by Earl
“Perhaps,” returned the scientist. “Perhaps we won’t get that far.”
They waited to see. Finally the island universes thinned out, faded to the rear, forming a football of nebulosity that rapidly dwindled. No new universes appeared ahead. Space seemed impossibly darker there, as though it were truly empty.
When at last the star-like galaxy of island-universes winked out behind them, lost in irretrievable distances, Moore became panic-stricken. The void stretched ahead, seemingly forever and forever, into an infinity of infinities. No single light beam came from any direction. When they turned out the lights in the cabin, to sleep, the terrible blankness that enveloped them made Moore moan aloud in mortal terror, Even the calm, impassionate Dr. Templeton gasped.
They slept with the lights on. But Moore could not sleep. His staring eyes gazed into the haunting nothingness about them. His nerves hammered until his body trembled In every cell. He envied the phlegmatic scientist.
“Good Lord!” groaned Moore when he thought he could stand it no longer. “We’ll never get back to our world, or even to our galaxy. God alone knows how far we’ve come or how fast we’re moving. We won’t even know when our forward speed has stopped nor when we’re going back!”
“We can tell by the chronometer,” answered Templeton, “When it lacks a week of six months that we’ve been gone from Earth, the ship will have stopped and will then be automatically retreating, tail-first.”
It seemed like an eternity to Moore. The numbers of the steadily clicking chronometer dial changed with exasperating slowness. But time did pass. Moore counted it backwards, toward the moment when they would be moving back. Two weeks left—one week—one day—one hour—one—
MOORE, watching the chronometer dial, saw a strange thing happen. The dial suddenly unaccountably stopped, in mid tick! There it stuck.
The rest that happened was madness.
At the same time that the chronometer stopped, the steady thunder of their nose-rockets ceased—instantaneously. The long streamers of ejected particles in-front froze into positions of static beauty, like a photograph of the sun’s corona. All instruments within the ship halted in mid-stroke. It was very much like all motion had jammed up against an unbreakable barrier.
But there was no shock!
The two men found their bodies locked in position, also. Dr. Templeton, who had been eating at the moment, remained with a spoon poised halfway between a paper cup and his lips, mouth open, head thrown back. He had been in the act of crossing his legs, and now the leg he had brought up from the floor stuck comically out at an angle, as though he had been turned into stone.
Moore would have laughed except that he could not laugh. He was a frozen statue, sitting with spine twisted in an awkward slumped position before the Chronometer. He had been in the act of chewing his nails in impatience and remained thus with a fingernail between his teeth.
Somehow, all the ordinary laws of the universe were in abeyance, whether of motion, time, or space. Even their human emotions seemed caught in this preposterous state of negativity. Moore knew he should be astounded, even frightened, but instead his mind simply accepted the startling event as a matter of course.
The answer to it all was supremely simple, and somehow he knew it without being able to objectively think of it.
THEY were caught in a Timeless Shore that their ship had reached just before it had decelerated to a full stop. The moment it had reached this point, motion ceased. This strange, incredible zone that man’s mind could not fathom lay around the universe like a cocoon. What it actually was the human mind could not conceive. But its effects—
Time, in man’s sense, had no meaning in this zone. It had a time of its own, measured in eternities!
Their mind’s eye, penetrated by some ultra-radiation that mirrored the macrouniverse, showed them scenes their mortal eyes could never have witnessed.
Clearly, they saw their entire universe, composed of trillions of island galaxies. Together, they formed a swarm whose individual sums ran into figures greater than the sum total of atoms known to the human mind.
This was the full view of things that their new eyes saw from the strange, timeless shore on which they were beached. And there was the entire universe going through an incredibly accelerated life-cycle. They watched it, realizing that ordinary time was passing by in eternities at a click.
They saw the island-universe rushing outward from a common center. In this, at least, Earth’s cosmogonists had been right. The universe expanded, as Jeans and Eddington had postulated. The island-universe did not expand within themselves, but simply separated from one another, flung outward, like bits of debris from an earlier explosion.
