COLOSSUS

by Donald Wandrei

“Their (certain astronomers) picture is the picture of an expanding universe. The supersystem of the galaxies is dispersing as a puff of smoke disperses. Sometimes I wonder whether there may not be a greater scale of existence of things, in which it is no more than a puff of smoke.”

—Sir Arthur Eddington,

The Expanding Universe; Macmillan & Co., 1933.

* * * *

Like a flame in the sky, the golden-red stratoplane circled Mount Everest and dipped toward its crest. Not so many years ago that peak had been unclimbed, almost unknown, a challenge to man. Wintry gales tore across this top of the world, and cold rivaled precipices to defeat assault. The bitter winds still blew, but a man-made tower rose higher than the old peak, and a landing field which was a triumph of engineering audacity and genius stretched over sheer space beside the tower.

The circling stratoplane landed and rolled to a stop. The man who climbed out—Duane Sharon—seemed distinctive even in his heavy flying clothes.

His hands were powerful. No one would have admired any single feature of his, the hair of casual brown, a weathered face, a nose far from classic, and eyes of gray that glittered or softened as occasion required. But the general effect was good. He had a kind of loose rhythm, and a genial personality.

He sauntered toward the great observatory of the WLAS—World League for the Advancement of Science. Fifteen years had been required to build and equip this observatory which had been planned as long ago as 1960.

Once inside the tower, he identified himself and tossed a cheery word to the guard before sauntering into the observation room.

Probably the 400-inch reflector of Mount Everest Observatory would never be surpassed. Man, on Earth, could go no further toward conquering the limitations of atmosphere, metals, and optics. Through this gigantic mirror, underlying a telescope in whose construction the efforts of dozens of great minds had been united for years to produce an instrument of unrivaled accuracy, intricacy, and range, equipped with every device desired by and known to astronomers, study of the universe had reached a climax.

A man of ascetic features was studying the reflector. His speculation must be idle, since the Sun had not set. Calculations and symbols, equations and reductions covered a blackboard near him. A sheaf of scribbled pages lay on a table beside a heap of photographs, charts, and books. Professor Dowell had his own quarters, but he usually worked in the observation room itself. Here the temperature always remained constant, at thirty below zero, but special clothing warmed him and nonfrosting goggles permitted vision.

Dowell did not look up until Duane stood beside him. Even then, consciousness of another’s presence was slow to dawn.

“Hello! Am I intruding?” Duane asked.

Dowell blinked. A far-away look in his eyes faded. “Not at all; I’m glad you came. Here, have a chair—sit down!”

“Thanks, but I’ve been sitting in a plane for the last hour. I’d rather stand around for a while. Anything new? What’s on your mind?”

The astronomer motioned toward the calculations. “You remember when you were here the day before yesterday? And I showed you photographs we made of the thirty-first magnitude nebulae in the Orion group?”

“Of course! You said they marked a milepost in astronomy.”

“Did I? Yes, yes; to be sure. Just to think that only eighteen magnitudes were visible until we built this telescope, and now there are thirty-one, while the known universe has been expanded to nearly a billion light-years.”

“Don’t!” protested Duane. “That’s too much!”

The professor did not hear him. ‘I’m puzzled about a phenomenon of the thirty-second magnitude.”

“What is it?”

“There is no thirty-second magnitude!”

Duane reflected, lit a cigarette. “That’s very interesting,” he remarked. “I don’t understand.”

Dowell fretted. “Neither do I. Several nights ago, we photographed nebulae of the thirty-first magnitude. According to Jeans’ theory and Valma’s equations of the expanding universe, there should be nebulae up to about the fortieth magnitude.”

“And there aren’t?”

“Right.”

“What’s the reason?”

“I don’t know. There are only two possible answers. Either Valma made an error, which is inconceivable, or our whole theory of the universe is wrong.”

Duane thought this over. “How?”

* * * *

Dowell paced back and forth nervously. “You know the three main theories of the universe, of course. There’s the old one that space is limitless and extends forever in all directions. There is the theory elaborated by Einstein early this century, that space is affected with a curvature which makes it return upon itself. After Einstein, a group headed by Jeans advanced the idea of an expanding universe which might be said to create space as it expanded.”

“Yes, I’m familiar with them and some others,” Duane commented.

“No doubt. But nebulae and dark spots from the thirty-first to fortieth magnitudes do not exist, though they should. That may mean any of several possible explanations. Perhaps the universe has stopped expanding. Perhaps it is stationary, or even contracting now. Or if Einstein was right, perhaps the outer star-clusters have swerved through the curvature of space so that they are now approaching us instead of receding. That would account for the surprising number of aggregates in the twenty-ninth to thirty-first magnitudes. Possibly the oldest theory is correct, but some unknown set of factors prevents us from seeing galaxies beyond the thirty-first order. There are other possibilities.”

“What’s your guess?”

“I don’t know,” Dowell replied querulously. “But there is a fourth alternative that has almost driven me mad just to think about.”

“So? What’s this one?”

Dowell polished his glasses. “I don’t know whether I can explain it, the concept is so gigantic. Well, here goes: You are familiar with the atomic theories. Has it ever occurred to you that all the billions of stars that form all the millions of nebulae and galaxies of our whole universe might be only the electrons of a superatom upon which vast beings might exist as we dwell upon the surface of Earth? That concept would explain the absence of nebulae beyond the thirty-first magnitude.

“From there on would be an outer shell, or an invisible plane of energy and tension that incloses our universe but is substantial enough for beings to live on. There is no such thing as solid earth. The apparently solid matter we are standing on is, ultimately, atoms, electrons, vibration, with spaces between each particle comparatively as great as those between the stars and galaxies.”

The voice of the astronomer trembled in presenting this tremendous theme. “Think what might happen if some one from Earth could burst through that superatom!”

Duane pondered. “It’s a staggering conception. If you carry it out to its limit, that giant atom might be only one of billions of other atom-worlds on a scale we can’t even begin to imagine, and all that super-universe forming—what?”

“A molecule! And there might be on that still vaster universe still more tremendous beings! And that molecule might be only one of billions of other molecules sown through trillions of trillions of light-years of space and forming even--”

“Don’t!” Duane cried. “It’s too big! I can hardly grasp it!”

He stared at the reflector. When sunset came, its vast disk would gather the light of stars from far places, light that had been traveling since land boiled out of steaming seas and formed continents on young Earth. Lights of infinity, the stars would record their being upon plates for men like Dowell to analyze.

* * * *

In the old days, the prophets had looked at the night sky and bowed to God who made Earth the center of the universe of fixed stars. Then the scientists had come to prove that the Sun was the center only of a planetary system that moved in a universe. Then the astronomers had shown that a spiral haze in Andromeda was a galactic universe 800,000 light-years away, and that the whole Milky Way was only a galaxy among thousands.

So the roll of star-fields mounted, and the boundaries swept outward, and men’s imaginations, roving afar, found new glory while the universe expanded and its depth staggered understanding. Beyond the stars lay nebulae, gaseous and spiral and helical, with vast voids between; until by 1933, some 30,000,000 galaxies were identified in a range of 200,000,000 light-years; and by Duane’s time, with the Mount Everest telescope, the range had risen to over 800,000,000 light-years, comprising 150,000,000 galaxies, each composed of millions of stars.

“Tell me,” Dowell requested, “how is the White Bird coming along? Is she about ready? It was stupid of me to bore you with my guesswork.”

“Don’t mention it,” Duane answered. “It wasn’t dull. The mere idea of limitless space is as exciting as life itself. As for the White Bird, she’ll be done by October. The power-converters are being installed now. I think that a preliminary test can be made in September.”

“I see. Perhaps you’ll have the honor of informing us astronomers what the other universe really is like!”

Duane retorted: “Long before then, you’ll have worked out the one theory that my voyage will only prove to be true. I still wonder if the theory you mentioned a while ago could be right. And what would happen if the White Bird could carry us through?”

“If there were beings on that giant atom, they would never see you, so infinitesimal would you be. We have never seen an electron, let alone anything that might be on an electron. And you could never get there in a million lifetimes even at the speed of light.”

“True,” Duane answered thoughtfully, “but I haven’t told you the whole story. The White Bird draws on intra-spatial emanations and radiations. It has unlimited power. It should be able to reach a maximum velocity of thousands of light-years, per second!”

“What!” shrilled Dowell, his face shining with excitement. “Do you realize what that means? You and the White Bird would extend in the direction of flight until you were as tenuous as a gas and elongated to thousands or even millions of times your first proportion! The ship would swell sidewise as well from the transverse energy-pull of the universe! You might become huger than Earth, or the solar system, or even our galaxy! You would be Colossus himself! And you would never realize any change because you would have nothing for comparison! Duane, if you do it, you may burst through to that giant atom, and you would be visible to, and you could perceive, whatever was on it!”

Duane, overwhelmed, looked dreamy-eyed. “Vast concepts!” he murmured. “They’re too much for my brain.”

“Colossus!” Dowell half whispered, as though this vision, this apex of cosmic conjecture, dominated his mind and exerted a hypnotic fascination. “Colossus of time, space, and matter!”

“Even the mention of such a journey appalls me.”

“I wish I could go with you.”

“Nothing would please me better.”

“I know, but if Anne is along—by the way, I suppose you would like to see Anne?”

Duane, the chain of cosmic theory broken, made gestures of mock deprecation, “Oh, my, no! Anne? Why, I merely came from America to make sure that Mount Everest was still standing.”

“I like that!” A musical but at the moment sarcastic voice broke in. “So it’s Mount Everest you’re here to see and not me? Well, you can have Mount Everest.” With truly feminine pique, the girl who had entered banged the door as she went out.

Anne was not a beauty in the sense of Mona Lisa or a movie star. She had above all animation of expression, clearness of thought, and more than average appeal. Her dynamic qualities were masculine wit, reason, energy, originality. Her aesthetic characteristics were feminine changeability, the figure of a patrician, Nordic features with mahogany-colored hair, a rhythmic stride and beauty of motion.

