There was a moment when a single star gleamed far ahead. But soon it was a spiral of whirling star dust. It spread to the sides as we leapt at it. And every myriad particle of it suddenly showed as a tiny swirling spiral mist of yet other particles.
They spread gigantic, each of them a nebula—a universe. One of them whirled directly through us, a white stream of tumbling radiant dust. Behind us it shrank again to a single point. And the billion other points shrank into one. And the one faded and was gone.
A night of this. Was our own universe an electron? I realized it could hardly have been that. Call it an intime. If we had encountered it now, it would have been too small for our sight. The tiniest swirling particle flashing through us now was composed of billions of universes as large as our own.
The night passed. We sat calmly eating our morning meal. The human mind adjusts itself so readily! Physical hunger is more tangible than the cosmos of the stars. Dr. Weatherby gestured toward the windows where the points of luminous mists momentarily were very remote.
“I should say that we . . . this vehicle is larger than any intime now. Possibly larger than electrons.
“Soon we will find ourselves among the atoms, and the molecules. There will then be a change. Very radical.
“A little more coffee, Alice, please. Presently I am going to try and erect our electro-telescope. Then I must get a little sleep.”
He seemed, indeed, upon the verge of exhaustion.
There was a slow change all that day. These glowing things we were passing—universes, stars, or electrons or intimes, call them what you will—they seemed now more uniform; those at a distance, more like opaque globules, gray. And they seemed almost solid and cold. Yet it was the illusion of distance only, for we passed through several of them—streams of white fire mist as always before.