"I have asked myself this question and I believe the latter statement to be in a sense correct, but what does it mean? Well, it means that if you move further and further into larger universes, you eventually get to where you started. Not that Big is the same thing as Small, but that from wherever you happen to be, the ones in the direction--outward--look successively bigger, while the ones in the other direction--inward--look successively smaller. Now if there were some kind of super-telescope that could look beyond our universe of super-atoms, and beyond the next and so on indefinitely, you would find yourself staring up through a super-microscope at your own eye." "Get along with you!" Katherine said. "This is the pipe dream to end all pipe dreams. Tell us more." * * * * * "Well, I'll revise it to this extent," said Phil. "It wouldn't be your eye that you'd see, any more than you'd see your own face if you looked far enough across ordinary intergalactic space. You'd see the back of your head--or, rather, the other side of the Earth--provided there was nothing in the way." "And in this case it would be what?" she asked. "I don't know," Phil said, looking worried. "What is the equivalent of the back of your head--looked at along the direction of hyper-time? Could it be that what you saw would not be from behind, but from ... inside?" Katherine's beautiful sightless eyes seemed to be turned inward, and she sat very still. Then she said, "You evoke something in my mind like the echo of a picture I once knew, and will know again." Farley looked at her sharply. "You mean something in your subconscious?" Phil asked. "Perhaps that's what it is, and yet they say that you try to escape knowledge of your subconscious--that it frightens you. I am not frightened, Phil. I feel ... expectant." "I'd feel more expectant," he said, "if I were quite sure of what I was doing. The trouble is that while ordinary light could in theory show you the super-astronomy of the stars and planets that are made up of atoms consisting of our stars and planets, it won't work the other way." "Why not?" Farley wanted to know. "Wave length. As it is, we have to use an electron microscope to see the larger molecules; the wave length of visible light is too coarse-grained to show anything that small. So just try to imagine how impossible it would be to see the sub-atoms--infra-atoms--that I'm talking about if one had to rely on ordinary light! The electron microscope wouldn't help, either. It would be exactly as though some gigantic, super-researcher were trying to look at one of our molecules by bombarding it with a shower of planets." "Then how can you see this 'red shift'?" Katherine asked. "I can't," he said. "I detect it by a kind of mathematical diagnosis. It's an inferential process--as most forms of observation are, in modern physics."