Probably she was most effective when annoyed as at present, for the triumph of emotion over reason lent her face a kind of hectic charm, and she made a study of strength and weakness.

Duane turned to Dowell. “If you will excuse me, I’ll try to make my peace. I-”

“Go right ahead!”

It took little time to find Anne. It required patience to pacify her. He need not have done so, but he found delight in playing up to her mood. The game of pursuit and the world of pretense would never change, however long Earth wore away to old age.

* * * *

II.

The holidays of August drew to a close. September came in with a burst of riotous colors through forest and hills. Work on the White Bird came to an end. Professor Dowell knew of its imminent launching. So did Anne. The world did not. Duane figured that there would be ample time to tell the world after, of success or failure.

It was a windless evening whose chill approached frost when he and Anne stood beside the White Bird at Havenside, north of New York.

“Almost anything can happen,” Duane said gravely. “The ship may not work, something might go wrong, or we might run into dangers beyond our knowledge. Do you know what you are letting yourself in for?”

Anne looked at him with slightly disgusted eyes. “I’m not a child. Forget this protective business. Let’s go.”

Duane sighed. Anne’s realism was disconcerting.

The girl’s eyes sparkled as she looked at the White Bird. “Only you could have built such a thing of beauty,” she said and impulsively clung to Duane. She darted off as he made a futile grab and laughed at him, teasing, “That wasn’t an invitation, Duane!”

“The devil it wasn’t!” Duane shouted in exasperation and dived after the fleet-footed girl. Breathless they came to the White Bird’s entrance.

The ship lay long and low in the light of the full moon. It shone with a glow like phosphorus. A hundred feet in length, the cylinder, never more than ten feet thick, tapered to points. Crystalite composed its shell— crystalite, that strange element numbered ninety-nine. Invented by chemists, it had the transparency of glass, the color of platinum, and a higher tensile strength than any other metal, combined with a melting point above 6,000⁰ C.

The White Bird’s interior contained only essentials: a pilot room; a cabin; a supply room; and the front and rear power compartments. The torpedo looked bizarre, for its shell was transparent, but the inner walls dividing room from room were of vanachrome, that thin, rubbery steel which was virtually indestructible.

To look at the White Bird was to look into a house like a glass cylinder and see the rooms within, though, from within, no room could be seen from any other room.

“I’ll never get over this funny arrangement,” Anne remarked as they entered. “The whole world can look inside, but I have to walk from room to room to see what’s there.”

“Not a bad idea,” Duane answered cheerfully. Anne’s eyelids went down. Duane fidgeted. He suddenly stated, “Let’s go!” and pushed a button.

The White Bird curved up from the ground like a real bird soaring after a dive.

“Oh!” exclaimed Anne. “You should have warned me!” Her face sobered. The great adventure had begun. “Isn’t it strange”?” she asked in a very small voice and with very big eyes.

“It’s a miracle,” Duane answered. His fingers caressed the dials as he spoke. “Just to think that a simple condenser-transformer picks up cosmic radiations all around us, turns them to power and drives us on. Power by radio, more power than we could ever use, out of thin air!”

Anne emerged from her awe, but she seemed a different girl with more of the poetic about her. There was indeed a new luminous quality to her face while she took in the impressive spectacle of the skies.

The White Bird, at steadily mounting speed, passed beyond the stratosphere.

Above them, the sky darkened and blackened. Stars brightened to a brilliance that dazzled the eyes.

Then the Sun of the solar system became visible beyond Earth, and the light of the Sun and its reflected glare from Earth and Moon bathed the White Bird in a flood of radiance so bright that Duane and Anne donned goggles, and the craft’s interior became perceptibly warmer in spite of the crystalite hull.

There was a glory to the skies, a spacious sweep, an infinite majesty of stars that ranged from brilliant white to faint and far-away orange, from pale blue to flame red and emerald green, which silenced the voyagers by its cosmic beauty.

* * * *

It was long before either traveler spoke, and steadily the White Bird fled outward, erasing the way to the Moon in ever faster time.

Anne broke the reverie. She waved her hand toward the universe. “If all this affects us so much,” she said simply, “what would we feel out there?” She pointed toward the faintest star, out where the spiral nebulae began in Andromeda.

“When I go there, perhaps I can answer then,” Duane replied.

A dreamy look entered Anne’s eyes, and they shone with an almost mystical fervor. “I have a queer idea, Duane. Maybe it wouldn’t be so different from Earth. Back home, everything is related to something else. The same trees grow every spring. The same Sun rises and the days are always alike. Don’t look so skeptical—you know what I mean. Of course they aren’t the same trees, and the days are separated by time, and there aren’t any two persons alike, but, just the same, nature repeats herself, and there seems to be some sort of pattern to everything, a pattern that unites everything and recurs again and again.” She ended with a breathless rush of words.

“I think you’re right,” Duane mused, “but who knows? I don’t. I don’t suppose any one will ever know, unless he can go out there, where the stars end.”

“Why don’t we?” A hectic note heightened Anne’s voice, and her cheeks flushed with excitement.

“Why don’t we?” Duane echoed. “Why—I mentioned it to Professor Dowell and we joked about it, but I never really expected to go beyond the planets.”

Mysterious raptures burned in Anne’s eyes. “I wonder what’s beyond the stars?”

That question which the wisest philosophers never have been able to answer, and the most learned astronomers have fretted in vain to solve, brought only reflective silence from Duane for a long period.

“I don’t know,” he said at last. “Professor Dowell thinks I might break through and discover that our whole universe is just an atom, and the great atom might be only one world among billions forming a still more gigantic molecule. Why, Anne, if he’s right-”

Anne looked dazed. “What an idea! You’ll go mad thinking about it. Why, it gives me the creeps!”

“I don’t wonder!”

“I once took a course in biology. If we are essentially like matter, then electrons make atoms that form cells that compose organs which are part of a body. If that’s so, Duane, and you got on the giant atom-world, and could go still farther, you might eventually come out on a vast living organism of which Earth is merely part of a single cell.”

“Now you’re giving me the creeps! Don’t think about it. The idea is maddening. It’s all I can do just to picture the giant atom!”

Anne went on recklessly, with morbid mischief, “Darling, maybe some one like you on one of those invisible particles inside you is traveling outward now on a space ship and is going to burst through on a cell-”

“Anne!”

“—and you’ll feel just a little twitch in your side, and maybe he’ll keep on going and pop out of your brain finally and-”

Duane stopped this merciless and all-too-vivid description by the simple process of kissing Anne’s inviting lips.

“Oh!” She broke away. “What a man! Is that all you think about?”

“Sure, when I’m with you!” he answered candidly; and then, serious again: “But don’t forget, Anne, that the world is a powder mine right now. If war comes, all trips are off.”

“War!” she blazed. “You would agree to murder and give up the pursuit of something that will mean more than all the wars in history? I will never love you for that!”

Duane kept a thoughtful silence.

* * * *

Visions beyond infinity and past eternity changed gradually to speculation about the Moon, which loomed ever larger overhead. The buoyant feeling that Duane and Anne should have experienced as they drew away from the attraction of gravitation did not materialize, since the speed of the White Bird counteracted it.

The Moon swelled, cut off a fiftieth, a tenth, a fifth of the sky above. Their viewpoint modified. Instead of flying upward, they found themselves falling. The new perspectives of space gave rise to new experiences and unfamiliar sensations. They had been shooting upward from Earth. Now they were descending toward the Moon.

Duane cut off their power. The White Bird fell at furious speed. He turned on the forward repellers, unloosing upon the Moon’s surface an invisible bombardment of energy that almost counterbalanced their speed.

The White Bird plunged less rapidly, slowed, and finally hung a few thousand feet above the Moon.

“Only Doré could have dreamed it!” exclaimed Anne.

Great craters pitted its surface. Masses of slag and lava flowed down the sides of extinct mountains, and fissures like the marks of giants’ swords marred its lowlands.

Dead sea bottoms and barren continents alone suggested life of long ago; these, and certain clusters that might have been cities; masses of granite, blocks of marble and basalt, quartz, and silica, arranged in geometric formations. Were these ruinous heaps the remains of cities? Had a civilization flourished here, of a race that had perished, leaving only its works to crumble beneath the everlasting encroachments of time? What legends and records, achievements and histories might lie beneath those shards?

Duane drew a deep breath. The answer would never be known to men. Great as the curiosity was that impelled him to study the riddles of the Moon, the dangers were greater, and greater still the goal of his dream. There was a mystery to all the universe. What lay beyond? Where would the end be, if one started off and traveled at random in any direction for as long as space lasted or life permitted?

“Let’s land!” cried Anne. “Just imagine—walking on the Moon! And we can do it with your space suits!”

“Not now. We ought to be returning to Earth. There is little to be gained by landing, and a lot that we might lose.”

Anne looked hurt. “All this way, all this trouble, and we don’t find out what’s on the Moon?”

Duane, exasperated, cursed inwardly this plague of woman’s desire, this wish to exhaust the moment. Aloud, he answered: “We can always come. I’ve proved what I wanted—the White Birds capacity. Let’s head home. Our next trip will take us—well, wait and see.”

“Where will we go?”

“Outside. Away to the end of things, whatever that may be. The White Bird can do it, and I’m going to where space ends. Whatever lies beyond the universe, empty and endless space or giant atom, I’ll find—with you.”

Anne’s eyes shone. She held the breathless appearance of a mystic to whom a vision of glory comes. The dream transfigured her face as she gazed at infinity and saw the far places. Sappho might have had so lovely and rapturous an aspect when she stood on a cliff of Lesbos and looked at the sweep of sky and wine-dark sea. Never before, and never again, did Anne’s expression achieve such beauty. And Duane, as he watched her, absorbed something of her mood, that supernal wonder which the old philosophers and the great poets and the prophets have been gifted with.

