Produced by Greg Weeks, adhere and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
Transcriber's Note
This etext was produced from Amazing Stories July 1942. Extensive
research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this
publication was renewed.
_Out of nowhere came these grim, cold, black-clad men, to kidnap three
Earth people and carry them to a weird and terrible world where a man
could be a giant at will._
[Illustration: Lee Anthony crouched and set himself to resist the
attack of the robed men.]
THE WORLD BEYOND
By RAY CUMMINGS
The old woman was dying. There could be no doubt of it now. Surely she
would not last through the night. In the dim quiet bedroom he sat
watching her, his young face grim and awed. Pathetic business, this
ending of earthly life, this passing on. In the silence, from the living
room downstairs the gay laughter of the young people at the birthday
party came floating up. His birthday--Lee Anthony, twenty-one years old
today. He had thought he would feel very different, becoming--legally--a
man. But the only difference now, was that old Anna Green who had been
always so good to him, who had taken care of him almost all his life,
now was dying.
Terrible business. But old age is queer. Anna knew what was happening.
The doctor, who had given Lee the medicines and said he would be back in
the morning, hadn't fooled her. And she had only smiled.
Lee tensed as he saw that she was smiling now; and she opened her eyes.
His hand went to hers where it lay, so white, blue-veined on the white
bedspread.
"I'm here, Anna. Feel better?"
"Oh, yes. I'm all right." Her faint voice, gently tired, mingled with
the sounds from the party downstairs. She heard the laughter. "You
should be down there, Lee. I'm all right."
"I should have postponed it," he said. "And what you did, preparing for
it--"
She interrupted him, raising her thin arm, which must have seemed so
heavy that at once she let it fall again. "Lee--I guess I am glad you're
here--want to talk to you--and I guess it better be now."
"Tomorrow--you're too tired now--"
"For me," she said with her gentle smile, "there may not be any
tomorrow--not here. Your grandfather, Lee--you really don't remember
him?"
"I was only four or five."
"Yes. That was when your father and mother died in the aero accident and
your grandfather brought you to me."
Very vaguely he could remember it. He had always understood that Anna
Green had loved his grandfather, who had died that same year.
"What I want to tell you, Lee--" She seemed summoning all her last
remaining strength. "Your grandfather didn't die. He just went away.
What you've never known--he was a scientist. But he was a lot more than
that. He had--dreams. Dreams of what we mortals might be--what we ought
to be--but are not. And so he--went away."
This dying old woman; her mind was wandering?...
"Oh--yes," Lee said. "But you're much too tired now, Anna dear--"
"Please let me tell you. He had--some scientific apparatus. I didn't see
it--I don't know where he went. I think he didn't know either, where he
was going. But he was a very good man, Lee. I think he had an
intuition--an inspiration. Yes, it must have been that. A man--inspired.
And so he went. I've never seen or heard from him since. Yet--what he
promised me--if he could accomplish it--tonight--almost now, Lee, would
be the time--"
* * * * *
Just a desperately sick old woman whose blurred mind was seeing visions.
The thin wrinkled face, like crumpled white parchment, was transfigured
as though by a vision. Her sunken eyes were bright with it. A wonderment
stirred within Lee Anthony. Why was his heart pounding? It seemed
suddenly as though he must be sharing this unknown thing of science--and
mysticism. As though something within him--his grandfather's blood
perhaps--was responding.... He felt suddenly wildly excited.
"Tonight?" he murmured.
"Your grandfather was a very good man, Lee--"
"And you, Anna--all my life I have known how good you are. Not like most
women--you're just all gentleness--just kindness--"
"That was maybe--just an inspiration from him." Her face was bright with
it. "I've tried to bring you up--the way he told me. And what I must
tell you now--about tonight, I mean--because I may not live to see it--"
Her breath gave out so that her faint tired voice trailed away.