Gradually, they stopped flying outward. They hovered for a while and then slowly came together. Faster and faster they went. They continued coming together, and finally all melted together into one supernal, gigantic mass of matter. Into one huge sun almost as large in diameter as the former Milky Way Galaxy had been.
The separate galaxies and stars were no more. They had dissolved into this superatom. This atom contracted till it was but a pin-point, as small as a former star, matter compressed solidly together so that electrons, protons and neutrons touched. Then it suddenly exploded. Trillions of bits of debris were flung outward from a common center. Each bit was a nebulous, hot cloud that condensed and became a spiral nebula. Within each bit the nebulous matter condensed to suns, forming an island-universe.
The outflung galaxies still separated from one another, flung outward from the earlier explosion. Gradually they stopped flying outward. They hovered for a while and then slowly came together. Faster and faster they went. They continued coming together, and finally all melted together into one supernal, gigantic mass of matter. The separate galaxies and stars were no more. They had dissolved into this superatom. This atom contracted till it was but a pin-point, then suddenly exploded.
The eternal cycle—world without end.
Their minds curiously in a timeless rapport, Templeton and Moore told: each other what they were seeing. The birth-and-death cycle of their entire universe, occurring over and over again, like a repeated movie. Each time it formed a universe essentially like the previous ones, but with a totally new structure. Each new crop of island universes, though similar, were immeasureably different from previous galaxies. Thus the Milky-Way Galaxy’s particular structure was no longer in existence, in the succeeding explosions of the superatom that contained all matter.
The entire universe they knew was lost in an ageless eternity![7]
As they watched this rapid life-cycle occur again and again, they knew they should be appalled. Every time the superatom formed and exploded and formed again, an eternity of eternities had passed, by man’s scale. The Earth they once knew was already lost in ageless time, several hundred universe-deaths past. But they did not feel appalled. They could feel no emotion. They could only think dry, passionless thoughts. They were like gods, living some higher life, and watching the petty universes of ordinary beings living and dying in the space of a heartbeat.
How long, in man’s scale, they watched, they did not know—could not know, for there was no such number. The superatom, formed and exploded countless trillions of times, till that became a number beyond expression.
They were aware gradually that others were around them, caught in this magic zone. Some were beings from-their own universe, but from different worlds of different galaxies. Others were beings from other universes entirely, which had existed during a later or earlier beat of the atom-pulse. Hundreds, thousands—perhaps again a number beyond calculation—there were who had also found the secret of interstellar travel and had unwittingly penetrated beyond their known universe. They were all caught in this timeless sea, like flies on flypaper.
And they were all waiting.
Templeton and Moore formed mental, telepathic rapport with many of the other beings, learning amazing things about other lives and other civilizations. About uni
verses that had not even existed when theirs had.
But it was worth a sort of mental joy that they contacted Ulg, who had lived on a world that revolved around Sirius, of their own particular universe. It did not matter that Ulg had actually had life a million years before Templeton and Moore had been born. He was the closest one to them, in all these millions of lost beings.
For ageless hours they talked with Ulg, and learned that his civilization of intelligent vapor-beings was strangely parallel to theirs. They too had had a long evolutionary struggle upward from a primal gas-cell that had existed among the hot heavy vapors of their torrid planet.
It was a mental shock to the two Earthmen to hear that the gaseous Sirians had landed on Earth a million years before man’s era. They had tried to colonize it for a time, living in fuming volcanoes. But eventually Earth had proven too thin-aired and cold, and they had left.
Ulg went on to explain that only he of his race, so far as he knew, had ever penetrated into the outer regions of space. He, too, had been urged on by his own insatiable curiosity and had wanted to circumnavigate the entire universe. Finally he had run into this unsuspected timeless zone.
It was Ulg who cleared up their misty doubts about what they were all waiting for.