Alexander, wishing for more worlds to conquer; Marco Polo, wending his way across lands of legend; Columbus, sailing upon unknown waters; Peary, assaulting the roof of the world; Lindbergh, winging through the skies—the ghosts of all the master explorers and travelers of the past haunted him, and he felt an invisible presence urging him on to that voyage for which history, and almost thought, had no counterpart. An exaltation of spirit possessed the two, and spontaneously they leaned together in unity of mood and vision.

“The way is homeward,” said Duane at last.

“And outward,” echoed Anne. She lifted her hazel eyes to his, and even he, well as he knew her, was startled by the unfathomable depths that they showed.

Almost regretfully, he sent the White Bird flying Earthward, and the crag-strewn, jagged, white ruin of the Moon’s surface fell swiftly away, paled into softer outline, until once again, like a silver disk in the sky, it floated glowing and lovely and bathed in soft radiance. Then the majesty of stars and the procession of the Milky Way; and Earth looming larger. A buoyancy of spirit raised Duane to a peak of mental intoxication.

Here, in open space, he felt a sense of freedom such as he had never before known. Was it the nearness of Anne, whose mere presence influenced him strangely? His partial escape from the attraction of gravitation? Or a headiness that came inevitably from this preliminary voyage? He looked at the Moon and Earth, Sun and stars, the great void beyond, and then back to Anne. Anne’s eyes were refreshing. Especially when they were as large and reliant as now. Duane parked her beside him on the way back. There was a mutual need for physical reality in the presence of space rampant.

* * * *

III.

September marched into October; and the maples vied with the oaks in colors of russet and tawny and flame. Earth throbbed with the activity that was industrializing Africa, tapping energy from the Gulf Stream, capitalizing power from the Sun. Socialized Russia in the eastern hemisphere stood powerful and defiant against the yellow menace that rolled over northern Asia. The proscripted United States, operating under dictatorship with industrial and capitalistic socialism, wealthier and stronger than ever before, with the unfit retired, the insane eliminated by euthanasia, and the criminal sterilized, surged on to dominance of the western world.

Economic rivalry in the new market of Africa created estrangement between England and the United States. The ugly undercurrents of competition and diplomatic folly were repeating themselves in the World War. Russia and the United States against Japan and England seemed to be the coming line-up of Titans, with the rest of the world involved in a holocaust that would undoubtedly mark the end of civilization.

Duane looked at a news sheet. “Japan Creates Secondary Militia of Women; British Claim New Germ That Kills Millions,” ran the headlines.

“The world goes mad,” he mused. “I only hope that all this slaughter will be over by the time I return.”

For the remodeling of the White Bird went on swiftly. Adjustments of the delicate power controls to give the ship greater drive, corrections in its sensitive hull so that it might make the utmost of cosmic rays, gravity attractions, and atomic repulsions, correction of instruments to accuracy— these were changes that must be made before the White Bird could start upon that tremendous voyage to the end of the universe.

The work ran on, and the world raced ahead to disaster. The looming clouds of war grew blacker, and Duane fretted. What did the bickerings of mankind matter when so vast a project neared fruition?

October nineteenth. Mist opened the day at Havenside. By noon, a fine rain was falling, and the skies were solid gray. Duane roved restlessly around. To-night was the night of launching. The White Bird would set out to the ends of the universe, in an effort to solve one of the greatest riddles that confronted man—the mystery of space.

Twelve o’clock brought an ominous note. Duane, as always when he felt nervous, sat down at his light-piano and rippled off phrases of his favorites—a Bach fugue, the frantic monotone of Ravel’s Bolero, Lecuona’s wild Malaguena, a few bars from the Peer Gynt suite of Grieg. And while he played, upon a panel in front of him, wizardry of supersonics transformed sound to light and color that wove a visible symphony.

Duane had reached an impressive passage from The Hall of the Mountain King when the televisor broke forth: “Count Katsu Irohibi, Minister of War for Japan, announced at 11:55 a. m. to-day that Japan was prepared to drop bombs of a new nature upon any part of the world by remote control unless Russian aggression in Central Asia ceased immediately, and unless the United States and England permitted her to compete with them in the development of Africa.”

Duane felt a growing tightness. He anxiously wanted to fly immediately to Everest and bring Anne back, but she would not be ready until two, by which time Professor Dowell and she would have analyzed the previous night’s photographs—their final effort to riddle the stars and uncover the secret of perplexing vacua beyond the thirty-first magnitude nebulae.

He rambled through sonatas and fugues, fragments of symphonies. The drizzle turned to a sodden downpour, and the oaks and poplars shook with sodden groans.

About twelve thirty, the televisor erupted: “Russia replied to Japan’s ultimatum at 12:25 p. m., to the effect that she was not the aggressor, and that her territorial rights would be fully protected in Central Asia. The British and American governments simultaneously issued a redeclaration of African policy, denying the right of interference to any third party.

“Russia’s defenses and offenses are already fully mobilized, as are Japan’s, according to unconfirmed report. England is expected to issue a proclamation of national peril at any moment. John L. Caverhill, dictator of America, will declare our position shortly, according to reports from Washington. The situation has grown tense. Analysts fear a recurrence of the World War upon a more serious scale. Every effort is being made to avoid armed conflict, but—” the voice droned on.

Prophetic clouds of war! Events were moving far too swiftly in a world of delicate economic adjustments. Duane turned away from the speaker’s image and strode toward his stratoplane.

Rain beat upon him and ran in rapid trickles down the slicker he had donned, a sullen, heavy, steady rain splashing from skies of slate. Nations plunged toward disaster. Darker than any clouds loomed the threat of war. Mass murder might come by nightfall—and his dream would be ended. Duane had no illusions. If war came, he knew that he would plunge blindly in at the draught like millions of other pawns in the game of economic kings. He would serve for loyalty, patriotism, many reasons, but he would serve unwillingly because a greater goal lay at stake.

He climbed in his stratoplane, headed toward Tibet. Anne should be ready by the hour of his arrival. The voyage through infinity would begin at sunset—unless war intervened.

Skies of blue steel overhung Everest. The quarrels of nations seemed something alien and apart from this austere summit of Earth. The skyward pointing finger of the observatory rose like a timeless tower, a thing of perpetual beauty, a challenge above the assaults of weather and war, age and decay.

But the televisor gave pictures and words of ugly meaning: “War Minister Irohibi issued a proclamation at 1:10 interning all Russian ships lying in Japanese ports. The order will remain in effect until Russia makes a satisfactory explanation and settlement for the mysterious explosion that wrecked the Japanese embassy in Stalingrad yesterday. It is reported that a great concentration of all Russian aircraft is now taking place outside of Stalingrad.

“Simultaneously, a second note was received at Washington demanding unrestricted colonization privileges for Japanese in the recently formed Anglo-American territory of Tanesia in Southeast Africa. The state department has made no official reply as yet; but a bulletin issued at noon today announced the perfection of a new instrument of war. Short-waves are sent by remote control to cause the collapse by vibration of buildings at any given spot. The situation is critical. Mobilization may be ordered by nightfall.”

* * * *

Suppressing the anxiety and weariness he felt over this danger that loomed, Duane landed his ship and walked into the observatory.

Professor Dowell was striding back and forth irritably, his sandy mustache bristling. “War! War!” he choked. “They want me to work out formulae for the flight of projectiles! They want me to tell them just how to shoot at a point a thousand miles off and kill every one within a mile radius. Me? And there is work to be done on those!” He waved thin fingers toward the sky whose stars were hidden by day.

“I know; I’m worried, too. It looks like the end.”

The astronomer raved: “They want to store munitions here! Make this a mere depot! This, the finest observatory ever built!”

Duane tried to soothe him. “War has not been declared yet. Every one knows that it will be the end if it comes. It will be the last war and maybe the last of civilization. But where’s Anne? I took out the license this morning. We’re to be married at three, and I’ve advanced the takeoff to three-ten.”

The professor bristled in one of those swift changes of mood that make the individual both fantastic and human. “Running away, eh? On the eve of battle, as the historians would say?”

“No,” Duane replied steadily. “I’ve got a goal. A tremendous goal. Something that may enrich man’s life more than the last two thousand years. I have a mission. If I fail, what is one life lost? If I succeed, the rewards will be beyond guessing. If I stay here—what? Whether I am killed or not, nothing is gained. Therefore, I go. If that is cowardice, then I am glad to be a coward. If war is declared, I will serve. Frankly, I am trying to get started before war begins.”

Dowell stalked around. “Madness, all is madness. Let war come. Science must push on. There may never be another opportunity to find out what lies at the end of the universe. Electrons and atoms. Giant atom universes in a vaster molecule.” He paused and stared owlishly a long minute through thick glasses at Duane. “Go away!” he commanded. “I’m upset. I do not know what I say. Find Anne and take her with you, my blessings upon you both!” He snorted and trod about in nervous circles, weighing —who knows what?

Duane turned away from this spectacle of a fine mind sent askew by the forces of disaster.

Anne was laboring over photographs. She glanced up as he entered her workroom. “Hello!” she greeted him. “I’m fine, thanks, even if you didn’t ask.”

“Now, Anne--”

“I know the rest. These photographs are more important. Nothing beyond thirty-one.”

“Listen, lady-”

“And what’s more--”

Anne never finished the sentence. She suddenly found herself picked up and carried out. She did not seem to mind.

“Hello!” exclaimed Professor Dowell, surprised. “And good-by!”

“See you when I return!” Duane called.

“Good luck!”

Duane deposited Anne in the cockpit beside him and headed homeward. She leaned back, stretched in a most unfeminine but natural fashion. “So we get married today?” she remarked casually.

“So it would seem, but don’t let that bother you. You’ll get over it and—”

The televisor cut in: “Emergency announcement! Japan declared war against Russia at two-five to-day. The Bank of England has just issued a call for the loan of one billion pounds by popular subscription. The department of war of the United States has evoked the compulsory clause of the war code of 1943. All males registered as voters are required to report at their district military station before sundown.”

