Collected Short Fiction, page 216
Another, stronger wave of heat came down upon them. Rod felt sweat break from his hot skin. He tore open his shirt, futilely.
Anxiously he asked, “Can he do it?”
“If he has time,” Thorn said. “He’ll have a few minutes longer, below. But he has to change the circuits, and make some very delicate adjustments——”
Thorn’s words were lost in a mist of consuming flame. Rod strangled, with molten metal in his throat. With maddening, painful blows, his pulse beat against his congealing brain.
He heard the clang of the manhole opening, then, and a little gasping cry at his feet. Clinging to his consciousness, against the battering waves of heat, he looked down.
He saw two heads: the wavy, platinum hair of Melanie Dean, and the smooth, dark head of Madeline Thorn. The two women were dragging themselves up through the manhole, helping each other.
Thorn, trying to assist them, fell weakly to his knees. The three were together on the floor. Rod clung desperately to the instrument ledge, to hold himself from falling upon them.
“Jarvis,” he heard one of them say, “we’ve come to be with you.” In the faintness of his mind, Rod did not know which one was speaking, nor did it seem to matter. “This is the end, we know—this burning. We’ve come to be with you.”
“We’ve talked together, Jarvis,” said the other voice. “We’re friends—we must be, because we love you. We came together.”
“My dear ones,” Thorn whispered, unsteadily. “I’m glad. I’m——”
Rod was conscious, then, of a new, consuming intensity of the heat. Thorn had been trying to say something more. But his flushed, sweat-drenched face went suddenly lax. He pitched limply forward, toward the open manhole.
He was going to fall through it, Rod thought, and down upon the great barrel of the converter. Rod grasped at him, weakly, and realized that if he released his grip on the ledge, he would only fall after him.
But the two women seized his arms. With a desperate, united effort, they pulled him back from the yawning opening. They collapsed beside him, on the hot floor, and lay three together.
A cool little joy soothed Rod’s aching brain, as he sank down into the abyss of heat beside them, reaching in his last instant of awareness for the lever to close the manhole.
RODNEY was lying in a dark, fern-grown canyon. Cool shadows caressed him. Sweet, refreshing spray of an icy waterfall fell on him. He slept, escaping terrible memories of the flaming desert beyond the canyon, striving to forget its intolerable heat.
He woke in the little conning pit. The heat was gone—or, rather, going, for the metal was still warm to the touch; his clothing adhered to his hot, clammy body.
Thorn and Melanie Dean were busy over dark-haired Madeline, who was just recovering.
Rod, after a little, was able to get shakily to his feet. He looked out through the dome. The sky was still totally dark. The converter beam, however, had returned to hissing life. Its color was now the living blue of flame.
Looking carefully at the wild masses of uranium under the blue beam, Rod saw that they were no longer wasting away. Yes, slowly the incandescent patch of metal was building up. Starbuck, then, had succeeded.
“You coming around all right, Mr. Trent?” Melanie Dean asked warmly.
He nodded. They were helping Madeline to her feet.
“That terrible heat?” She was shuddering. “It won’t come back?”
“No, my dear,” Thom told her. “Will Starbuck saved us—with probably the quickest, most brilliant bit of scientific thinking on record. We can go ahead, now, to explore the new universe.”
She smiled at him, and at Melanie Dean, beside him.
“The three of us,” she said, “together.”
Thorn was opening the manhole.
“Young’s coming up to take charge a while,” he said. “They had it easier, below. I believe we all need a little recuperation.”
Rod agreed.
XII.
DARKNESS was still above the dome, five days later, when Rod came up into the conning pit, to rejoin Thorn. When he looked out, he saw that the blue beam had already restored most of the uranium. The Infiniterra was almost a sphere again, although its surface was yet rather unequal.
“Well, Trent,” the big scientist greeted him, “we’ll soon know a little more of the new universe.”
“What are you expecting?”
