The corrupted zenith: When human ambition turns the cosmic void into a theater of conflict

“ In the first place, Jupiter has always been a favourite telescopic object. The globe itself is so vast that the features are on a sufficiently large scale to be discernible with comparatively small instrumental power. Thus it is that the cloud belts on the great planet are familiar objects to everyone who has ever used a telescope. Then, too, the ever- varying positions of the four older satellites make them a spectacle that is always attractive. At one time we are watching an eclipse, in which a satellite plunges into Jupiter's shadow and disappears for a while. ”

“ Multitudes of nebulæ appear to the unassisted eye, or are seen with ordinary telescopes, like round comets without tails; but when viewed with powerful instruments they convey the idea of a globular space, insulated in the heavens and full of stars, constituting a family or society apart from the rest, subject only to its own internal laws. ”

“ Far above their heads, and in the vastness of space, the well-known stars and constellations, notwithstanding the enormous distance they had now come, looked absolutely unchanged, and seemed to them emblematic of tranquillity and eternal repose. The days were changed by their shortness, and by the apparent loss of power in the sun; and the nights, as if in compensation, were magnificently illuminated by the numerous moons and splendid rings, though neither rings nor satellites shone with as strong a light as the terrestrial moon. But in nothing outside of the solar system was there any change ”

“ A telescope, the best and largest that scientific resources can furnish, and a corps of observers devoted to the work, must be established on this permanent locality. Then, from this high point, sun, planets, stars, nebulae, comets, and meteors, may be attacked by observers armed with the most effectual scientific weapons, until from the depths of infinite space come answers to some of the great problems that are puzzling the brains of thoughtful students of celestial mysteries. ”

“ We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. ”

“ By and large, the kind of science-fiction which makes tomorrow's headlines as near as this morning's coffee, has enlarged popular awareness of the modern, miraculous world of science we live in. It has helped generations of young people feel at ease with a rapidly changing world.
But fashions change, old loves return, and now that Sputniks clutter up the sky with new and unfamiliar moons, the readers of science-fiction are willing to wait for tomorrow to read tomorrow's headlines. Once again, I think, there is a place, a wish, a need and hunger for the wonder and color of the world way out. ”

“ The fact that the space ship and its ruthless denizens still engaged in the awful work of devastation was amply being proved. In the main room it was possible, through the use of telescopes and audiphones—set into the walls so that they were invisible, yet enabled any one in the room to see everything, and hear everything that transpired on the far earth below—to keep close watch on the work of the destroyers. Anything close enough could be seen with the naked eye through the walls of the globe. ”

“ Every day this Wrongness of Space is getting stronger. Whether it’s devil or man, I know not. Whether it’s vulnerable or not, I cannot fathom. Yet somewhere in the heart of this crater-pocked seimi-riven satellite there crouches an ancient stagnated evil which must be eradicated sooner or later, which is threatening at the peace of the universe and is uniting with that devil in man’s guise, Ay-Artz.”
“What?” stammered Bull, staring. “You mean—“
“That fools win where scientists fear to tread,” quoted Dos-Tev.
Bullo came forward, his eyes gleaming eagerly. ”

“ Even the Lick Observatory, which was built at the summit of Mount Wilson, 5885 feet high, at tremendous expense, cannot satisfy the astronomers. An observatory that would reach about twice that height, such as the one built by the scientist in this story, would be more likely to hit the mark. Certainly, the views obtained of the Moon, and even of Mars, through our present apparently gigantic telescopes, undoubtedly call for a higher observatory, fitted with a more enormous telescope, which will some day be established. ”

“ Jupiter and Saturn are very conspicuous objects, and the eclipses, transits, and occultations of the moons, and the belts of the former and rings of the latter, are among the most interesting phenomena revealed to us by our telescopes, while the delicate markings on the third satellite of Jupiter furnish us with one of the most difficult tests of definition. ”

“ In one part of space we perceive, with the aid of our best telescopes, vast nebulæ of glowing, infinitely attenuated gas; we see in them the embryos of heavenly bodies, billions of miles away, in the first stage of their development. ”

“ Those who have good telescopes will think on the fortune which might conceivably have smiled on them, if perchance the satellite had presented itself on one of those rare occasions when it might have come within the reach of instruments less powerful than that by which it was actually discovered. The mathematical astronomers to whom the problem of Jupiter has ever been an attractive though a very difficult subject will find that the new satellite imparts an entirely fresh aspect to the question. ”

“ For it is my opinion that the occasions by which men have acquired a knowledge of celestial phenomena are not less admirable than the discoveries themselves." His tentatives, failures, leadings, his glimpses and his glooms, those aberrations and guesses and gropings generally so scrupulously concealed, he exposes them all. From the first flashing of a discovery, through years of tireless toil, to when the glorious apparition emerges full-orbed and resplendent, we follow him, becoming party to the process, and sharing the ejaculations of exultation that leap to his lips. ”

“ We may, however, sketch out a brief chapter in modern sidereal astronomy, which seems to throw a ray of light into the constituents of the vast abyss of space which lies beyond the range of our telescopes. The ray of light is no doubt but a feeble one, but we must take whatever information we can obtain, even though it may fall far short of that which an intellectual curiosity will desire. ”

“ We have no right to treat man as an abstract being, to disdain his history, or to attribute to science an influence over the direction of the moral axis of the world, which its progress does not justify. We have, it is true, conquered the earth, measured the track of the planets, calculated the mechanism of the heavens, analyzed the stars, resolved the nebula?, and followed the eccentric course of comets; but beyond those stars, whose light is centuries in reaching us, there are other orbs whose rays are lost in space ”