Duane stepped up the speed of his stratoplane to the limit.

“That means—what?” Anne queried.

“The end,” replied Duane grimly, “unless we leave sooner.”

The stratoplane bored westward high above the Atlantic. New York City curved into view, a vague blur looking like some fantastic toy with its towers and megaliths, its setbacks and hanging gardens and sky palaces showing as a sodden blur through the rain that still fell.

Duane headed north of the city and landed at Havenside. Standing beside the hangar that housed the White Bird, with rain pouring down his face and oilskins, he smiled at his bride-to-be. Casual though they had been thus far, he felt the stir of vast, sinister forces that menaced life, and felt, too, a surge of emotion that was novel.

* * * *

A small blue plane darted from leaden skies toward them. “That must be the official minister and the National Marriage Bureau’s representative,” Duane speculated.

Anne, looking suddenly flustered and with heightened color, decided: “Say, darling, I’ll go straighten myself up a bit if you don’t mind,” and turned toward Duane’s bungalow. “What a rotten day!” The steady downpour had soaked fields and trees, and pools gathered in every hollow.

A blast of sound, an explosion like thunder smote the air! The strato-plane’s televisor crackled: “A terrific explosion has just occurred in New York City. The explosion was preceded by a shrill whine. It is believed that this is the unofficial opening of war. It will be recalled that Japan announced the possession of a new explosive that could be dropped in bomb form on any part of the globe by remote control. Stand by! A second whine has come-”

Out of the televisor came a roar that deafened. Then silence. And out of the south swept a second blast. Duane looked up. The blue plane rocked wildly in violent currents of air. Rushing winds caught it, flung it upward, sent it spinning to earth. Flames licked it up; the wreck became a funeral pyre. The rain eddied in mad gusts.

Duane’s face was gray. “It is war,” he said coldly and swiftly. “Get anything you want. We’re leaving now!”

Anne flung her arms around him like a child, her wet face pressed to his. She kissed him quickly and ran toward the house, after a promise, “I’ll be right back—by the time you’re ready.”

Duane entered the hangar, and moved his space ship outside. Resting on automatic rolling supports, the White Bird glistened with silvery transparency. Her mechanism in the fore and aft compartments was of provocative design and strangeness. All possible essentials piled the supply room amidship. Behind it lay sleeping quarters. Controls occupied the room behind the fore power chamber. A door, so finely fitted that it was unnoticeable, supplied the only entrance midway between stem and tail.

Duane surveyed everything in a quick appraisal. The long streamlined hull, pointed at each end, passed his inspection. He waited anxiously, peered through mist and water toward his bungalow. He felt relieved when Anne appeared, running through the doorway.

Something screamed from afar. Duane paled. “Hurry!” he called.

A blast of flame roared up beyond his home, colossal gouts of soil and rock belched skyward, and his home flattened from a hurricane wind. Rain drove at him like needles. The explosion blew him down and swept the White Bird from her supports.

“Duane!”

That faint cry brought him out of his daze as nothing else could have. He staggered toward the spot where he had last seen Anne. He threw boards and planks aside with incredible strength. The rain beat down, but the darker rain of debris ceased.

Somehow, he clawed and dug his way to Anne, all the while cursing fate and the gods of war who had mocked him. A great dead quiet overhung the world. Only the endless rain dripped while riven oaks and blasted bushes gave the dreary, sloshy sound of wet vegetation.

Anne was dying.

The realization of that fact was the most heartbreaking moment in his life. He stared dumbly at the face, lovely and white and calming, with whose repose would go half the driving desire of his life. And with that love lost, the trip became as nothing.

Anne’s eyes opened tiredly. Her lips moved. “Go,” she whispered. “I’ll be with you, darling. Remember what I said when we were coming back from Everest a few weeks ago? There is no beginning or end to anything. All goes on and on, and so will you and I.”

A moody look misted her eyes, they grew ghostly with something that only a mystic could interpret. If this were death, then death were ecstasy. The effort to speak exhausted her. Duane bent over as her lips moved, and her voice came to him from infinite distances with a last command, faint and barely audible: “Go!” Longing and love, peace and dreams, were in her eyes.

The embrace that she asked for, the kiss he gave, was the seal of death and the token that parted.

Beginning, and end. End, or beginning? The words danced a monotonous refrain in his thoughts when he raised himself and stared bitterly ahead, a queer, hurt look warping his expression, as though he tried to understand some simple fact that continued to elude him.

Why go? Where to? War ran a red smear around the globe. He would be needed. But war had taken Anne from him. Hatred of man and his savage works seethed through his mind, a crimson background to the black tapestry of his thoughts. Go—go—go—that was Anne’s request.

In the distance, the eerie whine of radio projectiles shrilled anew. Earth shook with blasts and detonations. Fumes of acrid and pungent odor bit into his lungs.

The air itself was now becoming poisoned.

The glare of a great conflagration or explosion reddened the sky above New York City, turned the wall of rain into smoky scarlet. His mind was made up. He entered the White Bird.

The door closed behind him. Burned energy shot from the three rear projectors. The craft swooshed away and up in a great arc and disappeared like a ghost amid rain and gloom, while giant flashes of flame roared up where cities had stood.

* * * *

IV.

The sweep of infinity, so impressive, so implicative of mysteries that mind never had solved, helped to relieve Duane of his misery. He would never forget, wholly; but there were splendor and cosmic riddles all around, and beyond the end—would there be another beginning? What lay out there, past the ultimate stars? Was Dowell correct, and did the circling stars represent only vibrating electrons of a giant atom? And if the extension and expansion of the White Bird took place as predicted, would Dowell follow his progress, watching him grow ever larger and dimmer as he sundered space, until he became invisible because of distance and attenuation?

Sunlight flooded the White Bird, and the Sun hung radiant and the Moon gleamed, but the skies were a blackness fretted with hordes of stars, not only above, but below, and in every direction; and the traveler felt again the overwhelming strangeness of things, the crushing magnitude of the universe, as Earth dropped away.

Go he must. All his dreams lay buried upon Earth. As if to symbolize his flight—or was it pursuit?—he stepped up the cosmic-ray power in successive jerks that hurled the White Bird at ever-accelerating velocity toward the constellation Cygnus. Any constellation would serve, but Cygnus, the Swan, was overhead when he burst from the air blanket of Earth, and toward Cygnus he shot.

Power he would never lack. Space was filled with more power than he could use. Light rays, cosmic rays, infra-red rays, radiations of countless lands were all picked up by his driving mechanism, much as a radio picks up waves, and were transformed into energy that bombarded all matter lying behind his line of flight with a force that hurtled him forward. There was only a theoretical limit to the speed he could attain—whatever limit the nature of things imposed.

He had not yet, even in his experimental runs, tested the White Bird’s capacity, but he knew that she could exceed the velocity of light. He knew, too, that a metamorphosis would occur when he passed the speed of light rays. According to the law propounded decades ago by Einstein, the White Bird, all its contents, and he himself would undergo a change, lengthening in the direction of flight. How great that extension would be depended upon the velocity itself.

He could estimate it in advance, but he could never realize it as an experience, simply because he could have nothing for comparison excepting the stars. And expansion would accompany that elongation; enlargement, to a degree beyond computation, along the planes of both the long and the short axes of the White Bird.

The planets of Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto passed behind. Ahead lay a great void of four light-years until the myriad stars of the solar system’s galaxy began with Alpha Centauri. The solar system diminished to a mere point. The bright illumination in the White Bird faded to a glow which was all that the stars provided. Duane did not turn on the interior lights. He preferred this shadowy and soft luminance.

There was nothing to do, little to calculate, nothing to expect until he approached his goal. The danger of collision remained ever present, but automatic safeguards could be depended upon to swing the White Bird around any important mass that loomed ahead. Later, at the ultimate enormous speed he hoped to attain, scarcely any mass smaller than the Sun would disturb his cruiser. Its attenuation and expansion would be so great, its elongation and atomic separation so tremendous, that it would approximate the nature of a gas and literally pass through intervening bodies.

Stars paraded. Constellations swung behind. Cygnus vanished, the Big Dipper changed its outlines, the evening star became faint, Betelgeuse and Antares flamed away, second and third-brilliance suns loomed as bright as the old first-magnitude stars. His speed pyramided. He achieved the velocity of light and outdid it. The White Bird swept onward with cyclonic fury. It tore outward in tens, hundreds, and thousands of times the speed of light.

It streamed beyond the eighth, ninth, and tenth-magnitude stars. Always its velocity increased. The man who watched the controls had a demon’s set expression. He seemed to take a bitter pleasure in increasing the White Bird’s velocity to a pitch that imagination itself could hardly grasp.

Eight hundred million light-years formed the distance to the farthest nebula. Even if he hurtled at a million times the rate of light, it would require eight hundred years for him to reach the outpost. Even at a light-year per second, more than twenty years would lapse before he achieved the goal. So he continued to draw on universal energy in a steady acceleration that ripped the White Bird through space at a blasting and frightful velocity now mounting toward dozens and hundreds of light-years per second.

Duane, exhausted, dropped into a dreamless slumber at some point of his journey. The automatic controls were set. Whether they worked he hardly cared. His accumulated hopes, tragedy, and undertaking of the day were above rational analysis.

The eternal procession continued. He wakened to find stars and suns hurtling past in linear streaks. All the heavens were strange. Not one body did he recognize. Star-point far ahead, streaks parallel with his plane, dwarfing maze of light flecks remotely to his rear—these were intangible realities.

Blackness deepened ahead. The Milky Way and its spectacular infinitude of suns became as a dream. He bored out of this galaxy in a haze of vaporous extension, burst through eternal voids. Now space was a misty immensity where the nebulae, the island universes, sown afar on a lavish scale, rushed toward him out of the cosmic depth, with glow of birth and procession of star-field units, and blaze of youth and parade of creation. He was a star treader, a traveler who used the starry galaxies for fleet stepping points toward the outer blackness.

