"I couldn't understand it anyway," said Trehearne, "so it's just as well."
They had reached the forward end of the corridor. There was a narrow circular stairway leading up. Edri stood back and motioned Trehearne to climb it. He did, fighting down another attack of the shakes on the way—you couldn't take it all in, you couldn't get used to it all at once, the strangeness, the utter separation from everything that had been, the headlong plunge into alien horizons, for a long time you were going to get panicky when you thought about it. He emerged into a round observation dome of immensely heavy quartz. He didn't know what he had expected to see, but he was disappointed. There was nothing to be seen at all but darkness, streaked with creeping lines of light.
"Those are stars," said Edri, who had come up behind him. "Or rather, the radiation patterns of stars. At our present velocity we're overtaking the lines of luminous energy they have left behind them. Star-tracks, we call them."
He closed a switch, and the thick quartzite became suffused with a pallid, milky glow. Edri consulted a master dial, and made adjustments.
"Watch the dome," he said. "It's triple thickness, of a special molecular composition, each plane laid at a different oblique angle. I've switched high-frequency electronic current into hair-line grids between the three planes and all sorts of interesting and complicated things are happening in the molecular structure of the quartzite."
Trehearne watched. His heart was beating hard.
"Behold," said Edri, "the light-impulses of the star-tracks are caught, stepped up, wrenched about, and finally held on the inner lens."
Trehearne beheld, and beholding, he forgot Edri and the ship and himself. He forgot Earth, the past, and the future. He forgot almost to breathe.
Edri's voice came to him softly. "You may see this often, Trehearne, but never again for the first time."
Trehearne barely heard him. The ship had fallen away beneath him, leaving him suspended in the plunging gulfs that lie between the island stars, and he looked awestruck into the dark and splendid loneliness of space.