“I’m waiting to see.” Thorn chuckled. “I have, though, allowed myself a few speculations. Theoretically, physical conditions here ought to correspond somewhat with those in the old universe. And the instruments register a zone of radiation ahead that seems to resemble our cosmic rays—that’s why I called you.
“Radiation implies matter. Matter, from its own nature, means gravitation, which will concentrate it, swing it through orbits in space, in the form of planets, suns, galaxies. But I’m waiting to see.”
“Aren’t we very large?” asked Rod. “Larger than our whole universe?”
Thorn hesitated, rubbing his chin.
“We are,” he said slowly, “yet we are very small in the scale of this universe. All our old universe is apparently only one single atom of this one.
“Here, though, we have a riddle. The Infiniterra increased in size, until our universe could not contain it. It burst out. And, outside, it has still been expanding steadily, until it is nearly normal size in the new universe.
“But this is the riddle—a thing that neither Starbuck nor I can account for. Our expansion in this universe has consumed no power. On the contrary, the used uranium has been restored. When we reach normal size, we shall have it all back, except that lost through inefficiency.
“That fact has amazed both of us. But soon——”
He broke off, intently staring upward through the dome.
“There!” his deep voice throbbed eagerly. “Light! We can see.”
Rod looked out. The long darkness, indeed, was fading. A feeble red washed the sky, became steadily stronger. The increasing light revealed the Infiniterra placed in a curious situation.
“We seem,” Rod observed excitedly, “to be in a kind of deep pit.”
“A crater,” suggested Thorn, “in the surface of some planet of the new universe.”
On every side mounted vast vertical precipices. The ship hung in the throat of a colossal dark funnel. Between those looming, Cyclopean walls, the sky was no more than a scrap of scarlet. As the ship still expanded, the walls contracted, drew in.
Thorn sprang to the instruments.
“We must rise out of here,” he cried. “Or we’ll be caught——”
He was flinging down a series of keys. The dark smooth walls fell away. The scarlet sky grew wider.
“Now,” exclaimed Rod, burning with anticipation, “we shall look upon the new world——”
The words congealed in his throat. The strange funnel, as they came out of it, assumed a curiously familiar form—it took on the shape of a canna bloom, incredibly enlarged.
And the vast precipices that pushed up, mountainous, in the distance, to the purple-red sky—— He seized upon them with bewildered recognition.
Thorn’s startled words anticipated him:
“The laboratory at Morning Slope!”
“We’re back in our own world, where we started,” whispered Rod, dazedly. “That pit was a flower. When we started, the ship was lying on the grass, just beyond that row of lilies——”
He was pointing down, at the black, tremendous forest of the lawn, when speech once more deserted him. There, looming above the huge grass, reposed an immense, shimmering metal sphere.
Voiceless, he gripped Thorn’s shoulder, pointing.
“Yes, that’s the Infiniterra.” Thorn’s voice was hushed with a great amazement. “The Infiniterra, with all of us aboard. See, it is rising for the beginning of our flight!”
Watching in complete bewilderment, Rod saw the gleaming ball of metal float gently away from the grass. Expanding swiftly, it drove upward into the gulf of the purple-red sky. It was growing in size so fast that it did not appear to dwindle with increasing distance. It vanished at last in tenuity, and the strange sky was blank.
“So!” remarked Thorn. “We returned in time to see ourselves set out upon the journey.”
He guided the Infiniterra over the dark, gigantic forests of grass, and set it down softly upon the spot from which they had just seen it depart.
“That,” said Thorn, “is that.” He snapped down a key, and the hiss of the blue converter beam ceased beneath them. “We set out to reach infinity. And here we are.”
XIII.
SOME HOURS LATER, Infiniterra’s time, the great cube rose up the square shaft, carrying all the passengers away from the ship. Rodney Trent contrived to be again in the conning pit with Thorn.
“Still, Dr. Thorn,” he said, “I can’t understand it. I know we got larger. I saw the Earth shrinking behind us, millions of miles away. I saw it flying around the Sun, ticking off years like seconds. Yet we’re back here, small instead of large. Back before we started!”