"What?" he urged. "What is it, Anna? About tonight--"
What a tumult of weird excitement was within him! Surely this was
something momentous. His twenty-first birthday. Different, surely, for
Lee Anthony than any similar event had ever been for anyone else.
"He promised me--when you were twenty-one--just then--at this time, if
he could manage it--that he would come back--"
"Come back, Anna? Here?"
"Yes. To you and me. Because you would be a man--brought up, the best I
could do to make you be--like him--because you would be a man who would
know the value of love--and kindness--those things that ought to rule
this world--but really do not."
This wild, unreasoning excitement within him...! "You think he will
come--tonight, Anna?"
"I really do. I want to live to see him. But now--I don't know--"
He could only sit in silence, gripping her hand. And again the gay
voices of his guests downstairs came up like a roar of intrusion. They
didn't know that she was more than indisposed. She had made him promise
not to tell them.
Her eyes had closed, and now she opened them again. "They're having a
good time, aren't they, Lee? That's what I wanted--for you and them
both. You see, I've had to be careful--not to isolate you from
life--life as it is. Because your grandfather wanted you to be normal--a
healthy, happy--regular young man. Not queer--even though I've tried to
show you--"
"If he--he's coming tonight, Anna--we shouldn't have guests here."
"When they have had their fun--"
"They have. We're about finished down there. I'll get rid of them--tell
them you're not very well--"
She nodded. "Perhaps that's best--now--"
He was hardly aware of how he broke up the party and sent them away.
Then in the sudden heavy silence of the little cottage, here in the
grove of trees near the edge of the town, he went quietly back upstairs.
* * * * *
Her eyes were closed. Her white face was placid. Her faint breath was
barely discernible. Failing fast now. Quietly he sat beside her. There
was nothing that he could do. The doctor had said that very probably she
could not live through the night. Poor old Anna. His mind rehearsed the
life that she had given him. Always she had been so gentle, so wise,
ruling him with kindness.
He remembered some of the things she had reiterated so often that his
childish mind had come to realize their inevitable truth. The greatest
instinctive desire of every living creature is happiness. And the way to
get it was not by depriving others of it. It seemed now as though this
old woman had had something of goodness inherent to her--as though she
were inspired? And tonight she had said, with her gentle smile as she
lay dying, that if that were so--it had been an inspiration from his
grandfather.
Something of science which his grandfather had devised, and which had
enabled him to--go away. What could that mean? Go where? And why had he
gone? To seek an ideal? Because he was dissatisfied with life here? Her
half incoherent words had seemed to imply that. And now, because Lee was
twenty-one--a man--his grandfather was coming back. Because he had
thought that Lee would be able to help him?... Help him to do--what?
He stirred in his chair. It was nearly midnight now. The little
cottage--this little second floor bedroom where death was hovering--was
heavy with brooding silence. It was awesome; almost frightening. He bent
closer to the bed. Was she dead? No, there was still a faint fluttering
breath, but it seemed now that there would be no strength for her to
speak to him again.
Mysterious business, this passing on. Her eyelids were closed, a symbol
of drawn blinds of the crumbling old house in which she had lived for so
long. It was almost a tenantless house now. And yet she was somewhere
down there behind those drawn blinds. Reluctant perhaps to leave, still
she lingered, with the fires going out so that it must be cold ... cold
and silent where she huddled. Or was she hearing now the great organ of
the Beyond with its sweep of harmonies summoning her to come--welcoming
her....
A shiver ran through young Lee Anthony as he saw that the pallid
bloodless lips of the white wrinkled face had stirred into a smile. Down
there somewhere her spirit--awed and a little frightened doubtless--had
opened some door to let the sound of the organ in--and to let in the
great riot of color which must have been outside.... And then she had
not been frightened, but eager....
He realized suddenly that he was staring at an empty shell and that old
Anna Green had gone....
