Ray Cummings

“ The stars paled around it. A flood of yellow light lay upon the sea in a broad path of rippling gold.
The island was bathed in the golden flood. We were much closer to it now, swooping a few hundred feet above its beach which along here was broad and hard. The jungle was beside us, a fairyland of tropical verdure.
Warmed by the waters of the sea, and perhaps by hidden fires of the cone-shaped hill, the vegetation grew to giant size.
A giant forest edged with gold, mysteriously dark, romantic, amorous, scented with spices and the heavy perfume of flowers. ”

“ Come in.” His huge hands gripped us with a strength that made Jim pretend to wince and grin mockingly at Alice. “Come in. We’ll sit in the garden upstairs.”
He led us up the inclines through his rambling house and to its roof, where in the starlight we sat on leafy couches in a garden blooming with flowers, shrubs and coned ferns.
It was about an hour before dawn, cloudless, moonless—a brilliant firmament of gems strewn upon their purple velvet. Venus was rising now to be the morning star and herald the dawn; red Mars, lying opposite and low, glowed like the ashless end of a cigarro. ”

“ Weatherby went on; “I remember remarking to you, Leonard, that there would be no need for navigation. We will grow, with an infinite velocity, to an infinitely gigantic size. Conversely, all this—” He waved his hand at the window, the firmament of white blazing suns—“all this immeasurable space we see out there will shrink to a size infinitely small. It will, later on, be smaller than our vehicle itself. Smaller than my body, my hand.”
His voice rose to a sudden vehemence. “Don’t you get the conception now? All this, our celestial space, will shrink to a pinhead—an atom. ”

“ It was Altho firing the weapon Jim had taken from the giant; in a moment the still distant girls heard a report, like a tiny clap of thunder, the sound of the red ring striking the rock. Down in the valley the giant muzzle of the vertical projector began issuing a stream of green light.
It mounted a hundred feet, sprayed out like a fountain column of water. From the ground, huge black figures tossed a balloon head into the column of light. The head rose, surged upward, until at the top it hung in the light spray, balancing itself like a ball held at the top of a jet of water. ”

“ Above the cliff, behind it, a jagged mountain range stood yellow in the moonlight, tumultuous, naked crags.
The cover closed overhead. A tiny green light winked on. Within the boat, lurid in the green glow, the four brutemen moved about with swift activity; the soft voice of Talon was directing them; his great head was raised on his hands as he followed their movements.
They bolted the metal over, adjusted other mechanisms which now came into use at the stern. A lessening of the flow of gas from beneath the hull; the water filled the chamber there. ”

“ Talon’s eyes gleamed. “We more than ride on them.” He showed Jim where from beneath his head a ropelike sinew depended. “This we fasten upon a nerve-center of their backs. Their little brain is dulled, unconscious then of existence. Our brains take command.
“The body is ours, for the time! We can feel its physical power; our brain animates it. We are one being. One entity when that connection is made.”
Ren spoke up softly, “Why did you go to that city where you captured us? Those people there haven’t harmed you. But you captured their prince and princess.” ”

“ The great vault of the heavens with its myriad whirling stars shrank before my far-flung imagination into a tiny space teeming with its agitated particles!
Dr. Weatherby added gently, “A fragment of iron is microscopically no different in structure from our starry universe. The distances between our heavenly bodies compared to the size of them are quite the same as the distances between electrons, or intimes, compared to their size. You get my point?”
“I do,” Jim exclaimed. “What we call the sky would seem a solid mass of matter—like a fragment of iron—to some greater viewpoint?” ”

“ One of the giant, hairy brutes of men moved aside to let it pass.
Jim whispered, “It’s coming!”
A revulsion of horror swept him—a repugnance to have this great bloated head come near him. He strove to master the horror. This was a man. Strange of form, but a living, mortal being. A man—an enemy. Nothing supernatural, not gruesome, merely strange, an enemy with whom he had to cope.
Jim sat up abruptly. His shoulder touched Ren’s. From down the boat the bloated head came hitchingly forward. A few feet from Jim and Ren it stopped, rested with a slight swaying upon the tiny body hunched under it. ”

“ Civilizations have risen, held their peak, and declined. Great cities have come and gone. Ice has been again where once I saw the jungles of the tropics. And the ice has melted again through countless ages.
The new humans of earth often communicate with me. Their thoughts are amazed at what I have to tell them. It is all amazing to me, the great riddle of the universe. ”