* * * *

Days and nights passed, but there were no days and nights, only the ceaseless gyration of stars, passing of constellations, traversing of nebulae and clusters and great gaseous patches, in whose center cosmic birth or death might be taking place.

The White Bird’s speed still increased. That vast gap between the solar system and Alpha Centauri, a distance so enormous that light required four years to cross it, represented a fraction of a second at his present velocity. The fastest lens, the quickest eye, could not have seen his passing. The White Bird fled swifter than a dream, winged through infinity almost as instantly as the mind itself could think of the spaces outward.

A cyclone stood still compared to the White Bird. The flight of bullets, the flight of meteors, the flight of light, were snails in relation to him. He annihilated the far reaches of the universe at hundreds and thousands of light-years per second. A flash in infinity, a silvery bolt through the black, a ghost that was gone more quickly than the messengers of death, the White Bird bored the known universe, and went on.

Great constellations, Cygnus itself, which had loomed large ahead, had resolved themselves into streaks shooting by all around him, and had then faded behind to a cluster, a point, a mote, were now nothingness. He hurtled stars and clusters and nebulas, plunged wildly across voids, leaped infinitudes. His galaxy had utterly disappeared.

And all the while, according to theory, the White Bird underwent a transformation, became longer, stretched away farther and farther as the speed mounted, but Duane would never know, for he was part of that change.

The White Bird by Earth measurements must be hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles in length, so attenuated as to be almost vaporous, so nebulous and distorted as to appear like a mist. According to calculation, he must also be annihilating time, for his whole relation to the cosmos had been profoundly altered, and what he perceived as a thousand miles was in reality a thousand light-years, and what seemed to him a second must actually be centuries of Earth time.

If Dowell were watching, he must have seen the White Bird become as a meteor, a vaporous fog, a gigantic haze, hurtling and expanding toward infinity, until it vanished, since it exceeded the speed of light, and light-rays from it would require hours or years to reach Dowell’s reflector.

Now it mattered not whether he pierced suns or struck planets. Automatic controls veered the White Bird; but, in theory, at this frightful velocity, and with this vaporous extension, he should pass through apparent solids, much as air blows through a sponge. Power? All space held invisible power. He had not begun to tap the inexhaustible store, but greater speed he feared to achieve lest the White Bird pass completely out of control.

The crystalite cruiser traversed voids and eons in moments. Nebulae of the twentieth magnitude streaked past. White suns and blue, pale-orange and apple-green stars, colossal tapestry of night blazing with eternal jewels, the procession approached and receded. Blackness deepened ahead. The hordes of star systems grew fewer. The spiral nebulae and the black gas clouds, the island universes and the chaoses of flaming birth decreased. He was nearing the end.

By only one comparison could he sense the change that was occurring. At first, the galaxies had seemed gigantic, flaming constellations and aggregates of billions of stars. Now they looked like dim and hazy disks of mist; and, by that diminution alone, Duane guessed that his extension and expansion had progressed on an unbelievable scale of magnitude. Had the White Bird surpassed in size the Earth or the solar system or even his galaxy? He would never accurately know, though he were Colossus beyond measurement.

What would he find? Some scientists held that the universe was expanding and that space was created with this expansion. What would happen if this were true, and if the White Bird at its present velocity passed beyond the limit? Other astronomers held that space was infinite in all directions. Must he go on till death overtook him while he tried to find an end when there was no end?

Still other prophets suggested that all the bodies of the universe might be only the myriad components of a superatom, beyond which lay a greater universe; and if these proved true, would that superuniverse be only a stepping-stone, only a larger atom in a yet more gigantic cosmos? Where did the end lie? And if those speculative mathematicians were correct who thought that space was subject to a curvature which made it return to its beginnings--

* * * *

Duane’s head ached. So vast the possibilities, and so limited his ability to understand! Life so short, and truth so hard to learn! And this the attempt to solve a problem above even the deepest inquiries of mind, exceeding the oldest attempts that thought had made to fathom!

“Thus far shall ye go, and no farther.” A phrase from dimly remembered teachings drifted through his brain. “Seek, and ye shall find.” What? He wondered. “Men are deceived in their conceits beneath the Moon, and have sought in vain for any patent from oblivion above the Sun!” So a mystic had said.

Who had guessed closest to truth? Dowell, with his theory about a giant atom-world composed of electronic vibrations represented by all the stars of all the galaxies of all the universe known to man? Einstein? Jeans? Or some obscure prophet? Duane shook his head as though to free it of oppressive weight. These were thoughts too complex and inconceivable for mortal mind, too dangerous for sanity.

Now the last stars shone close, and streaked by, and one emerald sun marked the outpost of space.

Remotely ahead came blackness, solid, absolute blackness. Behind lay Earth and Sun, stars and constellations, galaxies and star-fields, a hundred million strong, billions of billions of stars, trillions of trillions of miles, enormity comprehensible solely in terms of the stellar mathematics of astrophysics. The young emerald sun, flaming in the radiant beauty of birth, swirled by and became one with the billions of billions of stars behind. Duane looked back. There was a vast and dwindling conglomeration of points of light that receded to haze, to a vague luminousness, and that mysteriously was blotted out. The phenomenon puzzled him until he thought of one explanation—light rays had not yet penetrated thus far!

No loneliness, no fear of darkness, no feeling of utter helplessness in the grip of frightful forces and in the presence of far places and alien lands, no longing for the sweet companionship of Anne, such as now overwhelmed him, had ever before combined to appall in such magnitude any mortal creature. The blackness everywhere was solid, so complete that his eyes ached, and not one part of his ship could he discern, not one object, not even the hand that he held before his eyes.

A horror of that infinite blackness, that absolute void, gripped him, and he stumbled about with something akin to blind panic in an effort to find the interior-lighting controls. The glow comforted him, until he looked at his velocity dial. The speed of the White Bird was falling off swiftly!

Was this immensity so vacant that there were not even cosmic radiations to supply him with power? Or was some unknown but terrific drag slowing him down? Would the White Bird come to inertia and he to death in this black void? What forces prevailed here?

And what was the nature of that dim and shadowy glow, like a pale fog, that gradually appeared in place of a void blacker than coal?

Hope surged anew through the voyager, an uncontrollable excitement gripped him, he stared with painful intensity at the far-away mist. Had he followed a curvature of space and did he now approach his own universe? Had the White Bird leaped some titanic chasm to a new universe? Did he plunge toward that enormous atom imagined by Dowell? Was he now Colossus, exceeding man’s deepest dream of giantism?

Colossal speculations of a colossal journey!

The mist drew closer. The White Bird’s velocity fell to thousands, hundreds, and now only tens of light-years per second. Duane experienced a curious buoyancy and dizziness. He felt as if unfamiliar power and forces were gathering him in. Weakness overcame him. The play of foreign laws inclosed him. His sensations baffled analysis. His mind, governed still by Earth principles, could not understand what was happening. A whirling confusion as though his brain were an eddying mist enveloped him. Darkness and light divided his course. He sensed a shudder and a trembling of the White Bird as if it were a deep-sea creature caught in tides and forced toward the surface.

A shock followed by a violent jolt stunned him.

He had literally burst space.

* * * *

V.

When Duane’s dazed faculties began to function again, it was with a feeling of the deepest awe that he stared around and tried to comprehend what had happened. Realization came slowly, and he found it difficult even to decipher his surroundings.

Light flooded his compartment, bright white light that was curiously restful and soothing to his eyes, unlike the glare of the Sun. The White Bird rested on a flat plain of what looked like glass, perhaps a hundred yards long and ten wide. Far below him he saw a second plain, mahogany-colored, which swept away in the distance, then stopped at a sheer cliff that fell an unknown distance down toward the blur of what seemed to be solid ground. From the second level rose two brasslike towers that supported the glassy oblong upon which the White Bird rested.

What did this mean?

He looked upward. What was that giant circle overhead?

He peered out. What were those colossal and serrated monuments that looked like the mechanism of giants and possessed eerie illusions of a four-dimensional geometry? What were those other massive bulks that towered toward the spaces above?

Understanding, and fright paralyzed him in a flash of intuition.

The White Bird reposed on the slide of a microscope! The second plain was a table top, the third plain a floor. The geometric metallic mountains were apparatus and machines. The towering things were living beings. He had burst through the atom that was his universe and had emerged on a planet of a greater universe, a superuniverse!

The vastness and spaciousness around, the acres and leagues of ground, staggered him. Everything was on a giant scale to which it was hard for him to become accustomed. And yet it was not until he looked intently upward that the full magnitude of his surroundings impressed themselves upon him.

At what seemed the horizon, and seen as through a light haze, beyond plains and mountains that were only tables and machinery, rose walls more towering than the peaks of the Himalayas or the cliffs of the Moon, walls that curved gigantically zenithward where lay an opening toward which pointed a monstrous tube whose length must have been miles.

Around this tube stood two of the alien beings, and at a table far to one side sat a third, and a fourth faced a complicated mass of blue-white metal apparatus whose nature was beyond conjecture, while a fifth leaned beside the great microscope.

Duane at long last understood completely. This vast region of bare surfaces and precipitous descents was only a single room, an observatory, and the beings were astronomers studying whatever skies lay above!

Still dazed by his pilgrimage, he experienced a new awe. Dowell had guessed the truth in his amazing theory! All the universe that he had traversed was only an atom, perhaps drifting in the air around him, perhaps part of the slide, perhaps the whole interior of this world. He would never know where, for it was as lost to him as the treasures of Atlantis. But that universe, with its scope and sweep and myriad components, formed only the least part of this sphere. There must be other worlds, an entire new universe of stars and suns and comets! And beyond these— what? His mind, numb from the exhaustion of mere speculation upon so stupendous a scale, turned wearily to the beings.

They were Titans. Compared to Duane, the Colossus of Rhodes was infinitely less than the tiniest particle of matter. Compared to the Titans, Duane stood as lowly as a worm!