* * * * *
A sound abruptly brought Lee out of his awed thoughts. It was outside
the house--the crunching of wheels in the gravel of the driveway--the
squeal of grinding brakes. A car had stopped. He sat erect in his chair,
stiffened, listening, with his heart pounding so that the beat of it
seemed to shake his tense body. His grandfather--returning?
An automobile horn honked. Footsteps sounded on the verandah. The front
doorbell rang.
There were voices outside as he crossed the living room--a man's voice,
and then a girl's laugh. He flung open the door. It was a young man in
dinner clothes and a tall blonde girl. Tom Franklin, and a vivid,
theatrical-looking girl, whom Lee had never seen before. She was inches
taller than her companion. She stood clinging to his arm; her beautiful
face, with beaded lashes and heavily rouged lips, was laughing. She was
swaying; her companion steadied her, but he was swaying himself.
"Easy, Viv," he warned. "We made it--tol' you we would.... Hello there,
Lee ol' man--your birthday--think I'd forget a thing like that, not on
your life. So we come t'celebrate--meet Vivian Lamotte--frien' o' mine.
Nice kid, Viv--you'll like her."
"Hello," the girl said. She stared up at Lee. He towered above her, and
beside him the undersized and stoop-shouldered Franklin was swaying
happily. Admiration leaped into the girl's eyes.
"Say," she murmured, "you sure are a swell looker for a fact. He said
you were--but my Gawd--"
"And his birthday too," Frank agreed, "so we're gonna celebrate--" His
slack-jawed, weak-chinned face radiated happiness and triumph. "Came
fas' to get here in time. I tol' Viv I could make it--we never hit a
thing--"
"Why, yes--come in," Lee agreed awkwardly. He had only met young Tom
Franklin once or twice, a year ago now, and Lee had completely forgotten
it. The son of a rich man, with more money than was good for him....
With old Anna lying there upstairs--surely he did not want these happy
inebriated guests here now....
He stood with them just inside the threshold. "I--I'm awfully sorry," he
began. "My birthday--yes, but you see--old Mrs. Green--my guardian--just
all the family I've got--she died, just a few minutes ago--upstairs
here--I've been here alone with her--"
It sobered them. They stared blankly. "Say, my Gawd, that's tough," the
girl murmured. "Your birthday too. Tommy listen, we gotta get
goin'--can't celebrate--"
It seemed that there was just a shadow out on the dark verandah. A tall
figure in a dark cloak.
"Why--what the hell," Franklin muttered.
A group of gliding soundless figures were out there in the darkness. And
across the living room the window sash went up with a thump. A black
shape was there, huddled in a great loose cloak which was over the head
so that the thing inside was shapeless.
For an instant Lee and his two companions stood stricken. The shapes
seemed babbling with weird unintelligible words. Then from the window
came words of English:
"_We--want--_" Slow words, strangely intoned. Young Tom Franklin broke
in on them.
"Say--what the devil--who do you people think you are, comin' in here--"
He took a swaying step over the threshold. There was a sudden sharp
command from one of the shapes. Lee jumped in front of the girl. On the
verandah the gliding figures were engulfing Franklin; he had fallen.
Lee went through the door with a leap, his fist driving at the cowled
head of one of the figures--a solid shape that staggered backward from
his blow. But the others were on him, dropping down before his rush,
gripping his legs and ankles. He went down, fighting. And then something
struck his face--something that was like a hand, or a paw with claws
that scratched him. His head suddenly was reeling; his senses fading....
* * * * *
How long he fought Lee did not know. He was aware that the girl was
screaming--and that he was hurling clutching figures away--figures that
came pouncing back. Then the roaring in his head was a vast uproar. The
fighting, scrambling dark shapes all seemed dwindling until they were
tiny points of white light--like stars in the great abyss of
nothingness....
He knew--as though it were a blurred dream--that he was lying inert on
the verandah, with Franklin and the girl lying beside him.... The house
was being searched.... Then the muttering shapes were standing here. Lee
felt himself being picked up. And then he was carried silently out into
the darkness. The motion seemed to waft him off so that he knew nothing
more.