“ My platform rose over the castle grounds. Around me, the girls and the other platforms circled. Down in the estuary the ten black boats were starting in a double line. Out beyond the city, on the road toward the sea, a thin black line showed in the yellow moon glow—Jim’s land division. The city beneath me was a frantic, waving mass of humanity.
I shouted through my aerial. The girls and the platforms broke their circle and started forward. With my platform leading them, we swept in a great arc over the city, and away into the moonlit sky. ”

“ The gray area was shrinking to a blob, a blob of gray shining in a brilliant light. Directly beneath us, stretching to the horizon on both sides, lay an undulating white level surface. The single blob of gray was down there on it. And off in the distance, where the surface seemed abruptly to end, gigantic blurs loomed into the blue sky.
Dr. Weatherby was calling me to the tower. I found him trembling with eagerness. “Leonard, I have the electro-telescope working. Look through it.”
I gazed first through the front and overhead tower windows. The white disk filled a perceptible area of the sky. ”

“ I heard Dr. Weatherby’s sharp command, “Don’t do that! Look there; see the red ray?”
I clung to my reeling wits.
Jim muttered, “Look at it!”
The interior of the workshop was a whirling fog drenched in blood. I could see the red streaming out its open doorway.
“We’re moving!” Alice cried. “Dolores, we’ve started!”
The enveloping room of the workshop seemed gliding backward. Not a tremor of the vehicle. Mascar’s figure moved slowly backward and downward beyond my sight. The workshop walls were sliding past. The rectangle of its open end seemed expanding, coming toward us. ”

“ Altho had leaped. The giant kept his feet, swaying, kicking; he stopped, and with an upflung arm, dashed Jim’s body away. But Jim was back at him again, he and Altho, now, clinging, kicking, gouging.
And then Ren. The harrassed giant, fighting with scarce the intelligence of a man, staggered across the cave with Altho and Jim clawing at him. Their bodies struck Ren, and scrambling in the dark, he caught a great hairy leg and wound himself around it.
In the pale-green glow of the cave, the giant bruteman surged about. He tripped, went down, with the three men pounding on top of him. ”

“ Beneath us in the yellow moonlight the great throng of men, the girls, and the vanquished guards stood silently gazing up at me.
“Now, Sonya, I’ll talk to them! Tell them I am Leonard Gray, the Earthman. Remind them that their king is dead; their prince is captured by a horrible unknown enemy that menaces us all! Tell your girls that they shall have justice. Tell the men that we are going to rescue our prince! All of us united, not fighting one another. ”

“ But every desolate valley sweeping beneath them was pale and wan in the starlight. Then Sonya prepared an image-finder. She connected the batteries, the projector, and the grid of glowing wires.
Alice and Dolores held the grid between them. Sonya fired the small projectile. It sailed off, a whirling pink ball. It was in reality a small, flat disk with a lenslike eye and a whirling, pink, glowing armature on top.
Over a radius of several miles Sonya’s raytron apparatus could direct its flight, and back over the invisible connecting ray came an image of all that the lens eye saw. ”

“ The valley, the crags, the ledge upon which the fugitives lay were all momentarily brilliantly illumined. Jim saw that beneath them in the valley a hundred of the mounted heads were gazing upward. And he knew too, that they had been seen upon the ledge.
A shout arose; a rush of the figures to climb. But a voice, Talon’s voice, seemed commanding them to stop. Farther down the valley, brutemen were dragging forward a heavy piece of apparatus, a huge gun-muzzle on wheels, the muzzle pointed vertically upward.
Jim leaped to his feet. “We’ve got to get higher! Try to get to that cave overhead.” ”

“ This whole universe of stars, merely a cluster of tiny particles, clinging together to form an atom of something else! And trillions of such atoms making up the head of a pin, lying on someone’s bureau!
Dr. Weatherby’s voice quieted. “Suppose ultimately, we were to cross our atom and emerge in exactly the wrong direction. We would find no vastly great emptiness, but merely other atoms like our own, going downward, so to speak, into the pin’s head, instead of merging from it.
“But that cannot happen. Nature, in all its natural phenomena, always chooses the path of least resistance. ”

“ Our microscopes show nothing which is actually more solid than the sky itself. From here, on earth, to the Milky Way is to us a tremendous distance. But suppose that we were so gigantic—so vast in comparative size—that we needed a powerful microscope even to perceive that space. What would we see? A multiplicity of vibrating particles! And without the microscope the whole space would seem solid. ”

