“Yes,” he said. “Thought-waves are infinitely faster than light. No one has ever—”
“I mean,” I went on, “we are hoping to reach those other beings. But how—this is what Jim and I can’t understand—how do you know where you are going? Might we not be heading directly away? Or perhaps Dolores is receiving the thought-waves progressively stronger and thus guiding us.”
“No,” Dolores spoke up. “It is difficult to receive the thoughts. There has been no time since we left—” She stopped, and added, “That makes me realize, didn’t Alice leave us a moment ago?”
“Yes,” said Jim. “It’s time for lunch.”
Dolores left her grandfather’s side. “I must go help her.”
Alice had slipped quietly away. Dolores now joined her in the galley.
Dr. Weatherby went on; “I remember remarking to you, Leonard, that there would be no need for navigation. We will grow, with an infinite velocity, to an infinitely gigantic size. Conversely, all this—” He waved his hand at the window, the firmament of white blazing suns—“all this immeasurable space we see out there will shrink to a size infinitely small. It will, later on, be smaller than our vehicle itself. Smaller than my body, my hand.”
His voice rose to a sudden vehemence. “Don’t you get the conception now? All this, our celestial space, will shrink to a pinhead—an atom. We will emerge from it into some tremendous greater emptiness, some greater space. As much greater as the space of a bedroom interior would be to the head of a pin lying on a bureau! What matter whether we emerge on one side of the pinhead or the other? The distance will be infinitesimal!”
What matter indeed! I clung to the conception. So simple, yet so vast! And suddenly there sprang before me a vision of our little earth back there, already invisible, circling its tiny orbit, a mere nothing in the cosmos of infinite nature. An electron! Less than that—the merest infinite particle of an electron.
This whole universe of stars, merely a cluster of tiny particles, clinging together to form an atom of something else! And trillions of such atoms making up the head of a pin, lying on someone’s bureau!