Anthropomorphic in general appearance, they possessed both strikingly human characteristics and alien traits. They reminded Duane—but on how gigantic a size!—of the Easter Island sculptures, for these Titans had flat-backed heads, high, slanting foreheads, deep-set eyes, the noses of kings, and thin, ascetic lips above a jutting jaw. No race of conquerors ever before gave such an impression of strength, austerity, intelligence, and power.

Godlike, the incarnation of supremacy, these giants gained added impressiveness from the radiant texture of their skin, which was as clear and cold as the glint of ice or the sparkle of a blue-white diamond, and as smooth. Had some dim awareness of these entities filtered through the minds of the races of Earth and helped to develop the concept of deity? Were these the prototypes that served the sculptors of Easter Island?

Duane, moody and tired, longed for the companionship of Anne, for the presence of one human being to accompany him in this Odyssey that vanquished space, only to plunge him into the beginning of new mystery.

* * * *

Far, far overhead towered the Titans, league-long, massive creations overshadowing even the inhabitants of Brobdingnag. The reddish tunics that they wore formed a splash of color against the brightness of their Cyclopean bodies.

They were talking among themselves, the Earth man observed by the motion of their lips, and curiosity overcame fear. He stealthily opened the White Bird’s door. A Titan, peering through the telescope, spoke. In the vast but clear resonance of that voice, Duane distinguished a syllable wholly foreign to the tongues of Earth. The Titan by the mechanisms pushed a lever, and from the machine came five strokes of a gong. The first Titan peered through the telescope and spoke again, a different syllable. The mechanism rang once.

Understanding flashed through Duane. The first Titan, evidently an astronomer, was studying a body in the skies and reading its position to his companion who registered the figure. The first word, then, meant “five,” and the second word, “one.” He jotted down the syllables as accurately as he remembered them.

The astronomer spoke again, the recorder pressed a level, but no gong resounded. “Nothing, or zero,” Duane wrote. The last number was “nine.”

Silence descended, and now the intruder made out, upon a great mirror beside the recorder, a reflection of star fields, and guessed that the Titans were studying one among that horde. The astronomer called out, and the recorder raised his head. Duane wrote two words as the name of the recorder who played with intricate mechanisms.

Then the star fields began an apparent march, drawing ever nearer, until one bright sun or planet loomed largest in the mirror’s center. The astronomer uttered a command, the reflection became motionless, and Duane wrote the phonetic transcription for “stop.”

All this while his fear of discovery had been lessening since the attention of the giants was centered elsewhere, but his curiosity was mounting. Why were the great ones so interested in this star or planet? Who were they and how did their apparatus function? He wished that he could understand every word they spoke; given time enough, he would, for already he had a fair list of primary words: several mathematical numbers, the concept “zero,” a few verbs, including “stop,” “continue” or “go,” and “to be,” the names of three of the Titans, and several adjectives of whose meaning he was uncertain but had an approximate understanding.

The star cluster swam closer until only one body filled the mirror. The recorder played with dials and levers, and the one sphere, now discernible as a planet, and approaching rapidly, expanded beyond the reflector’s sides.

The Titans gathered around the mirror. The surface of the satellite raced toward them. Continents became visible, outlined by seas. Dark masses of forests and mountain ranges contrasted with units that looked like villages or cities. Paths, trees, huts, and lakes were visible. At last the recorder adjusted whatever mechanism controlled this optical marvel, and the picture again became stationary.

There on the Gargantuan panel, a forest glade showed clearly to the last detail. Strange and exotic trees, not unlike those of Earth’s carboniferous era, raised great conical leaves and flower buds and full blooms to the sky. The ground was riotous with ferns and glossy flowers, orchidaceous cups and blossoms of wallflower brown.

Dawn was breaking and blue-white light filtered through the vegetation. Shadows shortened. Moths fluttered, and birds of brilliant plumage soared up with lyrical morning songs. A creature similar to a deer crossed with a rabbit bounded away in search of breakfast. Another beast, resembling a huge squirrel, but with a glossy coat and the membranes of a bat, flitted to the edge of a pool and, after drinking greedily, frolicked away through the forest.

A path led to the pool. While the Titans and Duane looked on, a girl danced into view.

Nothing that he had experienced in these hectic weeks affected Duane as profoundly as the sight of that girl. She differed from the women of Earth, and yet she possessed a similarity. He thought that she looked like Anne—or was his impression only a wish fulfillment? In the quiet of dawn, she danced along. She wore no garments. Her supple figure, tawny as ripe wheat, pirouetted around trees, and her light feet dipped across mosses. She had hair of emerald, that floated lightly around her, and liquid, beguiling eyes of amber. A glow the color of goldenrod pollen enriched her face. Her fingers seemed boneless, so tapering were they, and flexible as she cupped them and wove them in supplication to the dawn.

The scene held beauty of an exquisite kind, from the lush petals of flowers and mossy carpet to the exotic trees; from the young girl dancing in the glow of sunrise to the light that shimmered through branch and leaf and formed patterns of divided darkness upon the ground.

Then the girl flung her arms skyward and lifted her face to greet the sun. In the forest glade she seemed lovelier than a naiad out of legend. Her lips parted, and Duane could almost hear the rapturous song that she caroled. Then she danced again in carefree abandon, swirling toward the edge of the pool, and there she flung herself down and laughed at her own drowning image in the waters.

From the poetry and enchantment of the idyll, Duane’s attention was gradually turned to a crescendo whose volume reverberated through the air. The Titans were talking excitedly, one Titan apparently scoffing at the others who ringed him. Judging by his gestures, he was discounting the truth of the visualization which had occurred upon the mirror. He strode from the circle and in a few Gargantuan steps was beside the microscope to resume whatever investigation he had interrupted.

His peril engraved itself on Duane’s mind in a second that saw him frantically spin the door to the White Bird. His action came too late. The door was only partly sealed when a vast cry issued from the throat of the giant. The others looked over and began approaching him. Two fingers the size of barrels appeared at the edges of the slide and lifted it in a wild swoop skyward!

* * * *

VI.

That curving sweep, almost vertical, which carried him a mile upward in a mere second, was more sickening than a plunge, but Duane quaked at a simple but terrifying incident that followed. The Titan raised him to eye level and scrutinized him with cold appraisal. His eye, huge as a room, with fathomless depths of black in it and a piercing, hypnotic pupil, overwhelmed Duane with its conviction of dynastic power and its attitude of unhuman, solely scientific analysis. No worm in alcohol, no microbe under the lens, could have felt more lowly than he, under the glare of that tremendous orb.

Duane was trapped and he knew it. One squeeze of colossal fingers and he would be pulp in the flattened shards of his stratoplane. It might have been fear, it might have been courage, that prompted him. He opened the White Bird’s door and stepped out onto the slide.

The great eye widened and its black depths stirred. The four other Titans gathered around like shining angels of doom, their stern, conquerors’ faces staring at him with more interest, but no more personal feeling than they would have studied a fly. They talked rapidly, the cruel lips forming thunder that deafened at this close range. Duane gesticulated, and they became silent, looking at him and at each other with questioning glances. Using all the power he could muster, he shouted out the microscopist’s name.

The effect was electrical. The Titan almost dropped the slide. He broke into a flood of questions, but the Earth man shook his head and shouted the syllable for “nothing.”

The Titan understood—Duane did not know the questions. Walking toward a mechanism of abstruse nature, the astronomer set his captive on a table and placed upon his head a cap of metal with a skein of fine wires terminating in what resembled a telephone switchboard beside a smooth panel. He placed a similar cap on the table and indicated that Duane touch it with his head. It looked like the crown of an observatory, this hemisphere of the gods. A tingling flux ebbed through his body upon contact.

In the mirror appeared an image of the astronomer with his name underneath. Duane comprehended. This miraculous apparatus transformed thought currents into pictures and made ideas visible. Duane thought of his portrait and his name. Promptly they flashed upon the panel. In this novel manner, with the start he already had in finding something of their speech and language, he had little difficulty in carrying on a silent conversation.

“Did you come from Valadom—the planet in the reflector? Are you one of the little creatures?”

“No.”

The Earth man’s reply obviously surprised them. The scientists conferred, as if deciding whether he was giving truthful answers.

“Whence came you?”

Duane hesitated. Would they believe him if he told the truth? Should he rescind his first answer and assert that he was one of the “little creatures”? These were giants of intellect as well as Titans of body. It would be wiser to answer truthfully even if they scoffed. “I came from an atom under your microscope,” he answered.

His reply raised a tempest, but not the skepticism that he had expected. The astronomer talked with new animation as though he had found support for a theory, and the mind reflector became a crazed confusion of mathematical symbols, concepts involving energy and matter, and hypotheses of atoms.

Appearances indicated that he had once set forth a theory that each particle of matter was as complex as the universe, and that submicroscopic parts might be star fields as elaborate as those visible above, and with life on a proportionately most infinitesimal scale, a theory which his associates must have decided against. The very concept taxed Duane’s faculties. His universe an atom forming this sphere; this globe a planet in the superuniverse; and what if that billion-bodied unit was, as Dowell had suggested, only the molecule of a cosmos still more far-flung, above and beyond and outside? Conversely, were there universes within the atoms of the Earth he had left? Where did the cycle begin or end?

His gangling figure, in which tenseness fought his desire to relax, must have presented a study in contrasts. The cathedralesque majesty of this one hall that formed an arena as large as the ground and the heavens and the horizons of Earth was in itself a thing of wonder, but the lordly dwellers added the emotional burdens of awe and fear and inferiority, so massive were their statures, so radiant, so stern, so implacable, and godlike. And to the weight of these visible things was piled on concepts to stagger the brain of genius, or the universal mind, if such existed, or the intra-universal intellect. Yet the general patterns of nature as he knew it seemed to recur here. Where lay the beginning and whither the end? To what purpose? He drifted back from mental fog to find the Titans questioning him anew.