CHAPTER II
_The Flight Into Size and Space_
Lee came back to consciousness with the feeling that some great length
of time must have elapsed. He was on a couch in a small, weird-looking
metal room--metal of a dull, grey-white substance like nothing he had
ever seen before. With his head still swimming he got up dizzily on one
elbow, trying to remember what had happened to him. That fingernail, or
claw, had scratched his face. He had been drugged. It seemed obvious. He
could remember his roaring senses as he had tried to fight, with the
drug gradually overcoming him....
The room had a small door, and a single round window, like a bullseye
pane of thick lens. Outside there was darkness, with points of stars.
His head was still humming from the remaining effect of the drug. Or was
the humming an outside noise? He was aware as he got to his feet and
staggered to the door, that the humming was distantly outside the room.
The door was locked; its lever resisted his efforts to turn it.
There he saw the inert figures of the girl, and Tom Franklin. They were
lying uninjured on two other small couches against the room's metal
wall. The girl stirred a little as he touched her dank forehead. Her
dyed blonde hair had fallen disheveled to her shoulders. Franklin lay
sprawled, his stiff white shirt bosom dirty and rumpled, his thin sandy
hair dangling over his flushed face. His slack mouth was open. He was
breathing heavily.
At the lens-window Lee stood gasping, his mind still confused and
blurred, trying to encompass what was out there. This was a spaceship! A
small globular thing of white metal. He could see a rim of it, like a
flat ring some ten feet beneath him. A spaceship, and obviously it had
left the Earth! There was a black firmament--dead-black monstrous abyss
with white blazing points of stars. And then, down below and to one side
there was just an edge of a great globe visible. The Earth, with the
sunlight edging its sweeping crescent limb--the Earth, down there with a
familiar coastline and a huge spread of ocean like a giant map in
monochrome.
Back on the couch Lee sat numbed. There was the sound of scraping metal;
a doorslide in the wall opened. A face was there--a man with a blur of
opalescent light behind him.
"You are all right now?" a voice said.
"Yes. I guess so. Let me out of here--"
Let him out of here? To do what? To make them head this thing back to
Earth.... To Lee Anthony as he sat confused, the very thoughts were a
fantasy.... Off the Earth! Out in Space! So often he had read of it, as
a future scientific possibility--but with this actuality now his mind
seemed hardly to grasp it....
The man's voice said gently, "We cannot trust you. There must be no
fighting--"
"I won't fight. What good could it do me?"
"You did fight. That was bad--that was frightening. We must not harm
you--"
"Where are we going?" Lee murmured. "Why in the devil are you--"
"We think now it is best to say nothing. We will give you food through
here. And over there--behind you--a little doorslide to another room.
You and these other two can be comfortable--"
"For how long?" Lee demanded.
"It should not seem many days. Soon we shall go fast. Please watch it at
the window--he would want that. You have been taught some science?"
"Yes. I guess so."
To Lee it was a weird, unnatural exchange between captor and captive.
The voice, intoning the English words so slowly, so carefully, seemed
gentle, concerned with his welfare ... and afraid of him.
Abruptly the doorslide closed again, and then at once it reopened.
"He would want you to understand what you see," the man said. "You will
find it very wonderful--we did, coming down here. This was his room--so
long ago when he used it. His dials are there--you can watch them and
try to understand. Dials to mark our distance and our size. The
size-change will start soon."
Size-change? Lee's numbed mind turned over the words and found them
almost meaningless.
"From the window there--what you can see will be very wonderful," the
man said again. "He would want you to study it. Please do that."
The doorslide closed....
What you can see from the window will be very wonderful. No one, during
the days that followed could adequately describe what Lee Anthony and
Thomas Franklin and Vivian saw through that lens-window. A vast panorama
in monochrome ... a soundless drama of the stars, so immense, so awesome
that the human mind could grasp only an infinitesimal fragment of its
wonders....