“I’ve been talking two hours with Starbuck,” Thorn said, deliberately. “We reconciled our mathematics well enough—we each had just one angle of the truth. Together, we worked out an hypothesis. It seems to account for all the facts.
“And it gives us a new cosmogony.”
Intently, Rod waited, while the big, grave-faced scientist read his instruments, made some change in their course.
“Strangely, the reasoning is childishly simple. The thing should have been apparent from the first—if the most obvious solutions were not often the hardest to arrive at.
“The infinity paradox,” said Thorn, adjusting dials and keys as they mounted into the weirdly changing sky. “Einstein came at the key to it long ago, with his concept of curved space. Go far enough in a straight line—in any direction—and you find yourself back at the starting point.
“We should have deduced the rest of it from that; it’s simply so obvious that we overlooked it.”
“I don’t see——” objected Rod.
“Don’t you? Well, the identity of time as an actual fourth dimension is well recognized. There is no real, absolute distinction between time and any spatial dimension. That means that time is only another direction. Go far enough in time, then, and you return to where you were.
“To-morrow is the first day of the past; yesterday lies in the future—infinitely remote around the circle of time.”
Rod’s bewilderment did not stop his swift fingers, inconspicuously busy in his coat pocket, setting down these amazing words.
“The relatively paradox applies also to extent. Size is relative. The infinitely large is also the minutely small; the macrocosm and the microcosm are identical. When we became too large to exist longer in our universe, as we thought, we became the smallest particle in it.
“Infinity ever brings us back to the starting point.
“And this, Trent, gives us the clearest picture of the universe that science has ever had. Wave mechanics postulated, long ago, that the waves of every electron pervade the entire universe—but nobody realized the meaning of that, before to-day.”
“I don’t—yet,” commented Rod.
“Then here it is.” Thorn smiled. “Every atom in the universe is also the entire universe; conversely, the universe is identical with every atom in it. That is why matter and energy are indestructible: destroy one atom, utterly, and you would annihilate the universe.
“The universal atom, at the beginning, is obviously uranium. It is in motion, internally. The motion accounts for the dynamic state of the universe, for the passage of time.
“It is normally disintegrating. Each individual atom is its identity at a different instant of time, at a different moment in its distintegrating life. That explains the occurrence of apparently different kinds of atoms, of iron and oxygen as well as uranium.”
Rod tugged at his ear, pondering.
“This sums up the voyage, Trent. In space, we went around the universe. We completed the circle of time. We went through the cycle of size. And here we are.”
The cube soared above the dwindling globe of the Infiniterra. The purple gray of cosmic radiation faded into darkness, and darkness gave way again to the redness of the ultra-violet. The mountains of the laboratory buildings shrank toward their proper dimensions.
The cube settled upon a lawn once more velvet-green. The sky changed from crimson to summer blue. The shrinking gray buildings came to rest. Thorn turned a key on the instrument ledge, repeating:
“Here we are.”
“Right where we started,” said Rod, still lost in the shadow of a great bewilderment.
“Not quite,” said Thorn, soberly. “My life, at least, will be changed. I’ve found a new scale of value. I see, now, Trent, that I have not been a living being at all—but just a calculating machine. No, I’m not where I started.”
He opened the manhole.
“If you’ll excuse me, Trent, I’ve some one waiting below. Two persons, in fact.”
He chuckled, with a light, genial happiness new to Rod.
They went down together, and Morrison Cross stopped Thorn in the hall. His long face wore an unwonted smile, curiously gay. He was spinning the. snake-headed cane with an amazing youthful dexterity.
“So we’re back, Jarvis?” he said jovially. “You got fooled once, yourself!”
“Anyhow, Morrie,” retorted Thorn, “we fooled you for awhile.”
“So you did,” admitted the gaunt man, cheerfully. “It was good for me, Jarvis. Glad I went. Had a lot of time to think, in those ten days—and a lot to think about. Changed my point of view, Jarvis. Find I’m not so important as I thought. See an obligation.”
