"Sure, but what could they compare it with? They couldn't see a white dwarf from here. They couldn't measure the parallax to the nearest star, so they would have no idea of stellar distances. They wouldn't know how bright S Doradus was. Or how dim Van Maanen's star was."
"Then," Fuller said speculatively, "they'd have to wait until one of their scientists invented the telectroscope."
Arcot shook his head. "Without a knowledge of nuclear physics, the invention of the telectroscope is impossible. The lack of opportunity to watch the stars that might teach them something would delay their knowledge of atomic structure. They might learn a great deal about chemistry and Newtonian physics, and go quite a ways with math, but even there they would be handicapped. Morey, for instance, would never have developed the autointegral calculus, to say nothing of tensor and spinor calculus, which were developed two hundred years ago, without the knowledge of the problems of space to develop the need. I'm afraid such a race would be quite a bit behind us in science.
"Suppose, on the other hand, we visit a race that's far ahead of us. We'd better not stay there long; think what they might do to us. They might decide our ship was too threatening and simply wipe us out. Or they might even be so far advanced that we would mean nothing to them at all—like ants or little squalling babies." Arcot laughed at the thought.
"That isn't a very complimentary picture," objected Fuller. "With the wonderful advances we've made, there just isn't that much left to be able to say we're so little."
"Fuller, I'm surprised at you!" Arcot said. "Today, we are only opening our eyes on the world of science. Our race has only a few thousand years behind it and hundreds of millions yet to come. How can any man of today, with his freshly-opened eyes of science, take in the mighty pyramid of knowledge that will be built up in those long, long years of the future? It's too gigantic to grasp; we can't imagine the things that the ever-expanding mind of man will discover."
Arcot's voice slowed, and a far-off look came in his eyes.
"You might say there can be no greater energy than that of matter annihilation. I doubt that. I have seen hints of something new—an energy so vast—so transcendently tremendous—that it frightens me. The energies of all the mighty suns of all the galaxies—of the whole cosmos—in the hand of man! The energy of a billion billion billion suns! And every sun pouring out its energy at the rate of quintillions of horsepower every instant!
"But it's too great for man to have—I am going to forget it, lest man be destroyed by his own might."
Arcot's halting speech told of his intense thought—of a dream of such awful energies as man had never before conceived. His eyes looked unseeing at the black velvet of space with its few, scattered stars.