As one, the company's eyes opened wide at the curious picture which lay exposed to their views. Star-strewn heavens sprawled before them, yes; but no such spangled jet as might be seen from Earth or any of Earth's sister planets. There, stars were dim, small specks, faintly aglitter in unfathomable distance. Stars had diversity of size ... this one was great, that other small. Stars clustered in recognizable patterns. Here a portion of the sky was filled with their tinsel sprinkling; elsewhere might be a patch of sparse-strewn midnight black. Thus the heavens as seen from Earth.
But not so was space as seen from this vantage point. For, viewing their surroundings through the vision plate, it seemed as if they swam through a sea of radiant light where every star was a beacon, each planet a steadfast buoy of glowing color. And in this gleaming pattern was a regularity, an orthodoxy as painstaking as if some master craftsman had allocated each glowing sphere with precise care.
Regularly discernible against the omnipresent back-drop of space were the solar galaxies, each a complete entity, aloof, removed from its fellows and confined to its own definite segment of space. Some galaxies were younger than others. One formed a whirlpool nebula. Another, giving birth to worlds, was a gleaming, egg-shaped blob of gold. Still elder universes had achieved secure and permanent balance.
But in certain things they were all alike. Each dominated its own sector of space without encroachment on a neighbor. And each parent star was very nearly equal in size to every other.
It was, in short, the mathematician's dream: the perfect achievement of theoretical stellar mechanics. A universe balanced in absolute stasis, with each galaxy arranged in contrapuntal adjacence to each other.
"But this—" said Flick Muldoon wildly—"this can't be the Sirian system! This isn't any part of the universe we knew!"
Young Dr. Lane nodded soberly. "Yes, Flick, it is. This, at last, is the true universe. The real and constant universe we theorized might exist when first we took those photographs on Luna. We are looking, as no man has looked for countless years, upon the true 'bubble universe' of which our solar system was once a part."
"But—" asked Nora—"our solar system now?"
Warren had been twisting the vision lens. Now he halted its periscopic movement at a space sector behind the Liberty. "I think," he said dubiously, "that may be the universe from which we came. Gary—?"