He poked at Thorn, boyishly, with the cane.
“Atomic power can do a lot for the world, Jarvis. It can be used to make the world a paradise.”
Just then the student couple, Paul and Martha Lee, arrived.
“Dr. Thorn,” the big, hazel-eyed girl broke in impulsively, “I’m awfully glad you brought us. It has been wonderful. Our return was like a miracle of God. He willed that we should go on living, serving.
“Before, Paul and I wanted to die. Now we never could. The world is so different, now; our little troubles seem so small, and there is so much that we can do.”
She, and thin, stooped Paul, shook Thorn’s big hand, warmly. Rod glimpsed the glow of a new life in each of them.
Thorn turned away, then, to meet his tall, dark-haired wife, and willowy, platinum-headed Melanie Dean. Looking at the three, smiling together, Rod wondered.
Outside the gleaming, nickel-white cube, on the yielding green of the lawn, Rod found himself near red-haired Ellen Cross, and Will Starbuck, his blond head bare to the sun, his smooth, brown face smiling down at the vivacious girl.
Starbuck saw him, and cheerfully demanded congratulations.
“Ellen has just agreed to marry me.”
Rod met the demand, with enthusiasm.
“Where’s Jarvis?” the girl asked. “We must thank him for the trip.” Her gay smile sobered a little. “This would never have happened to us, Will, if we hadn’t gone.”
“So we must,” agreed Starbuck, genially grave. “It’s hard to explain, but our glimpse of infinity has given us a clearer view. It has made the world a simpler, happier place to live in.”
“It seems odd, Will, to remember how you used to treat me—like some foreign untouchable.”
“And just as odd,” he reminded her gravely, “that you told me that love in you was dead.”
Well, her love wasn’t dead, now. They seemed to be forgetting him. Rod drifted on, pondering upon the human implications of the vision they all had had of infinity. Why had it made such a difference? Why had so many fears and uncertainties vanished, leaving only clear, solid realities?
Was it because the riddle of the universe had bewildered them all, burdened them with subconscious fear? And now, when they had the whole view of the universe and the small place in it for each, all reason for fear had gone? Or was it something deeper, some supernal contact?
Well, he had to write up his copy for old McGreggor.
He went out of the laboratory, and walked the half mile to the station. As he walked, and on the interurban, he pondered his problem. After all, where was the story? Nobody dead. Nobody hurt. Everything just as it had been. Could he convince McGreggor that he had been around the universe, in two hours?
He could do the story—somehow. He had his notes, of course. He could corner Garrick, and make him help with the scientific end.
Rodney was getting off the train when he remembered the one thing in the world he really wanted to do. Mrs. Connors was still waiting for his rent money, to buy her invalid husband the microscope—still, after these millions of years, it was the old gentleman’s birthday. And Rod turned back toward his boarding house.
Islands of the Sun
A Thought-Variant Novel in Two Parts
IN THE BEGINNING, Ken Darren and Dakkil Kun were young herdsmen upon Pylos, the planet whose orbit is now the third from the Sun. But that time was before the deliverance. Pylos, like her sister planets, then still floated like an island within the fiery sea of the Sun. And like the others, it was shielded still within the etheric sphere formed eons past, when the cosmic forces of a tidal vortex, deep within the tortured bowels of the Sun, ruptured space itself and extruded the matter of the new-born planet into a subspace beyond.
Until that day, the two young men had been friends.
Pylos was then new to civilized man. Only two generations since, the geodesic fliers had first crossed to Pylos, through the raging, fiery oceans of the solar photosphere. From ancient, far distant Nydron, beyond the perilous belt of Sun-spot storms, the planet where first rose science and culture, the globes brought explorers, conquerors, exploiters. The last planet added to the vast realm of the reigning Lhundar in Kothri, Pylos brought him mines for such precious minerals as the rare crystals of okal, and the broad plantations of the food companies, and such herds as Ken Darren and Dakkil Kun tended upon the remote frontier.
