solid or solid to liquid.
They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of
blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must
ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck
that was Earth.

The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts,
showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the
man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the
woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where
solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was
held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon
them from many pencil like tubes.

The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into
human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and
extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and
cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the
ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their
bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them
in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into
space--all this through millions of miles and a hundred years,
compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of
space.

Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers
of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.

And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a
blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker;
saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past
the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark
nothingness.

Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them
into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another
ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great,
yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it.
Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the
darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies
drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.

At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of
horror and voices crying out, "Shut it off! Shut it off!" There was a
moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval
grew in volume.

Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and
the bod