Beyond the Stars by Ray Cummings

Alice and I were sitting in the small round tower that projected some six feet above the top of the vehicle, near its forward end. Through the windows here-eight of them, and one above us-the huge, inverted black bowl of the heavens lay fully exposed.

Myriad swarms of stars were thick-strewn everywhere. Freed from the distortion of the earth's atmosphere, they blazed like balls of molten fire: white, blue-white, yellow and red. Red giants and dwarfs, the old and the young, occasionally a comet with its millions of miles of crescent, fan-shaped tail.

Clusters of stars appeared, blended by distance: binaries, revolving one upon the other, multiple stars; single white-hot suns, blazing victorious with their maturity. And far off the spiral nebulae-patches of stardust, suns being born anew, or complete, separate universes. It was a glorious, awesome sight!

The red Elton Beta ray now preceded us. From here in the tower we could see it, flashing ahead like a dim searchlight beam. We had picked up velocity rapidly, had reached now some three hundred and sixty thousand miles a second, nearly twice the speed of light. Yet in all this scene, these whirling stars at which we were plunging, there was no visible movement. To an ant, crawling along a hillside ledge, the distant mountains seemed coming no nearer.

The dials showed our velocity to have reached very nearly one light-year per hour. No longer was it possible to use the unit of miles: our instruments showed now only light-years. Light travels 186,400 miles a second, and in our earthly year there are 31,536,000 seconds. A light-year, then-the distance light can speed in a year-represents 5,883,000,000,000 miles. This sum now was our smallest unit of measurement.

We were now 4.25 light-years from earth. Alpha Centauri, nearest of all the stars to earth at 4.35 light-years, loomed ahead of us. I stood at one of the forward windows regarding it. Two stars it is, in reality, for it is a binary.

Its components were beginning visually to separate now: two white blazing suns, millions of miles apart, slowly revolving upon a common center with a revolution that took thousands of years.

Yet, as I stood there, I fancied I could see them turning! We were heading directly for them; they were leaping up out of the void. There was a slow but visible movement throughout the firmament now. The stars in advance of us were opening up, spreading apart, drifting past our side windows, closing together again behind us. Dr. Weatherby was at my elbow.

"I shall keep away from Centauri," he remarked. "And presently, we must go faster, Leonard."

He went to his instrument table. The red Beta ray preceding us seemed to intensify a trifle; the firmament shifted slightly as our direction was altered. As I stood there, in ten minutes or so, the twin blazing suns of Alpha Centauri came up and swept past us.

I hastened to a side window to watch them. Blazing giants they were, floating off there a million miles away, each of them so large that our own huge sun would have been a match flame beside them.

But suddenly I wondered, blinked and stared with my breathing stopped by the shock of it. Were these indeed blazing giants a million miles off there? Or were they white points of fire a mile away? Abruptly my whole viewpoint changed. I saw these stars, all the blazing white points in the firmament, not as giant suns unfathomably distant, but only as small glowing eyes quite close.

These were gleaming eyes in a black night, gleaming eyes close around me. Eyes no larger than my own! Our vehicle. myself-gigantic! I realized it now. All this unfathomable distance around me had shrunk. I saw our giant vehicle floating very slowly, very sedately onward between the staring, crowding eyes.

Dr. Weatherby smiled when I told him. "It is all in the viewpoint, Leonard. In my computations I shall cling to the viewpoint of earth. Miles then light-years. Earthly standards of time, distance, and velocity. But shortly we shall have to abandon them entirely. Sit down, Leonard. I want to talk to you. Where is Dolores?"

"In the galley, I think," I said, sitting down at the instrument table beside him.

"I don't want Dolores to hear me. I've been wondering whether I should try and have her communicate again with the outside. It has been a month since we did that."

This, almost more than any other aspect of our adventure, interested me. "Tell me about those thought communications, Dr. Weatherby."

"There is nothing else to tell. There seem to be two. shall we call them people? A young man and a girl. They are in dire distress. The man is intelligent-more so than we are, I should judge. He was surprised to have us answer him."

"Does he know where we are?"

"No, I think not. But when I told him, he seemed to understand. Dolores gets, not words, but ideas, which naturally she can only translate into our English words. But, Leonard, I do not conceive these beings will be physically of an aspect very different from ourselves. We are. so close to them."