it.
Days and weeks went by, and still the ship plowed on through the unexplored stars, turning steadily to go back to the worlds they knew. Then one day, while Neith was sitting in thought at the bridge, there was an alarm.
The ship's crew was startled. Neith's officers held the opinion that a search ship had come up to them. They strained their eyes for the first glimpse of the other craft, the one which had tripped their area of radar sensitivity. Finally the dot was sighted, and eagerly they watched it grow.
Szek was tense but smiling. "It'll be great to hear news again from the home worlds," he said. "There are a lot of people aboard this ship who had relatives rescued first. They'll be glad to know we're safe."
Neith was staring uneasily at the incoming craft. "I think you've all failed to notice something," he finally remarked quietly. His officers ceased their bantering and listened. "Do you notice where that ship is coming from? How do you suppose it got there?"
They all looked again. Then they became quiet, and two swore softly beneath their breath. The other craft was approaching them in an orbit that did not come from the Komarian worlds which lay far to one side of them. It was coming directly out of another sector of sky, on an orbit that by no possible stretch of the imagination could have originated within the vast boundaries of the Empire.
"What is it?" muttered Szek. "What can it be?"
Neith would not have known, but Warren Alton in his brain did. It was Warren who put the words in Neith's mouth. "It can only be a ship from another star system. From a world that has discovered space flight for itself!"
Warren remembered the last discussion at Enderby's table. There were more than a half-dozen worlds that had discovered and practiced space flight. That had been about fifteen hundred Komar years ago. Those worlds would not have lagged in developing and improving their craft nor their techniques.
Could it be Weidekind's sector? Or Williams's sector? Desperately Warren tried to recall the details of the reports of the other worlds, but they were vague to him. Then he remembered the physical dimensions of the microcosm and it came to him that the oncoming stranger could be from none of the worlds covered by the scientists of Project Microcosm. They were all too remote from this wing of the spiral galaxy.
The newcomer was an unknown. But Neith/Warren was armed with the knowledge that these strangers could not be much different, could scarcely be more backward, or more advanced. So when the oncoming vessel had loomed to a disc of light and the radio began to crackle with the words of a command in a language unknown to all, he did not make the mistake of panicking.
"We should stand and fight," urged Szek and the other officers agreed. "Ram 'em," urged a deck officer. "Blast 'em, with our tail-rocket assembly!" said a gunner.
Neith shook his head. "We have two thousand men and women aboard this ship, and our first duty is to them. I propose to take no action that will jeopardize them. The minds in that ship may be alien to us, but they cannot be Stupid, animal-like monsters if they have mastered the same laws of nature that we have."
Now the stranger flashed a light three times, and was close enough to have its details showing. It was a sharp-nosed craft, undoubtedly foreign in design, and yet clearly a star ship designed for speed, maneuverability, and combat.
Neith ordered a hull light blinked three times, likewise in indication of acknowledgment. The stranger came around, drew up parallel to the Formidable and blinked again, drawing slightly ahead. It was plain to all that they were expected to follow it.
Neith matched his great ship's pace to that of the stranger and the two ran on, heading, he determined, for a star glowing ahead of them, whose rays could be seen lighting a family of seven planets. A tiny globe detached itself from the stranger and worked its way across space to the side of the Formidable. There was a knock at the particular hull-port where the space-boat came to rest. Neith himself got up to go to meet the strangers, and he felt himself in a curious state of mental exaltation and alarm. This was a moment in history of great significance. He felt drained as he walked to the port, and as he walked he seemed to get dizzy; he felt a moment of vertigo. . . .
Warren, at that instant, recovered consciousness in the transferal chamber at Thunderhook Mountain.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
DURING THE next six weeks the researchers of Thunderhook Mountain found that a great many changes were going on in their mental attitudes. It was a result that they really hadn't anticipated, and was due to the curious time-shifts each man underwent when engaging in transferal.
For what it amounted to was this: In that period, each of the transferees lived a period of six weeks on the planet Earth at the place called Project Microcosm, and their physical bodies aged but forty-two biological days in that time—nothing visible at all. But in the same time, their minds and memories had been stocked with many years of actual day-by-day, minute-by-minute life as inhabitants of a multitude of different worlds. Also these worlds were never alien to those whose minds were phased onto them. For within the brains of people born and raised in these planets of a universe beyond physical touch and control, their home worlds were familiar and natural, and everything upon them was the normal state of society and nature.
Thus each had lived for varying periods of two to ten months as part and parcel of humanoid societies, sharing the family life, the daily problems, the worries, the hopes, the ambitions and the pleasures of these societies, and sharing them as natural members of such social systems, and not as visitors from an alien world. The increased concentration of the staff on these transferals had literally added years crammed with memories and emotional involvements to the characters and psyches of scientists on Thunderhook Mountain.