“We will eventually get back to out own universe!” Ulg declared with his mental voice.
“But how?” Templeton and Moore asked, “How can it be! Our universe—yours and ours—has long vanished. There have been a trillion trillion universes since ours—all different!”
“And there will be trillions and trillions more,” said Ulg calmly. “But some day, there will be ours—again!”
“What? Our very own universe, just as we left it?”
“Yes,” Ulg said. “There are countless atoms in the superatom there, but eternity is a long time. And in eternity, any combination of atoms that once existed, can exist again! We have but to wait!”
“How will we knew?”
“When our particular universe forms again,” replied the Sirian, “our minds will know. Do not ask me why. I do not know that. But it will be so. Look—there goes Klkla, whom I recently spoke to. His universe just formed!”
Templeton and Moore, with their strange supersight, saw a tiny space ship, of queer purple metal, plunge past their position and disappear into the realm of the superatom. Into the ordinary universe where time, motion and all other normal laws were in force. One of the lost things here in the timeless sea had returned to his home universe, or one essentially like it. But it was appalling to think that already he had reached home, lived his full life, died, and his race and world and sun and universe with him—for the superatom had already exploded countless more times!
The two Earthmen could not really understand it. They could only faintly comprehend the fringe of it, and wait.
TIMELESS ages passed. They talked with Ulg and came to knew his world and time almost as well as their own. And yet with all the new and incredible things they learned, their minds did not seem filled. It was all such an infinitesimally small part of the cosmic plan that it was a mere tithe of the complete scale of things. Their minds seemed to have a limitless capacity to absorb things, but there were further limitless things t® be absorbed. Never at any time could they feel even slightly that they had comprehended the All.
Timeless ages had paraded past while the two Earthmen communed with these thoughts. Their superatom had exploded and contracted again for an infinite eternity. With Ulg, they were waiting, waiting.
Then, suddenly, their minds seemed stabbed with the one word—“now!” It was as if an All-being had warned them. One word came also from Ulg—“Goodbye!”—and then his queer, tubular ship dashed past them. The next instant their own ship was hanging in the normal void, away from the timeless shore, and they knew that soon their universe would loom out of the black abyss.
MOORE saw the chronometer dial finish the half-tick it had ended on. Coincidentally, the frozen streamers of ejected flames at the nose writhed into life and completed their fiery course. The ship’s instruments began where they had left off. The automatic calendar that had net altered one tiniest fraction of a second, began steadily clicking and whirring now.
Dr. Templeton finished bringing his spoon to his mouth and swallowed the protein-gelatin. His upswinging leg completed its motion, crossing over on the other leg. Moore found himself chewing on his nails as impatiently as before they had struck the timeless shore.
There was one change they sensed, though their instruments could not show it yet. Their forward velocity had now reached the final inch and they were streaking backward at a rapidly increasing speed, away from the timeless zone and toward home.
“Was it all a dream?” asked Moore dazedly.
“No,” returned Templeton, “because the mind of man could not dream a dream like that. It’s true, Moore. We’re back in what is probably precisely the same universe we left. Perhaps an atom or two is out of place, but otherwise it’s been put together quite the same, like a child-dan erect the same house again and again with his blocks. Somehow, I know that without a particle of doubt.”
“And Ulg, the being from Sirius, with whom we talked just a minute—or an eternity—ago, has already been home, and dead and buried for a million years! But, Dr. Templeton, what of the atoms of our bodies? They haven’t been formed out of this universe!”
The scientist became very thoughtful over this. It, and certain related thoughts were uppermost in his mind during the long trip back home.
It was not difficult to find their way back, for they had essentially pursued a straight course all the time. At their terrific velocities, this path within the random course of the island universes had not deviated more than a few million miles. Nor had the galaxies, by Templeton’s new measurements, shifted position by more than a few billions of miles—a small margin of error in wide space.
