I was aware that Alice had come in to sit beside me, her cool white hand impulsively pressing mine. And Dolores was saying,
“Alice, they’re going! Isn’t that wonderful? We’re all going, just as soon as we can get ready!”
“A strange simplicity,” Dr. Weatherby was saying. “First, let me make this clear: when I say universe—the construction of our universe—I mean everything that exists, or has, or will exist, the smallest entity of our infinitesimal atomic world to the greatest conception of what may lie beyond the stars. Does that sound complicated? Let me say again, it is simple.”
He leaned toward us, with his thick, strong hands gripped in his lap. “I want you to realize first that we are dealing with infinities. The human mind is so finite, so limited. You must cast off most of your instinctive methods of reasoning. You understand me?”
“We’ll try,” I said.
He nodded and went on.
“Conceive a void of nothingness. No space, no time, no material bodies. Just nothing. That was the beginning. Do not try to wonder when it was. A billion years ago . . . a billion billion. Not at all. You must not think of when, because when implies time. There was no time. There could be no time without material bodies to create movement and events. For time in itself is nothing but the measurement between events.
“We have then, a nothingness. A vortex. A whirlpool.”
“A vortex of nothingness?” I exclaimed.