Anxiously he asked, “Can he do it?”
“If he has time,” Thorn said. “He’ll have a few minutes longer, below. But he has to change the circuits, and make some very delicate adjustments——”
Thorn’s words were lost in a mist of consuming flame. Rod strangled, with molten metal in his throat. With maddening, painful blows, his pulse beat against his congealing brain.
He heard the clang of the manhole opening, then, and a little gasping cry at his feet. Clinging to his consciousness, against the battering waves of heat, he looked down.
He saw two heads: the wavy, platinum hair of Melanie Dean, and the smooth, dark head of Madeline Thorn. The two women were dragging themselves up through the manhole, helping each other.
Thorn, trying to assist them, fell weakly to his knees. The three were together on the floor. Rod clung desperately to the instrument ledge, to hold himself from falling upon them.
“Jarvis,” he heard one of them say, “we’ve come to be with you.” In the faintness of his mind, Rod did not know which one was speaking, nor did it seem to matter. “This is the end, we know—this burning. We’ve come to be with you.”
“We’ve talked together, Jarvis,” said the other voice. “We’re friends—we must be, because we love you. We came together.”
“My dear ones,” Thorn whispered, unsteadily. “I’m glad. I’m——”
Rod was conscious, then, of a new, consuming intensity of the heat. Thorn had been trying to say something more. But his flushed, sweat-drenched face went suddenly lax. He pitched limply forward, toward the open manhole.
He was going to fall through it, Rod thought, and down upon the great barrel of the converter. Rod grasped at him, weakly, and realized that if he released his grip on the ledge, he would only fall after him.
But the two women seized his arms. With a desperate, united effort, they pulled him back from the yawning opening. They collapsed beside him, on the hot floor, and lay three together.
A cool little joy soothed Rod’s aching brain, as he sank down into the abyss of heat beside them, reaching in his last instant of awareness for the lever to close the manhole.
RODNEY was lying in a dark, fern-grown canyon. Cool shadows caressed him. Sweet, refreshing spray of an icy waterfall fell on him. He slept, escaping terrible memories of the flaming desert beyond the canyon, striving to forget its intolerable heat.
He woke in the little conning pit. The heat was gone—or, rather, going, for the metal was still warm to the touch; his clothing adhered to his hot, clammy body.
Thorn and Melanie Dean were busy over dark-haired Madeline, who was just recovering.
Rod, after a little, was able to get shakily to his feet. He looked out through the dome. The sky was still totally dark. The converter beam, however, had returned to hissing life. Its color was now the living blue of flame.
Looking carefully at the wild masses of uranium under the blue beam, Rod saw that they were no longer wasting away. Yes, slowly the incandescent patch of metal was building up. Starbuck, then, had succeeded.
“You coming around all right, Mr. Trent?” Melanie Dean asked warmly.
He nodded. They were helping Madeline to her feet.
“That terrible heat?” She was shuddering. “It won’t come back?”
“No, my dear,” Thom told her. “Will Starbuck saved us—with probably the quickest, most brilliant bit of scientific thinking on record. We can go ahead, now, to explore the new universe.”
She smiled at him, and at Melanie Dean, beside him.
“The three of us,” she said, “together.”
Thorn was opening the manhole.
“Young’s coming up to take charge a while,” he said. “They had it easier, below. I believe we all need a little recuperation.”
Rod agreed.
XII.
DARKNESS was still above the dome, five days later, when Rod came up into the conning pit, to rejoin Thorn. When he looked out, he saw that the blue beam had already restored most of the uranium. The Infiniterra was almost a sphere again, although its surface was yet rather unequal.
“Well, Trent,” the big scientist greeted him, “we’ll soon know a little more of the new universe.”
“What are you expecting?”
“I’m waiting to see.” Thorn chuckled. “I have, though, allowed myself a few speculations. Theoretically, physical conditions here ought to correspond somewhat with those in the old universe. And the instruments register a zone of radiation ahead that seems to resemble our cosmic rays—that’s why I called you.