They found the little door which led into another apartment. There were
tables and chairs of earth-style, quaintly old-fashioned. Food and drink
were shoved through the doorslide; the necessities of life and a fair
comfort of living were provided. But their questions, even as the time
passed and lengthened into what on Earth might have been a week or more,
remained unanswered. There was only that gentle but firm negation:
"We have decided that he would want us to say nothing. We do not know
about this girl and this smaller man. We brought them so that they could
not remain on Earth to talk of having seen us. We are sorry about that.
He probably won't like it."
"He? Who the devil are you talking about?" Franklin demanded. "See here,
if I had you fellows back on Earth now I'd slam you into jail. Damned
brigands. You can't do this to me! My--my father's one of the most
important men in New York--"
But now the doorslide quietly closed.
A week? It could have been that, or more. In a wall recess of the room
Lee found a line of tiny dials with moving pointers. Miles--thousands of
miles. A million; ten millions; a hundred million. A light-year; tens,
thousands. And, for the size-change, a normal diameter, Unit 1--and then
up into thousands.
For hours at a time, silent, awed beyond what he had ever conceived the
emotion of awe could mean, he sat at the lens-window, staring out and
trying to understand.
* * * * *
The globe-ship was some five-hundred thousand miles out from Earth when
the size-change of the weird little vehicle began. It came to Lee with a
sudden shock to his senses, his head reeling, and a tingling within him
as though every fibre of his being were suddenly stimulated into a new
activity.
"Well, my Gawd," Vivian gasped. "What're they doin' to us now?"
The three of them had been warned by a voice through the doorslide, so
that they sat together on one of the couches, waiting for what would
happen.
"This--I wish they wouldn't do it," Franklin muttered. "Damn them--I
want to get out of here."
Fear seemed to be Franklin's chief emotion now--fear and a petty sense
of personal outrage that all this could be done to him against his will.
Often, when Lee and the girl were at the window, Franklin had sat
brooding, staring at his feet.
"Easy," Lee said. "It evidently won't hurt us. We're started in
size-change. The globe, and everything in it, is getting larger."
Weird. The grey metal walls of the room were glowing now with some
strange current which suffused them. The starlight from the window-lens
mingled with an opalescent sheen from the glowing walls. It was like an
aura, bathing the room--an aura which seemed to penetrate every smallest
cell-particle of Lee's body--stimulating it....
Size-change! Vaguely, Lee could fathom how it was accomplished; his mind
went back to many scientific articles he had read on the theory of
it--only theory, those imaginative scientific pedants had considered it;
and now it was a reality upon him! He recalled the learned phrases the
writers had used.... The _state of matter_. In all the Universe, the
inherent factors which govern the state of matter yield most readily to
a change. An electronic charge--a current perhaps akin to, but certainly
not identical with electricity, would change the state of all organic
and inorganic substances ... a rapid duplication of the fundamental
entities within the electrons--and electrons themselves, so
unsubstantial--mere whirlpools of nothingness!
A rapid duplication of the fundamental whirlpools--that would add size.
The complete substance--with shape unaltered--would grow larger.
All just theory, but here, now, it was brought to an accomplished fact.
Within himself, Lee could feel it. But as yet, he could not see it. The
glowing room and everything in it was so weirdly luminous, there was no
alteration in shape. These objects, the figure of Vivian beside him, and
the pallid frightened Franklin, relative to each other they were no
different from before. And the vast panorama of starry Universe beyond
the lens-window, the immense distances out there, made any size-change
as yet unperceivable.