* * * *

“Can you return to your universe, your atom?”

“No,” Duane replied.

“Why not?”

“I do not know where it is. I would not know how to find it. If I could find it, I would not be able to enter. Something happened, when I burst through. I am bigger than my whole universe was. I cannot shrink down. Besides, millions of years have passed back there since I departed. I do not even know whether Earth, my planet, still exists.”

The sages nodded gravely, accepting his statement, and evidently understanding far better than he did what had happened.

“What is the principle of your tiny ship, little one?”

Duane bristled and his lank joints stiffened. The White Bird a “tiny ship”? He, Colossus, called a “little one”? He swore angrily, and a flock of “damns” appeared on the mind reflector. The Titans stared without feeling at these strange words, asked him to elaborate. Swallowing his indignation, he tried to pictorialize the building of the White Bird, and how it harnessed universal radiations for its energy. The Titans watched, attentive and impassive as before. And yet Duane sensed an extraordinary interest in his ideas; and by careful observation came to the conclusion that they had only recently built this laboratory with a scientific knowledge far in advance of that of the human race.

They, too, had discovered how to tap perpetual power. Already exploration of the great spaces, the outer abysses, the chasms and voids and illimitable depths, was under way. They were plainly amazed that any creature as minute as he could have progressed so far; and still more eagerness accompanied their absorption in his story of the submicroscopic electrons which, to beings as small as he once had been, yet represented a mysterious, enormous, and complex universe of inconceivable magnitude.

Duane felt his prestige rising. He thought it his turn to watch mind pictures and obtain some understanding of his journey’s end.

“Who are you? Where am I?” he began.

The astronomer reflected soberly, as though weighing whether this mite could possibly grasp the ideas that might be presented. Then, upon the panel, flowed a stream of images: Qthyalos, a giant world in its ripe maturity, inhabited by Titans of deific knowledge and power, whose intellects rivaled in proportion the girth of their bodies; mind supreme in supreme and vital matter whose life-span averaged thousands of years.

Duane’s eyes ached when he saw their cities, how Cyclopean they were, and their works, how passing strange, and their arts, how alien and bizarre. Their structures baffled him with their apparent fluxes and processional changes, their tenuous and unreal unstability, combining with solid attributes. Had they a four-dimensional basis that warped straight lines into helical spirals, and cubes into weirdly shimmering pyramids?

What was the gleaming stuff that composed these megalithic metropolises which shone with blinding color and yet whose incandescence was underlain with the shadow and ambiguity and shifting forms of a geometry that eluded him? Whether he understood or not, the résumé flowed on, and now he found why they were examining Valadom with such interest when he came. He translated the series of images into words.

“One of our exploring flyers reported that he thought he saw signs of life on a small planet of our system.” Here the consecutive pictures broke, and a sight of the giant globe Qthyalos flashed forth alone, then the image of its sun and hundreds of large and small planets that made a solar system upon a huge scale; then the great sweep of a galaxy, and beyond this island universe—nebula after nebula, star-field on star-field, flaming gas and black voids, soaring outward and deepening afar toward infinity, the eternal abyss.

Duane, humble in the presence of this immensity so like his own universe but of so immeasurably a more stupendous range, watched with almost glazed eyes the resumption of the story.

“Only recently have we controlled optical and intra-spatial laws to such a degree that we could bring any planet of our system into as close focus as we wished. We have been studying one planet or more nightly for the past year, but discovered no signs of life until the explorer reported today on Valadom, which we studied through a telescope a while ago.

“We had intended to send scientists there to obtain specimens of these curious little creatures, who seem to be much like us, for laboratory study and analysis. There are several difficulties in the way. One is their tiny size. Judging by the one we saw, they can be no larger than you. Consequently, if we landed, they would probably be so paralyzed by fright that they would run away and hide. We might step on thousands of them without ever realizing it. Great pains would be needed to capture even one, and he would be likely to be badly damaged or fear-filled so as to be useless to us.

“We could not camp there. It is doubtful if we could live on that small asteroid. The air blanket would extend, perhaps, no higher than our heads. Even if we took advantage of all our wisdom, conditions would be most unfavorable for observation. Our purpose would not be wholly answered by observation from here. We can watch actions, but we cannot discover their past, interpret their thoughts, examine their true nature, or obtain more than a general idea of their life.”

This long sequence, much of it obscure and only guessed at by Duane because of the abstract quality of the pictures which resulted from the Titan’s attempt to visualize concepts, seemed to be leading up to a definite end.

* * * *

The five conferred among themselves, their miens dignified and stately with an austerity that ascetics would have envied. Like sculpture of gods, like the chiseled, enigmatic heads of Easter Island, like uncrowned rulers debating the fate of empires, and with expressions immobile to a degree that seemed stony, the Cyclopean beings conversed in voices that quaked like thunder, roaring in Duane’s ears, cataclysmic volumes of resonance. From this table top, now that the shining giants stood erect, they looked like figures of hewn marble slashed from mountains.

Fleetingly, he thought of plunging into the White Bird and rocketing off, but he knew the gamble would not win. The heads in conclave miles above, the horizon-reaching sweep of floor and apparatus and devices, the seemingly boundless space overhead, offered no hope of escape. Then the stone-hard, mercury-glistening head of the astronomer bent toward him in a rush that sent violent currents of air whirling across the table, and the lordly entity spoke words that he could not understand, but whose import was translated by the mind panel.

“Since it is unwise to explore Valadom, and difficult to obtain a little creature, we have decided to dissect you, instead, and discover how you work, what you are made of, and how you react.”

The Titan enunciated doom as if he conferred an honor. His expression was imperturbable. Why he should have announced to the victim his purpose remained a riddle, unless he had access to power beyond Duane’s knowledge, or unless the fervor of scientific inquiry obsessed him, and he saw goals but forgot intermediaries.

Whatever the reason, it mattered little to Duane. His life hung at stake. He was no more than a germ, an insect, a minute creature, a worm, to these Titans. There was neither cruelty, enmity, nor any other emotion in the statement. To them, it was a simple fact. Here stood a little creature who stimulated their curiosity. He would make a splendid laboratory specimen. They did not like him or resent him. They had no feeling about him. The cause of knowledge would be far advanced by the dissection and analysis of this specimen of a new species.

The Earth exile, the chill of horror overcoming him at his prospective fate, strove to think. Was this to be the reward of his stellar Odyssey? This bitter death in foreign places to be the last goal? This going out, not in glory, but ignominiously, with not so much quickness and almost as little distinction as the lowliest insect?

He would make a run for it at the end, a dash that at least would win him fast oblivion in a snap of those monstrous fingers. Better to be slapped into pulp than to linger under the knife. But these were Titans dominated wholly by mind and its pursuits. If he could only appeal to their rational nature!

Upon the reflector appeared the ideas set up by his chain of thought, the appeal and defense that he mentally projected:

“Titans! I am not one of the little creatures of Valadom! You may put me under the microscope and the knife, but you will still know nothing of how the little creatures work!”

The master of the microscope lowered the mammoth and marmoreal sculpture of his flat-backed head, donned a metal cap, and with brooding visage replied through thought-presentation: “It does not matter. We find out how you work, and later how the little creatures work, as well.”

Disheartened, Duane tried again. “My death will not serve you, Titans! You will discover what I am made of, but only that, and you know little of my life!”

He had made a bad mistake, a tactical blunder, and he realized it the instant he spoke. Sweat oozed out on his forehead. The biologist-Titan destroyed his plea with: “We do not plan to end you for some time. We will keep you under observation for experiments in the laboratory for as long as may be necessary until we have exhausted your animate being. Then we will take you apart.”

Only the aims of high endeavor lightened the black, enormous eyes. No feeling marred their serenity and repose as the sentence of death remained.

Discouraged, but with will indomitable while life lasted, and with wits sharpened by this intellectual battle for preservation, Duane made a new shift in the game. “Titans! I am like you. I think, I feel, I am as you are! Why then dissect me? I differ principally in size from you! Would you dismember one of your own race?”

“We have taken apart enough beings among ourselves to find out what causes us to be what we are,” came the unexpected and disillusioning response. “You resemble us, but exact study of everything in you will be necessary to prove the similarities and differences between us. Your head has a strange shape. Thus your brain cannot function quite like ours.”

The web tightened. They closed each argument as quickly as he advanced it. His sole comfort was their consent to listen, dispassionately, detached, impersonal, weighing his reasons for their intrinsic validity. He had one chance left, short of a fatal dash, and he put all his persuasive mental resources into the gamble.

“Titans! I will make a bargain with you! Let me enter my cosmocraft and depart. I will go to Valadom! I will live among the little people. I will stay there for a year. I will learn their language, study their customs and history, interpret their life. At the end of a year, I will return and give you all the knowledge I have obtained. Furthermore, I will bring back at least one dead specimen of the little people for you to examine. All this I promise, Titans, in return for two conditions—you will agree not to harm me when I return, and you will agree not to harm the little people of Valadom.”

* * * *

The five grave giants, like judges studying evidence, considered his proposal. He sensed the biologist arguing against him, and in favor of immediate experimentation, since specimens of the little creatures might be obtained later. The astronomer favored his case, for he would enable them without trouble to obtain a complete record of Valadom, and in the year intervening they could pursue researches into other parts of the universe. The three remaining giants appeared to show little preference which way the discussion ended.

Duane, tense and drawn, waited for their decision. There was a grotesque quality to this situation, something both superhuman and supernormal, something both familiar and foreign, something gigantically dissimilar between these Cyclopean conquerors with their minds that thirsted for knowledge alone, and he himself, a mite to them, but pleading for his existence—he, who in his own search for the answer to the mystery of things had performed the feat of bursting through a universe and leaving it but an atom behind. Colossus though he had become, he was only an insect to them! Titanic though they seemed, were they only submicroscopic, submeasurable motes in the fathomless molecule beyond?