“Radiation implies matter. Matter, from its own nature, means gravitation, which will concentrate it, swing it through orbits in space, in the form of planets, suns, galaxies. But I’m waiting to see.”
“Aren’t we very large?” asked Rod. “Larger than our whole universe?”
Thorn hesitated, rubbing his chin.
“We are,” he said slowly, “yet we are very small in the scale of this universe. All our old universe is apparently only one single atom of this one.
“Here, though, we have a riddle. The Infiniterra increased in size, until our universe could not contain it. It burst out. And, outside, it has still been expanding steadily, until it is nearly normal size in the new universe.
“But this is the riddle—a thing that neither Starbuck nor I can account for. Our expansion in this universe has consumed no power. On the contrary, the used uranium has been restored. When we reach normal size, we shall have it all back, except that lost through inefficiency.
“That fact has amazed both of us. But soon——”
He broke off, intently staring upward through the dome.
“There!” his deep voice throbbed eagerly. “Light! We can see.”
Rod looked out. The long darkness, indeed, was fading. A feeble red washed the sky, became steadily stronger. The increasing light revealed the Infiniterra placed in a curious situation.
“We seem,” Rod observed excitedly, “to be in a kind of deep pit.”
“A crater,” suggested Thorn, “in the surface of some planet of the new universe.”
On every side mounted vast vertical precipices. The ship hung in the throat of a colossal dark funnel. Between those looming, Cyclopean walls, the sky was no more than a scrap of scarlet. As the ship still expanded, the walls contracted, drew in.
Thorn sprang to the instruments.
“We must rise out of here,” he cried. “Or we’ll be caught——”
He was flinging down a series of keys. The dark smooth walls fell away. The scarlet sky grew wider.
“Now,” exclaimed Rod, burning with anticipation, “we shall look upon the new world——”
The words congealed in his throat. The strange funnel, as they came out of it, assumed a curiously familiar form—it took on the shape of a canna bloom, incredibly enlarged.
And the vast precipices that pushed up, mountainous, in the distance, to the purple-red sky—— He seized upon them with bewildered recognition.
Thorn’s startled words anticipated him:
“The laboratory at Morning Slope!”
“We’re back in our own world, where we started,” whispered Rod, dazedly. “That pit was a flower. When we started, the ship was lying on the grass, just beyond that row of lilies——”
He was pointing down, at the black, tremendous forest of the lawn, when speech once more deserted him. There, looming above the huge grass, reposed an immense, shimmering metal sphere.
Voiceless, he gripped Thorn’s shoulder, pointing.
“Yes, that’s the Infiniterra.” Thorn’s voice was hushed with a great amazement. “The Infiniterra, with all of us aboard. See, it is rising for the beginning of our flight!”
Watching in complete bewilderment, Rod saw the gleaming ball of metal float gently away from the grass. Expanding swiftly, it drove upward into the gulf of the purple-red sky. It was growing in size so fast that it did not appear to dwindle with increasing distance. It vanished at last in tenuity, and the strange sky was blank.
“So!” remarked Thorn. “We returned in time to see ourselves set out upon the journey.”
He guided the Infiniterra over the dark, gigantic forests of grass, and set it down softly upon the spot from which they had just seen it depart.
“That,” said Thorn, “is that.” He snapped down a key, and the hiss of the blue converter beam ceased beneath them. “We set out to reach infinity. And here we are.”
XIII.
SOME HOURS LATER, Infiniterra’s time, the great cube rose up the square shaft, carrying all the passengers away from the ship. Rodney Trent contrived to be again in the conning pit with Thorn.
“Still, Dr. Thorn,” he said, “I can’t understand it. I know we got larger. I saw the Earth shrinking behind us, millions of miles away. I saw it flying around the Sun, ticking off years like seconds. Yet we’re back here, small instead of large. Back before we started!”