As a result of this space-time aging, these added experiences in depth, each of those involved had undergone a change in personality. It was shown in a mellowing, an accumulation of wisdom and patience, a deeper insight, a certain unusual emotional maturing in many of these people. Perhaps they were not altogether aware of this themselves, but the non-participating members of the staff noticed it.
Jack and Kenster and the other guard noticed it. Whereas before they had made an adjustment to the learned men they guarded, they found that they had to readjust constantly. This in particular was the case with Marge McElroy. As she had returned again and again to the world in the hub of the microcosm she had gained exactly that worldly wisdom that her city childhood had failed to give her. In her mind she had memories of motherhood, of love given, of love denied, of life devoted to ideals, of life devoted to religion. She was as a result, in that small space of six weeks, a far more mature and enriched person. Still a sweet and smiling young girl, she looked upon the guards now for what they were—husky strong men of not much education, perception nor native intelligence. For she had known men of quality and women of forebearance, and that knowledge had done her well. She was in some ways not clear as to her relationship with the men about her; she recognized a lack in herself, yet knew also that never again could she be the same rather superficial and at times self-centered girl.
Jack Quern had managed to kiss her a few times during the first four weeks, but soon he sensed in her an aloofness, a growing disinterest in this childish play of cheap romancing. He was angered by it, attributed it to some other man-probably one of the scientific staff—cutting in. He wasn't sure who it was, but he began to keep an eye on her to spot the egghead who had cut him out.
As for Marge herself, she gave only part of her time to work on the endless photographic records kept by Steiner and Marco. She was by no means an ideal reporter, but her records of the rise and historical changes in the world where she had spent mental years—were of interest. For one, it was a world which had developed along less materialistic lines than most. Possibly due to its position in the middle of the greatest point of star concentration, the inhabitants had acquired a fixation on the glory of their heavens—they had evolved a rather unique astrological theocracy, given over to elabor
ate ritual, dance, and vast musical concepts.
In the course of the rising evolution of the microcosmic civilizations, this world, too, had been visited by the space fliers from other planets, and finally had become integrated into the vast network of finked intelligences.
For that had proved to be the course of intelligence in that microcosm. It was Enderby's view that it would also prove the inevitable course of fife in the future of our own universe. Whether that were so or not, it was certainly shown to be a route that all had to traverse within the hundred thousand planets of the man-made universe.
Even as the Ultra-Komarian Empire had colonized and created a federation of planets in its own sector, so had other space-traveling worlds in their sectors. In time these sectors began to overlap—civilization met civilization. Starship met starship; not always in as spectacular a fashion as that which had followed the nova of Morlna's star, but somehow in some fashion, it had to happen.
These meetings were sometimes peaceful, as had been the aftermath of the Morlna episode. Warren had read the full account of this momentous meeting during a transferal a thousand years later when he had deliberately looked it up. The account was found in a tri-D transcription taken from the yellowing and crumbling volumes in the Hall of Archives in the great university at Komar. The librarians had looked in surprise at the young physics student—which was Warren during that transfer—who had insisted with youthful intensity on that particular antique book. *
But sometimes the meetings of the interplanetary civilizations were more militant.
There were star empires that had come to blows at first meeting, quarreling over possession of a planet or over some slight. These empires had clashed in vicious battles of hurtling spacecraft in the empty outer reaches, with sneak raids on undefended worlds.
But even those clashes had ceased as more and more planetary combinations took to the field. Finally the day had come when empires combined to form mightier confederations. And these confederations in turn, across a few thousand more years, combined to make sector centers.
There was the memorable affair on which Warren had finished reporting as they sat around the great table on Thunderhook Mountain. It had been Warren's most recent transferal, and his story had held them all spellbound, even though they had been used to wonders and marvels.
For Warren had been a participant at the Galactic Congress which had voted to combine the six great sector federations into one single all-embrasive League of Planets.
The Congress had met in the great city of Dau, capital of the Federation of the Southwest, and Warren had been one of that federation's sixty-two delegates, as a representative of three worlds.
He described to them the vast hall—really several great halls linked together with tri-D telecommunications which gave each hall the appearance of being one with all the others. He described the various types of beings present at that meeting—human in all general appearance, but exotically different in various ways. The crested feather-skulls from one planet, the dwarfmen of another, the eight-footers from one world, and the odd-hued skins and colorful ceremonial dress of a hundred different planets. Most had two eyes, a few had four, one planet group had a single eye centered in their foreheads.
They had voted Dau the capital of their galaxy; this city, named after perhaps a mythical forerunner of space flight, one of the oldest planetary cities.
As he spoke, Williams nodded for he had missed that gathering only by a century, but it had been talked of in his day. Weidekind was fascinated, for he was going off to transferal next and would see the one-galaxy system in operation in its earliest years. Enderby himself had made a number of transfers, and so of course had the others, save Steiner and Marco. But these two were old enough to have acquired wisdom through their own years, and they left the wandering to the younger men.
