“You see! We may be going wrongly now. It makes no difference; the ultimate distance will be infinitesimal. But I know that by all natural laws we are seeking greater spaces. We will find, beyond these stars, an infinitely greater emptiness. “Our size ultimately will fill it. But we will have turned to seek an emptiness still vaster, until, at last, freed from these clusters of substance which themselves are clinging together to form that pinhead, we will emerge.” V EMERGING FROM INFINITE SMALLNESS Alice and I were sitting in the small round tower that projected some six feet above the top of the vehicle, near its forward end. Through the windows here—eight of them, and one above us—the huge, inverted black bowl of the heavens lay fully exposed. Myriad swarms of stars were thick-strewn everywhere. Freed from the distortion of the earth’s atmosphere, they blazed like balls of molten fire: white, blue-white, yellow and red. Red giants and dwarfs, the old and the young, occasionally a comet with its millions of miles of crescent, fan-shaped tail. Clusters of stars appeared, blended by distance: binaries, revolving one upon the other, multiple stars; single white-hot suns, blazing victorious with their maturity. And far off the spiral nebulae—patches of stardust, suns being born anew, or complete, separate universes. It was a glorious, awesome sight! The red Elton Beta ray now preceded us. From here in the tower we could see it, flashing ahead like a dim searchlight beam. We had picked up velocity rapidly, had reached now some three hundred and sixty thousand miles a second, nearly twice the speed of light. Yet in all this scene, these whirling stars at which we were plunging, there was no visible movement. To an ant, crawling along a hillside ledge, the distant mountains seemed coming no nearer. The dials showed our velocity to have reached very nearly one light-year per hour. No longer was it possible to use the unit of miles: our instruments showed now only light-years. Light travels 186,400 miles a second, and in our earthly year there are 31,536,000 seconds. A light-year, then—the distance light can speed in a year—represents 5,883,000,000,000 miles. This sum now was our smallest unit of measurement. We were now 4.25 light-years from earth. Alpha Centauri, nearest of all the stars to earth at 4.35 light-years, loomed ahead of us. I stood at one of the forward windows regarding it. Two stars it is, in reality, for it is a binary. Its components were beginning visually to separate now: two white blazing suns, millions of miles apart, slowly revolving upon a common center with a revolution that took thousands of years.