“ And it was one of the received arguments against the Copernican system, that we can not conceive so great a void space as that system supposes to exist in the celestial regions. When men's imaginations had always been used to conceive the stars as firmly set in solid spheres, they naturally found much difficulty in imagining them in so different, and, as it doubtless appeared to them, so precarious a situation. ”

“ If the eye, when it fixes its gaze upon the vault of heaven, could see, in fancy, a causeway arched across the void, and bordered in long series with the hills and plains of an earthly journey—repeated ten thousand and ten thousand times, until ages were spent in the pilgrimage, then would he who possessed such a power of vision hide himself in caverns rather than venture to look up to the terrible magnitude of the starry skies, thus set out in parts before him. ”

“ These milliards of celestial bodies have their respective movements for the purpose of stability, and mutually lean upon each other across the void which separates them. The mind which could eliminate time and space would see the Earth, the planets, the Sun, the stars, rain down from a limitless sky in all imaginable directions, like the drops carried away by the whirlwinds of a gigantic tempest, and drawn, not by a common basis, but by the attraction of each and all ”

“ There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon... (interrupted by applause) ”

“ Bill watched the enormous blue globe of Mars in fascinated horror, followed the huge, luminescent red-purple atomic bombs, that were hurtling out toward them, driven on broad white rays.
"An amazing amount of power in those atomic bombs," Dr. Trainor commented, his mild eyes bright with scientific enthusiasm. "I doubt that space itself is strong enough to hold up under their explosion. If they hit us, I imagine it will break down the continuum, blow us out of the universe altogether, out of space and time!" ”

“ Joe said shortly that if the Martians tried to destroy the Winship that he, Ychan, would have personal experience of the method. But he would explain. The Earthmen had a weapon the Martians knew nothing about. It destroyed all living things. It killed them by turning them to vapor. Turned upon a space-ship, the Earth-weapon turned its crew to smoke and vapor, and left the space-ship unharmed. Turned upon a planet, the Earth-weapon would make all its vegetation explode, and all its people, and even the fish in its swamps. ”

“ Then Bill, with his eye at a telescope, saw a little spark of purple light appear beside the blue globe. A tiny, bright point of violet-red fire, with a white line running from it, back to the center of the sphere. The purple spark grew, the white line lengthened. Abruptly, the newspaperman realized that the purple was an object hurtling toward him with incredible speed. ”

“ Did you ever hear that if the Martians thought they had one percent edge over fifty of wiping us out and taking over the solar system they'd try it? Did you ever hear that only the technical superiority of Earth science has held off a war this far? ”

“ Presently, evidently noticing how tired and worried she looked, he sent her to her stateroom to rest. She went, in tears.
"No chance to fight, if they run us down," said Captain Brand. "We can handle four, but not forty."
Time dragged heavily. The Red Rover flew out into space, past the moon, on such a course as would not draw pursuit toward the City of Space. Her maximum acceleration was slightly greater than that of the Moon Patrol fliers, because of the greater number and power of her motor tubes. Steadily she forged away from her pursuers. ”

“ The first serious consciousness of Nature's gesture--her attitude towards life--took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, an insanity of force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect. ”

“ In such a case, it could only be the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul’s history and fate!
We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye and heart, that the minister, looking upward to the zenith, beheld there the appearance of an immense letter,—the letter A,—marked out in lines of dull red light. ”

“ Man knows not what to become in the presence of that awful incantation. He bows under the enigma of those Draconian intonations. What latent meaning have they? What do they signify? What do they threaten? What do they implore? It would seem as though all bonds were loosened. Vociferations from precipice to precipice, from air to water, from the wind to the wave, from the rain to the rock, from the zenith to the nadir, from the stars to the foam—the abyss unmuzzled—such is that tumult, complicated by some mysterious strife with evil consciences. ”

“ He surveyed the two celestial strangers from top to toe, and maintained to their faces that their persons, their fashions, their suns and their stars, were created solely for the use of man. At this wild assertion our two travelers were seized with a fit of that uncontrollable laughter, which (according to Homer) is the portion of the immortal gods: their bellies quivered, their shoulders rose and fell, and, during these convulsions, the vessel fell from the Sirian's nail into the Saturnian's pocket, where these worthy people searched for it a long time with great diligence. ”

“ He had seen outside of his life, not learned it within, the way a woman was mourned when she had been loved for herself: such was the force of his conviction of the meaning of the stranger’s face, which still flared for him as a smoky torch. It hadn’t come to him, the knowledge, on the wings of experience; it had brushed him, jostled him, upset him, with the disrespect of chance, the insolence of accident. Now that the illumination had begun, however, it blazed to the zenith, and what he presently stood there gazing at was the sounded void of his life. ”

“ Who knows how many fleshly forms the heir of heaven occupies before he can be brought to understand the value of that silence and solitude whose starry plains are but the vestibule of Spiritual Worlds? He feels his way amid the void, makes trial of nothingness, and then at last his eyes revert upon the Path. ”

“ And whereas thou seest him rather give heed to rake up straws and sticks, and the dust of the floor, than to what He says that calls to him from above with the celestial crown in His hand, it is to show that Heaven is but as a fable to some, and that things here are counted the only things substantial. Now, whereas, it was also showed thee, that the man could look no way but downwards, it is to let thee know that earthly things, when they are with power upon men's minds, quite carry their hearts away from God. ”

“ They who have reached the point where their eyes discern the Sacred Portals, who, not looking back, not uttering one regret, contemplate worlds and comprehend their destinies, such as they keep silence, wait, and bear their final struggles. The worst of all those struggles is the last; at the zenith of all virtue is Resignation,—to be an exile and not lament, no longer to delight in earthly things and yet to smile, to belong to God and yet to stay with men! You hear the voice that cries to you, ‘Advance!’ Often celestial visions of descending Angels compass you about with songs of praise ”