EXPLORERS into INFINITY By Ray Cummings. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Weird Tales April, May, June 1927.] CONTENTS FOREWORD 1 FREEDOM IN TIME AND SPACE 2 "THIS COULD DESTROY THE UNIVERSE" 3 EXPLORERS INTO INFINITY 4 THE WATCHERS 5 THE RETURN 6 THE FLIGHT INTO TIME, SIZE AND SPACE 7 "A SINGLE STARLIT NIGHT--AN ETERNITY" 8 THE ENCOUNTER IN THE FOREST GLADE 9 "DWINDLING GIANTS FROM LARGENESS UNFATHOMABLE" 10 THE SOLITARY VOYAGER 11 BRAVE LITTLE BEACON STRIVING TO PIERCE INFINITY _FOREWORD_ _Some of my present readers will doubtless remember "The Girl in the Golden Atom." When I wrote that book of the realm of infinite smallness there was in my mind its logical converse, the realm of the infinitely large. The one a complement to the other. And so I offer "Explorers Into Infinity," in no sense as a sequel to "The Girl in the Golden Atom," for fictionally they have no connection, but rather as its companion story._ _You will find here a complete theory of the material universe as I conceive it may perhaps really be. To my own imagination--and I think very likely to your own--it is difficult to conceive of an infinite distance beyond the stars--empty Space stretching out forever. Nor is Einstein more satisfying to me, rather less so, for out beyond the Einstein system of curved Space must lie something or nothing. It is the nothingness which puzzles me. I have tried vainly to imagine a realm, infinitely large, of unending nothingness. Time is equally puzzling. I can conceive of eventful eons lying ahead of us; but rob that time of its future events and I flounder. To me at least, the conception of Time with nothing ever happening anywhere is impossible. To me also, an event presupposes the existence of something; and so, in my effort to imagine the infinitely large--Space illimitable, Time unending--I am forced to conceive what must fill that Space, what must happen to create that time._ _You may call this tale fantastic, weird, bizarre. Doubtless it is. But with our most powerful microscopes reaching inward so tiny a distance to see no end in infinite smallness; our greatest telescopes groping futilely out into largeness unending to our vision, what is left but our imagination? And that, at least, we can send winging into the infinite!_