"You're coming back, Kinnison," the Port Admiral had replied gravely. "That is why I am sending these men and this stuff along--to be as sure as I possibly can that you _do_ get back." Now they were out in intergalactic space, and the Gray Lensman, lying flat upon his back with his eyes closed, sent his sense of perception out beyond the confining iron walls and let it roam the void. This was better than a visiplate; with no material barriers or limitations he was feasting upon a spectacle scarcely to be pictured in the most untrammeled imaginings of man. There were no planets, no suns, no stars, no meteorites, no particles of cosmic débris. All nearby space was empty, with an indescribable perfection of emptiness at the very thought of which the mind quailed in uncomprehending horror. And, accentuating that emptiness, at such mind-searing distances as to be dwarfed into buttons, and yet, because of their intrinsic massiveness, starkly apparent in their three-dimensional relationships, there hung poised and motionlessly stately the component galaxies of a universe. Behind the flying vessel the First Galaxy was a tiny, brightly shining lens, so far away that such minutiae as individual solar systems were invisible, so distant that even the gigantic masses of its accompanying globular star clusters were merged indistinguishably into its sharply lenticular shape. In front of her, to right and to left of her, above and beneath her were other galaxies, never explored by man or by any other beings subscribing to the code of Galactic Civilization. Some, edge on, were thin, waferlike. Others appeared as full disks, showing faintly or boldly the prodigious, mathematically inexplicable spiral arms by virtue of whose obscure functioning they had come into being. Between these two extremes there was every possible variant in angular displacement. Utterly incomprehensible although the speed of the space-flyer was, yet those galaxies remained relatively motionless, hour after hour. What distances! What magnificence! What grandeur! What awful, what poignantly solemn calm! Despite the fact that Kinnison had gone out there expecting to behold that very scene, he felt awed to insignificance by the overwhelming, the cosmic immensity of the spectacle. What business had he, a sub-electronic midge from an ultra-microscopic planet, venturing out into macro-cosmic space, a demesne comprehensible only to the omniscient and omnipotent Creator? * * * * * He got up, shaking off the futile mood. This wouldn't get him to the first check station, and he had a job to do. And, after all, wasn't man as big as space? Could he have come out here, otherwise? He was. Yes, man was bigger even than space. Man, by his very envisionment of macro-cosmic space, had already mastered it.