g, still seemingly no
further away than before. And then in a few minutes more, a mile out
there in the shrinking distance, it was a tiny luminous point, vanishing
beyond his vision.

Uranus, little Neptune--Pluto, almost too far away in its orbit to be
seen--all of them presently were dwindled and gone. Lee had a glimpse of
the Solar system, a mere bunch of lights. The Sun was a tiny spot of
light, holding its little family of tiny planets--a mother hen with her
brood. It was gone in a moment, lost like a speck of star-dust among the
giant starry worlds.

Another day--that is a day as it would have been on Earth. But here was
merely a progressing of human existence--a streaming forward of human
consciousness. The Light-year dial pointers were all in movement. By
Earth standards of size and velocity, long since had the globe's
velocity reached and passed the speed of light. Lee had been taught--his
book-learning colored by the Einstein postulates--that there could be no
speed greater than the speed of light--by Earth standards--perhaps, yes.
The globe--by comparison with its original fifty-foot earth-size--might
still be traveling no more than a few hundred thousand miles an hour.
But this monster--a thing now as big as the whole Solar System
doubtless--was speeding through a light-year in a moment!

Futile figures! The human mind can grasp nothing of the vastness of
inter-stellar space. To Lee it was only a shrinking inky void--an
emptiness crowded with whirling little worlds all dwindling.... This
crowded space! Often little points of star-dust had come whirling at the
globe--colliding, bursting into pin-points of fire. Each of them might
have been bigger than the Earth.

There was a time when it seemed that beneath the globe all the tiny
stars were shrinking into one lens-shaped cluster. The Inter-stellar
Universe--all congealed down there into a blob, and everywhere else
there was just nothingness.... But then little distant glowing nebulae
were visible--luminous, floating rings, alone in the emptiness....
Distant? One of them drifted past, seemingly only a few hundred feet
away--a luminous little ring of star-dust. The passage of the monstrous
globe seemed to hurl it so that like a blown smoke ring it went into
chaos, lost its shape, and vanished.

Then at last all the blobs--each of them, to Earth-size conception, a
monstrous Universe--all were dwindled into one blob down to one side of
Lee's window. And the