The scene outside my windows was a chaos: flashing points of fire. How could we avoid them? Showers of white sparks rushing at us. I tried to shout a warning, but instead I laughed with a touch of madness. Avoid them! Millions of them were already colliding with us! Sparks showering impotently against our sleek electrite sides.
And then I realized that these sparks, these stars, were passing through us! A steady, flashing stream of them. I could see their luminous white points beaming within the vehicle as the stream flowed through.
Stars no longer. Why, these were mere imponderable electrons! Some were dark, shining only by reflected light-worlds like our earth. But I knew they were not imponderable bodies passing through the density of our vehicle. The reverse.
It was we who were the less dense. Our vehicle comparatively was a puff of vapor, through which these tiny bodies were passing.
A stream of electricity, myriad electrons flowing through a copper wire, are not less dense than the wire. The electrons are the densities; imponderable, of a mass imperceptible, because they are infinitely small. But of a tremendous density; it is the wire which is ponderous.
So now with us, I sat bewildered, for how long I cannot say. I heard at intervals Dr. Weatherby’s voice: “Light-years a hundred thousand. One million. Ten. One hundred million.”
We were a hundred million light-years from earth! The flashing points of fire continued to stream past. But there was a change, a thinning in advance of us; a clustering white radiance behind.
I sat motionless, tense. It might have been minutes, or an hour.
I found Dr. Weatherby beside me, and I turned to him. I was stiff, cramped and cold. I tried to smile. “We’re all right . . . still, Dr. Weatherby.”
“Look,” he said. “We’re beyond them.”