“I’ve been talking two hours with Starbuck,” Thorn said, deliberately. “We reconciled our mathematics well enough—we each had just one angle of the truth. Together, we worked out an hypothesis. It seems to account for all the facts.
“And it gives us a new cosmogony.”
Intently, Rod waited, while the big, grave-faced scientist read his instruments, made some change in their course.
“Strangely, the reasoning is childishly simple. The thing should have been apparent from the first—if the most obvious solutions were not often the hardest to arrive at.
“The infinity paradox,” said Thorn, adjusting dials and keys as they mounted into the weirdly changing sky. “Einstein came at the key to it long ago, with his concept of curved space. Go far enough in a straight line—in any direction—and you find yourself back at the starting point.
“We should have deduced the rest of it from that; it’s simply so obvious that we overlooked it.”
“I don’t see——” objected Rod.
“Don’t you? Well, the identity of time as an actual fourth dimension is well recognized. There is no real, absolute distinction between time and any spatial dimension. That means that time is only another direction. Go far enough in time, then, and you return to where you were.
“To-morrow is the first day of the past; yesterday lies in the future—infinitely remote around the circle of time.”
Rod’s bewilderment did not stop his swift fingers, inconspicuously busy in his coat pocket, setting down these amazing words.
“The relatively paradox applies also to extent. Size is relative. The infinitely large is also the minutely small; the macrocosm and the microcosm are identical. When we became too large to exist longer in our universe, as we thought, we became the smallest particle in it.
“Infinity ever brings us back to the starting point.
“And this, Trent, gives us the clearest picture of the universe that science has ever had. Wave mechanics postulated, long ago, that the waves of every electron pervade the entire universe—but nobody realized the meaning of that, before to-day.”
“I don’t—yet,” commented Rod.
“Then here it is.” Thorn smiled. “Every atom in the universe is also the entire universe; conversely, the universe is identical with every atom in it. That is why matter and energy are indestructible: destroy one atom, utterly, and you would annihilate the universe.
“The universal atom, at the beginning, is obviously uranium. It is in motion, internally. The motion accounts for the dynamic state of the universe, for the passage of time.
“It is normally disintegrating. Each individual atom is its identity at a different instant of time, at a different moment in its distintegrating life. That explains the occurrence of apparently different kinds of atoms, of iron and oxygen as well as uranium.”
Rod tugged at his ear, pondering.
“This sums up the voyage, Trent. In space, we went around the universe. We completed the circle of time. We went through the cycle of size. And here we are.”
The cube soared above the dwindling globe of the Infiniterra. The purple gray of cosmic radiation faded into darkness, and darkness gave way again to the redness of the ultra-violet. The mountains of the laboratory buildings shrank toward their proper dimensions.
The cube settled upon a lawn once more velvet-green. The sky changed from crimson to summer blue. The shrinking gray buildings came to rest. Thorn turned a key on the instrument ledge, repeating:
“Here we are.”
“Right where we started,” said Rod, still lost in the shadow of a great bewilderment.
“Not quite,” said Thorn, soberly. “My life, at least, will be changed. I’ve found a new scale of value. I see, now, Trent, that I have not been a living being at all—but just a calculating machine. No, I’m not where I started.”
He opened the manhole.
“If you’ll excuse me, Trent, I’ve some one waiting below. Two persons, in fact.”
He chuckled, with a light, genial happiness new to Rod.
They went down together, and Morrison Cross stopped Thorn in the hall. His long face wore an unwonted smile, curiously gay. He was spinning the. snake-headed cane with an amazing youthful dexterity.
“So we’re back, Jarvis?” he said jovially. “You got fooled once, yourself!”
“Anyhow, Morrie,” retorted Thorn, “we fooled you for awhile.”
“So you did,” admitted the gaunt man, cheerfully. “It was good for me, Jarvis. Glad I went. Had a lot of time to think, in those ten days—and a lot to think about. Changed my point of view, Jarvis. Find I’m not so important as I thought. See an obligation.”
