A darkness loomed ahead. To the sides the brilliant star-points seemed rushing together; clustering to form other, fewer white points. And the whole, sweeping backward into the seething radiance which lay behind us. Soon it was all back there, a shrinking white mist of fire; billions of seething particles of star dust shrinking together.
“Watch it, Leonard. It is our universe. Watch it go!”
We turned to the rear window. Everywhere now was empty blackness, except directly behind us. A silver mist hung back there in the void. It was dwindling. Then I saw it as a tiny, flattened, lens-shaped silver disk. But only for an instant, for it was shrinking fast.
A lens-shaped disk! A point of white fire! A single faint star—a single entity! No . . . not a star; nothing but an electron!
For a breath I realized how near it was. A single tiny white spark, trembling outside our window. I could have pinched it with my thumb and finger.
It trembled, vanished into blackness.
A day passed, a day to us because we ate our meals, and slept. But to the worlds, universes outside our windows, congealing behind us into single points, winking and vanishing into an oblivion of space and time, this day of ours was an eternity.
Our dials had long since become useless, a billion light-years from our starting point. A billion billion, and even that dwindling with our changing standards and viewpoint into a space we could have held in our cupped hands. Of what use to try and measure it. Or even conceive it.
The black, empty firmament had only remained empty for a moment. Ahead and off to the sides other luminous points showed. For hours Dr. Weatherby and I sat together watching them.