We were now 4.25 light-years from earth. Alpha Centauri, nearest of all the stars to earth at 4.35 light-years, loomed ahead of us. I stood at one of the forward windows regarding it. Two stars it is, in reality, for it is a binary.
Its components were beginning visually to separate now: two white blazing suns, millions of miles apart, slowly revolving upon a common center with a revolution that took thousands of years.
Yet, as I stood there, I fancied I could see them turning! We were heading directly for them; they were leaping up out of the void. There was a slow but visible movement throughout the firmament now. The stars in advance of us were opening up, spreading apart, drifting past our side windows, closing together again behind us. Dr. Weatherby was at my elbow.
“I shall keep away from Centauri,” he remarked. “And presently, we must go faster, Leonard.”
He went to his instrument table. The red Beta ray preceding us seemed to intensify a trifle; the firmament shifted slightly as our direction was altered. As I stood there, in ten minutes or so, the twin blazing suns of Alpha Centauri came up and swept past us.
I hastened to a side window to watch them. Blazing giants they were, floating off there a million miles away, each of them so large that our own huge sun would have been a match flame beside them.
But suddenly I wondered, blinked and stared with my breathing stopped by the shock of it. Were these indeed blazing giants a million miles off there? Or were they white points of fire a mile away? Abruptly my whole viewpoint changed. I saw these stars, all the blazing white points in the firmament, not as giant suns unfathomably distant, but only as small glowing eyes quite close.
These were gleaming eyes in a black night, gleaming eyes close around me. Eyes no larger than my own! Our vehicle . . . myself—gigantic! I realized it now. All this unfathomable distance around me had shrunk. I saw our giant vehicle floating very slowly, very sedately onward between the staring, crowding eyes.
Dr. Weatherby smiled when I told him. “It is all in the viewpoint, Leonard. In my computations I shall cling to the viewpoint of earth. Miles then light-years. Earthly standards of time, distance, and velocity. But shortly we shall have to abandon them entirely. Sit down, Leonard. I want to talk to you. Where is Dolores?”