The astronomer prepared to reply, and Duane’s eyes hovered on the reflector; a lone, small figure against fate and the gods, he watched judgment.

“Little creature, we have decided that the cause of knowledge will be furthered better and quicker by your going to Valadom and returning here, than by our analyzing you now. We will allow you to proceed on your way, but you must return according to your agreement in a year. Go!”

Shaking in the nervous let-down that followed reprieve, he said: “I thank you, Titans. What pledge will you have?”

“Pledge? Truth showed in your thoughts. If it had not, we would not let you depart. Do you know the way to Valadom?”

“No.”

The astronomer flashed upon the screen picture after picture of the skies, the principal stars, Valadom and Qthyalos and their system, until Duane had the necessary directions. Then he bowed to those great beings, who, incalculable, thinking thoughts beyond his grasp, and preserving a silence more stately than the repose of a deserted cathedral, watched him depart.

Neither well-wishing nor friendly farewell attended his going. The flat-backed heads of sloping brow, the stern lips, the chins and noses of deific disdain, the cheek bones of godlike pride, the faces of sexless radiance, the black, tremendous eyes from whose wells shone the vision of destroying angels, these betrayed unhuman, abstract interest, and nothing more.

The White Bird soared skyward in a beautiful arc. The heads of the Titans dropped away. The horizon-sweeping immensity of the observatory fell behind, and became like an ordinary room, with beings of generally anthropomorphic nature standing amid devices and structures of puzzling design. The austere faces of the giants blurred to points as the wanderer of infinity rocketed outward through the open roof in a trajectory that followed the league-long telescope.

It gave him a queazy sensation to realize that he himself, could he see himself with the eyes of man, must be Colossus multi-magnified as a result of the transmutation that had occurred when he annihilated space and sundered his universe, yet only a thumbnail pygmy to them, who were nothing compared with the molecule beyond!

His last impression of the lordly dwellers on Qthyalos was one of profound reverence mingled with fruitless speculation. Who they were and what their nature remained almost as insoluble conjectures as when he first saw them. Then darkness enfolded him and he burst through the dome where it lay open for the telescope.

* * * *

VII.

Now there were star-fields again, and the ceaseless throngs shone above, and the skies hung strange and alien, ablaze with infinite brilliant jewels. On the rim of the northern horizon sank a pale-gray moon, and on the edge of a southern sea sank a moon of orange.

As the White Bird soared, Duane looked back. The surface of Qthyalos, in the shadow of night and under the canopy of stars, stretched vast, dim, and mysterious. There were mountain ranges striking stark and bold five thousand miles and more into the citadels of space, peaks of terrific bleakness until their ice-crowns of naked and blue-white grandeur blocked the skies beyond them.

The observatory itself stood on a precipice whose sides were chasms plunging sheer through sooty gulfs. There were cities on the plains and in the valleys, monstrous metropolises, dark towers out of fable, erections on titanic scale that tortured vision with illusions of a new geometry, dream cities as unreal as the domes of Xanadu, and assaulting the skies themselves with their topmost and almost topless towers.

There were lakes as large as seas, and seas that curved like the arc of heaven. There were islands the size of continents, and continents of un-guessable extent.

Colossal lords of a colossal planet! Qthyalos, a single planet huger than the universe, faded, with all its mysteries and all its visionary wonder, farther and ever farther behind. Its mass became a dark puzzle, but its rim brightened sharply and the edge of a dazzling sun crept out.

The White Bird sped on, and the central sun emerged into the radiant glory, a white-hot orb that compared with Qthyalos as a balloon to a ballbearing. There were great planets and multiple moons and a host of asteroids behind, on the opposite side of this system; and ahead shone other planets and moons against the tapestry of space; and among them glimmered Valadom, a mere asteroid to Titan, a sphere as big as Earth to Duane’s sense of values.

The White Bird winged onward in accelerating tempo that shot her toward her goal. Scarcely an hour could have lapsed as his senses recorded time before Valadom became discernible as a tiny globe. Beyond it, the enormous sweep of constellations sprinkled infinity; and beyond the riotous blaze glowed the haze of nebulae where the celestial parade began of outward-flung galaxies in the remote depths and recesses of this cosmos. Twin stars and suns of purple and white and gold, myriad moons and planets of silvery splendor, space and night held unrivaled beauty, majesty, and glory, a spectacular display that challenged the scope of imagination, and the White Bird only a streaming blur amid the immensities and infinitudes.

He felt tempted to trick the Titans; to blast his way outward and discover the final organism or farthest megacosmos, to test Dowell’s theory in its ultimate scope. His pledge to the Titans prevailed.

Yet it was with a sense of cosmic weariness that Duane approached Valadom. The everlasting procession of stars and galactic universes began to pall. Who could say what lay beyond the utmost outpost? Beyond this cosmos—another atom on a larger scale? A cell or molecule? Or night eternal? Or mysterious limitations where space finally ceased? His mind withdrew from visions too vast, speculations where madness lay.

Oddly, he felt a gladness as Valadom loomed large, the gladness of the wanderer homeward bound from voyages afar. The blinding sun shone remotely behind, yet still far larger than the Sun of Earth; and to one side hung Qthyalos, abode of Titans; and, in relation to them, Valadom seemed hardly so much as a pin point, but it loomed fully the size of Earth.

Duane’s thoughts recurred to Anne with a kind of sad longing for her companionship. So well she would have changed the loneliness of his travels! So sweet a comfort she would have been! But irrecoverable years in a universe more distant than Carcosa and Hali divided him from the dead dream of love.

Valadom swept close. Moody, the expression of an old man in his youthful eyes, Duane watched the harbor draw nigh. He could not rid himself of the feeling that the Titans watched his progress through their telescopic and ultra-optical equipment; and the sense of their invisible presence billions of miles behind was a depressant only partly relieved by his impression of another presence, ghostly, intangible, elusive.

But over Valadom lay quiet; the quiet of dawn above the seas and continents toward which he dropped; and peace became part of his mood. His thoughts drifted to the lovely and forlorn creature he had watched make her obeisance to the morning. Did she still recline beside the pool? Or had she danced her way back to lover or family or mate? Duane was startled by his interest and resentment. Preposterous! He did not even know the nature of this child of Valadom, and might never find her, yet he dreamed while the planet rushed near.

Seas outlined themselves against land masses. He recognized the topography as he recalled it in the Titans’ reflector. Swiftly the White Bird settled, too swiftly. He unloosed the triple fore projectors to break his fall. The White Bird leveled away high over a tossing sea, and headed westward until the coasts of a continent swam out of azure mist.

There were dots on the ocean below—atolls or flotsam or small craft? He could not tell and did not pause. The ramparts of a village or city rose on a bay. Civilization? Or savagery? Did it indicate rising culture and progress, or decline from a peak surpassed? Time might answer; now, he had only a desire, curiously compelling, to reach the glade he had seen. The village flowed underneath, its architecture analogous to that of the Greeks—temple and dwelling, shrine and inn, lying white and pagan in the dawn.

The White Bird dipped toward the surrounding forest, for here should lie the haven he sought. The dark thread of a river wound its way seaward in the distance. The forest rushed up. The White Bird settled toward a greensward between two ridges, which he recognized immediately as the vista he had scrutinized from Qthyalos. Here lay the pool, a disk of emerald.

The White Bird came to rest upon grasses and lush flowers amid trees of fantastic shape. The loose-jointed figure of the Earth man slouched out.

* * * *

Morning had broken. The sun stood high, Qthyalos a sphere of misty beauty beside it. A soft wind blew, and he breathed deeply of that fresh, fragrant elixir. Sounds came from the forest, strange songs of unknown birds and cries of hidden beasts. Moths of brilliant coloring made splashes of cerise and green-gold, lemon and indigo and ebony; one long-beaked bird, imperial purple with markings of pomegranate red, flew past, a lovely thing until it croaked harshly.

Everywhere rose curious vegetation; flower-capped stalks; ferns of feathery grace; lichens and great single leaves; coniferous trees; weird trunks and stems from which clusters of berries, fruit, nuts, and blossoms hung; buds like bursting seed pods; thick moss. The ground was a carpet where green grew the grasses, and over them wealth of blooms; orchids that lifted hot faces to the sun; petals of silver freaked with black, and of turquoise, of cinnamon, of pistachio, and blood; a hectic riot wherein colors of fever and tones of coolness splashed the landscape.

The wanderer, amid this drowsy paradise, where dreams faded and aspirations vanished in the presence of nature’s extravagance, trod his way toward the pool. Through foliage and frondage and leafy patch, with sunlight fretting arabesques of light and shadow athwart his path, he sauntered on, wearily, hesitantly, but with active curiosity.

There was never so exquisite a peace as this, so ineffable a haven, and the rising music of birds became a choir that only deepened the repose. Then a voice caroled, a rich, glad hymn to the sun, soaring and falling, deepening with ecstasy and dreamful of rapture. His mood responded to the song and the invisible singer. As he wove his way through the forest, the recollection of Anne rose like a specter hovering behind the lyrical and golden-throated phrases.

Then he came to the edge of the glade and saw the girl. She stood beside the pool. She laughed at the sky and the sun, the land and the waters. Her young face flushed in the bloom of youth. Her emerald hair hung silken around her throat and shoulders. She sang for the glory of living, the breathless adoration of being, and her voice warbled gladness. She whirled in light abandon, and the hair rippled across her back and shimmered against the glow of her skin.

For a long minute, Duane dwelt on the beauty of her figure and her dance, the grace of her rhythm, before he stepped out.

Exile from Earth and child of Valadom, they faced each other. The dance came to an abrupt end. Her amber eyes grew wide and startled, questioning the intruder. Hesitantly, he stepped a pace forward and greeted the girl with hands spread in token of peace.

Her lips parted and her eyes, showing neither the fear nor the mistrust that he might have expected, shone of something secret, as if to greet some dimly remembered and half-forgotten friend of long ago.