The universe became a glowing diamond in the ultrablack void, grew swiftly, and scattered into the separate island universes, to their vision. Once surrounded by these, Dr. Templeton picked out the Milky Way Galaxy with ease. They found their ship aimed a little off-center, more than he had calculated, which again made the scientist thoughtful.
In due time their galaxy expanded into a glowing ball, became a spiraled dinner-plate, and finally changed to gossamer clouds Wat filled the heavens. The delicate clouds faded and became pin-pricks of light. These brightened. They were the familiar suns.
Moore decelerated steadily as they entered We hub of the Milky Way Galaxy and shot homeward. The procession of celestial phenomena again titillated their Earth-born eyes. Winking Cepheids, angry-red Titan suns, ring-nebulae, magnificent clusters, ominously black coalsack nebulae, bursting novae, and the complete category of diversified stars.
When Alpha-Centauri enlarged in the heavens, it seemed like their own back yard. They shot past it and watched eagerly as their own yellow sun expanded out of the other stars. Pluto looked like an old friend, and the other planets like long-lost brothers.
Moore hummed the bars of “Home, Sweet Home” with more fervor than he had ever before had occasion to use.
Earth resolved itself from the firmament, as green and beautiful as ever, and Moore drove the ship home with almost reckless haste. Just as he was lowering away for a plunge into the atmosphere, something swept past them so closely that they almost collided with it.
“W-what was Wat?” gasped Moore. “I’d swear it was another space ship, just like ours!”
Templeton was again thoughtful, making no answer. Moore forgot about the event in the eagerness of landing in the enclosure around Wear secret hangar. When they stepped from the ship, their wives met them at the lock, with surprise written on their faces.
“You’ve decided not to go after all!” cried Mrs. Templeton joyfully. “Oh, I’m so happy!”
She hugged her husband while he murmured unintelligibly. She went on. “As I saw your ship disappear in the sky, fifteen minutes ago, I felt that I’d nev
er see you again—remember I told you I had that strange feeling? And you called me a spiritualist. Of course I was silly. Here you are, safe and sound. I’m glad you used your better judgment. Let someone else do that dangerous flying to the outer planets.”
Templeton looked at the bewildered Moore, whose wife was saying about the same thing, and signalled him with his eyes not to speak on the subject.
“You two look a little worn and pale, though,” commented Mrs. Moore. “As though you had been gone a month or more! Did something happen while you were up there for those fifteen minutes?”
“Why—you see—a meteor nearly struck us,” said Dr. Templeton.
The two wives instantly became solicitous of their husbands, not noticing the peculiar fact that the ship, too, looked worn and used.
LATE that night, the two men got together, alone.
“Good God, Dr.!” gulped Moore. “What is it all about? My wife insists we left only fifteen minutes before!”
Templeton’s voice was low, brooding. “The atoms of these bodies of ours, missing from this universe, slightly changed everything for us. Particularly the time scale—by a full year! That was us leaving—that other space ship we passed that seemed to be a meteor. And that was us coming back—the ‘meteor’ we nearly hit when leaving a year ago. A year—or an endless eternity! We must never let their—our—wives know that most of our fuel and supplies are gone from this ship. Do you hear, Moore? We must never let them know—what we know!”
Moore nodded, with a faint, worried smile on his face. He was wondering if those other two before them had nearly collided with a “meteor.” And whether those other recent two would come back and also have to keep a secret from their wives.
The eternal cycle—world without end.
[1] (There was a clue all the time, to earthly astronomers. Roemer, the first man to measure the light-speed, in 1676, got a result of 192,000 miles a second. He had found the eclipses of Jupiter’s moons some fifteen minutes late, when observed from opposite sides of Earth’s orbit, a distance of 186 million miles. Why was his result higher? Because, by Templeton’s theory, the light that left Jupiter kept increasing its velocity, so that by the time it reached Earth, it was 6000 miles a second faster!)