Marge sat at the table, sitting gravely silent, listening with interest. But she sat more erectly, she was subtly different, and Warren was vastly intrigued by her. Lately, several times they had conversed and he found that the latent attraction which had first simply amused him, was now becoming a growing emotional thing. He felt that he wanted to see her, wanted to talk and walk with her. Even as he was recounting the discussions and the differences that had occupied the Galactic Congress, his mind turned on how he could get to chat with Marge that evening.
The problem of combining the federations was no easy one. Many of its elements had been solved during the earlier centuries, but working on the whole galaxy was a different and more complex matter. With a galaxy that was a universe, starship voyages took periods of time which were for years out of touch with their home-worlds. Within the starships, no voyage was too intolerable. The problem was not that; the hot problem was to keep contact between worlds without too much loss of time.
In essence, the solution had been found in quite the same way as the men of Thunderhook had transfered their .minds. Not in mind-power, but in the deliberate creation of blocks of matter so exactly balanced that they vibrated in precise sympathy with each other. For such a block would vibrate simultaneously with its phased companion, regardless of whether a galaxy separated the two units. As a result of this, it had been possible to set up whole communication systems for the exchange of messages and vision across a hundred thousand worlds simultaneously.
So this congress had another unique quality, a symbolic one. It was a meeting of physical beings which might never occur again. There was no actual need for the delegates to see each other. They could have communicated easily without taking the time and inconvenience of cosmic trips. They could have stayed in their home worlds and talked to each other.
But for the sake of the moment, as a means of impressing forever the unity of the galaxy, this meeting had been decided. In the future, in the city of Dau, there would be the sympathetic tuners of all the worlds, and it would act as the central station for all interchanges.
So this meeting was the first physical gathering, and would be the last such of the microcosm. It was Warren's glory to have been there.
After his report had been given and discussed, the meeting broke up. There had been a brief discussion of the spy problem—there had been evidence of other attempts to copy the data, but they had been thwarted. Enderby nevertheless warned everyone that it could be expected that these efforts would continue until the spy had achieved success, or been exposed. He urged caution. "We are," he had said, "now in possession of the scientific secrets that mankind here is not due to discover for the next twenty thousand years. We must take care in our guardianship of these secrets; very great care."
Later that day, when most of the men had left the supper table for a quiet game of cards, or to read and smoke, Warren went out for a stroll.
It was deep in the summer. The sky was not entirely dark, the horizon was glowing violet from the last moments of twilight. A single spot of white indicated the planet Venus, the Evening Star, pioneering the celestial procession of oncoming night. There was the smell of pine in the air, the dampness of the encircling forested mountainsides, the twilight twittering of birds, and the first sounds of the crickets.
Warren walked slowly over the grass in the cleared area outside the group of buildings that composed Project Microcosm. There was a rise of hill beyond on which he had sometimes ascended in past evenings to stand quietly and smoke a pipe, while watching the stars come out. It was a period of meditation.
He was a different man from the one he had been the day he drove upstate on this assignment. In his mind were memories of other beings' lives. He recalled other moments, standing on alien countrysides, meditating on other landscapes, looking at other skies. He remembered the rest periods on the Ice Moon, shivering in his space suit and looking into the airless black void. He recalled a vacation with his wife in the seashore of Morlna, and her laughter and the sound of the flying fish. He remembered other times and other worlds. And they were all real, all poignant.
Yet this was his own world, this un
iverse his. The other, though its spaces were vast, was yet finite. Compared to this infinite universe of the Milky Way and its attendant galaxies and meta-galaxies, it was a mere bubble—a space-time bubble, with definite boundaries on all sides. These boundaries were charted; the League of Planets had arrived at such knowledge—and beyond them there would be nothing for the inhabitants. But our own universe was infinite, so far as man could determine. Bursting into existence somehow, it seemed to go on forever, spreading out, its parts rushing away steadily—one theory holding that new parts were constantly being spawned. This was infinity. Could it be, then, that for world humanity there were no limits?
It was growing darker as he reached the top of the little hill. Behind him were the lights of the main lodge and the few lights from the other buildings. All around were the dark shadows of the mountain tops, and overhead was the arch of the sky, with here and there a few stars beginning to show up through the darkening blue.
He noticed that there was someone else on the hiH, a figure seated in the grass, sitting quiedy. "Hello," he ventured, "who's there?"
The figure looked at him. He saw a glimpse of face and the darker outline of a mass of hair. "It's I," said Marge's voice. "Just came up here to look at the sky and think."
"Me too," he answered. "Mind if I join you?" He squatted down on the grass near her and for a while they were both silent, watching the sky darken to blackness and the stars begin to appear.
After a while they could see the wide band of the Milky Way stretching across the heavens and the twinkling lights of myriad stars. "It's a wonderful sight, isn't it?" he asked.
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