST GLADE
9 "DWINDLING GIANTS FROM LARGENESS UNFATHOMABLE"
10 THE SOLITARY VOYAGER
11 BRAVE LITTLE BEACON STRIVING TO PIERCE INFINITY
_FOREWORD_
_Some of my present readers will doubtless remember "The Girl in the
Golden Atom." When I wrote that book of the realm of infinite smallness
there was in my mind its logical converse, the realm of the infinitely
large. The one a complement to the other. And so I offer "Explorers
Into Infinity," in no sense as a sequel to "The Girl in the Golden
Atom," for fictionally they have no connection, but rather as its
companion story._
_You will find here a complete theory of the material universe as I
conceive it may perhaps really be. To my own imagination--and I think
very likely to your own--it is difficult to conceive of an infinite
distance beyond the stars--empty Space stretching out forever. Nor is
Einstein more satisfying to me, rather less so, for out beyond the
Einstein system of curved Space must lie something or nothing. It
is the nothingness which puzzles me. I have tried vainly to imagine
a realm, infinitely large, of unending nothingness. Time is equally
puzzling. I can conceive of eventful eons lying ahead of us; but rob
that time of its future events and I flounder. To me at least, the
conception of Time with nothing ever happening anywhere is impossible.
To me also, an event presupposes the existence of something; and so,
in my effort to imagine the infinitely large--Space illimitable, Time
unending--I am forced to conceive what must fill that Space, what must
happen to create that time._
_You may call this tale fantastic, weird, bizarre. Doubtless it is. But
with our most powerful microscopes reaching inward so tiny a distance
to see no end in infinite smallness; our greatest telescopes groping
futilely out into largeness unending to our vision, what is left but
our imagination? And that, at least, we can send winging into the
infinite!_
_I would not have you fear from this foreword that my story may be some
pedantic, heavily technical exposition. It is not; for it is fiction
only--a romance with which to entertain you; an effort, by using
fictional methods, to reduce theories purely imaginative into concrete
form with as great a degree of plausibility as may be. It is this only
I desire: to carry you with me as you read; to make plausible this
flight of our imaginations momentarily set free from the tiny everyday
universe which is all we have physically to envisage._