“ Along the shore I could see the slow-moving line of Jim’s army, crawling like a black snake over the winding, moonlit road. I had hoped that the head of it would be approaching the bluff near the west channel of the Virgins’ Island. But it was not that far as yet.
I spoke into my aerial. “Make it faster, Jim!” The image of him showed his smiling face. Good old Jim, always smiling. “Right,” he said.
From this height there was no sign of Talon. Behind me, from Kalima, Maxite had sent out an aerial image-finder. Its pink whirling ball came sailing past me overhead. ”

“ Yet, after such a trip, they were days of almost normality.
Our vehicle beneath that microscope had grown rapidly in size. And with our expanding visual viewpoint, and the nearness of solid, motionless objects, its velocity seemed infinitely small. It barely floated past the microscope, settling to the floor of that huge room; and with a normal proportionate size, the Beta ray shut off, it came to rest.
They crowded around us—old men, loosely robed, and with flowing white hair, seamed, sooth, hairless faces, stern, but kindly, and eyes very bright and intelligent. ”

“ The void of space itself is a mass of particles, a mass of densities, of every possible size and character.
“The earth is one; a wandering asteroid is another. And meteors, meteorites, down to the smallest particles of dust. And still smaller, are the particles of light, far flung everywhere through space. Other entities are again still smaller—call them intimes—down in size to infinity.
“Space then, you must realize, is not empty. The emptiness, the nothingness, is only the infinitely small. ”

“ Alice was regarding her with a blue-eyed gaze of quite obvious admiration. Dolores moved over on the low couch; her hand plucked at the hem of Sonya’s smock as it lay just above her knees and touched the smooth white metal band that encircled her leg.
“Sonya, what is that? Just for ornament? It’s very pretty.”
“No,” she said. “Not altogether for ornament. Every woman wears one.” She brushed her fingers across it; her smile was quizzical. “It is, in fact, well . . . it had become almost a symbol of what we girls are striving for. The virgins’ band. You see, it is quite unmarked. ”

“ A breathless swoop and I was close upon the boat. From the dim glow of its engines, I saw it held only four figures, three mounted heads. Two were controlling the boat. The other was Talon. I could see him moving about giving commands. And Altho lay in the boat’s bottom, Altho, his body lashed and bound into an inert bundle.
My Frazier beam struck the boat’s interior. The two mounted heads controlling it stiffened and fell. But Talon was untouched. I was close over the stern of the boat, holding my projector downward. Talon’s face glared up at me, untouched. ”

“ It maintains its separate existence by virtue of having around its exterior an emptiness greater than the emptiness of its interior. Think of that a moment.
“The earth itself is such a density. The space around it is greater than any of the spaces within its molecules, its atoms, its electrons—down to its finitely small intimes—to the ultimate nothingness of which it is composed.
“That is our earth. It is in movement. And another density near it we call Venus, and another Mars, vibrating with a space between them. All our starry universe; you see, Leonard?” ”

“ The girls hurried down the corridor, down the stone steps into the arsenal room. Sonya had been here once before with her uncle. The place was dark, but Sonya found a hand-wire and Alice carried it above her head. Its light glowed dimly blue, in a big room of fearsome shadows. Overhead they could hear the faint tramp of a guard. Every moment they expected to be discovered.
Sonya seized one of the electronic needle pipes, and the range apparatus with which to operate it. And a large metal cylinder in which was packed a group of image finders and their aerial controls. ”

“ This navigation of space was clear enough. All my life scientists had been discussing it. We were moving now at a velocity of some twelve thousand miles an hour. But what was that? Less than the crawling of an ant using the equator of the earth as a race track! Twelve thousand miles an hour—or twelve billion—would get us nowhere among the distant stars in a lifetime!
Dr. Weatherby answered my spoken question: “We are only very little larger than when we started, Leonard. An infinitesimal fraction, for our velocity is nothing as yet. I’ll use the Elton Beta ray once we get farther out.” ”

“ He smiled. “Quite close, Leonard. One of them might be holding us—our whole universe—on the palm of his hands. An inch from a thumb, a foot from his ear. I was thinking of that when I was trying to fathom the possible velocity of thought-waves. It’s all in the viewpoint. His thoughts would not have to travel far to reach us. His brain gives orders to his muscles in a fraction of a second over a far greater distance.”
The dials showed us to be ten thousand light-years from earth, our velocity fifty light-years an hour, when Dr. Weatherby called to us all to assemble in the instrument room. ”

“ The small rectangle of screen glowed with its formless silver blurs, took form and color. A girl’s face, ash-blond hair wound around her forehead, her white throat, with the square neck of a pale-blue jacket showing. And her earnest azure eyes searching mine, lighting with recognition as on her own screen she caught my image. Alice! ”