He poked at Thorn, boyishly, with the cane.
“Atomic power can do a lot for the world, Jarvis. It can be used to make the world a paradise.”
Just then the student couple, Paul and Martha Lee, arrived.
“Dr. Thorn,” the big, hazel-eyed girl broke in impulsively, “I’m awfully glad you brought us. It has been wonderful. Our return was like a miracle of God. He willed that we should go on living, serving.
“Before, Paul and I wanted to die. Now we never could. The world is so different, now; our little troubles seem so small, and there is so much that we can do.”
She, and thin, stooped Paul, shook Thorn’s big hand, warmly. Rod glimpsed the glow of a new life in each of them.
Thorn turned away, then, to meet his tall, dark-haired wife, and willowy, platinum-headed Melanie Dean. Looking at the three, smiling together, Rod wondered.
Outside the gleaming, nickel-white cube, on the yielding green of the lawn, Rod found himself near red-haired Ellen Cross, and Will Starbuck, his blond head bare to the sun, his smooth, brown face smiling down at the vivacious girl.
Starbuck saw him, and cheerfully demanded congratulations.
“Ellen has just agreed to marry me.”
Rod met the demand, with enthusiasm.
“Where’s Jarvis?” the girl asked. “We must thank him for the trip.” Her gay smile sobered a little. “This would never have happened to us, Will, if we hadn’t gone.”
“So we must,” agreed Starbuck, genially grave. “It’s hard to explain, but our glimpse of infinity has given us a clearer view. It has made the world a simpler, happier place to live in.”
“It seems odd, Will, to remember how you used to treat me—like some foreign untouchable.”
“And just as odd,” he reminded her gravely, “that you told me that love in you was dead.”
Well, her love wasn’t dead, now. They seemed to be forgetting him. Rod drifted on, pondering upon the human implications of the vision they all had had of infinity. Why had it made such a difference? Why had so many fears and uncertainties vanished, leaving only clear, solid realities?
Was it because the riddle of the universe had bewildered them all, burdened them with subconscious fear? And now, when they had the whole view of the universe and the small place in it for each, all reason for fear had gone? Or was it something deeper, some supernal contact?
Well, he had to write up his copy for old McGreggor.
He went out of the laboratory, and walked the half mile to the station. As he walked, and on the interurban, he pondered his problem. After all, where was the story? Nobody dead. Nobody hurt. Everything just as it had been. Could he convince McGreggor that he had been around the universe, in two hours?
He could do the story—somehow. He had his notes, of course. He could corner Garrick, and make him help with the scientific end.
Rodney was getting off the train when he remembered the one thing in the world he really wanted to do. Mrs. Connors was still waiting for his rent money, to buy her invalid husband the microscope—still, after these millions of years, it was the old gentleman’s birthday. And Rod turned back toward his boarding house.
Islands of the Sun
A Thought-Variant Novel in Two Parts
IN THE BEGINNING, Ken Darren and Dakkil Kun were young herdsmen upon Pylos, the planet whose orbit is now the third from the Sun. But that time was before the deliverance. Pylos, like her sister planets, then still floated like an island within the fiery sea of the Sun. And like the others, it was shielded still within the etheric sphere formed eons past, when the cosmic forces of a tidal vortex, deep within the tortured bowels of the Sun, ruptured space itself and extruded the matter of the new-born planet into a subspace beyond.
Until that day, the two young men had been friends.
Pylos was then new to civilized man. Only two generations since, the geodesic fliers had first crossed to Pylos, through the raging, fiery oceans of the solar photosphere. From ancient, far distant Nydron, beyond the perilous belt of Sun-spot storms, the planet where first rose science and culture, the globes brought explorers, conquerors, exploiters. The last planet added to the vast realm of the reigning Lhundar in Kothri, Pylos brought him mines for such precious minerals as the rare crystals of okal, and the broad plantations of the food companies, and such herds as Ken Darren and Dakkil Kun tended upon the remote frontier.