* * * * *
But the size-change had begun, there was no question of it. With his
senses steadying, Lee crossed the room. A weird feeling of lightness was
upon him; he swayed as he stood before the little line of dials in the
wall-recess. Five hundred thousand miles from Earth. More than twice the
distance of the Moon. The globe had gone that far with accelerating
velocity so that now the pointers marked a hundred thousand miles an
hour--out beyond the Moon, heading for the orbit-line of Mars. Now the
size-change pointers were stirring. Unit One, the size this globe had
been as it rested on Earth, fifty feet in height, and some thirty feet
at its mid-section bulge. Already that unit was two, a globe--which, if
it were on Earth, would be a hundred feet high. And Lee himself? He
would be a giant more than twelve feet tall now.... He stood staring at
the dials for a moment or two. That little pointer of the first of the
size-change dials was creeping around. An acceleration! Another moment
and it had touched Unit four. A two hundred foot globe. And Lee, if he
had been on Earth, would already be a towering human nearly twenty-five
feet in height!
Behind him, he heard Franklin suddenly muttering, "If only I could
change without everything else changing! Damn them all--what I could
do--"
"You're nuts," Vivian said. "I don't see anything growing
bigger--everything here--jus' the same." Her laugh was abruptly
hysterical. "This room--you two--you look like ghosts. Say, maybe we're
all dead an' don't know it."
Queerly her words sent a shiver through Lee. He turned, stared blankly
at her. This weird thing! The electronic light streaming from these
walls had a stroboscopic quality. The girl's face was greenish,
putty-colored, and her teeth shone phosphorescent.
Maybe we're all dead and don't know it.... Lee knew that this thing was
a matter of cold, precise, logical science.... Yet who shall say but
what mysticism is not mingled with science? A thing, which if we
understood it thoroughly, would be as logical, as precise as the
mathematics of science itself? Death? Who shall say what, of actuality,
Death may be. A leaving of the mortal shell? A departure from earthly
substance? A new state of being? Surely some of those elements were here
now. And, logically, why could there not be a state of being not all
Death, but only with some of its elements?
"I--I don't like this," Franklin suddenly squealed. On the couch he sat
hunched, trembling. "Something wrong here--Lee--damn you Lee--don't you
feel it?"
Lee tried to smile calmly. "Feel what?"
"We're not--not alone here," Franklin stammered. "Not just you and
Vivian and me--something else is here--something you can't see, but you
can almost feel. An' I don't like it--"
A presence. Was there indeed something else here, of which now in this
new state of being they were vaguely aware? Something--like a fellow
voyager--making this weird journey with them? Lee's heart was so wildly
beating that it seemed smothering him.
* * * * *
Unit Ten ... Twenty ... a Hundred.... With steady acceleration, the
lowest size-change pointer was whirling, and the one above it was
moving. The globe was five thousand feet high now. And on Earth Lee
would have been a monstrous Titan over six hundred feet tall. A globe,
and humans in that tremendous size--the very weight of them--in a moment
more of this growth--would disarrange the rotation of the Earth on its
axis!...
And then abruptly Lee found himself envisaging the monstrous globe out
here in Space. A thing to disarrange the mechanics of all the Celestial
Universe! In an hour or two, with this acceleration of growth, the globe
would be a huge meteorite--then an asteroid....
He stared at the distance dials. With the growth had come an immense
augmentation of velocity. A hundred thousand miles an hour--that had
been accelerated a hundred fold now. Ten million miles an hour....
Through the window-lens Lee gazed, mute with awe. The size-change was
beginning to show! Far down, and to one side the crescent Earth was
dwindling ... Mars was far away in another portion of its orbit--the
Moon was behind the Earth. There were just the myriad blazing giant
worlds of the stars--infinitely remote, with vast distances of inky void
between them. And now there was a visible movement to the stars! A sort
of shifting movement....
An hour.... A day.... A week.... Who shall try and describe what Lee
Anthony beheld during that weird outward journey?... For a brief time,
after they swept past the orbit of Mars, the great planets of Jupiter
and Saturn were almost in a line ahead of the plunging, expanding globe.
