"Richard, what is it?"
"The wasps, Joan. They're getting smaller!"
"Richard, you're either stark, raving mad, or your vision is swimming from the strain of watching them."
"No, Joan. I'm quite sane, and my eyes are all right. I tell you, they're shrinking."
"Richard, how could they shrink?"
"I—I don't know. Perhaps—wait a minute, Joan. Eddington's oscillations."
"Eddington's what?"
"Oscillations," I exclaimed, excitedly. "A century ago Eddington pictured all matter throughout the universe as alternating between a state of contraction and expansion. Oh, Joan, don't you see? These creatures are composed not of solid matter, but of some form of vibrating energy. They possess an oscillatory life cycle which makes them contract and expand in small-scale duplication of the larger pulse of our contracting and expanding universe. They become huge, then small, then huge again. They may expand and contract a thousand times before they die. Perhaps they—"
A scream from Joan cut my explanation short. "Richard, the web's slackening. I'm going to fall."
Fifteen minutes later we were rocketing upward through Jupiter's immense cloud blanket, locked in each other's arms.