Despotism -- Fiction; Dissenters -- Fiction; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Science fiction
"The light from the island universes we can see through the ports has
never yet reached the First Galaxy since time began. It hasn't had
time! We're not only beyond the limits that men have guessed at, we're
beyond their wildest imagining!"
The Mayor of Steadheim blinked at him. Then he got up and peered out
the vision-ports. Dim, remote luminosities were visible, each one a
galaxy of a thousand million suns!
"Hah!" grunted the mayor, "Not much to look at, at that! Now what?"
Kim spread out his hands and looked at Dona.
"Turning about and trying to go back," he said, "would be like starting
from an individual grain of sand on a desert, and flying a thousand
miles, and then trying to fly back to that grain of sand again. That's
how the First Galaxy stacks up."
Dona took a deep breath.
"You'll find a way, Kim! And--anyhow--"
She smiled at him shakily. Whether or not they ever saw another human
being she was prepared to take what came, with him. The possibility
of being lost amid the uncountable island universes of the cosmos
had been known to them both from the beginning of the use of the
_Starshine_.
"We'll take some pictures," Kim told her, "and then sit down on a
planet and figure things out."
He set to work making a map of all the island universes in view
of the _Starshine's_ current position, with due regard to the
_Starshine's_ course. On the relatively short jumps within a
galaxy, and especially those of a few light-years only, he could simply
turn the ship about and come very close to his original position--the
line of it, anyhow.
But he did not know within many many billions of light-years how far
he had come and he did know that an error of a hundredth of a second
of arc would amount to millions of light-years at the distance of the
First Galaxy.
The positions of galaxies about the First were plotted only within a
radius of something like two million light-years. There had never been
a point in even that! At fifteen hundred thousand times that distance
he was not likely to strike the tiny mapped area by accident.
He set to work. Presently he was examining the photographs by enlarger
for a sign of structure in one of the galaxies in view. One showed
evidences of super-giant stars--which proved it the nearest. He aimed
the _Starshine_ for it. He threw the ship into transmitter-drive.
The galaxy was startlingly familiar when they reached it. The stellar
types were normal ones and there were star-clusters and doubtless
star-drifts too and Kim was wholly accustomed to astro-navigation now.
He simply chose a sol-type sun, set the radiation-switch to stop
the little space-ship close by, aimed for it and pressed a button.
Instantly they were there. They visited six solar systems.
They found a habitable planet in the last--a bit on the small side, but
with good gravity, adequate atmosphere and polar ice-caps to assure its
climate.
They landed and its atmosphere was good. The Mayor of Steadheim stepped
out and blinked about him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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