Islands of Space - John W. Campbell (pdf to ebook reader TXT) 📗

nebulae,” said Morey, looking out into the almost unbroken night of intergalactic space. Only here and there could they see a star, separated from its nearest neighbor by thousands of light years of empty space.

“You know,” said Wade slowly, “I’ve been wondering about the progress along scientific lines that a race out here might make. I mean, suppose that one of those lonely stars had planets, and suppose intelligent life evolved on one of those planets. I think their progress would be much slower.”

“I see what you mean,” Arcot said. “To us, of Earth, the stars are gigantic furnaces a few light years away. They’re titanic tests tubes of nature, with automatic reading devices attached, hung in the sky for us to watch. We have learned more about space from the stars than all the experiments of the physicists of Earth ever secured for us. It was in the atoms of the suns that we first counted the rate of revolutions of the electrons about their nuclei.”

“Couldn’t they have watched their own sun?” Fuller asked.

“Sure, but what could they compare it with? They couldn’t see a white dwarf from here. They couldn’t measure the parallax to the nearest star, so they would have no idea of stellar distances. They wouldn’t know how bright S Doradus was. Or how dim Van Maanen’s star was.”

“Then,” Fuller said speculatively, “they’d have to wait until one of their scientists invented the telectroscope.”

Arcot shook his head. “Without a knowledge of nuclear physics, the invention of the telectroscope is impossible. The lack of opportunity to watch the stars that might teach them something would delay their knowledge of atomic structure. They might learn a great deal about chemistry and Newtonian physics, and go quite a ways with math, but even there they would be handicapped. Morey, for instance, would never have developed the autointegral calculus, to say nothing of tensor and spinor calculus, which were developed two hundred years ago, without the knowledge of the problems of space to develop the need. I’m afraid such a race would be quite a bit behind us in science.

“Suppose, on the other hand, we visit a race that’s far ahead of us. We’d better not stay there long; think what they might do to us. They might decide our ship was too threatening and simply wipe us out. Or they might even be so far advanced that we would mean nothing to them at all⁠—like ants or little squalling babies.” Arcot laughed at the thought.

“That isn’t a very complimentary picture,” objected Fuller. “With the wonderful advances we’ve made, there just isn’t that much left to be able to say we’re so little.”

“Fuller, I’m surprised at you!” Arcot said. “Today, we are only opening our eyes on the world of science. Our race has only a few thousand years behind it and hundreds of millions yet to come. How can any man of today, with his freshly-opened eyes of science, take in the mighty pyramid of knowledge that will be built up in those long, long years of the future? It’s too gigantic to grasp; we can’t imagine the things that the ever-expanding mind of man will discover.”

Arcot’s voice slowed, and a far-off look came in his eyes.

“You might say there can be no greater energy than that of matter annihilation. I doubt that. I have seen hints of something new⁠—an energy so vast⁠—so transcendently tremendous⁠—that it frightens me. The energies of all the mighty suns of all the galaxies⁠—of the whole cosmos⁠—in the hand of man! The energy of a billion billion billion suns! And every sun pouring out its energy at the rate of quintillions of horsepower every instant!

“But it’s too great for man to have⁠—I am going to forget it, lest man be destroyed by his own might.”

Arcot’s halting speech told of his intense thought⁠—of a dream of such awful energies as man had never before conceived. His eyes looked unseeing at the black velvet of space with its few, scattered stars.

“But we’re here to decide which way to go,” he added with a sudden briskness as he straightened his shoulders. “Every now and then, I get a new idea and I⁠—I sort of dream. That’s when I’m most likely to see the solution. I think I know the solution now, but unless the need arises, I’m never going to use it. It’s too dangerous a toy.”

There was silence for a moment, then Morey said, quietly:

“I’ve got a course plotted for us. We’ll leave this Galaxy at a steep angle⁠—about forty-five degrees from the Galactic plane⁠—to give us a good view of our own Galaxy. And we can head for one of the nebulae in that general area. What do you say?”

“I say,” remarked Fuller, “that some of the great void without seems to have leaked into my own poor self. It’s been thirty thousand years since I am going to have a meal this morning⁠—whatever it is I mean⁠—and I want another.” He looked meaningfully at Wade, the official cook of the expedition.

Arcot suddenly burst out laughing. “So that’s what I’ve been wanting!” It had been ten chronometer hours since they had eaten, but since they had been outracing light, they were now thirty thousand years in Earth’s past.

The weightlessness of free fall makes it difficult to recognize normally familiar sensations, and the feeling of hunger is one of them. There was little enough work to be done, so there was no great need for nourishment, but the ordinary sensation of hunger is not caused by lack of nourishment, but an empty stomach.

Sleep was another problem. A restless body will not permit a tired brain to sleep, and though they had done a great deal of hard mental work, the lack of physical fatigue made sleep difficult. The usual “day” in space was forty hours, with thirty-hour waking periods and ten hours of sleep.

“Let’s eat, then,” Arcot decided. “Afterwards, we’ll take a few photographs and then throw this ship into high and really make time.”

Two hours