A monstrous thing now--with electronically charged gravity-plates so
that it plunged onward by its own repellant force--the repellant force
of the great star-field beneath it.
* * * * *
Lee stared at Jupiter, a lead-colored world with its red spot like a
monster's single glaring eye. With the speed of light Jupiter was
advancing, swinging off to one side with a visible flow of movement, and
dropping down into the lower void as the globe went past it. Yet, as it
approached, visually it had not grown larger. Instead, there was only a
steady dwindling. A dwindling of great Saturn, with its gorgeous,
luminous rings came next. These approaching planets, seeming to shrink!
Because, with Lee's expanding viewpoint, everything in the vast scene
was shrinking! Great distances here, in relation to the giant globe,
were dwindling! These millions of miles between Saturn and Jupiter had
shrunk into thousands. And then were shrinking to hundreds.
Abruptly, with a startled shock to his senses, Lee's viewpoint changed.
Always before he had instinctively conceived himself to be his normal
six foot earthly size. The starry Universe was vast beyond his
conception. And in a second now, that abruptly was altered. He conceived
the vehicle as of actuality it was--a globe as large as the ball of
Saturn itself! And simultaneously he envisaged the present reality of
Saturn. Out in the inky blackness it hung--not a giant ringed world
millions of miles away, but only a little ringed ball no bigger than the
spaceship--a ringed ball only eight or ten times as big as Lee himself.
It hung there for an instant beside them--only a mile or so away
perhaps. And as it went past, with both distance and size-change
combining now, it shrank with amazing rapidity! A ball only as big as
this room.... Then no larger than Lee it hung, still seemingly no
further away than before. And then in a few minutes more, a mile out
there in the shrinking distance, it was a tiny luminous point, vanishing
beyond his vision.
Uranus, little Neptune--Pluto, almost too far away in its orbit to be
seen--all of them presently were dwindled and gone. Lee had a glimpse of
the Solar system, a mere bunch of lights. The Sun was a tiny spot of
light, holding its little family of tiny planets--a mother hen with her
brood. It was gone in a moment, lost like a speck of star-dust among the
giant starry worlds.
Another day--that is a day as it would have been on Earth. But here was
merely a progressing of human existence--a streaming forward of human
consciousness. The Light-year dial pointers were all in movement. By
Earth standards of size and velocity, long since had the globe's
velocity reached and passed the speed of light. Lee had been taught--his
book-learning colored by the Einstein postulates--that there could be no
speed greater than the speed of light--by Earth standards--perhaps, yes.
The globe--by comparison with its original fifty-foot earth-size--might
still be traveling no more than a few hundred thousand miles an hour.
But this monster--a thing now as big as the whole Solar System
doubtless--was speeding through a light-year in a moment!
Futile figures! The human mind can grasp nothing of the vastness of
inter-stellar space. To Lee it was only a shrinking inky void--an
emptiness crowded with whirling little worlds all dwindling.... This
crowded space! Often little points of star-dust had come whirling at the
globe--colliding, bursting into pin-points of fire. Each of them might
have been bigger than the Earth.
There was a time when it seemed that beneath the globe all the tiny
stars were shrinking into one lens-shaped cluster. The Inter-stellar
Universe--all congealed down there into a blob, and everywhere else
there was just nothingness.... But then little distant glowing nebulae
were visible--luminous, floating rings, alone in the emptiness....
Distant? One of them drifted past, seemingly only a few hundred feet
away--a luminous little ring of star-dust. The passage of the monstrous
globe seemed to hurl it so that like a blown smoke ring it went into
chaos, lost its shape, and vanished.
Then at last all the blobs--each of them, to Earth-size conception, a
monstrous Universe--all were dwindled into one blob down to one side of
Lee's window. And then they were gone....
* * * * *
Just darkness now. Darkness and soundless emptiness. But as he stared at
intervals through another long night of his human consciousness, Lee
seemed to feel that the emptiness out there was dwindling--a finite
emptiness. He noticed, presently, that the size-change pointers had
stopped their movement; the ultimate size of the globe had been reached.
The figures of the Light-year dials were meaningless to his
comprehension. The velocity was meaningless. And now another little set
of dials were in operation. A thousand--something--of distance. There
was a meaningless word which named the unit. A thousand Earth-miles, if
he had been in his former size? The pointer marked nine hundred in a
moment. Was it, perhaps, the distance now from their destination?
Vivian was beside him. "Lee, what's gonna happen to us? Won't this come
to an end some time? Lee--you won't let anybody hurt me?"
She was like a child, almost always clinging to him now. And suddenly
she said a very strange thing. "Lee, I been thinkin'--back there on
Earth I was doin' a lot of things that maybe were pretty rotten--anglin'
for his money for instance--an' not carin' much what I had to do to get
it." She gestured at the sullen Franklin who was sitting on the couch.
"You know--things like that. An' I been thinkin'--you suppose, when we
get where we're goin' now, that'll be held against me?"
What a queer thing to say! She was like a child--and so often a child
has an insight into that which is hidden from those more mature!
"I--don't know," Lee muttered.
From the couch, Franklin looked up moodily. "Whispering about me again?
I know you are--damn you both. You and everybody else here."
"We're not interested in you," Vivian said.
"Oh, you're not? Well you were, back on Earth. I'm not good enough for
you now, eh? He's better--because he's big--big and strong--that the
idea? Well if I ever had the chance--"
"Don't be silly," Lee said.
* * * * *
The sullen Franklin was working himself into a rage. Lee seemed to
understand Franklin better now. A weakling. Inherently, with a complex
of inferiority, the vague consciousness of it lashing him into baffled
anger.
"You, Anthony," Franklin burst out, "don't think you've been fooling me.
You can put it over that fool girl, but not me. I'm onto you."
"Put what over?" Lee said mildly.
"That you don't know anything about this affair or these men who've got
us--you don't know who they are, do you?"
"No. Do you?" Lee asked.
Franklin jumped to his feet. "Don't fence with me. By God, if I was
bigger I'd smash your head in. They abducted us, because they wanted
you. That fellow said as much near the start of this damned trip. They
won't talk--afraid I'll find out. And you can't guess what it's all
about! The hell you can't."
Lee said nothing. But there was a little truth in what Franklin was
saying, of course.... Those things that the dying old Anna Green had
told him--surely this weird voyage had some connection.
He turned away; went back to the window. There was a sheen now. A vague
outline of something vast, as though the darkness were ending at a great
wall that glowed a little.
It seemed, during the next time-interval, as though the globe might have
turned over, so that now it was dropping down upon something tangible.
Dropping--floating down--with steadily decreasing velocity, descending
to a Surface. The sheen of glow had expanded until now it filled all the
lower hemisphere of darkness--a great spread of surface visually coming
up. Then there were things to see, illumined by a faint half-light to
which color was coming; a faint, pastel color that seemed a rose-glow.
"Why--why," Vivian murmured, "say, it's beautiful, ain't it? It looks
like fairyland--or Heaven. It does--don't it, Lee?"
"Yes," Lee murmured. "Like--like--"
The wall-slide rasped. The voice of one of their captors said, "We will
arrive soon. We can trust you--there must be no fighting?"
"You can trust us," Lee said.
It was dark in the little curving corridor of the globe, where with
silent robed figures around them, they stood while the globe gently
landed. Then they were pushed forward, out through the exit port.
The new realm. The World Beyond. What was it? To Lee Anthony then came
the feeling that there was a precise scientific explanation of it, of
course. And yet, beyond all that pedantry of science, he seemed to know
that it was something else, perhaps a place that a man might mould by
his dreams. A place that would be what a man made of it, from that which
was within himself.
Solemn with awe he went with his companions slowly down the incline.